Facing Trump crackdown, foundations form a mutual-defense pact
The Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on nonprofits are bringing together more and more organizations, often across ideological lines, to support the core idea that the government should not determine what groups and causes grant makers can support. Last week the leaders of two of the country’s most prominent foundations — one an outspoken critic of the Trump administration’s policies and the other a self-described “centrist” funder — discussed that fight during an event at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.
Over the past year and a half John Palfrey, president of the MacArthur Foundation, and Lumina Foundation CEO Jamie Merisotis have helped to build Unite in Advance, a network of hundreds of grant makers willing to defend one another’s right to fund work at odds with the Trump administration. Many of those grant makers come from differing ideological perspectives.
They launched the Unite in Advance campaign in partnership with several groups, including the McKnight and Freedom Together foundations and the Council on Foundations in response to a series of actions by the Trump administration. The cancellation of federal grants and contracts promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and threats to revoke the tax-exempt status of foundations that fund diversity initiatives were key factors.
The network has grown to nearly 800 members and has hosted several in-person meetings over the past year. Many of its members have increased their own funding to aid nonprofits that have lost federal grants and contracts. But some in the sector argue that solidarity statements and modest payout increases haven’t come close to matching the scale of need.
The idea for the group came early in the Trump administration when big American institutions quickly surrendered to pressure to end diversity work, Palfrey said. “We saw universities fold like cheap tents. We saw law firms fold like cheap tents, all but four of them,” Palfrey said, adding that foundations decided to do the opposite.
The worries that spurred the creation of Unite in Advance have only grown more acute. The Trump administration is still weighing whether to revoke the tax-exempt status of groups including the Open Society Foundations, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, according to a recent New York Post report. Separately, the Justice Department has charged the Southern Poverty Law Center with wire fraud and money laundering, alleging it improperly raised millions of dollars to secretly pay leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups to obtain inside information.
On the same day that Palfrey sat down for a follow-up interview with the Chronicle, there were also reports that the Trump administration is pushing a rule to strip tax-exempt status from private colleges and schools with DEI policies.
“Could that come for nonprofits in grant making? Of course it could,” Palfrey said.
NATO for grant makers
Over the past year, more than 750 organizations have signed on to Unite in Advance’s principles to uphold “fundamental rights and liberties.” That element of the pact has become a kind of mutual-defense agreement for foundations seeking to defend free expression.
“It’s a little like the NATO Article 5,” Palfrey said. “If you attack Lumina, I’m standing with Lumina. That’s the deal.”
There is general agreement among Unite in Advance’s members, who come from a range of ideological perspectives, that they will abide by the coalition’s commitment to defend a foundation’s legal right to give as they choose, according to Merisotis, who describes Lumina as a “very centrist-focused foundation.”
Asked how far the mutual-defense commitment extends if a member comes under legal scrutiny, Merisotis said the response varies.
“Some of it might be behind the scenes work to talk to people initiating the investigation,” he said in an interview. “Some of it might be public statements. Some of it might be a more strategic conversation.”
Banding together across ideological lines
Palfrey stands out as a key progressive foundation leader and vocal critic of the administration who is also courting those on the right. Earlier this year he shared the stage with leaders of the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute and Donor’s Trust, who all criticized government interference in the work of donors and nonprofits.
Primarily, the network functions as a CEO-to-CEO forum for information and resource sharing, Merisotis said. But it is not a substitute for existing groups like the Council on Foundations, where he previously served as board chairman. More than 100 CEOs have turned out for the coalition’s in-person meetings.
One tangible effect of the network was the emergence of a working group focused on protecting scientific research. It includes foundations who previously didn’t think of themselves as science funders but who are concerned about new federal policies targeting scientific research, Merisotis said.
Similarly, foundations that once wouldn’t have called themselves democracy funders increasingly do, he said. Lumina’s goal of expanding access to higher education isn’t achievable in a “non-democratic context,” he noted. “So, yeah, we’re a democracy funder,” he said. “Heck yeah.”
What about grantees?
Some nonprofit leaders would like to see these grant makers do more to help them, too, in a time of dire need, and they argue nonprofits are much more vulnerable to the administration’s attacks than deep-pocketed funders.
In response to the crisis, some grant makers have boosted their payouts. The Marguerite Casey Foundation pledged to increase its annual grant making to at least $50 million over the next decade. MacArthur’s payout topped 7 percent last year, which was roughly $190 million above the 5 percent legal minimum. Last week, the foundation announced it would keep spending at elevated levels through 2028.
Not every member treats this as new. Merisotis said Lumina’s own giving hasn’t changed because the foundation has spent above 6 percent of its endowment every year of his 19-year tenure, though it doesn’t publicize the number.
Despite these initiatives, the philanthropic response overall has “still felt very fragmented” said Shaady Salehi, senior fellow at the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project and a founder of the separate Meet the Moment campaign launched last year to increase funding to nonprofits. To many nonprofits, it has felt like solidarity efforts have focused on protecting foundations rather than the sector as a whole.
The deeper problem is a structural imbalance in which foundations have resources and institutional protections that give them choices about how and when to respond, while nonprofits are more vulnerable to these big policy and financial swings, she said.
“Every single organization in every issue area is experiencing a hit,” Salehi said. She’d like to see more foundations stand up for nonprofits.
Told of concerns that the sector’s response has been fragmented, Palfrey said he couldn’t speak to a conversation he was not part of but disputed the broader premise.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen greater coordination within the foundation sector during my experience,” he said in an interview. “We are much more organized. We are much more coordinated in a way that has created an important political power for our sector and for our grantees.”