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Statement On the 2024 Election From Democracy Fund President Joe Goldman

Joe Goldman

November 7, 2024

As a leader of a foundation committed to a more inclusive multiracial democracy, I want to acknowledge the pain, fear, and exhaustion that so many of us are experiencing right now — while also feeling an urgency to take action to respond to the threats that lie ahead.

In a heightened authoritarian environment, civil society and philanthropy will be under tremendous pressure. The authoritarian playbook depends on the expectation that we will mute our values to appease those in power and leave targeted communities, including Black people, immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, and others to fend for themselves. It expects communities to scapegoat one another and for us to accept the harmful and discriminatory policies of Project 2025 as our future.

As we move forward, we must find solidarity and unity within the pro-democracy movement. We must reject efforts to blame or scapegoat targeted communities, and look for opportunities to resist and to build. I believe a multiracial democracy that is open, just, resilient, and trustworthy is not only possible – it is essential.

The leadership of our grantees and partners has shown us that now, more than ever, we must:

1. Pursue accountability for – and defend against – abuses of power that undermine democratic institutions and values, especially those that threaten free and fair elections or prevent the free and independent exercise of power by those opposed to authoritarian actions.
2. Build the durable power of grassroots pro-democracy organizations and broaden the coalition committed to an inclusive multiracial democracy in order to lay the foundation for long-term transformational change.
3. Defend the safety, security, and well-being of organizations and communities who will be most vulnerable to authoritarian attacks, including the physical safety and well-being of so many of us in the movement who will continue to face attack for our commitment to defending our democracy.

Democracy Fund grantees have led years-long efforts to ensure the integrity of our electoral systems, improve voter access, expand access to information, and motivate the public to get engaged in this election. We are inspired by their creativity and heart in the face of many challenges: from hurricanes, to misinformation, to voter suppression attempts. It is thanks to these efforts that we saw so many bright spots in this election, and we are deeply grateful. While some of these leaders pause to rest, process, and recover, others of us will need to take up the banner for them.

Today, like every day, we draw inspiration from the resolve of our grantees and partners, and from the stories of generations of pro-democracy champions around the world and in our own history. Democracy Fund remains committed to this fight and to you. We’ve got your back.

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Why Funders Must Support Local News Before, During and After the Election

Josh Stearns

October 30, 2024

We are just one week away from Election Day in the U.S., and in this week, good information matters more than ever — from coverage of candidates, to information about how and where to vote, to endorsements. This is particularly true in local communities where voters are deciding on everything from president, to school boards, to affordable housing.

Yet, we live in a time when falsehoods about the election, the issues, and the candidates themselves are spreading rapidly. And that’s not likely to change after the election — regardless of who wins. As Americans go to the polls, as they watch the results roll in, and as they move forward after Election Day, they need help sorting fact from fiction. To safeguard our democracy, funders cannot wait until the next election cycle to fund local news. We must act now.

As someone who has spent the better part of my career working with local news outlets, I have seen firsthand how local journalists can serve as the first line of defense against falsehoods that undermine public trust in our democracy. Local journalists are uniquely positioned to understand the nuances of their communities, to reflect residents’ diverse voices and viewpoints, and to build bridges and find solutions. This makes them a powerful defense against anti-democratic tactics that seek to divide us and diminish us.

However, even in this critical moment for democracy, local newsrooms remain largely underfunded and overlooked. A coalition of foundations that have mobilized around the Press Forward campaign just gave $20 million to more than 200 local newsrooms — an unprecedented set of grants. But it only just scratched the surface of what is needed — more than 900 newsrooms applied for funding.

There is an incredible movement of civic media entrepreneurs rebuilding local news from the ground up, reimagining how reporting can spark civic engagement, and reinvesting in people and places that have long been marginalized in our communities and our democracy. If funders step up now, we can ensure this emerging ecosystem of hundreds of new local newsrooms are ready to report on what happens after the election.

Recent natural disasters underscore the urgency for investing in local news. After Hurricane Helene, false claims spread in North Carolina that FEMA and state officials were using storm recovery efforts to impose stricter controls on local residents. These rumors, fueled by fear, quickly generated confusion, mistrust, and even threats of violence, but local journalists stepped in to clarify the situation with accurate reporting.

We saw similar tactics during the 2020 election, during which Latino voters in Florida were inundated with false claims about voter fraud and mail-in ballots. This disinformation specifically targeted those with histories of living under authoritarian regimes to erode their trust in democratic processes. The same tactics continue to be used in this election cycle in other communities. Publishers of color reporting online, in print and over the air are helping set the record straight but need resources to dispel these false narratives.

