In 2020, our Digital Democracy portfolio (DDP) wanted to find a way to learn more about our grantees’ challenges while also being mindful of their limited time during a turbulent year. We decided to hold learning conversations with our grantees instead of commissioning formal evaluations, so that we could quickly extend support. Our learning and evaluation partner, ORS Impact, led these conversations by hosting 90-minute small group discussions with grantees, focusing on their work ensuring tech, telecom and media serves communities of color, trends they were seeing across the digital rights movement, and challenges they faced. After a couple of iterations of these yearly learning conversations, we adapted them to count as narrative grant reports, providing the option to replace the traditional, often time-consuming annual narrative reports written by each DDP grantee.
ORS Impact currently conducts these sessions on an annual basis and prepares a final report, which we submit internally to meet the grant reporting requirement. This method of reporting and evaluation is an efficient way to get all the information we need to explore how grantees’ actions lead to outcomes in the aggregate. It also helps us adjust our strategies and activities to best support grantees and the field. Note: Initially, Democracy Fund staff attended the small group sessions. We no longer participate in the sessions because we know our presence creates power imbalances and may alter results.
This new method is just one way that Democracy Fund is experimenting with different forms of reporting that are inclusive, add value to the field, and embrace complexity (tenets of our Strategy, Impact and Learning values).
While the learning cohorts are a unique practice of DDP, Democracy Fund has been using other forms of reporting, like one-on-one verbal reporting, in addition to traditional narrative reports. Most Democracy Fund grantees have the choice between verbal reports or narrative reports, which so far, caters to each grantee’s preferences and reduces the burden on their time and energy.
What we’ve learned from this new model
Over the past four years of experimenting with this method of reporting, DDP grantees have had in-depth discussions on topics ranging from field infrastructure, coordination and networks, and strategies connecting research and advocacy. We have been able to learn a lot from our grantees on these topics, with a richness of findings that is only possible through group conversations.
The small group dynamic has many advantages:
Facilitating real-time learning for us and our grantees. This allows us to spot more connections and patterns across our portfolio, which a traditional one-off narrative report doesn’t do.
Ensuring our grantees have access to the same learnings we do. We share the final report back to grantees and share it with other partners, making our learnings known to the field.
Building relationships and more coordination between grantees.
Reducing grantees’ time spent on reporting.
Most importantly, this approach de-centers the funder and ensures that learning isn’t happening in a vacuum.
There two disadvantages worth noting:
Unlike with written grant reports, the findings from group discussions are aggregated and anonymous so there is less specificity and consistency year over year.
This method, along with verbal reporting, caters to verbal processors, and not everyone prefers learning this way.
Because of our learning philosophy to embrace complexity and conduct learning activities that are inclusive and add value to the field, these disadvantages do not outweigh the benefits of this reporting method. We value our grantees’ time and expertise, and strive to help build more opportunities for coordination.
What we learned from DDP grantees in 2024
This year’s findings have produced valuable insights for the DDP team and our grantees. We asked our grantees about field coordination, philanthropy’s impact on the field, infrastructure support, and how to support local organizing work. These topics, among others, were best discussed without Democracy Fund in the room, to promote candor and provide a safe space. The grantees raised that funder-driven shifts create disruption, loss of strategic agency, and competition and instability. When shifts happen, funders should provide transparency and transition support, and connections to other funders.
Another finding worth noting from this year’s conversations was about supporting local organizing. Our grantees who do local organizing around tech justice talked about the importance of trusted relationships between organizations, community visioning processes, and national policy organizations taking direction from community organizing. The grantees were able to riff on each other’s ideas, and find commonalities across locales. This discussion was less likely to have been as rich or honest if it had happened in a one-on-one conversation.
More findings from the 2024 learning cohorts, such as what grantees surfaced as infrastructure needs and inhibitors to local organizing can be found in our 2024 summary report.
Funders need to consider the impact of their reporting models
As trust-based philanthropy takes hold across the field, more and more funders are looking for methods to learn alongside their grantees and track changes within the field without creating an overwhelming burden on grantees. As a result of Democracy Fund’s recent Grantee Perception Survey, we are committed to finding more ways to share what we are learning. We encourage other funders to do the same, and avoid reporting requirements that put funders’ needs above those of grantees.
Here are some resources, organizations, and individuals that informed shifts in our internal reporting requirements:
As we head into the presidential election, the pro-democracy movement must meet the moment to strengthen our democracy and ensure equitable participation, voice, and power in communities of color. This work happens on both sides of the ballot box – by increasing voter participation and by supporting election administrators who serve our diverse electorate.
