Multi-Year, General Support Is a Matter of Strategy for This Reproductive Rights Funder

Margaret Hempel, executive director of the Collaborative for Gender + Reproductive Equity (CGRE), has a message for other funders working to save and preserve reproductive rights in the United States: Multi-year, general operating support isn’t just a nice thing to do. It’s also an effective strategy.

Hempel has helmed CGRE since its launch in 2018. The collaborative funder is backed by philanthropic heavyweights like the Ford Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies and more, including MacKenzie Scott. Using a pooled funding approach, CGRE has moved a combined $214 million to 262 grantees so far. Given this depth of expertise, CGRE’s work represents an example that other funders may want to heed.

For example, take CGRE’s longtime focus on state-level work. Since the collaborative funder’s launch, 43% of its grantees have been state focused, a foresighted move, given that most of the action on reproductive rights was taking place in the states long before the Dobbs decision reinforced the need for targeted funding in states where rights are being criminalized. (In 2024, a full 76% of CGRE’s grants will be to state-focused nonprofits.)

As my colleague Connie Matthiesen reported last year, an emphasis on state-based efforts isn’t the only thing to like about CGRE’s work. The collaborative also supports equity work through three main strategies that combine for something of a wrap-around approach to the issues: state power-building, advancing equity through state judicial systems and supporting efforts to build alliances across different groups.

The part of CGRE’s approach that may be of the most interest to funders and reproductive-rights-aligned nonprofits, though, is the fact that 66% of its grantees receive general operating or flexible project support, and 69% of those grants are for multiple years. “We start with an assumption of general support, and with an assumption of multi-year support, and then we work from that,” Hempel told me recently.

CGRE says that this flexible funding has helped nonprofits continue to survive and provide services, even in states with abortion bans. For instance, CGRE’s grantees have supported patients’ increased costs for out-of-state travel, expanded the use of emergency contraception, fought misinformation seeking to confuse pregnant people about their legal options and provided resources to preserve their staffs’ wellness and resilience in the face of unrelenting attacks on reproductive rights.

Seeing as they work in such a rapidly evolving space, multi-year general operating support gives reproductive rights nonprofits the ability to pivot as necessary without having to first ask funders’ permission (and, probably, also file more paperwork). But that’s just the start. Most funders, Hempel said, don’t offer rapid-response support, which can leave grantees scrambling for money in case of a crisis — or, as with reproductive rights, in case of yet another crisis. Multi-year general operating support can fill that gap. Further, multi-year general support allows BIPOC-led and other underrepresented groups to take a more prominent role around the strategy table with their better-resourced peers. When joining strategy discussions, general operating support can help these groups make decisions about what role they will play in a campaign without having to worry if they’ll be able to squeeze the money from existing resources to make their participation possible.

“We often equate general and multi-year support with keeping their staff going and keeping the lights on, and that is all true,” Hempel said. “But it also allows you to be effective in the moment. It’s a smart strategy, it’s not just a good thing to do.”

Of course, saving and preserving reproductive rights isn’t the only field where conditions are rapidly changing, and it’s logical that strategies that work there will also be effective in other such fields like LGBTQ+ issues, preserving voting rights, and protecting and serving immigrants. In all of these areas and more, a grant that a nonprofit receives for a specific purpose today may very well be useless to that same nonprofit in just a few weeks or months because its work has been restricted by a court or state legislation. These are also sectors where it’s reasonable to assume that last-minute emergency needs have become a way of life.

While jobs in every sector have their challenges, nonprofit workers in particular are burned out, as we’ve covered extensively. They are underpaid, overworked and they’re shouldering the emotional burden of truly caring about the issues they are engaged in. Take all of these factors and add in the uncertainty and even physical danger of working in reproductive rights and other hotly contested areas, and Hempel’s stance on multi-year, general operating grants feels to me like something of a moral imperative.

“I often think about this as respect-based philanthropy,” she said. “We're funding groups because we think they're smart and we think they're doing good work. Let's respect them.” It’s a message that more funders — particularly funders that want to combat efforts to suppress essential rights without placing even more burdens on the people doing the actual work — would do well to heed.

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