Consider The Haitian Times and DocumentedNY, which played a critical role in debunking disinformation targeting immigrant communities in Springfield, Ohio, following the presidential debate. Rumors spread fear and sought to divide residents, but these journalists worked to give voice to the people behind the talking points. This came at a cost: outlets faced harassment, and a newsroom’s community event was canceled due to safety concerns amidst the more than 30 bomb threats to government buildings and schools in Springfield.

The power of local news as a check and balance on disinformation, hate and division is one of the reasons why anti-democracy forces target independent media. If we want local journalists to have our back, we need to have theirs.

Backing local journalism is not just about halting disinformation — it’s about creating a media ecosystem that can handle future challenges. Outlier Media in Detroit provides residents with vital information via text messages, empowering them to make informed decisions. Similarly, El Tímpano investigates health issues like lead in soil, and hosts community events for local residents to come test the soil in their backyards, and learn about steps they can take to protect their families.

By centering community voices, and helping people put information to use in their lives, a new generation of newsrooms are rebuilding trust in journalism at the local level and equipping residents to resist false narratives. Journalism like this strengthens civic engagement, weaves our social fabric, and helps build resilience against disinformation.

For funders, the message is clear: supporting local journalism is a powerful way to strengthen democracy. Initiatives like NewsMatch, the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund, and The Pivot Fund have created easy on-ramps for funders to ensure their dollars will support powerful, trustworthy community journalism. They are working to create more diverse, inclusive newsrooms that prioritize community engagement and equity. But we need more funders to step up — quickly and boldly.

The election is just one week away, but the work of covering the impact of this election is just beginning. Here at Democracy Fund, our new campaign, Election Day to Every Day, emphasizes that funder support must extend beyond the electoral cycle, ensuring local journalism can support resilient communities long after the votes are cast.

Our democracy depends on a well-informed public. Local journalism — especially new and emerging models — stand as one of the most critical tools to defend democratic values, build trust, and empower communities. For funders committed to advancing equity and the common good, the question is not whether to support local journalism, but how swiftly we can act.

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A Letter of Gratitude to Democracy Champions

Lara Flint, Sanjiv Rao & Lauren Strayer

October 29, 2024

We are seven days away from the 2024 election. You can feel the combination of excitement, anxiety, and fatigue in the air. In any given moment, many of us are experiencing some version of those feelings simultaneously. We want to take this moment to express our enormous gratitude for the work of every organization and individual that is working to build the inclusive, multi-racial democracy that our country needs.

This work is made harder and more necessary by the challenges our democracy is facing at this moment. Political violence is worsening, efforts to disenfranchise communities of color continue, and major newspaper owners are censoring their editorial boards. While our country has made great progress over the past 250 years — anchored by demands for change by systematically oppressed communities — progress is often met with resistance. Simply put, pro-democracy work is hard, complicated, and can feel like an endless cycle of two steps forward, one step back. We appreciate the work our grantees and partners are doing every day, even outside the spotlight of an election year, and acknowledge that philanthropy needs to do a better job of offering consistent, meaningful support.

This year’s election is rightly on our minds as we see and hear candidates up and down ballots across the country make their cases for how they will represent their constituents’ interests. Our commitment is to building a multiracial democracy where people are treated fairly, feel they belong, and have long-term power — and where our political system is open, just, resilient, and trustworthy.

We remain committed to helping sustain the fields and grantees doing this work every day and every year, and we commit to stepping up in the days, months and years ahead to ensure the pro-democracy field has the resources it needs to continue this important work year round.

No matter what happens over the next few weeks, we are humbled by the tireless work of pro-democracy civil society organizations and leaders to ensure our elections are free, fair, and representative. Many organizations have tightened their budgets and made it work to continue to build power in the marginalized communities that have been historically targeted and scapegoated during election cycles time and again. They are safeguarding the progress the pro-democracy field has made over the years, and continue to lay the foundation to respond to the opportunities and challenges to come.

We know the work toward creating an inclusive, multi-racial democracy continues beyond Election Day, and Democracy Fund remains committed to that work in responsive partnership with others in philanthropy and with our grantees — on Election Day, and every day.

In deep and sincere gratitude,

Lara Flint – Managing Director, Elections and Institutions

Sanjiv Rao – Managing Director, Movements and Media

Lauren Strayer – Managing Director, Communications and Network

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New Research Explores Connection Between Democracy and Local News

Teresa Gorman

October 15, 2024

Studies have long demonstrated that strong local journalism can encourage higher voter turnout, counter polarizing narratives, expose corruption, and lead to people feeling a strong sense of community.

We’ve seen much of this show up anecdotally in the local news ecosystems that Democracy Fund supports. We define a news ecosystem as the network of institutions, collaborations, and people that local communities rely on for news, information, and engagement. This approach puts people and places squarely at the center of our goals and vision.

