‘We feel that we were used’: Nonprofits after Chan Zuckerberg dropped social advocacy

But now, in February 2025, things were shifting. The text Gascó received from her contact was terse and foreboding: We need to talk.

The call was brief. CZI was halting its contributions. Meanwhile, similar news was trickling out to social justice-minded nonprofits across the country. On February 18, CZI made the pivot official in a blog post, though it didn’t disclose a total dollar amount.   

The news surprised Gascó, who felt confident in late 2024 that her funding would continue. “We feel that we were used,” she says. 

Prospera is among a collection of nonprofits that have spent the past year grappling with the fallout of CZI's retreat from social advocacy causes. Although some anticipated the shift, others were blindsided and left scrambling to fill gaping budget holes. Some laid off staff. Others approached former donors and challenged them to double down against the Trump administration’s pressure. Many seem to agree that CZI’s contributions, while they lasted, produced enormous impact and that suddenly losing them was nothing short of devastating. 

“The downside of foundation funding is that it can go away and their strategies can change,” says Annie Chang, vice president of community engagement at the Nonprofit Finance Fund. “So as a nonprofit leader, you need to understand each of your revenue sources. You should be really clear about your buckets of revenue.”

Within these nonprofits’ struggles lies a partial road map for others navigating an unpredictable political reality. Some donors are putting grant language under an ideological microscope, forcing nonprofits to thread a needle in how they tell their stories. Others have fled the social justice space altogether. It all adds up to an environment that demands new levels of creativity from nonprofits hoping to make social advocacy work sustainable. They’re balancing their own financial needs with the whims of a donor class whose giving priorities are attuned to the political winds. 

In a statement to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, CZI insisted that its social advocacy work was always intended as a five-year endeavor. “Over the past decade, CZI has invested hundreds of millions of dollars to expand opportunity and strengthen communities,” a spokesperson wrote. “We’re proud of the lasting impact of that work.”

Gascó had loved working with CZI. Beyond general operating support, CZI provided Prospera with impact measurement and communications consulting. This closeness, she says, made the feelings of abandonment all the more acute. “We didn’t receive a CZI communication to say, ‘Hey, we are changing our priorities. We changed our strategy. We are so sorry, but we cannot give you more money,’” she says. “It was a call, and it’s like, ‘Hey, I’m sorry, things are changing,’ and that’s it.”

‘We are trying to serve everyone’

CZI’s change of direction came as a shock to many because it had spent nearly a decade establishing its social justice bona fides. In a December 2015 founding letter to their newborn daughter, Maxima, co-CEOs Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan laid out two overarching goals: “advancing human potential” and “promoting equality.” The latter priority, they wrote, was not just about charity; it was a key ingredient in unlocking “the greatness of human progress.” They vowed to empower everyone in their giving — including immigrants and “underrepresented minorities.”

Chan, a former pediatrician, repeatedly reaffirmed this message in the years that followed. In a 2021 interview at the Financial Times Future of American Healthcare Summit, she touted her organization’s $500 million commitment to “promoting racial equity, diversity, and inclusion in the work that we do, because we are trying to serve everyone.” Over the years, the charity poured hundreds of millions of dollars into affordable housing, criminal justice reform, and immigrant legal defense.

And it built a talented team along the way, says Juan Hernandez III, CEO of the Creser Capital Fund, a community development financial institution located in Sonoma County, Calif. “They hired some really smart staff that went out deep into the community and tried to find programs that were making a difference back at the grassroots level,” he says.

When Creser Capital received a $500,000 gift from CZI in June 2023, the money accounted for 50 percent of its annual budget. Hernandez says half of it went toward capacity building; the other half was funneled directly into microloans for small businesses led by mostly Latino entrepreneurs.

In early 2025, Hernandez felt confident that CZI would continue funding Creser — partly based on a meeting he’d recently had with a program officer. Over lunch on a Tuesday that January, the two discussed how to apply for the next round of funding. “And then Monday or Tuesday of the next week, she told me she got fired,” he recalls. (A CZI spokesperson said the role was eliminated.)

Lindsay Haddix, the executive director at East Bay Housing Organizations (EBHO), recalls a similar shock in early 2025 when her email inbox started filling up with panicked fundraising calls from nonprofits in her network. CZI’s “exit from funding the housing space was extremely dramatic,” Haddix says, “because it wasn’t just like one or two organizations were losing a large funding source. It really impacted the whole ecosystem.”

CZI had invested roughly $275 million in housing affordability and homelessness prevention since 2017. So when that funding stopped, Haddix says competition among nonprofits ramped up. 

With significant chunks of their operating budgets yanked away, both Haddix and Hernandez were forced to downsize. Creser slashed its microloan program by 75 percent and halted contract work on its website. Haddix, whose organization had received a $500,000 CZI grant in 2022, says she laid off staff and took the rest of the organization down to a four-day workweek. She paused 401(k) contributions and sunset EBHO's “faith and justice” organizing efforts, which had previously brought together religious leaders to successfully push for affordable housing legislation in California.

CZI maintains that it did not step away from housing work without a wind-down process, instead doling out $55.5 million since 2025 to areas that included housing programs. Although it provided a list of dozens of organizations that it says received this wind-down money, it declined to provide detailed amounts. It also declined to provide a list of housing organizations that did not receive wind-down funding.

