A Small Step Toward Accountability, and Big Questions for Philanthropy

What happens now that the man who knelt on George Floyd’s neck for over nine horrifying minutes, killing him, has been convicted of murder? Since the verdict was announced, the prevalent mood has been one of guarded celebration and relief, with an eye on what’s to come. Movement leaders and justice advocates have repeatedly made the point that this rare instance of accountability doesn’t diminish the need for sustained action. In fact, it only reinforces that need.

Leaders in philanthropy have echoed that message. “While there is no erasing the loss of George Floyd or the outrage caused by his senseless murder, the conclusion of the Derek Chauvin trial shows us that accountability is possible,” Ford Foundation President Darren Walker said in a statement. “We know that progress can feel fleeting when we have to continually mourn Black and brown lives senselessly lost to state violence. The long work of justice must continue.”

Chauvin’s murder conviction marks the end of one part of a saga that began almost a year ago when Floyd was killed. But it’s just a small step in the nation’s ongoing reckoning over systemic racism and police violence, which took the lives of Breonna Taylor, Daunte Wright, Adam Toledo, and many more. It’s also a challenge to a philanthropic sector often characterized as slow-moving and hesitant to embrace bold change and the long-term commitment that reckoning demands.

We’ve seen philanthropy grapple with institutional racism in unprecedented ways over the past eleven months. Funders have made record-setting grant commitments, pioneered new avenues for movement funding, and even, at times, acknowledged that philanthropy is often a part of the problem. It certainly feels like, as with the rest of the nation, something has shifted. The simple declaration that Black lives matter is no longer the province of a few progressive grantmakers, and most major funders have acknowledged in some fashion that structural racism must be addressed.

The question is whether, and how for how long, this rhetorical shift and initial wave of commitments will galvanize sustained support for organizations fighting racism on the front lines. Another question is how much we can expect an institution like philanthropy, so rooted in the status quo, to interrogate its own biases, procedures and leadership.

We’ll be looking more closely over the coming weeks at philanthropy’s struggle with state violence, with systemic racism, and with itself. As the nation reflects on the outcome of the trial and the road ahead, here’s a look at some of the ways the sector responded to historic demands for racial justice in the time since George Floyd was killed.

Who took a stand?

Rightly or not, big pledges tend to dominate the philanthropic news cycle, and they’re pretty infrequent, though they shouldn’t be. That wasn’t the case in the aftermath of Floyd’s murder. As millions flooded the streets demanding justice, high-dollar commitments from foundations, corporations and individuals flowed in. The pace of those pledges did slow after a while, but they continued to an extent throughout the remainder of 2020 and into this year.

Social-justice-oriented foundations led the way with numerous major commitments in the weeks and months following the grisly event. Ford, for instance, pledged to expand its already considerable racial justice grantmaking by a minimum of $180 million, in part by drawing on proceeds from its unconventional bond sale. The Open Society Foundations committed $220 million over five years toward power-building in Black communities, reimagining public safety, fighting voter suppression and growing the movement leadership pipeline.

The Hewlett Foundation also came in early with a $170 million pledge, a notable move from a funder that, unlike Ford and OSF, had been less explicitly active in the racial justice space until that point. Other foundations like the Meyer Memorial Trust, the James Irvine Foundation and the Lumina Foundation also made significant early pledges as protests continued.

Of course, foundations weren’t the only funders that stepped up. The early weeks and months saw a flurry of racial justice commitments from celebrities and other individual donors. One highlight was a $100 million pledge from Michael Jordan that marked a major ramp-up in the billionaire NBA legend’s giving. A number of celebrities, including Chrissy Teigen and Seth Rogen, supported bail funds like the Minnesota Freedom Fund during the protests, while Jordan Peele pledged $1 million to movement organizations and Kanye West donated $2 million, in part to help Floyd’s family. Even some stars from abroad supported Black movement groups in the wake of Floyd’s death, including Korean pop group BTS.

As summer turned to fall, the pace of large foundation pledges inevitably fell off. But funding commitments continued to accumulate from foundations and individual donors alike. The big standout in the latter category is MacKenzie Scott, whose promise at the end of July to “empty the safe” included over a half-billion dollars for racial equity. Like many of the aforementioned foundations, her grants prioritized movement organizations. They were also unrestricted.

In many cases, foundation commitments paired racial justice funding with new pledges for interrelated causes like civic engagement. For instance, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund rolled out $48 million in new spending to seize on a “hinge moment in history,” with funding to bolster democracy, back racial justice groups and examine related questions of economic justice. The Kresge Foundation’s late-fall commitment of $30 million to racial justice organizations is one example where a funder took its time but ended up with something promising.

Funding the infrastructure-builders

In many cases, funding from these justice-minded philanthropies went to places like the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), the Black-Led Movement Fund at Borealis Philanthropy, Black Voters Matter, the Black Futures Lab and the Southern Power Fund. As organizing and funding hubs for movement organizations that have long taken point in the fight against systemic racism, it’s crucial that these infrastructure-builders get the support they need.