On June 26, Democracy Fund hosted a webinar that focused on the trends and needs in the election administration field, featuring Amanda Litman, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Run for Something Civics and Virginia Kase Solomón, Executive Director of Common Cause Education Fund. The conversation, facilitated by Ebony West, Senior Associate at Democracy Fund, focused on the critical issues surrounding election administration in the United States, including the challenges and opportunities administrators are facing today and strategies to strengthen and diversify election administration leadership.
Since 2020, we have experienced a high level of attrition among election administrators as a result of low compensation, inadequate funding, and a hostile work environment due to growing threats against election administrators. And, despite our country becoming increasingly diverse, many election administration positions are still largely filled by older, white Americans who may be unaware of the challenges faced by marginalized communities in gaining equitable representation and access to the vote. Finally, many states have enacted restrictive voting laws, making the voting process more difficult for people of color, young people, LGBTQ+ people, and people with disabilities. However, thanks to the efforts of our panelists, their organizations, and others like them, we’re seeing inspiring progress to confront many of the challenges facing the election administration field.
One example of Run for Something Civics’ approach is exemplified in the Arizona Pima County recorder Gabriela Casarez Kelly, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation. Kelly successfully advocated for the reinstatement of early voting sites on the Pasquay Yankee reservation, significantly increasing accessibility and voter turnout. Her journey exemplifies the real-world impact of diversity in election administration.
We also heard about the work Common Cause Education Fund is doing to increase state-level funding for election offices so they have more resources for voter education and operations. In North Carolina, Common Cause North Carolina and Democracy North Carolina successfully advocated for increased funding to the Chatham County Board of Elections so they could hire an IT Specialist. These partnerships between election administrators and advocates are key to bolstering funding for elections so that they are accessible, secure, and responsive to voters.
The field of civil society organizations supporting election officials is small, but mighty. Organizations like Center for Tech and Civic Life, Center for Civic Design, and Public Rights Project are some of the few organizations who provide training and legal support to a field that continues to face an increasing amount of challenges including our ability to carry out a safe and fair election.
While these efforts show hope of a better, more representative democracy, this important work is at risk. The chronic challenge of underfunding in election administration has now been met with new operational challenges posed by escalating security threats. Election administrators are the last line of defense against abuse of power in our government, and their work needs our support.
Our ask is simple. Philanthropy must urgently prioritize long-term investments in the backbone of how our elections are run, election administration. Our support should support the strengthening of the workforce and the systems that make the voting process equitable. Civil society and election administrators must continue to deepen the relationship with each other to ensure we work together to solve the most urgent problems for the long-term health of our democracy.
Last year, Democracy Fund partnered with the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) to conduct our third Grantee Perception Report. This work builds on previous surveys from 2014 and 2017. We felt it was crucial to hear from our grantee partners last year as we launched refreshed program strategies as part of our new five-year organizational strategy.
Our 2023 CEP survey was open to all 250 Democracy Fund grantees with a grant active between June 2022 and June 2023. One hundred fifty grantees shared their feedback with us. We deeply appreciate the time and care they took in sharing their thoughts, and we are committed to taking their feedback to heart as we strive to be a better funding partner.
We’re sharing the key findings from the CEP report, which includes feedback from grantees of our partner organization Democracy Fund Voice.
Grantees said Democracy Fund understands and impacts their fields – providing a rating of just under 6 out of 7 on both measures. They said our team was respectful (6.83 out of 7), compassionate (6.54 out of 7), and exhibited trust in them (6.51 out of 7). They also said Democracy Fund staff embody a “strong commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion” (6.44 out of 7).
One grantee wrote: “I have worked with many foundations, donors, government agencies, and other funders during my career to date and Democracy Fund is, by far, the most compassionate, empathetic, equitable, thoughtful, flexible, and trustworthy funder I have had the good fortune to work with.”
While it is always gratifying to hear when we are doing a good job, we view this survey as a unique opportunity to understand what is working and where we can improve. Among the most important messages we heard were:
1.Grantees value our efforts to streamline our grantmaking process. Sixty-two percent of respondents reported receiving unrestricted grants and 36% reported receiving multi-year unrestricted grants – placing us at the 92nd and 89th percentile of foundations respectively. Grantees encouraged us to provide more multi-year general operating support, reinforcing the ongoing changes we’ve made to our grantmaking process and approach. After our 2017 survey, we committed to clarifying our process for prospective grantees, right-sizing our application requirements, and streamlining our reporting practices. In our 2023 survey, Democracy Fund grantees reported spending a median of 10 hours on our proposal process and 6 hours on reporting, down from 24 hours and 15 hours, respectively, in 2017. We are particularly proud that in 2023, grantees reported significantly less pressure from us to modify their organization’s priorities to create a grant proposal that was likely to receive funding: grantees placed us in the 15th percentile of all funders in CEP’s dataset related to feeling pressure from the foundation, down from the 98th percentile in 2017.
