December 10 was International Human Rights Day and the Heising-Simons Foundation marked the occasion with a gathering that turned out to be remarkably hopeful — despite the topic and the times.
The event was held at the SF Jazz Center in downtown San Francisco, just a block away from Davies Symphony Hall, where school children from around the city were converging for the annual holiday concert, pouring out of school buses and filling the sidewalks with excited clamor. At the Jazz Center, there was an air of anticipation, too. The theme of the day was “Hope and Human Rights,” and speakers included former President Barack Obama, San Francisco’s new Mayor Daniel Lurie and a line-up of human rights advocates and activists. (See a list of speakers and recorded sessions here.) Befitting the venue, there was a jazz performance by the Oakland band, Wildchoir, halfway through the program.
The Heising-Simons Foundation was created in 2007 by Liz Simons and her husband, Mark Heising. Simons is the daughter of hedge fund billionaire and megaphilanthropist Jim Simons, who passed away earlier this year. Family members are closely involved in the foundation’s work and serve as directors: Liz Simons chairs the board, Mark Heising is vice chair, as is their daughter, Caitlin Heising. Human rights is one of the foundation’s primary program areas — and this is a human rights funder that keeps its focus on home turf.
Caitlin Heising kicked off the event with a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt: “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home — so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world.” Roosevelt’s words sum up a theme that speakers returned to throughout the event: While we tend to associate human rights violations with far-flung countries, there are serious rights issues that need attention here in the U.S. The Heising-Simons Foundation recognizes this in its funding priorities, focusing on mass incarceration, for example, and supporting efforts to end the criminalization of immigrants and advocating for immigrants caught up in the criminal legal system.
At the event, speakers embraced a broad conception of human rights, exploring issues of poverty, legal rights and housing justice. During the first panel, Daniel Lurie, the incoming mayor of San Francisco, talked with Michael Tubbs, the former mayor of Stockton. Lurie, who is an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, has a philanthropy background himself: He started Tipping Point Community, a Bay Area-based foundation. Tubbs, a longtime advocate of basic income, is advising the soon-to-be mayor; he is also special advisor for economic mobility to Gov. Gavin Newsom and the founder of End Poverty in California. Tubbs described poverty as a human rights issue, asking, “Why is poverty so persistent? Why do we allow it?”
Other speakers represented organizations that support families with justice system involvement, including Collette Flanagan, the founder of Mothers Against Police Brutality. Alec Karakatsanis, who founded Civil Rights Corps, described that group’s lawsuits on behalf of children of incarcerated parents. Civil Rights Corps is challenging policies, common in many jails across the country, that forbid in-person visits and require families to pay for expensive phone and video calls instead.
The discussion did reach beyond the nation’s borders at times. Tirana Hassan, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, called 2024 “a year of reckoning for human rights,” pointing to conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Bangladesh, Haiti and other regions.
Hassan reported that President-elect Donald Trump’s rhetoric is already animating other aspiring authoritarians. “[What] human rights activists around the world are telling us is that the sort of language that is being espoused by Trump even before he takes office — language which allows the marginalization of migrants, which demonizes the LGBTQ+ community, which talks about normalizing restrictions on women’s reproductive rights — we are seeing that emboldening leaders in other parts of the world.”
Hassan also underscored threats to human rights within the U.S., including attacks on marginalized groups and legislation recently passed in the House that would target the tax-exempt status of organizations the Trump administration labels “terrorist-supporting” — a threat to free speech and the right to protest that may have a dampening effect on progressive philanthropy down the road. “What that really is is a veiled excuse to strangle civil society organizations that may disagree with government positions and policies,” she said.
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“This audacious, weird experiment”
Barack Obama received a standing ovation when he bounded onto the stage for the capstone event of the gathering, a presentation called “Turning Hope into Action.”
In conversation with author and educator Anna Malaika Tubbs (who is married to Michael Tubbs), Obama admitted that he’s had to walk a number of people off the ledge since the November election. He insisted that he remains hopeful, and pointed to Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous quote: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” Obama had the quote stitched into the rug in the Oval Office when he was in the White House. (He didn’t mention that Trump had the rug replaced during his first term).
“The world is better now than it was 20 years ago, or 40 years ago or 100 years ago, and we lose sight of that because we see terrible things happening every day,” Obama said. “But overall, if you look around the world, for the most part, we’ve made significant strides. And that’s not because of one grand leader. It’s not because of one grand moment. It is this constant accretion of hope, this constant push toward more justice and more equity and more inclusion and more kindness.”
Obama has a foundation of his own (Liz Simons and Mark Heising are included on the Obama Foundation’s list of contributors). The young people who participate in the foundation’s Leaders Program, which provides support and mentorship to emerging leaders around the world, help keep Obama hopeful, he said.
He advised philanthropy to make more investments in leaders and leadership, and voiced doubts about overly “strategic” and technocratic approaches to giving. “One of my objections to a lot of philanthropy is a sort of a misdiagnosis, thinking that what we need is technical solutions to our problems,” he said. In fact, he said, philanthropy should be investing more in the people working on these issues, who are often doing so on a shoestring, in isolation, with few resources or champions.
“Spending more time, money, resources, training, and supporting and connecting those people, breaking their isolation, lifting them up — that, I think, is what we need to do,” Obama said. “So if you ask me, ‘how do we support our democracy?’ We support those who are working on that democracy.”
When Liz Simons introduced Obama, she expressed nostalgia for his message of hope and change, which, to many, seem in short supply at the moment. Obama provided a measure of hope and perspective for the long term.
“What I love about this country is that it is this really audacious, weird experiment where we think we can bring together people from every corner of the globe, every religion, every ethnic group, every race, and that somehow, we can figure out how to get along and take collective action. And what is inspiring about the United States is not our perfection. It is that we keep on trying to get better.”