When we launched our new Equitable Journalism strategy in 2023, we wanted to learn even more about how journalism is strengthening democracy. We recently partnered with Impact Architects (IA) to revisit the Healthy News & Information Ecosystem framework. This framework was initially built in 2020 in partnership with Impact Architects, Knight Foundation, and Google News Initiative to share models for understanding the health and evolution of local news ecosystems with other funders who were considering funding local news. The graphic below illustrates the four layers of data that our updated model uses to understand local news ecosystems:

This new “Democracy Indicators” layer provides a deeper understanding of how Democracy Fund’s vision of an inclusive multiracial democracy is coming to life, community by community. Some examples of data we’re taking into consideration include:

the availability of legal resources for local journalists;
the relative difficulty of voting for residents in different states;
and the percentage of residents who have recently contacted a public official, attended a political demonstration, and/or donated to a political candidate or organization.

Through these indicators we want to understand how expanding access to local news and information can result in deeper engagement with our democracy. We can then pair this layer of research with even deeper dives in ecosystems that include more community listening and collaboration.

How Democracy Fund Thinks About Local News Ecosystems

At Democracy Fund, we’ve invested over $15.75 million in local news ecosystems across the US since 2016. If our work is successful, then communities will have access to news and information that advances justice, confronts racism and inequality, and equips people to make change and thrive, wherever they live.

Over the years, we’ve seen exciting signs of progress:

In New Jersey, the state has allocated millions of dollars to bolster community media, building on years of community-informed organizing.
In North Carolina, media makers from the western mountains to the eastern coast are receiving recognition and resources for their work.
In New Mexico, more people have more opportunities to get involved in news gathering and reporting, including a fellowship program to help recent grads stay in-state.
The local news ecosystem funding model is also growing. Press Forward, a national coalition investing more than $500 million to strengthen local journalism, launched the Press Forward Local network modeled on this news ecosystem approach, which quickly grew to 25 chapters of local funder coalitions in its first year.

Findings from the Latest Research

While we purposefully didn’t rank the ten ecosystems that Democracy Fund explored overall because of their variety and diversity, the latest research shows there are still many promising themes that can be found across them, especially when we consider the ecosystems in different stages of their development.

Strong ecosystems (Chicago, Michigan, and New Jersey)

Strong ecosystems generally have higher than average indicators across most if not all of the four categories in the graphic above. There is evidence of a relationship among information providers, community, and civic engagement and democracy. These strong ecosystems demonstrate more consistency across the entire ecosystem. For example, this could be more equal access to information across various racial, ethnic, and/or linguistic groups.

Emergent ecosystems (Colorado, Georgia, New Mexico, and North Carolina)

Emergent ecosystems generally score higher than average across many of the indicators and/or groups of indicators and show evidence of gathering momentum. However, they still have gaps in information providers and/or access for significant segments of the population. Impact Architects also found less evidence of connection among information providers, community, and civic engagement in these ecosystems.

Ecosystems ripe with opportunity (Arizona, Oklahoma, and Washington, D.C.)

These ecosystems score lower than average across many indicators or categories of indicators. They demonstrate significant need and opportunity with respect to information providers and support for community and civic engagement. In each ecosystem, there are examples of bright spots across an uneven landscape. For example, this could be one strong region within a larger ecosystem or one prominent organization that is helping local news thrive.

Under-resourced ecosystems

Under-resourced ecosystems score lower than average across some indicators and/or categories of indicators and demonstrate significant need across information providers. These ecosystems have information gaps in communities and uneven and/or low levels of civic engagement. Impact Architects did not identify any under-resourced ecosystems in this assessment. However, these local news ecosystems are large and complex and there are likely under-resourced areas within many of the identified ecosystems.

How We’re Using What We’ve Learned

We believe that this framework can support conversations, including our own at Democracy Fund, about how we can take a more nuanced approach to learning about communities’ news and information ecosystem health. We have invested in this space for nearly a decade, and there is a lot we can learn from the changes over time. One of the most powerful things equitable local news can do is build powerful relationships between people that help them make change in their lives — and that is hard to track. We hope to revisit this data in the coming years to understand more of the changes taking place.

There are many organizations and projects taking on this challenge that we are grateful to continue learning with on this journey. We hope this framework serves as a resource for the field and this cohort of organizations, and welcome further ideas, collaboration, and feedback on the themes and ideas within it.

This work would not have been possible without the many folks who contributed time to share thoughts and feedback on their ecosystems. Thank you for all you do in Arizona, Chicago, Colorado, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Washington, D.C., and beyond.

Please reach out to learn more about Democracy Fund’s work with local news ecosystems.