2. Our beyond-the-grant assistance (especially our support around field building and fundraising) adds significant value to our grantees’ work. Nearly two-thirds of our grantees reported receiving non-monetary assistance, reflecting our 2017 commitment to expand our non-monetary support. Grantees emphasized that Democracy Fund should continue to help new donors enter the space to increase funding for the democracy field overall, connect grantees to new funders, share its own research and learnings with the field, and convene grantees and partners to strengthen field strategies. Many grantees suggested we double down on this type of support in their narrative feedback, along with requests to more regularly bring cohorts of grantees and partners together, something Democracy Fund did much more frequently before the pandemic.
3.Many grantees highlighted their strong and trusting relationships with Democracy Fund program officers but noted a disconnect between those one-on-one relationships and our foundation-wide communications practices. Following our 2017 survey, we committed to supporting program staff as they worked to build trusting and collaborative relationships with their grantee partners. We are heartened that our grantees reported feeling more comfortable approaching us with problems, and they gave our program officers high marks for being respectful and compassionate. However, we have more work to do to provide organizational context and share timely and consistent updates with our grantees. This need was particularly pronounced as we pivoted into our new organizational strategy. Grantees felt we could have done more to engage them in our strategy development, explain the changes, and describe the implications for their organizations. This sentiment was especially strong among grantees whose grants were not being renewed, who rated their experiences with Democracy Fund less favorably across the board and highlighted areas where our communication and transparency fell short of their expectations.
We take this feedback seriously, and moving forward, we commit to:
Deepening our engagement with grantees by providing clearer and more consistent communications, particularly around foundation-wide strategy, as well as program-level updates. We will experiment with different approaches over the coming months, and we’re eager for feedback from our grantees about which hit the mark and where we can further improve.
Finding more ways to share what we are learning with our partners and develop a shared understanding of where resources can be most impactful. Learning is one of our organization’s core values, and we dedicate significant time and capacity to listening to our grantees and learning from their work. This information shapes our understanding of the problems facing democracy and helps us adapt our priorities to meet the field’s needs. We share our formal evaluations publicly, but we plan to more frequently share what we are learning from informal, ongoing reflections and to be in dialogue with our grantees about their learnings.
Continuing to streamline our grant application and reporting processes as we further reduce grantee time and resources spent on these activities. Since 2020, we have rolled out a streamlined renewal application, experimented with verbal reporting options, and included a “why we ask” rationale for every question on our application to ensure that the information we collect serves a clear purpose. We know how valuable our grantees’ time is, and we plan to further refine our application and reporting requirements to free up grantee capacity for other activities.
We plan to weave these commitments into our day-to-day practices over the long term as we aim to become a better funding partner. We will hold ourselves accountable to this spirit of continuous improvement by repeating the CEP survey every two to three years. We are grateful for our grantees’ feedback, and we are committed to learning and growing as we work together to build a more inclusive, multiracial democracy.
Admitting that you’re planning for the worst-case scenario when it comes to democracy can be tough. It takes courage not to brush aside threats of violence. It is hard to acknowledge that our political systems might fail or that forces are actively working to undermine our election system.
As Democracy Fund’s new paper,On Black Swans, Gray Rhinos, and the 2024 Election outlines, understanding the menagerie of “chaos factors” in front of us may hold the secret to readying the pro-democracy field to meet this moment.
Too often, “Black Swans,” or unpredictable disasters, distract our attention in these conversations. At Democracy Fund, we are more focused on “Gray Rhinos” — the foreseeable dangers that we fail to prepare for, even though they are charging straight at us in plain sight.
What makes a Gray Rhino foreseeable and a Black Swan nearly impossible to predict? The difference is often in what holds our attention. And navigating the chaos factors ahead will come down to listening, readiness, and resilience.
Listen to Marginalized Communities Sounding the Alarm
By the time the rumbling earth caused by a charging rhino is close enough to feel, most responses are ineffectual: fear, hope that the carnage will happen to someone else but not us, doubt that we can do anything to stop it, and of course, the desire to just run and hide. There’s no escaping disaster when a Gray Rhino is on our heels.