Recovering in CZI’s wake

EBHO, like so many of the groups that felt abandoned by CZI, scrambled to find funding. Haddix says it secured an additional $175,000 general operating support grant from the San Francisco Foundation’s reserves in the fall of 2025. Then it received a $40,000 matching gift from an anonymous donor late last year. This summer, the organization locked in a three-year, $300,000 commitment from the Sisters of St. Joseph Healthcare Foundation. But those donations have not returned EBHO to its former capacities.

For all its disruption, Haddix says CZI’s pivot did come with a few modest silver linings. “It maybe has pushed some of us to think about ways to collaborate and work together, given scarce capacity,” she says. It also underscored the peril of relying too heavily on a small number of funders. When she stepped into her role in 2023, she noticed that EBHO derived a large proportion of its budget from just three foundations. 

Hernandez’s experience with CZI was a wake-up call: Even in liberal bastions like the San Francisco Bay Area, doing work that might be considered DEI can create major obstacles.  When he approached other funders to fill the gap CZI left, he recalls being told, “Yes, we’ll support you, but we need to have a conversation, you know, about how the application is gonna look.” Together, they scrubbed language that might be perceived as too DEI-focused — a move replicated by more than 1,000 other nonprofits in 2025, according to an analysis by ProPublica. “We were all sort of playing the game,” Hernandez says. 

Recently, Creser secured $115,000 from a major AI company Hernandez didn’t want to name to pilot a program that trains the Spanish-speaking community on how to use technology in day-to-day life. Hernandez is excited about the program — especially its on-site components — but he’s approaching the money behind it with a new level of caution.

“We’ve just got to be very mindful of the fickleness of these guys,” he says. “That experience with CZI has helped me with this other grant because I already know what may happen.”

‘A responsible exit’

When CZI announced its funding pivot publicly, Marc Malandro, chief operating officer, described it as the culmination of a gradual, considered process. Given the “current legal and policy landscape,” he wrote in February of 2025, “we want to reiterate that we made the decision a few years ago to wind down our social advocacy work.”

That framing read as disingenuous to Aaron Dorfman, president and CEO of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. 

Dorfman says the situation reminded him of another abrupt and controversial pivot a few years ago: The NoVo Foundation’s sudden announcement, in 2020, that it would lay off staff and step back from programs to help girls and women. At the time, Alicia Sanchez Gill, executive director of the Emergent Fund, called the move “reprehensible.” 

Yet other experts say CZI shouldn’t shoulder all of the blame for organizational disruptions. Pivots happen all the time, with or without notice, says Annie Chang, of the Nonprofit Finance Fund. At a certain point, it’s up to nonprofit leaders to build up the infrastructure necessary to absorb them.

Surviving as a nonprofit is always a balancing act, she says: Leaders need to keep one eye on the funding landscape and anticipate shifts as best they can. But doing so is a “hard thing because the nonprofit leader is also responsible for delivering high-quality services, right? So they’re managing both of these things.” On top of this, Dorfman says, it’s not easy for nonprofits to turn up their noses to big cash offers — future uncertainty be damned.

The biggest challenge in 2026, though, may be molding social advocacy nonprofits’ missions to the political realities without compromising core beliefs. Indeed, according to a July 2025 NCRP analysis of nearly 800 prominent foundations, 73 percent did not publicly address any change to the philanthropic ecosystem in the wake of Trump’s second inauguration. “Most of these funders had been regularly updating their website with new content, but nothing on their newest news, no blog posts or any relevant press releases that spoke to the ongoing attacks on democracy, civil society, and the rule of law,” NCRP authors wrote. 

Meanwhile, one in 12 foundations NCRP studied stripped its website of DEI language — a move the organization’s research director, Ryan Schlegel, called “self-censorship” that “snowballs into a lot of harm.” 

Tweaking website language may be tolerable for some leaders; the trouble starts when it crosses over into compromising one’s mission. That line is not always easy to parse. Hernandez, of Creser Capital, felt it was possible to finesse grant applications without losing sight of bigger goals. The word “Latino” became “marginalized” in some cases, but they chugged along.

Dorfman, for his part, thinks history will reward those who don’t compromise. “Work to advance racial equity, racial justice, or to benefit particular groups is super important,” he says. “A lot of nonprofits have, with integrity, said, ‘No. We’re not going to change how we talk about our work.’ And they do lose some funders because of that. I do think it sets them up well for the long term to have stuck to their guns. This political climate that we’re in right now will not exist forever.”

Not wavering

CZI insists it had made clear for years that its commitment to social justice causes was time-limited. But that message didn’t make it to everyone who was affected.

Once the sting of losing CZI funding wore off, Gascó had to decide what was next for Prospera. After consulting with lawyers, communications experts and other nonprofits, she and her team began cobbling together a contingency plan. Part of it was a new, fee-for-service model that allowed the organization to deliver its programs beyond Oakland. The group also applied for “rapid-response funds” donors started after the election, formed giving circles for individual contributors, and attended donor house parties to raise money.

The levels of funding have changed. In mid-2025, the organization had to revise its budget downward — from $2.36 million to $1.75 million. There were layoffs and salary reductions. But Prospera’s overall approach has not wavered, Gascó says. After collecting advice from lawyers, advisers, and communications colleagues, they brought their findings to their board, program participants, and partners. They decided their narrative and branding accurately reflected the organization’s work. Changing it wouldn’t serve the people the group hoped to help.

“It’s not the first time that our community is under attack,” Gascó says. “We are supporting Latino women. … We are not going to change that. We have to be strong, we have to be brave, and we know that is a risk.”

Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.