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Election Day to Every Day: Ending the Boom-and-Bust Cycle of Election-Year Giving

October 14, 2024

Our grantees are in for the long haul. So are we.

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Project 2025 is a threat to our democracy. Here’s how funding accountability work can help.

October 10, 2024

Readers of this blog have undoubtedly heard of Project 2025 by now. The 900-page document has been widely criticized for its ambitious and extreme plans to undermine and politicize career civil servants in the federal government, eliminate important safeguards against weaponization of government law enforcement, limit freedoms like access to reproductive healthcare, and much more. It aims to give the president unchecked power over the executive branch as a means to achieving policy goals that will negatively impact life for millions of Americans. The consequences will be far-reaching and difficult to reverse.

Thankfully, the government accountability field has prepared for years to preserve our system of checks and balances and ensure there are consequences for those who abuse their positions of power. Through coordination, litigation preparation, and public education, these organizations — including many Democracy Fund grantees — are preparing to halt and hinder these dangerous proposals.

In this piece, we’ll get deeper into how Project 2025 is a threat to democracy, how the accountability field is responding, and why funders must do more to provide sustained support to the field.

How is Project 2025 a threat to democracy?

Project 2025 is a threat decades in the making. The project is spearheaded by The Heritage Foundation and a coterie of influential groups, including America First Legal, Alliance Defending Freedom, Moms For Liberty and others that have espoused an authoritarian vision for governing. Its authors have advocated for ending marriage equality and LGBTQ+ protections, restricting abortion rights, mass deportations of immigrants, conservative takeovers of school boards, curtailing voting rights, and much more.

The proposals in Project 2025 touch on every aspect of federal policy-making, from education, to climate, to national security. At its foundation is a desire to weaken nonpartisan expertise throughout the government, increase the power of partisan officials, limit checks on the president, and roll back rights and freedoms to align with an authoritarian worldview. If put into place, these actions would not only reduce the effectiveness of the federal government, they would significantly enable abuses of power. Here’s what it would look like:

1. Weakening nonpartisan expertise would politicize and hamper essential government functions.

Project 2025 calls for the president to re-issue an executive order that allows for the replacement of a large swath of career officials, including scientists, researchers, and economists, with politically appointed cronies (known as “Schedule F”). These new officials would be selected based on loyalty tests and the extent to which they agree with the policies laid out in Project 2025, rather than qualifications and expertise. This opens the door to mismanagement of critical government functions, from air traffic controllers to food inspectors. A sobering example of this dynamic was illustrated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) response to the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, with unqualified political appointees being cited as one reason for the government’s failures. More recently, public health researchers cited the appointment of a Coronavirus Response Coordinator with vague authorities as one of the key factors contributing to haphazard inter-agency coordination during the COVID-19 pandemic.

2. Removing checks on the president would lead to the weaponization of law enforcement.

Project 2025 aims to politicize and weaponize the Department of Justice and other law enforcement agencies. There is a long-held practice of insulating the Department of Justice from the partisan goals of the president. This firewall protects the rule of law against real or perceived bias or influence. It prevents a president from ordering law enforcement agencies to selectively enforce the law for the benefit of his allies or detriment of his opponents. Project 2025 seeks to turn this norm on its head, by overturning policies that limit the president’s direct communication with the Attorney General and making explicit that all litigation strategies must be aligned with the president’s agenda. Project 2025 also proposes a vast expansion of the number of political appointees within the FBI, further opening the door for partisan motivations guiding investigatory decisions, rather than unbiased assessments of the law.

The impact of these changes could be the targeting, harassment, and eventual prosecution of perceived political foes of the president, selective enforcement of the law to benefit industries aligned with the president’s party, and legal actions against district attorneys who do not strictly follow the president’s agenda. Put simply, the rule of law — the foundation of our legal system – is at risk.

3. Rolling back federal policies that protect women, LGBTQ+ people, and communities of color would open the door to discrimination.

Project 2025 relies on a core element of the playbook used by authoritarians around the world — idolizing white, heterosexual men and the nuclear family while denigrating those who fall outside of this definition of a “real” American. To this end, Project 2025 seeks to roll back access to reproductive healthcare, target LGBTQ+ youth and families, and unravel federal policies to advance diversity and inclusion. It proposes eliminating guaranteed free access to emergency contraception while criminalizing the mailing of abortion medication — which could result in a de facto nationwide abortion ban. It orders the National Institute of Health to study the purported “negative effects” of gender affirming care for children while enabling adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex couples. And it broadly prohibits federal agencies from working to ensure their programs, hiring processes, and staff training utilize diversity, equity, and inclusion principles. Taken together, these policies would make the government more hostile and less responsive to women, LGBTQ+ people, and communities of color — potentially turning back decades of progress.