However, there are ways to prepare for Gray Rhino threats. One of the best ways to prepare is to listen to marginalized communities, who are often the first lines of both defense and impact. Their perspectives are invaluable because they are often the first to be targeted and tend to have the greatest perspective on the real scope of the dangers we face.
Too often, however, the people closest to the harms aren’t at decision-making tables — their valid concerns and forewarnings are cast aside by people in positions of safety and power.
Take for example, the conservative court’s intention to overturn Roe v. Wade as a Gray Rhino. Despite the clear and stated threat, along with the warnings of reproductive justice advocates and BIPOC organizers, many people were not able to imagine or prepare for the court taking this action. The Rhino was charging straight ahead, but too many hoped that it would ultimately divert its path. People who had already directly experienced their rights being taken away were in a better position to realize the threat and know how to organize against it. But with so many ignoring their warnings, we were largely unprepared when the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling finally came down in the summer of 2022.
Political violence may be the next Gray Rhino that will cross our path. Communities that have been under the threat of state-sanctioned violence are keenly tuned into the warning signs of authoritarianism and anti-democratic actors. All the warning signs in our election environment are there, including an alarming rise in threats against front-line leaders, election administrators, and public officials. Movement leaders are raising the alarm and lives are at stake should we continue to ignore their warnings. We need to not only prepare for this very real threat but protect the organizers and communities that are most directly in the path of this Gray Rhino.
Invest in Readiness by Taking Cues from Communities
Listening to marginalized communities doesn’t just help us identify threats. It also provides insights into effective solutions.
The signs and effects of most threats are felt first at a local level, which is also where the groundwork for solutions is often laid. As funders, we must look to local organizers and community-based solutions to understand what is most needed and likely to be the most effective. These efforts often embody the resilience we need — flexible, adaptive, and community-centered, rather than brittle and dependent on external forces.
For example, during COVID-19, mutual aid networks emerged to provide essential support where top-down responses fell short. Similarly, research shows that social connection and cohesion directly aid a community’s ability to recover from natural disasters and public health crises. Communities with a deep sense of connection that adopt a sustained, shared response to threats are more resilient than those relying on temporary, external interventions.
As grantmakers, we can fuel what works. For example, the Trusted Elections Fund has invested in state-based networks to prepare for the dual threats of election sabotage and political violence. And organizations like the Center for Tech and Civic Life are ensuring that under-funded local election offices have the resources they need to carry out a well-run election.
Just as the fields of natural disaster and public health response have developed coordinated strategies, pro-democracy philanthropy can apply this same resilience-planning mindset to prepare for future threats.
Resilience in the Face of Charging Rhinos
Planning for resilience requires us to look clear-eyed at Gray Rhinos and listen intentionally to people who know the signs before they begin to charge. We must listen to those who can see chaos factors on the horizon. With senses heightened to these threats, we may begin to realize that what looks like chaos is complexity. And where chaos can cause us to lose hope, complexity is something we can tackle together.
This preparation involves asking crucial questions: Who are we bringing to the scenario planning table? Whose voices are we listening to and prioritizing? What strengths and solutions already exist at the local level that we can further support?
The more that the grantmaking community can invest in planning and the more we shift resources to community-led efforts, the stronger the pro-democracy field will be. Together, we can weather what is ahead by investing in resilience, engaging in shared preparedness, and building trusted relationships with people who can identify these threats.
The 2020 presidential election happened amid a pandemic and racial justice protests, and it was followed by an insurrection. What can we expect in 2024?
Political observers, journalists, and others have begun raising questions about how different events could unleash uncertainty into the election year. Here are some of the things they’re thinking about:
What if a candidate, party, or segment of the public rejects the legitimacy of an election related court ruling? How likely is it that the losing side will accept the outcome, that voters will acknowledge the winner as legitimate, and that results will be accepted peacefully?
How will our democratic system respond to multiple criminal indictments against one of the party nominees for president? What are the implications of legal proceedings coinciding with the campaign? What would a guilty verdict mean?
What happens if a campaign of either major party candidate is suspended? How would the timing of this affect the election?
What if a third-party candidate garnered a significant share of the vote? Could this undercut acceptance of the result?
What if acts of domestic terrorism and violent threats disrupt campaigning and public events? If disillusionment and frustration with our democracy turn into widespread political violence or domestic terrorism, how will we address it?
What could happen if a new pandemic or regional climate disaster occurred on or near election day? How would the public respond to a state of emergency coinciding with voting or counting the vote?
How disruptive could AI-enabled misinformation campaigns get? How might a campaign use AI audio or video? How might they target particular communities? Could they change the makeup of particular coalitions?