For our coverage last year, Charles Long of M4BL told us that his organization has experienced plenty of isolation in the past, even to the point that it was treated as “taboo” in some quarters of the funding world. Though that has changed to some extent since Floyd’s murder, philanthropy still has a way to travel.

“While some in philanthropy have acknowledged that Black-led organizations are getting long-overdue resources to tackle the systemic racism that has dominated American society for centuries, anti-Blackness, racism and ignorance have shown up, as well,” wrote Malachi Garza of the Solidaire Network and Robin Beck of the Levinson Foundation in a recent op-ed for Inside Philanthropy. “At this critical moment in the struggle for racial justice, it is ridiculous and deeply problematic to be asking if Black-led organizations have too many resources, especially when so many white-led groups are doing just fine pulling in far, far more funding.”

That racial funding gap is one element of systemic racism in America that is philanthropy’s unique responsibility to deal with. It’s only a start, but the year since Floyd’s murder has given us some promising efforts to resource the Black- and POC-led movement organizations calling for transformative changes to public safety policy and the justice system.

One highlight is the Democracy Frontlines Fund, a collaborative funding initiative set up in the fall of 2020 to back Black-led movement building. Spearheaded by the Libra Foundation, the fund channels money from established racial justice funders as well as some newcomers to a set of 10 Black-led movement infrastructure groups that it characterizes as potential analogues to the legendary civil rights organizing groups of the 1960s—as long as they receive enough support.

Early this year, another multi-funder effort to support Black-led groups got underway: the California Black Freedom Fund. Aiming to raise $100 million over the next five years to support Black-run organizations in the state, its backers include some big names not often closely associated with progressive movement building—the Annenberg Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, JPMorgan Chase and others. Another state-based grantmaking initiative to note is Justice Oregon for Black Lives, funded by that $25 million commitment from the Meyer Memorial Trust.

While those efforts focus their funding on Black-led organizations, other new initiatives aim to increase funder support for wider segments of the BIPOC-led grassroots. The Groundswell Fund’s Blueprint plan to move $100 million to movement groups is one example.

Wider reverberations

The racial justice reckoning prompted by Floyd’s murder and the subsequent protests influenced pretty much every corner of philanthropy, and there’s certainly much more to say about how that’s playing out than can fit in a single article. From corporate boardrooms to the arts and higher education, the story is an ongoing one.

Take corporate pledges, which made up a good chunk of funding news last summer. The firms that rolled out big racial equity commitments include Nike, Walmart, Sony Music Group, Target, Visa and Bank of America, and many others. Numerous corporations also pledged in-kind support, promised to buy from Black suppliers and the like. YouTube, which is owned by Google, established a $100 million fund to support and publicize Black content creators.

However, as we’ve discussed, it’s all in the details when it comes to these commitments. And not just for corporate giving—that’s equally true of foundation giving and individual donor pledges. “Racial equity” and “DEI” can mean many different things. Only sometimes do they mean supporting the movement leaders, advocates and service organizations working to empower communities targeted by state violence.

That said, the racial reckoning propelled by Floyd’s murder has also reverberated in powerful ways outside the realm of direct movement building and advocacy. Take the arts, where the intense symbolism of what happened that day in Minneapolis inspired leading funders to back new work and shift programming to support Black artists and to keep BIPOC-led arts organizations afloat during the pandemic.

Another place where we’ve seen significant new funding is the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), which have long faced the same funding inequities as other organizations run by and serving Black people. Again, MacKenzie Scott has been a big part of that story, including major gifts to a wide range of HBCUs in her $6 billion in 2020 grant commitments. Other notable HBCU givers include big donors like Netflix founder Reed Hastings and wife Patty Quillin, and a range of corporations.

Longtime HBCU giver Robert F. Smith—currently the wealthiest Black American—also upped his support, sharing with us recently that he thinks empowering STEM students at HBCUs “will probably liberate the Black community more effectively than anything else I could think about.”

“Get in, and stay in”

All of these commitments amount to only a small fraction of what it will take to challenge and overcome the systemic racism that claimed George Floyd’s life and the lives of so many others, even as Chauvin’s trial took place. But they do mark at least the first signs of a future where philanthropy moves beyond mere rhetoric and gets behind anti-racist work in a wholehearted way.

To be sure, the way funders talk about these problems is important, and it’s meaningful when the sector adopts new norms in how it defines missions, strategies and plans. Nevertheless, advocates insist that talk must be a precursor to action. There’s no law of physics stating that philanthropy has to move slowly and cautiously. Perhaps the opposite could be true.

In the coming weeks and months, we plan to continue digging into what the sector’s doing to confront systemic racism, and what it’s failing to do. Meanwhile, we’ll leave off with a link to Libra Foundation Executive Director Crystal Hayling’s open letter to funders from last July, inspired by the late John Lewis’s exhortation during the 1963 March on Washington to “get in, and stay in.”

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