Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on May 7, 2025.
As the Trump administration passes the 100-day mark, is philanthropy finding its voice? The early weeks of the new administration saw the sector staying mostly silent, with few exceptions, even as Trump eviscerated federal support and forward momentum on key funder priorities. But despite finding themselves targeted in unprecedented ways — or perhaps because of that — more grantmakers and nonprofits have been speaking up over the past month or so.
Take the public letter from philanthropy defending funders’ right to give under the First Amendment; the letter has 620 signatories as of this writing. Or a call to action with over 130 signatories, spearheaded by the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations and the National Center for Family Philanthropy, for funders to “meet the moment” as nonprofit priorities are gutted.
A growing number of funders are also taking the next step: speaking up with their pocketbooks. In February, the MacArthur Foundation announced that it was boosting its annual payout in response to the administration’s actions, and the Freedom Together Foundation made an even bigger public commitment, joined by a few smaller foundations like Woods Fund Chicago, as IP’s Dawn Wolfe reported. In addition, the Northwest Area Foundation is doubling its funding for 2025, and last week, the Mellon Foundation stepped up with $15 million in emergency funding to the Federation of State Humanities Councils.
But few funders, so far, have come close to the level at which the Marguerite Casey Foundation is meeting the moment. The foundation announced late last month that it is committing $130 million “to ensure that nonprofits in the movement for racial and economic justice have the resources they need to continue providing critical community organizing, education and services across the country.”
For Marguerite Casey, this is a truly significant step-up in funding: It amounts to over five times the $25 million the foundation has averaged in a normal year — and it’s already distributing the funds. In this moment of unique crisis for the nonprofit sector, all payout bumps are welcome, but Marguerite Casey’s commitment is in a different league, and highlights just how much the sector actually has to give.
“Between board approval in March and now, we have committed more than half of those resources — overwhelmingly to our existing grant partners,” said Carmen Rojas, the foundation’s president and CEO. “We wanted to make sure that we were bolstering the ability of our grant recipients to continue to do the work that we think is really important beyond this political moment and climate.”
The Seattle-based Marguerite Casey Foundation is one of the Casey Philanthropies, which were built on the fortune of UPS founder Jim Casey. Since it was founded in 2001, Marguerite Casey has established itself as leading a social justice funder. Well before the events of 2020 spurred many philanthropies to amp up their funding for historically disenfranchised people, Marguerite Casey was on the case. More than that, the foundation also embraces a policy advocacy mission. As IP’s Mike Scutari wrote last year, the foundation is “committed to seeing that government prioritizes the needs of excluded and underrepresented people, families and communities” — that includes efforts like its Public Dollars for Public Good initiative, which Martha Ramirez wrote about in 2023.
Under the Trump administration, excluded and unrepresented people, families and communities are under clear threat as the administration claws away protections for immigrants, attacks DEI, undermines voting and civil rights, and guts education, health, environmental and countless social programs.
Taken in their entirety, the Trump administration’s actions are undermining basic American ideals of equality and justice. “This is a very white nationalist agenda,” Rojas said. “It’s an agenda that is seeking to erase history. To have, in the first 100 days, the intentional removal of the contributions that Black people have made, and to intentionally eliminate practices that allow institutions to be truly representative of our nation — for me, this is a signal that you are advancing a white nationalist agenda. That feels anathema to the work of the Marguerite Casey Foundation, to the work of our sector, and frankly, to the work of any American who understands the promise of this country and the hard-won gains we’ve made.”
For Rojas, it was urgent that the foundation not wait to act. “We have a window of time for intervention,” she said. “If we allow this administration to consolidate power and consolidate resources into the next 18, 24, 36 months, we’re going to see an even more dramatic shift in our body politic and our society.”
Why the Marguerite Casey made the decision to boost its funding
Even before last November’s election, Marguerite Casey was having discussions about how to respond in the event of a Trump presidency. “For about 18 months, the foundation has been preparing for an adversarial political climate starting in 2025,” Rojas said. “One of the big questions we had was, how do we safeguard our freedom to give? How do we protect our ability to continue to give resources to the organizations that are at the center of our charitable purpose and mission? And it immediately became clear after the inauguration that the administration was planning to take action on freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press.”
The foundation’s board shared Rojas’ concern, according to chair Ian Fuller. “The flurry of both petty and mean-spirited executive orders that were launched on the first day of the administration made it very clear that this was a unique moment of urgency,” he said. “You know the adage about Trump: Watch what he does and not what he says. And to watch the immediate attacks on American civil society, on vulnerable communities, and the power grab from the executive branch — all of those factors were catalytic for the board to build consensus quickly.”
The Marguerite Casey Foundation primarily supports small, local grassroots organizations, and aims to provide significant funding over a five-year period. Organizations it backs promote due process for immigrants, environmental justice, and tax reform, among other causes.
One new grantee is the National Council of Nonprofits, which, along with other nonprofits, sued the Office of Management and Budget for its freeze on funds for essential services. (A district court judge issued a preliminary injunction to halt the freeze.)
”We wanted to make sure that the organizations that are working to protect the nonprofits that make our communities better had the resources they needed to continue to hold the line with the administration,” Rojas said. “Their willingness to step into the fray and actually challenge the administration almost immediately — to be able to support the infrastructure that protects our sector — felt really important to us.”
Independent journalism will also continue to be a focus for the foundation, and a key priority as federal threats, rampant misinformation and top-down billionaire control of media outlets and tech platforms put pressure on the nation’s free press. The foundation supports the National Trust for Local News, More Perfect Union and Deep South Today, which is partnering with the New York Times to support more robust investigative journalism in that part of the country.
“I think that philanthropy as a sector is grappling with the undue influence of a new media landscape on politics in this country, and wanting to be able to marry this important organizing and leadership development work with the ability to tell the important stories of who is abusing power in a community,” Rojas said.
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Philanthropy has decisions to make
When Marguerite Casey made the decision to dip into its endowment and significantly increase its funding commitments, it was influenced by the actions of the MacArthur Foundation, the Freedom Together Foundation and others. Ian Fuller hopes that other foundations will in turn be inspired by Marguerite Casey. “We wanted to step up to meet the urgency on behalf of protecting communities and specifically our grantee partners, and also with the hope of inspiring other funding organizations to do the same,” he said. Fuller said that he is aware of a number of institutions that are having board-level conversations about increasing giving.
From our vantage point at Inside Philanthropy, we’ve watched as the philanthrosphere has grappled with the firehose of drastic, damaging and dubiously legal actions from the Trump administration over the last few months — actions that threaten the institutions and organizations that philanthropy has helped build and protect for years. We’ve also aimed to constructively critique the sector for failing to recognize and act against MAGA before all that harm could be done.
But now that we’re here, philanthropies have decisions to make. Some funders have been largely quiet, others have jumped into the fray, and many appear to be taking a wait-and-see approach. Marguerite Casey has elected to embrace philanthropy’s “risk capital” ethos and is acting as a model for others rather than remaining on the sidelines.
Perhaps part of that comes down to the lived experience of its leadership. Carmen Rojas’ own history demonstrates that it can happen here. Her father is Venezuelan and she grew up in that country. In recent years, the political situation there has deteriorated to the point that she isn’t sure if she will ever be able to return.
“It turned in a matter of years; society was just shut down,” she said. “There are elections there now, but they are just performative. So bringing in my personal experience, I believe we need to be proactive and not pretend we are not going to be a target of this administration, when they have said, time and time again, that philanthropy, individual donors and the nonprofit sector writ large may face political scrutiny.”