How will our election system weather the unprecedented turnover of seasoned election administrators across the country? What could happen with a wave of new administrators?
Could interventions or geopolitical events driven by foreign powers reshape political coalitions? How might the pro-democracy community fracture as a result of external events? How will the actions of foreign actors using social media platforms and artificial intelligence tools shape the spread of misinformation?
At Democracy Fund, we refer to these unpredictable, uncertainty-causing events as “chaos factors.”
Feeling overwhelmed? These and other chaos factors could make even the most seasoned observer throw their hands up in frustration. We are facing serious threats that — individually or in combination — could push our democracy to the brink. If those of us in the pro-democracy field are going to engage efficiently and effectively, we need a way to think about the range of variables we face.
Chaos factor: an event that, if it occurs, would create huge uncertainty in the system.
Making Sense of Chaos Factors
Conventional wisdom tells us to rank threats by how likely they are to happen and how big the impact could be. A highly likely, high-impact threat is something to pay close attention to, while an unlikely or low-impact threat is not. But the world is not that simple.
The challenge we’re dealing with in 2024 is just how much uncertainty there is. While we are already aware of a long list of chaos factors, there are likely more that we haven’t imagined. Many of the chaos factors are unprecedented, and we just don’t know what impact they might have. We can try to determine which are more likely, but we risk getting it wrong. In other words, there is a significant risk of focusing our attention and resources on threats that could be inconsequential — while ignoring those that end up mattering.
At Democracy Fund, we believe that the best way to address chaos factors isn’t to proactively anticipate and respond to specific threats, but to remain resilient in the face of any threats that might emerge. Rather than jump to “how likely is it?” about a possible threat, we can step back and also ask “is it possible to see such a thing coming?” And instead of focusing on only “how big would the impact be?” we also ask “is this something we could be prepared to respond to?”
“There is a significant risk of focusing our attention and resources on threats that could be inconsequential — while ignoring those that end up mattering.”
In 2007, Nassim Nicholas Taleb introduced the idea of the “Black Swan” into the world of foresight and strategic planning. A Black Swan is something that happens that is both unforeseeable and highly impactful. By definition, you don’t anticipate a Black Swan and you’re not prepared for it. While it may be tempting to spend our time trying to think of the one crucial event that no one else saw coming, many of the chaos factors facing our democracy in 2024 are not Black Swans. They are foreseeable, and we can prepare for them.
Since the introduction of the Black Swan, the foresight field has created a number of different terms1 for events that could or could not destabilize a system, and we’ve developed a framework using those terms to help us make sense of chaos factors. We argue that while Black Swan thinking can help us explore uncertainty, we can build overall resilience by focusing on factors we can already foresee, and which of those require additional preparation: White Swans and Gray Rhinos. Meanwhile, we can deprioritize those events we might categorize as Paper Tigers.2
Creatures of Chaos
The framework we have developed at Democracy Fund considers chaos factors as White Swans, Gray Rhinos, Paper Tigers, or Black Swans based on whether we can foresee them and/or prepare for them. Even internally, this categorization has provoked debate. For example, what may be a Gray Rhino for some can be a Black Swan for others. As Taleb has put it, “a black swan for the turkey is not a black swan for the butcher.” This debate can be useful, as it surfaces assumptions about what risks we are aware of and preparing for — and about our cognitive biases more generally. We offer the following definitions and examples for your consideration.
Foreseeable
White Swans are the opposite of Black Swans. They are events we know will happen and for which we routinely prepare. For example, flu season happens every year, and public health departments should have a clear plan of action. In the democracy field, White Swans include:
Errors in the tabulation of votes. It is highly likely that this will happen somewhere, and election administrators generally have approaches to identify and to address it.
Low voter turnout. This is a perennial concern, often compounded by deliberate voter suppression including intimidation and misinformation campaigns
Gray Rhinos are widely anticipated but ignored by the mainstream and largely not planned for. For example, public health experts warned about a global pandemic, but governments were largely caught off guard by rampant Covid breakouts. Likewise, the overturn of Roe v. Wade was a clear and stated goal of the conservative movement once it held a majority on the Supreme Court, yet the act still came as a shock to the public. A Gray Rhino for the U.S. election system was:
The false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. It was not a surprise that the 2020 election results would be disputed. However, the pro-democracy field was largely unprepared for the scale and persistence of the attacks on the integrity of our election system.