These are just three examples. The plan is extensive, and its architects hold many ideas that are dangerous to our democratic system of checks and balances. For example, a key author of Project 2025, Russell Vought, argues the president should use an illegal practice called “impoundment” — the withholding of congressionally appropriated funds – to effectively defund any federal program or agency he wishes. The threat to American values and civil liberties is clear.

How is the accountability field responding?

The pro-democracy response to the authoritarian ideology underpinning a platform as dangerous and sweeping as Project 2025 must be bold and comprehensive. It requires a broad coalition of groups with expertise on issues from healthcare to tax policy that are ready to fight in court and the court of public opinion. Thankfully, strategies for slowing or stopping the worst aspects of Project 2025 are in motion, and the field is coordinating to respond on Day One. Activities groups are pursuing include:

1. Research on Project 2025 policies and their impact.

The fact we know as much as we do about the proposals in Project 2025, and how dangerous they are, is due in large part to the indefatigable efforts of groups like Accountable.US, which shed light on the vast network of groups, supporters, and funders of the project — many of whom are influential political operatives. Documented helped uncover secret training videos provided to the supporters of Project 2025, providing additional context for how it could be implemented and even advice from its authors on how to avoid the scrutiny of the pro-democracy field. And the Center for American Progress reviewed all 900+ pages to highlight its most pressing threats. Without these efforts, the democracy field would be less informed — and likely less prepared to respond. Accountability-focused organizations have proven their worth, confirming the need to consistently support their efforts.

2. Raising awareness around Project 2025 policies and their impact.

The research underway is not only essential for groups that are planning legal and other responses, it is key to raising the public’s awareness. Polling now shows that a majority of Americans have heard of Project 2025 (a significant increase from just a few months ago) and more importantly, it shows that Americans view the policies negatively. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that Project 2025 would receive almost-daily front page coverage in national news outlets and extensive coverage in popular shows like Last Week Tonight or The Daily Show without the tireless efforts of these organizations.

3. Preparing for the legal and regulatory battles ahead.

Many of the policies in Project 2025 depend on regulatory and executive actions. To prevent or delay them, Democracy Forward is coordinating a broad range of issue-advocacy groups to prepare legal and other responses. They have also been a leading voice in congressional testimony regarding the harms of Project 2025. The Partnership for Public Service is working with media outlets to tell stories about real-life civil servants to help the public better understand the critical role of federal workers. It is also helping ensure federal employees understand their rights, building off of successful work coordinated by the Partnership, Protect Democracy, the Project On Government Oversight, Democracy Forward, and others, to advance a new federal rule that will make it harder to implement Schedule F.

4. Strengthening guardrails to prevent abuses

Many dangerous elements of Project 2025 are possible only because of weak or nonexistent checks on presidential power. An over-reliance on norms and policies that the president may discard at will paves the way for abuses. Combined with inaction and even assent from Congress and the courts, this is a problem decades in the making and one that will persist without further action. The accountability field is working to bolster guardrails to prevent abuse by:

Identifying weaknesses in the law and proposing model reforms. This includes research by Protect Democracy to better understand the weaknesses an authoritarian can exploit and a blueprint for model guardrail legislation from CREW.
Supporting key oversight functions in government. This includes work by the Project on Government Oversight to strengthen internal watchdogs, including Inspectors General, and work by the Government Accountability Project and Whistleblower Aid to support disclosures by government employees and contractors.
Demanding the courts and Congress hold the executive branch accountable. This includes legal advocacy and court filings from the Constitutional Accountability Center and work by Public Citizen to pressure Congress to investigate government wrongdoing.

What funders can do now

The work described above is just a snapshot of the ongoing efforts to understand and fight back against Project 2025. These efforts must be sustained through, and beyond, 2025. The threat encapsulated by the extreme policy proposals within Project 2025 existed before its publication and will continue to loom over our democracy even if not implemented next year. While the project is notable for its audacious scope, its policies have been years in the making and include the core tenets of the authoritarian movement.

We must sustain funding for research, communications, legal, and advocacy efforts about Project 2025, its authors and supporters: it guts checks and balances, threatens the rule of law, and is a brazen attempt to turn our democracy toward authoritarianism.

Please reach out to learn more about specific funding gaps, needs, and opportunities that Democracy Fund has gathered from our grantees and network.

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Democracy Fund Invests in the Promise of Representative Institutions

October 10, 2024

Americans have witnessed our democracy lurch from crisis to crisis in recent years. The stakes have become higher in each election, and our country remains stuck in an outdated political system that fails to reflect the will of most Americans. We need to reimagine our election system and governing institutions so we can fulfill the promise of a democracy where all voices carry equal weight and have real representation at all levels of power.

