An end-of-year collection of interesting and insightful thinking about grantmaking and giving.
Nobody knows
“Honestly, I don’t think people associate ‘dark money’ with (c)(4)s. No one even knows what ‘(c)(4)’ means, or ‘social-welfare organization.’”
— “A conversation with the University of Oregon’s Renée A. Irvin (Part 2 of 2),” July 11, 2023
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Muscle-flexing foundations and a metaphorical moment
“The elite class, the people who basically run everything in our country, are just remarkably homogeneous.” Philanthropic foundations “provide work and an importance, a sense of meaning, for this elite class when they’re not doing other things like running for office or staffing universities and the like” and they “basically move in the same direction when it comes to any kind of social or political issues.
“Foundations today, to most Americans, seem like billionaires flexing their muscles.”
Metaphorically invoking the timeline of the French Revolution, “We’re in the reaction moment. Robespierre has been guillotined. Now the elites are basically saying, no more of that, no more of this revolt-of-the-public stuff. I think the foundations are part and parcel of that. They subsidize views that are very unpopular, but since they bypass the marketplace, they can do that.”
— “A conversation with Martin Gurri (Part 1 of 2),” July 17, 2023, and “A conversation with Martin Gurri (Part 2 of 2),” July 18, 2023
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Every aspect of American life
“Foundation after foundation, philanthropy after philanthropy, university after university, they’re all saying the same thing.” They’re saying “America was wrong from the beginning.
“We’re in the middle of a revolution”—a political and cultural revolution that attacks “not simply our economy. It’s politics, it’s culture, it’s our manners and mores, as Tocqueville would have said. It’s every aspect of American life ….”
— “A conversation with the Hudson Institute’s John Fonte (Part 2 of 2),” August 1, 2023
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Philanthropy and politics, prospects for reform and practical advice
“You could at least enforce the rules, have enough people to enforce them, to say ‘This is not (c)(3) work anymore. You’re doing the act or work of a party or candidate.’”
Any aggressive legal or regulatory reform “would have to be uniform. It’s hard to imagine, given the state of politics today, you could get a neutral or perceived neutral body to do this. So I wouldn’t recommend that as a solution, because it’s not likely to work. In might enflame things.
“But I think you could … if you’re the one who’s taking advantage of these through your philanthropic giving, you can just demand higher standards—like, ‘We’re not going to give to groups that are quasi-partisan and pretend to be something else …. We want to fund groups broadly within our ideology or across our ideology or without an ideology,’ … which is, like, Madisonian pluralism.
Offering practical advice for charitable givers, “I just think it makes more sense for them to remain independent rather than to align themselves so much with any given leader or party at any time. I don’t know why you would align your philanthropic efforts with things that have such bad images, but that’s just me.”
— “A conversation with The Liberal Patriot’s John Halpin (Part 2 of 2),” September 20, 2023
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Funding for litigation, and preparing for a changed landscape
“[T]he power of our philanthropy really came from conservative foundations and high-net-worth individuals. I use the modifier conservative. As it turns out, there are quite a few kind of center-left individuals who thought that race-based affirmative action in college admissions was wrong, and they were very generous in helping us litigate.”
As for approaching foundations for funding, “It’s enormously more complex and complicated going to a foundation and saying, ‘Here’s who we are. This is our goal. We have sued Harvard. We have sued the University of North Carolina. That’s all we do. If we win, then race-based affirmative action will be over ….,’ Not having these budgets, not having the ability to provide the kinds of things that larger foundations want, was a challenge. And we got a lot of thumbs down, I think, because of that.
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“I’m not out here trying to drum up business for the American legal profession, but the landscape has changed. Private foundations should have a good long meeting” and “ask for a memorandum in light of the Students for Fair Admissions cases. Is there something that we need to be aware of [in] how we hire, how we make grants?”
— “A conversation with the American Alliance for Equal Rights’ Edward Blum (Part 1 of 2),” September 25, 2023, and “A conversation with the American Alliance for Equal Rights’ Edward Blum (Part 2 of 2),” September 26, 2023
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Enablers’ culpability
“[W]e call them funder enablers, because if you give a lot of money or any money to an organization, you may not know very much about what they’re doing … but it doesn’t make any difference. Your money is enabling them. And you own it.”