Unforeseeable
Paper Tigers are vaguely defined threats that stoke fear and anxiety, but largely amount to nothing because of existing safeguards in the system. For example, relatively few of the new tech products marketed as “game changers” actually “disrupt” the system and take over meaningful market share. For U.S. elections, notable Paper Tigers are:
Voting machine hacking. This has been advanced as a threat to our democracy, yet 2020 was “the most secure election in U.S. history.” Despite claims that some form of coordinated electoral fraud could affect the outcome of an election, instances of fraud are extremely rare, and there are numerous checks in place to maintain the integrity of the vote count.
Black Swans cannot be anticipated and cannot be prepared for. Their impact is significant. Taleb described the 9/11 terrorist attack as a Black Swan. Even though the possibility of an attack was understood, the nature and scale of the actual event was not. A Black Swan that continues to threaten our election system includes:
The storming of the Capitol and the insurrection on Jan 6th. Protests and rallies were anticipated, but the scope and scale of the violence were not.
Two categories of events we often discuss don’t fit neatly into this framework, but they are worth keeping in the back of our minds because they can help us understand the full sweep of the impacts we might face: the Dragon King and the Peacock.
Dragon Kings are somewhat predictable but can unexpectedly bring about the collapse of the system.3 That collapse is unanticipated and catastrophic, often because we under-appreciate the scale of the event or how interdependent aspects of the system are. For example, a massive earthquake could trigger a collapse in the transport system, which then causes a failure of food distribution. In the democracy field, there may be just such a combination of events that cause governance as we know it to break down, such as:
Election certification refusal. A critical mass of counties and/or states refuse to certify the
election results, and attempts to resolve the dispute through legal means fail.
President defies judiciary. A president refuses to abide by a court order even after an appeals process has played out.
Peacocks are totally inconsequential events that serve as a ploy for attention, often using a familiar formula or tactic. Peacocks are often distractions or cynical attempts at self-promotion.4 For example, the U.S. trucker convoy protesting federal vaccine and mask mandates was largely a manufactured controversy, because by the time it happened, the only federal requirements of this type applied to healthcare and military personnel. In terms of elections, Peacocks can include:
Election-inflected noise. Media personalities and media channels (who may not actually have much influence over voters) spin up election-related stories or stage photo ops.
Planning for Resilience
So how does this framework help us to set priorities and develop strategies for the year ahead? At Democracy Fund, we’ve spent significant time doing strategic foresight work to help us prepare for 2024. Here are some of our recommendations.
1. Keep doing the core work
As in every election, in 2024 there is a need for poll worker training, get-out-the-vote efforts, informing the public about an election, election protection, and other “bread and butter” election work. These efforts all respond to White Swans: very real challenges that we know are real and for which we know how to prepare.
Handling White Swans may not grab the headlines the same way Black Swan efforts do. But if, for example, we lose sight of the core work of election protection, we risk letting a key part of our resilience atrophy.
We launched a multifunder campaign, All by April, because we’ve learned over many election cycles that the best way to support free, fair, and representative elections is to get money out the door early.
TRUSTED ELECTION FUND
Many organizations are working to address Gray Rhinos. The Trusted Election Fund (TEF) is a nonpartisan pooled fund that supports efforts to prepare for and respond to high-risk threats to U.S. elections. TEF plays a critical role in helping the sector identify, communicate, plan, and support efforts to counter the range of threats we face.
This ensures that front-line election defenders have the funding they need to do the work that needs to be done.
2. Listen to the communities who can see chaos factors on the horizon
Most of the chaos factors on our list are Gray Rhinos. They are real, known risks. Are we doing enough to think through and plan for them — and identify others? We need to listen to people on the frontlines of defending our democracy and ask them what’s keeping them up at night. In particular, marginalized communities have often experienced the earliest and worst effects of our democratic system’s failures, and they are often aware of signals that indicate threats on the horizon before anyone else. As a sector, we need to build trusted relationships with people who can identify the Gray Rhinos — and take their warnings seriously.
We need to listen to the people on the frontlines of defending our democracy and ask them what’s keeping them up at night.
3. Provide early, strong support to communities most likely to be impacted.
We may not be able to foresee a Black Swan or contain its impact, but we know who is most likely to be affected — and to respond effectively in its aftermath. It’s easy to get fixated on conceiving of every imaginable threat to our democracy and think that a novel or untested approach is the best way to protect against it. But an important part of resilience is investing in the people and the ideas that we know can get the job done, and investing in them early.
Community activists, organizers, and leaders have been responsible for most of our democracy’s transformative moments, and they are a key line of defense against authoritarianism. Their movement- and power-building work has been part of our democratic system since its inception, ensuring that communities most likely to be affected by anti-democratic actors and practices are able to respond and engage. Investing in this work can help prepare our democracy for whatever comes next. The time to support movement- and power-builders is not after a crisis has occurred, but now, when they can build the critical democratic infrastructure needed to respond.