Currently, our institutions — including the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Electoral College — are set up to privilege the interests of a small minority. At the same time, our “winner-take-all” election system has given outsized power to extremists, leaving voters frustrated by the lack of options on the ballot. These interrelated issues have caused many Americans to question the integrity of our governing institutions.

It’s time to shift power to the people and communities that have been excluded for far too long.

Over the past year, Democracy Fund has advanced its new Representative Institutions strategy, working toward long-term, transformational changes to our institutions and election systems at the local, state, and federal levels. By looking beyond incremental reforms, we are confronting the anti-majoritarian practices embedded in our democracy’s foundation and moving closer to achieving the principle of “one person, one vote.”

To achieve this vision, we have developed a field-building strategy that supports organizations developing critical networks, resources, and infrastructure to advance structural changes to our democracy. We define these changes as improvements that lead to fairer representation and better governing institutions.

Our strategy prioritizes support for organizations that include community perspectives and engage diverse audiences. Far too often, these voices have been under-represented in reform efforts, and important considerations — such as racial and gender justice — have been overlooked in structural change efforts.

One organization we support, Democracy Rising, launched in 2020 with a mission to engage communities in reimagining and transforming our democracy. It helps voters, leaders of color, and election administrators adapt to new election systems such as proportional representation. This work is building a foundation for structural change and the community power required to achieve it.

Important work is also occurring to bring these leaders together with others in civil society. The George Washington University Law School’s Multiracial Democracy Project convenes legal scholars, civil rights leaders, and democracy reformers to examine the harms of our current system and explore new forms of representation that better serve communities of color. These improvements could provide the foundation for a new voting rights consensus — one that more closely reflects an increasingly multiracial and multicultural United States.

“These organizations are laying the groundwork for institutional changes that may not be fully realized in this generation, but must move forward today. Our democracy’s future depends on their efforts to shift the power of the vote back to the majority,” says Sean Raymond, Governance Senior Program Associate at Democracy Fund.

In 2024, Democracy Fund invested nearly $4 million to support organizations and changemakers advancing transformational shifts in our governing and electoral institutions.

“While we must respond to urgent threats facing our democracy, these investments allow us to simultaneously work toward reimagining our institutions and making our political system fairer,” says Winny Chen, Associate Director of Governance at Democracy Fund.

2024 Representative Institutions Grantees

Democracy Fund is proud to announce the 2024 Representative Institutions grantees, who all share a commitment to building a democracy in which all voters have meaningful representation and a stake in governing.

The 2024 Representative Institutions grantees include:

Boston Review, to support its forum on fusion voting and multi-party democracy.
Center for American Progress, Democracy & Elections Program, to bring together the progressive community to combat countermajoritarian features in our federal government and encourage adoption of election systems reforms.
Center for Effective Government at the University of Chicago, to launch a series of research primers and events that make cutting-edge scholarship on structural democracy accessible to those who can use it.
Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at Harvard Law School, to convene legal scholars, civil rights leaders, and advocates to study, identify, and recommend electoral systems reforms that increase representation for all voters, particularly historically underrepresented voters of color, as part of its Guinier Project on Strengthening a Diverse Democracy.
Cornell University, Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group Lab, to produce critical research and leading-edge modeling that will inform communities’ selection of election systems reform, while building a deeper evidence base for the field of structural democracy.
Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, to support its symposium on proportional representation and various implications of the reform, including effects on gerrymandering and ramifications for racial representation.
Democracy Revival Center, to bring the next generation of social and economic justice leaders, working across issue siloes, into the long-term fight to transform our political and governing institutions.
Democracy Rising, to provide effective, community-centered support for implementation of structural reforms that enable proportional representation and build stronger support infrastructure for women of color in public service.
FairVote, to advance better election systems in the United States through research, advocacy, and coalition-building.
Future of the Senate Project (Brookings Institution), to convene leading experts and practitioners to examine modern-day challenges to the Senate, such as the filibuster, malapportionment, and the need for modernization.
George Washington University Law School, Multiracial Democracy Project, to convene and build the capacity of prominent civil rights organizations to help shape the structural democracy movement.
New America, Political Reform Program, to build the research and intellectual architecture for electoral systems reforms, such as fusion voting, ranked choice voting, and proportional representation.
RepresentWomen, to advance systems-level structural solutions that increase and improve women’s political representation.
Sightline Institute, Democracy Program, to build momentum toward pro-voter structural reforms in the Cascadia region through research, education, and implementation support.

This portfolio of grantees represents just a portion of the investments needed to transform our political system. Democracy Fund’s work complements the efforts supported by our partner organization Democracy Fund Voice, a nonpartisan 501(c)(4) that empowers organizations and communities to express their political voice through lobbying, advocacy, ballot initiatives, and campaigns at the federal, state, and local levels. Democracy Fund Voice’s grantees marshal the collective power of communities to advocate for changes to achieve a multi-party, proportional representation system and to enact overdue reforms to institutions like the Senate and the Supreme Court.