All the donor agencies, including the UN, “that are active in Gaza know exactly what’s going on and they’re definitely culpable, they’re complicit in the terrible, indescribable murders that we saw just a few weeks ago” in Israel.
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“What we’re seeing on us campuses today—these pseudo-Jewish organizations that provide a fig leaf, claiming to be Jewish, like Jewish Voice for Peace—got their core funding from Rockefeller Brothers under the framework of promoting peace. One of the aspects of that was driving a wedge between the Jewish community and Israel.
“We’d be remiss in not talking about other funders as well. In terms of numbers, the amounts,” George Soros and his giving vehicles “dwarf what Rockefeller Brothers does,” and “if Soros gives, so many other people follow. … Foundations follow. So certainly, we hope that Alex, his son, will take a good look at what that money did and how much antisemitism and violence and hatred that it engendered and enabled.”
As for relevant policy distinctions in the tax treatment of nonprofits, “I think that needs to be looked at in more detail. There’s always a difficult line, but maybe now it’s not so blurry …. Material support for terrorism or various other types of incitement to violence, I think that needs to be looked at carefully ….”
— “A conversation with NGO Monitor’s Gerald Steinberg (Part 1 of 2),” October 30, 2023, and “A conversation with NGO Monitor’s Gerald Steinberg (Part 2 of 2),” October 31, 2023
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Recovering the lost liberty of truly charitable voluntary associations
From America’s Founding to before the Civil War, “there was this whole sort of culture of forming voluntary associations, for-profit and nonprofit. It was just something people learned, even in public schools …. They tried to create a public sphere outside of government. They would tell people, ‘Hey, if you see a problem and you want to try to fix it, this is how you go about it. You get with some of your neighbors and you form articles of association and you spell out the rules that your organization is going to follow.’ If an individual or a group of people didn’t know how to do this, someone within their social circle did or knew a lawyer who could draft the things.
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Historically, what’s called “the third sector” has “gone under various names, including ‘the forgotten sector,’ and still is forgotten. It’s not talked about enough. There’s all kinds of problems going on in it, and it’s difficult to have a robust public debate about it. It gets very quickly politicized and it looks like there are some untoward activities going on. We really didn’t have” that kind of activity “in the past because charity was so focused on helping individuals rather than helping political parties or ideologies.
“I think we have to talk about it and teach about it, and that’s more important than anything with the taxes. Get back to minimal government and letting people know that if you don’t like something, don’t tweet about it. Go and do something. You’re empowered. You have the liberty to try to address problems yourself.”
— “A conversation with Lost Liberty author Robert E. Wright (Part 1 of 2),” November 29, 2023, and “A conversation with Lost Liberty author Robert E. Wright (Part 2 of 2),” November 30, 2023
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Higher education’s “donor revolt”
“[T]he challenges to reform are real. They’re formidable,” but “higher education is too important to our society to abandon. … Unlike Vegas, what happens on college campuses doesn’t stay there. This illiberal ideology that we’ve seen take over workplaces, government, you name it—that started on college campuses. So I would encourage donors to not give up on reform efforts, because I think we can’t simply walk away from higher education.”
— Emily Koons Jae, from “A conversation with ACTA’s Michael Poliakoff and Emily Koons Jae (Part 1 of 2),” December 11, 2023
After October 7, many higher-education donors feel “a deep sense of betrayal and perhaps even a sense of awakening. The betrayal was watching students, the day after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, celebrating this. … I asked two questions immediately: Who raised these children? And who pretended to educate them? The antisemitism problem on campus had been a dirty little secret for a very long time.”
As for donors, “they should not be looked upon as piggy banks or check-writers or guests at the football game. They’re the guardians of values. And this is an opportunity for them to say, ‘It’s not our checkbooks that are an issue now, it’s our values.’”
— Michael Poliakoff, from “A conversation with ACTA’s Michael Poliakoff and Emily Koons Jae (Part 2 of 2),” December 12, 2023