An important part of resilience is investing in the people and the ideas that we know can get the job done, and investing in them early.
4. Watch out for distractions
There will be a lot of noise in this election year: fear-mongering around Paper Tigers that our system is already built to withstand, and Peacocks designed to distract everyone from important priorities. It’s easy to get sucked into the latest headline, clickbait, or petty provocation.
We need to be disciplined about not letting our focus wander into issues and events that ultimately aren’t consequential. We also need to push back against narratives that sow distrust in our electoral system, and that seek to undermine the processes and safeguards in place to ensure that our elections are free and fair.
5. Don’t ignore the Dragon King
Catastrophic events are a possibility that’s hard to face, but we have to acknowledge the dangerous moment in which we find ourselves. We don’t want to dwell on the worst-case scenario, but ignoring it or pretending that the collapse of our democracy is simply not possible would be a grave mistake. The leadup to the 2024 election will demand our full attention, because the risks are real — and the stakes for democracy couldn’t be higher.
Leaning into Uncertainty Together
Many of us in the pro-democracy field are individually preparing for what might happen this year by doing scenario and contingency planning. This can help each of us anticipate possibilities and reduce uncertainty about how we might respond to specific events.
But what if we focused on creating resilience across our field? This would mean leaning into uncertainty together as we share insights. At first, our expanded ability to see chaos factors across the system might feel even more overwhelming. But by working together we’ll be able to have richer conversations on which chaos factors we’re seeing and how they might interact. We’ll be able to discuss how to prepare, and explore different interpretations of the longer-term impacts on our democracy.
This shared practice could create more powerful and holistic insights into how our democratic system works, and what it might take to defend and transform it into the inclusive, multiracial democracy that many of us seek. Uncertainty, after all, can be a powerful place for listening to each other, learning, and building solidarity. We can let go of the need to be right, and consider new ideas and new perspectives with curiosity and openness. We can ensure that whatever happens — whether White Swan, Gray Rhino, Paper Tiger, Black Swan, Peacock, or Dragon King — the pro-democracy sector will be prepared.
This typology continues to be refined, reinterpreted, and adapted by many different foresight thinkers and practitioners. The definitions, examples, and framework provided here are from Democracy Fund’s internal futures and foresight practice, but we have provided citations to credit individuals who first coined the terms. [↩]
Paper Tiger is a term that comes from the Chinese “zhǐlǎohǔ” and is not specific to the foresight field, but we have found the concept helpful to describe a certain type of event. [↩]
Reliable information fuels our lives. We need to know who is on the ballot, what’s happening in our schools, where to find rental assistance, and how to make change in our neighborhoods. From daily reporting that equips people to act, to huge investigations that reveal corruption, the health of local news is bound up with the health of our democracy.
Over five years, Democracy Fund has invested $11 million in six geographic areas across the U.S., where residents and institutions are collaborating to better meet their communities’ real information needs.
This report tells the story of how Democracy Fund grantees created positive impact in their communities through innovative, locally-driven solutions. It also shares lessons for funders and local leaders interested in advancing a more equitable future for local journalism. As more funders consider local collaborative funding, we hope that this report will serve as a valuable resource.
We believe that funding local news ecosystems is an equitable way to support local news because it is rooted in community listening and redistributing resources to areas of greatest need. In 2023, we have committed $4.75 million over the next three years to the geographic areas highlighted in the report, as part of our new Equitable Journalism strategy.
As we move forward in this work, we will continue to share what we learn, including a deeper analysis of the health of various local news ecosystems later in 2024. Sign up for our email newsletter to stay in touch.
Democracy Fund’s Digital Democracy Portfolio (DDP) and its grantees have been radically reimagining platform accountability and media policy through strategies at the intersection of reparation and rights.
To support this work, the team’s evaluation and learning partner, ORS Impact, conducted learning conversations with DDP grantees in March and April 2023 to understand the current state of the media and technology policy field and facilitate real-time learning among grantees. The conversations focused on three key areas:
Coordination in the field
The network of state and local advocates in the field
If and how the field is considering and/or engaging in narrative and cultural change strategies
This report summarizes findings across the learning conversations and highlights feedback for Democracy Fund and philanthropy more broadly.
To inform Democracy Fund’s Public Square team strategy planning in 2022, we commissioned an evaluation of our program from 2016-2021. Our evaluation and learning partner, Impact Architects, developed an in-depth report that has deeply informed our new strategies.
