Unprecedented: Why a Modest Health and Equity Funder is Digging Deep for Democracy

This article was originally published on June 17, 2020.

“Today we march, tomorrow we vote.” Among the many impassioned messages protesters have brought to the streets following the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and many others by police, that one poses an important strategic challenge. It speaks to progressives’ struggle to translate youthful enthusiasm into wins at the ballot box, and hope among advocates that the historic reckoning with racial injustice happening now won’t lose steam come November.

Although philanthropy can’t be as pointedly political as a citizen on the street, 501(c)(3) funders can and do support organizations working at the intersection of people power, issue advocacy and voter engagement. That funding is crucial at a time when COVID-19 has thrown up unprecedented challenges to voter turnout—and heightened concerns about voter suppression.

But even in less turbulent times, there’s a strong case to be made for more philanthropic investment in voter engagement. “Civic participation is relevant for many funders that don’t see themselves as democracy funders,” said Scott Moyer, president of the Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation. “The issues and populations they care about are directly impacted by policies and systems, and to change those policies and systems, people need to vote.”

A modest funder with assets of about $88 million and grants totaling $6.8 million in 2018, the Langeloth Foundation recently announced the single largest commitment in its history. It’s giving away $10 million—over 10% of its assets—toward efforts to bolster civic participation and get out the vote, particularly in communities of color. That’s an interesting move from a grantmaker that has traditionally focused on health, not democracy, and typically likes to keep a low profile. So how did the Langeloth Foundation get there, and what does its commitment say about the role of philanthropy in a moment of great upheaval?

A 100-Year History

The Langeloth legacy (pronounced Lang-loth) dates back quite a ways. The money and the name come from Jacob and Valeria Langeloth, a couple who derived their 19th/early 20th-century fortune primarily from the American Metal Company. A German immigrant, Jacob Langeloth passed away in 1914 just as his home country and his adopted country went to war. He left in his will a provision to fund a convalescent home, named Valeria Home after his wife, which was constructed in New York in the 1920s.

Valeria Home remained in operation for about a half-century. By the 1970s, the home was no longer providing care, and the property was sold following legal proceedings. The proceeds of that sale provided an endowment for what is now the Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation, founded in 1975.

It’s important to note that Langeloth did not expect the organization’s trustees to “slavishly follow the dictates of his will,” as Moyer put it. Nevertheless, the foundation carried on Valeria Home’s mission of helping the convalescent well into the 1990s, mostly cutting checks to hospitals. Only around the turn of the millennium did it switch to competitive proposal-based grantmaking. In the early 2000s, Langeloth moved from strict medical funding to its current focus on public health and social justice.

Moyer came on board around that time. Langeloth’s funding has “gradually changed over the years to the point where we now fund mostly criminal justice reform, with an emphasis on ending solitary confinement, as well as safe and healthy communities, [with a focus on] preventing gun violence,” he said.

Langeloth’s funding has also taken on a distinct racial justice lens. A rising number of its grantees are led by and serve people of color. But at the same time, the foundation’s long history as a health funder isn’t over: Langeloth is one of a long list of philanthropies now approaching their work through the lens of the social determinants of health. “It’s a contemporary interpretation of Langeloth’s intentions,” Moyer said.

Health and Inclusion

That contemporary interpretation echoes Jacob Langeloth’s stated concern for people who were excluded from society. In its Justice Reform program area, the foundation has supported a number of efforts to move the system away from a punishment-based model and toward a humane and restorative one. In recent years, Langeloth has given to JustLeadershipUSA for its campaign to shutter New York’s Rikers Island jail complex; it gave to the ACLU and the National Religious Campaign Against Torture for advocacy against the use of solitary confinement, and to the Legal Action Center and the Council of State Governments for work to divert at-risk populations (like the mentally ill) away from the justice system and toward care.

Leadership development is another pillar of Langeloth’s justice reform funding, with grants to the Bard Prison Initiative to let formerly incarcerated people pursue careers in public health. Other funding themes include criminal justice journalism—the Marshall Project, Mother Jones and NPR are a few grantees—as well as confronting immigrant incarceration. As part of its 2020 grant cycle, Langeloth awarded $600,000 to Freedom for Immigrants to monitor the physical and mental health of detained immigrants, building on a smaller gift in 2018.

Most Langeloth grants tend to be in the low- to mid-six figures, with some outliers closer to or exceeding $1 million. The foundation’s recent $10 million commitment is, of course, a major outlier for this funder.

Langeloth’s other program area, Safe & Healthy Communities, doesn’t encompass quite as many grants as Justice Reform. Reducing gun violence has been the focus there since at least 2016, when the foundation awarded $450,000 to Mike Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety. Since then, a greater proportion of Safe & Healthy Communities grants seem to be going to racial justice groups like Color of Change, the Community Justice Reform Coalition and the Campaign for Black Male Achievement.