In the coming months, look out for more updates and news about Democracy Fund Voice’s investments.

Through the combined support of Democracy Fund, Democracy Fund Voice, and many other critical philanthropic partners, a new field is emerging to advance much needed, transformational changes in our democracy. Collaboration with partners and grantees is essential to achieve our vision of an inclusive, multiracial democracy — one where our political system is open, just, resilient, and trustworthy. We invite you to join us and learn more about our work.

Please Note: Democracy Fund does not accept unsolicited business plans, proposals, or personal requests. For more information on our work and grantees, sign up for updates. For general inquiries, contact info@democracyfund.org. To view a complete list of grantees, visit our grants database.

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Our Work is Not Done After Election Day

Joe Goldman

October 9, 2024

Our grantees are on the frontlines of the 2024 election, doing everything they can to ensure free, fair, and representative elections for our country. We know their work will not be done on Election Day — yet many of these nonpartisan organizations typically experience a sudden dropoff in funding after November.

This withdrawal of support threatens their ability to resist the authoritarian playbook, fuel a pro-democracy governing agenda, and build durable power to support an inclusive, multi-racial democracy. Anti-democracy forces don’t defund their infrastructure after every election cycle, forcing groups to downsize and lose momentum — and we shouldn’t either.

That’s why we’re launching a new campaign called Election Day to Every Day. Following on the success of this year’s All by April campaign, we’re inviting the philanthropic community to join us in ensuring the pro-democracy movement can be sustainable and resilient not just leading into Election Day, but every day that follows.

The boom and bust cycle of election-year giving is toxic. Unless we change our behavior as donors, our grantees will not be able to make progress toward the inclusive multiracial democracy that is so vital for everything we care about.

“People’s Action Institute is working together with networks and organizers across the country to scale up the movement for social justice. We can’t maintain the momentum we need to defeat authoritarianism when funding across the field drops off after every election. But with consistent support, we can strengthen our communities to create a vibrant, multiracial democracy that works for all of us.” – Sulma Arias, Executive Director, People’s Action Institute

With the Election Day to Every Day campaign, we are trying to do things differently. Together, philanthropy will continue our support for building an inclusive multiracial democracy. As a community, we commit to:

Start Planning Our 2025 Giving Now: We lose vital time when we fail to plan ahead and consider alternative scenarios for the future. Donors need to consider how our changing context could impact our strategy and priorities, so that we and our grantees can respond quickly to new needs on the ground. Anti-democracy forces are well-resourced and ready for multiple governing scenarios. We need to prepare for the same. Now is the time to start planning – not next year.
Provide a Bridge into Next Year: Many grantees come out of a hard fought election exhausted and with real gaps in funding. It’s not uncommon for leadership transitions to take place – further complicating the situation. Moving up grant decisions to the first quarter of 2025 or providing bridge funding allows grantees to avoid having to lay off staff and eases the pressure as they pivot to respond to new challenges.
Commit to Multi-Year Support: The single most important thing that donors can do for the health of our grantees is to provide multi-year support. Doing so allows them to plan, build infrastructure, and deploy longer-range strategies. This longer-term view makes our grantees more resilient to a changing environment.
Support Safety and Security: Grantees are facing evolving safety and security threats leading up to and following Election Day. Many are encountering cyber attacks and threats of physical violence. All of them have staff who are experiencing burn-out and trauma. If we want our grantees to sustain themselves past Election Day, we need to provide for their safety and well-being.

Individual donors, foundations, donor advisors, and other philanthropic organizations are all invited to join this critical campaign to change the culture of philanthropy. You can join by becoming an “Election Day to Every Day” signatory and by spreading the word within your networks.

Together, we can ensure the pro-democracy field is ready for the future. We came together powerfully earlier this year under the All by April banner, which mobilized at least $155 million to ensure our grantees had the resources they needed early in an important election year. Now we must keep our foot on the gas and make sure our democracy field partners know that we have their backs not just on Election Day, but Every Day.

Please feel free to reach out to us with any questions.

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What We Learned from All by April

Heather Creek

October 4, 2024

Earlier this year, Democracy Fund joined with funders from across the philanthropic community to commit to making their election-related grants by the end of April. The All by April campaign attracted 174 signers — including foundations, donor networks, advisors, and individual donors — who committed to move funds earlier in the year, simplify grant processes, and encourage their peers to do the same.

By providing early financial support, All by April aimed to empower nonpartisan, nonprofit organizations to plan and execute their election strategies more effectively, build out programs at lower costs, and engage voters earlier in the election cycle. We are proud to share the results from this campaign and outline how funders can carry forward the lessons into their ongoing election-related grantmaking.

