“From the Ground Up.” A Funder Looks to Translate Social Justice Scholarship Into Action
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the Highlander Research and Education Center's 2018 retreat, "Highlander Homecoming." The photo is provided courtesy of the Highlander Research and Education Center.
Early last year, my colleague Ade Adeniji spoke with Marguerite Casey Foundation (MCF) President and CEO Carmen Rojas about the Seattle-based funder’s priorities, which included supporting scholarship to advance economic and social justice. Central to this work was the Freedom Scholars Initiative, a $3 million effort launched in partnership with Group Health Foundation to provide funding for progressive academics.
For Rojas, this work represents an overdue counterweight to conservative donors’ decades-long support for thinkers whose perspectives methodically reshaped public opinion and contributed to enormous wins at the ballot and in the courts. “There are so many ways academic scholarship on the right has been heavily and disproportionately influenced by right-wing funders who’ve supported academics,” Rojas said at the time. “Progressives need to work in alignment with supports and activists on the ground. This is the kind of cross-sector weaving we know is necessary.”
A few months ago, the foundation announced its most recent giving in this area — $6 million to four organizations bridging the worlds of social justice scholarship and social movements. The investment, which is double the amount the foundation and Group Health Foundation committed to the Freedom Scholars Initiative, advances MCF’s strategy of “supporting leaders who are putting their ideas about shifting power into organizations to make real change,” the foundation told IP via email.
Two issues compelled leaders to allocate this support. First, leaders became concerned with what the MCF called “an increase in disinformation, attacks on critical race theory, and unprecedented scrutiny of progressive funders.” The foundation’s $6 million investment seeks to counteract this surge.
Second, Freedom Scholars, grant recipients and board members who spoke with MCF leaders consistently cited a lack of funding at the intersection of ideas and community organizing. However, rather than earmarking funds for community organizing, leaders “wanted to do an experiment where we funded a set of institutions that focus on improving praxis” — defined as the process of realizing or enacting an idea or theory — “from the ground up,” according to the foundation.
MCF granted $1.5 million each to four organizations — the Portal Project of the Social Justice Initiative at the University of Illinois Chicago, UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, Chicago’s Haymarket Books, and Highlander Research and Education Center, a social justice leadership training school and cultural center in New Market, Tennessee. These grantees “not only advance social justice causes,” according to the foundation, “but cultivate leadership and education in social justice movements, creating a sturdy foundation for initiatives to endure and flourish.”
At first glance, MCF’s efforts to build bridges between academics and activists seem to come straight from the right’s playbook. And why wouldn’t it? If I told you that by dramatically cutting taxes for billionaires and multinational corporations, the economic benefits would “trickle down” to the country’s middle class and poor, you’d probably either laugh or cry. But the idea entered the mainstream in the late 1970s in large part because its proponents funneled support to networks of academics, think tanks and lobbyists who slow-dripped laissez-faire capitalism into the country’s legislative circulatory systems over several decades. We’re still feeling the effects.
Similarly, MCF grantees forging connections between social justice scholarship and social justice movements are planting what the foundation calls “a seed to a multiracial future with a just economy.” The implication here is that, like their counterparts on the right, academics are expected to generate ideas that can be translated into action in the halls of local governments, statehouses, and on Capitol Hill. As a result, leaders are taking a “wait and see” approach before committing to additional funding for this type of work. “We made a significant investment and will determine our approach moving forward based on the results,” read the foundation’s statement.
But the comparison to right-wing funding strategy only goes so far. After all, working-class Americans were not clamoring for billionaire and corporate tax cuts in the mid-1970s. Supply-side economics was a top-down idea propagated by economists at, among other places, the distinctly non-grassroots American Enterprise Institute, and it stands in stark contrast to the women’s suffrage, civil rights, and marriage equality movements, all of which sprung up from the community level.
MCF’s investment also reflects its goal of “shifting the balance of power in society to those to have long been excluded from having it,” Rojas said in the MCF’s press release back in the early summer. The foundation isn’t alone on this front. In related analysis, check out how Mellon is amplifying underrepresented voices at national parks and funders are working to boost civic engagement and democracy on college campuses.