Langeloth has also given significant general operating grants to Guns Down America, a strategic advocacy shop pitted against the gun industry, and to Cities United to support mayors in their commitments to gun violence prevention. In addition, the foundation backs the Fund for a Safer Future (FSF), a donor collaborative at the New Venture Fund and a key coordinating hub for philanthropy’s response to gun violence. FSF has given over $10 million on its own alongside around $95 million in aligned grantmaking by its members.

The final components of Langeloth’s recent grantmaking are its rapid-response gifts and what it calls its small opportunity grants. It has given up to $1.5 million annually in rapid-response funding over the past three years, with a focus this year on COVID-19. Its small opportunity grants are five-figure commitments to pay for convenings, conferences and the like. As protests for racial justice continue, the foundation is looking into providing relevant rapid-response funding.

“Not a Democracy Funder”

Outright democracy giving hasn’t been a major line item on Langeloth’s overall balance sheet. But this unexpected $10 million commitment isn’t its first foray into civic engagement. That came in 2018, with a rapid-response gift to the voter registration group HeadCount following the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida. Langeloth gave $500,000 to the State Infrastructure Fund (SIF) last year, a sizable commitment to a key intermediary in the voter engagement field.

SIF is a collaborative fund at NEO Philanthropy that seeks, as the name suggests, to build up voting rights and election protection infrastructure at the grassroots level. It also backs election protection litigation. SIF’s progressive funders share an interest in an engaged electorate and include some big names like Ford, Kresge, JPB and OSF, as well as smaller, left-leaning funders like the Kendeda Fund, Unbound Philanthropy and Langeloth itself. When we heard from SIF in 2019, the progressive intermediary had plans to double down on strategic voter engagement work in the South, the Southwest and the Midwest.

Of Langeloth’s $10 million civic engagement commitment, a full $5 million will go to SIF. Another $3 million is headed to the Heartland Fund, a newer intermediary focused on middle America. Like SIF, the Heartland Fund’s model involves moving rarefied philanthropic money into the hands of local groups with a feel for the community. Unlike SIF, Heartland isn’t solely concerned with voter engagement—its grantees include a number of environmental groups, for instance. The Heartland Fund is housed at the Windward Fund, one of the fiscal sponsorship vehicles associated with Arabella Advisors.

In addition to its combined $8 million to SIF and Heartland, Langeloth is keeping $2 million in reserve to respond to emergent needs. Moyer expects to commit that money by the end of July.

According to Moyer, the decision to go big on voter engagement took shape during the height of the COVID-19 crisis. “The $10 million is a recognition of the disproportionate impact the justice system and gun violence have on black and Latinx communities,” Moyer said. “COVID’s impact on communities of color was just another example of how these communities are adversely affected by the policies and actions of [elected officials].”

At the same time, he said, “we are not a democracy funder.” That’s why Langeloth (with its staff of three) chose to fund through two collaboratives with the staff and expertise to put the money to use. But Moyer also believes civic participation should be a consideration in all grantmaking, not just an afterthought, because systemic challenges require structural solutions, and structural solutions require an active and engaged electorate. So it’s unlikely this will be the last of Langeloth’s civic engagement funding.

Rainy Days Are Here Again

Langeloth’s decision to go far above 5% payouts predates June’s widespread racial justice protests. However, those events have only increased the tempo of already-frenetic debates about payout rates and legacy funder complacency. Large foundations are ramping up their grantmaking and exploring new strategies like issuing debt, while other major funders have felt the heat for paring down programs in a moment of great need. While Langeloth’s resources are meager compared to the Fords and MacArthurs of the world, Moyer hopes this commitment will spur conversation.

“What we wanted to get across is a recognition that the 5% is a floor, not a ceiling, and what rainy day are we waiting for?” he said.

Beyond its big democracy commitment, the broader trajectory of Langeloth’s history resonates quite a bit right now. Here is a century-old institution whose original founder prospered during the last Gilded Age and left the world with a wish to include those who had been left out. For a long time, that meant healing the sick, but as the decades passed, that lens shifted to contemporary social ailments like gun violence and mass incarceration.

Now, it feels like things are coming full circle. A pandemic has laid bare just how much race and class inequities can affect health. Americans have taken to the streets, most with masks over their faces, to protest a system that denies black people justice. Both of those upheavals are taking place just months before an election of monumental consequence. One wonders what Jacob and Valeria Langeloth would think of their philanthropy’s evolving role in this world, at once so different from theirs and remarkably similar. Perhaps they would be pleased.

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