The Success of All by April

To understand the impact of the All by April campaign, Democracy Fund collaborated with Grassroots Solutions on an evaluation. Our topline findings include:

1. The campaign mobilized at least $155 million.

Of the 174 signers of the campaign, 60 percent were direct grant makers and 40 percent were groups that work with funders like donor advisors, intermediaries, and funder affinity groups. Forty-seven of the funders and individual donors provided data on their giving between January and April of 2024. They reported making $79 million in new 501(c)(3) grants for election-related work and moving up $61 million in scheduled grant payments so that grantees would have access to funds earlier in the year. The campaign’s message also reached groups that were not able to sign onto the campaign (often due to their organization’s policy on signing public commitments). Entities that didn’t sign the campaign but reported that it still influenced their giving reported $13.7 million in new grants and $3.25 million in payments moved up to the first four months of 2024. In total, the campaign mobilized at least $155 million in election-related support.

“AbA inspired us to make additional gifts — in addition to the 2024 and multi-year funding we had already provided — and to do so before the end of April.”
— All by April Participant (Grantmaker)

2. The majority of All by April signers reported that they changed their plans for giving in 2024 because of the campaign.

The campaign’s deadlines and structure created the motivation that moved signers to action – especially among those who were newer to election-related giving. Among direct grantmakers in the survey, 57 percent gave between 76-100 percent of their funding for elections work by April. Those who did not change their giving based on All by April reported that they had already planned to move their funds early or faced internal barriers that prevented them from doing so.

“Once we had our list of grantees, we might have spent more time obsessing over allocation amounts. Having taken the pledge helped inspire us to stop worrying and get the money moving.”
— All by April Participant (Grantmaker)

3. The campaign changed expectations about how philanthropy can support election-related work.

Nearly all of the campaign signers (98%) reported that they were already aware of the benefits of early money for election-related work before the campaign began, but they lacked the motivation and urgency to respond to the field’s need. Signers who were not direct grantmakers, but who advise donors or convene donor networks, reported that the campaign created a “movement wide” framing that gave them the language to encourage earlier giving among their clients and members.

“It allowed me to have conversations with peer funders about the importance of moving early. It created a very helpful (even if somewhat artificial) deadline.”
— All by April Participant (Donor Advisor)

“We used the All by April frame to push our entire donor community for larger, earlier giving, and to make the case for c4 money also. it was helpful to have “movement wide” framing, coordination and momentum to support the work we would have done.”
— All by April participant (Philanthropic Network)

We are grateful to all of the campaign signers who committed to meet the urgent needs of the field when the funds would be most useful. We are especially grateful to the signers who participated in the evaluation and shared their funding data. This transparency allows us all to learn together and continue to improve the way we support free, fair, and representative elections.

Exploring Practices to Move Money Faster

The All by April campaign evaluation revealed that some funders need to make intentional changes to their practices to meet the needs of the field. Funders reported needing to move their timeline for considering new grants or shift other internal processes — like grant amendment requirements — in order to move up payments.

At Democracy Fund and amongst survey respondents, we noted several practices that helped funders move funds quickly:

Streamlining the grant amendment process. Funders cut internal red tape and asked that grantees only submit an updated budget to process an amendment.
Adopting a shorter renewal application. A shorter application helped to avoid asking grantees to send information their current funders already had.

Starting in 2025, planning to default to making payments for election-related grants in Q1 of each year.

Funders may also consider other established time-saving practices like accepting applications that grantees have prepared for other funders or funding intermediaries who may have existing grantee relationships and can regrant money into state and local groups.

Looking Ahead: Funders Need to Sustain the Field Between Elections

Our grantees are on the frontlines of the 2024 election, doing everything they can to ensure it is free, fair, and representative. But we know their work is not over on Election Day. Anti-democracy forces don’t defund their infrastructure after every election cycle, forcing groups to downsize and lose momentum — and we shouldn’t either.

Yet many grantees see a financial cliff after November. This sudden dropoff in funding threatens their ability to resist the authoritarian playbook, fuel a governing agenda, and build durable power in service of creating a more inclusive, multi-racial democracy.

To ensure we are meeting these needs, we will be announcing a new campaign next week, called “Election Day to Every Day” to ensure our pro-democracy field is ready for any and all scenarios that lie ahead in the post-election period. We must keep our foot on the gas and make sure our field partners know that we have their backs not only on Election Day, but Every Day that follows.

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How (and Why) Democracy Fund is Experimenting with Grantee Reporting Models

Jenn Roche

October 3, 2024

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:

Please reach out to learn more about Democracy Fund’s learning processes.