We are sharing here an executive summary that will provide an overview of our learnings across three strategies:
Ecosystem News
Equitable Journalism
Press Freedom
This summary also shares what we have learned about grantmaking more generally — in particular, the critical importance of trusted relationships and the ongoing need for more general operating support.
Democracy Fund’s Digital Democracy Initiative (DDI) and its grantees have been radically reimagining platform accountability and media policy through strategies at the intersection of advocacy, public will building, and litigation.
To support this work, the team’s evaluation and learning partner, ORS Impact, conducted learning conversations with DDI grantees in July and August 2022 to understand:
How advocacy grantees are planning for and adapting their strategies to shifts in Congressional leadership and/or agency nominations e.g., FTC, FCC)
What research grantees are learning about effectively integrating research into advocacy/organizing work
This report summarizes findings across the learning conversations and highlights feedback for Democracy Fund and philanthropy more broadly.
In the fall of 2021, Democracy Fund commissioned an evaluation of our Election Security and Confidence portfolio – the major focus of the Elections & Voting Program’s Trust in Elections strategy – to summarize our investments, activities, and impact and help us make informed decisions about future investments. Here, we reflect on the history of our election security work and share key findings from the evaluation. For a deeper dive, we invite you to read the full report.
History of the Election Security & Confidence Portfolio
The 2016 U.S. Presidential Election was a turning point for election security following attempts by foreign actors, namely Russian, Chinese, and Iranian groups, to disrupt the election with cyber-attacks. After the election, as information surfaced about how foreign actors scanned – and in a few cases gained entry into – several state and local election networks, it became clear that election security was now a national security concern. In response to these events, the Democracy Fund Elections & Voting Program added a body of work in 2017 to focus on improving security and confidence in our elections. With an emphasis on election security, this portfolio aimed to fortify the election system to prevent further foreign interference and counter cybersecurity threats by investing in tools and training for election officials. As part of these efforts, we also launched the Election Validation Project, which focused on expanding the use of post-election audits, and Democracy Fund Voice supported coalitions that advocated for, and secured, federal funding for elections in three straight years – 2018, 2019, and 2020 – which was the first funding for elections since the passage of HAVA in 2000.
The Elections & Voting Program’s initial landscaping and research led to the development of four core areas for grantmaking to prevent election interference based on the threats posed by foreign actors and vulnerable security infrastructure. These core grantmaking areas included:
Fortifying the field with workable solutions and best practices
Empowering election officials to advocate for funding to strengthen election cybersecurity
Researching verification practices and resiliency efforts
Public messaging on the legitimate risks to election systems
Evaluating the Portfolio’s Impact
An evaluation of the portfolio’s impact, conducted by Fernandez Advisors, focused on identifying the impact, growth, and sustainability of our investments to improve both election security and confidence in election outcomes. The report found that our investments in election security resources and tools that increased the capacity of state and local election administrators to identify and manage security threats were among the most valuable. In particular, government agency partners noted the critical role that Democracy Fund played by acting quickly and early to take the financial risks necessary to develop and pilot new election security resources (e.g., trainings, tools, technical assistance, and playbooks), which were eventually adapted by local, state, and federal government agencies once the proof of concept had been established.
Our early investments in election cybersecurity contributed to the successful execution of the 2020 election. These investments in enhancing election cybersecurity through training and tools and the push for additional federal funding for elections helped create the conditions for what the U.S Department of Homeland Security called, “one of the most secure elections in history.”
Summary of Findings & Key Takeaways
Despite our work on election security and cybersecurity, public trust in the election system is dangerously low.When we started our work in election security, we believed that investing in election cybersecurity would protect the system from foreign interference, which would lead to increased public trust in elections. The first part of the hypothesis proved accurate—states and the federal government have adopted many of our grantees’ election cybersecurity training and tools, freeing election officials to turn their attention to other issues in the system. However, hyperpartisanship and threats of authoritarianism have further reduced public trust in elections and – in ways that were simultaneously unexpected and should have been anticipated – exposed new elections vulnerabilities including viral mis-and dis-information, the spread of unproven ballot review techniques, and attacks on election officials.
When we began investing in election security, it was still a young field with few philanthropic players. Democracy Fund played a role in catalyzing new approaches to improving election security, many of which are now embedded in the election system and the work of election officials. The 2016 election was a wake-up call that exposed the security vulnerabilities of our election system, and the system responded by shoring up the infrastructure. We are proud to have played a role in that initial response, and still believe that a resilient system is essential to ensuring free, fair, and equitable elections in this country.
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