April’s public statement by foundations and related organizations asserting their First Amendment right to give had already become A Thing when we covered it post-launch. By that time, the Council on Foundations-hosted statement had already attracted 73 signatories representing assets of more than $31 billion and links to as many as 7,000 funders.
As the saying goes, though, we hadn’t seen nothin’ yet. Since that April 10 article, the list of signatories has almost tripled: As of July 10, 710 foundations and related organizations had publicly declared “we are united behind our First Amendment right to give as an expression of our own distinct values.” The total assets involved have exploded to $224 billion, according to a spokesperson for the Council on Foundations. There are signatories in nearly every state and in Washington, D.C., and their individual net assets range from under $1 million to multibillion-dollar endowments.
Another fact that’s worth noting: Three more funders came on board during the two days I spent finalizing reporting for this piece.
What caused this single public statement to catch on like a spark during a drought? It wasn’t the result of any significant public push on her organization’s part, said Council on Foundations President and CEO Kathleen Enright. “We’ve not done super-active publicity for [the statement],” Enright told me at the council’s Leading Locally conference last month, “but we’ve put it in our newsletters and it’s a little bit word of mouth.”
In addition to engaging in strategic outreach to encourage participation from funding-related organizations in every state, Enright said that CoF has included a pitch for the statement in the newsletter it shares with its 900 member organizations. Otherwise, she said, the authors of the Nonprofit Quarterly article that kicked off the effort — McKnight Foundation President Tonya Allen, Freedom Together Foundation President Deepak Bhargava, and MacArthur Foundation President John Palfrey — “have still been sharing out a bit about it.”
At Inside Philanthropy, we’ve wondered about the public quiescence of so many funders amid the threats posed by the Trump administration. Sector groups and many funders have been vigorously opposed to incremental legislative reforms, including raising the foundation payout rate and placing limitations on DAFs, but the rhetoric out of the White House and the right wing is of a different magnitude, suggesting plans that are an existential threat to the sector and its independence. The lightning-fast growth of support for the sign-on statement might just indicate that the philanthropic lion has finally awakened and is willing to roar.
Enright herself referred to the statement as “a show of force for Capitol Hill,” and a “really valuable talking point” during the recent battle over possible plans to raise the excise tax on big foundations in the recently passed budget reconciliation bill. It’s a show of force that may well have worked, given that neither the proposed foundation taxes nor the aptly named “nonprofit killer” provisions introduced by the House made it into the version that reached Trump’s desk. It’s also possible that the united front displayed by the statement and its many signatories has helped prevent funders outspoken in opposition to dismantling civil society from facing harassment or intimidation, as my colleague Michael Kavate wrote in May.
In other words, the most effective way to counter a bully is to refuse to tolerate the bully’s nonsense. The fact that this particular counter has nearly a quarter-trillion dollars to wield doesn’t hurt, either.
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