Foundations focus their attentions on saving democracy
Democracy, as President Joe Biden declared in his inaugural speech, survived a barrage of misinformation and an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol to achieve a peaceful transfer of power.
Yet the threats to democracy remain alarming in the view of most experts. And many major U.S. nonprofits and philanthropies, which provided funding to help safeguard the 2020 elections, plan to keep the money flowing.
Philanthropic groups helped recruit roughly 500,000 potential poll workers last year, paid for election officials’ protective equipment and helped dispel disinformation about where and when people could vote. One nonprofit, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, an advocacy group, provided funding at 2,500 polling places for recruitment and training in the midst of the viral pandemic and the additional equipment and supplies that were needed to process record-high mailin ballots.
“It is impossible to overstate the significance of the philanthropic response to the difficulties of this election,” the Biden campaign said in an election postmortem.
For all their success in helping ensure what Christopher Krebs, who tracked the voting as head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, called the most secure U.S. election ever, advocates see the need to keep putting their financial muscle behind the cause.
“In Georgia, there have been a slew of voter suppression laws introduced — that’s happening right now,” said Lisa Versaci, director of NEO Philanthropy’s State Infrastructure Fund, which financed $55 million in programs to foster election engagement and protect voting in historically underrepresented communities. “Don’t be fooled. This isn’t going away. It’s going to be occurring in the states, and we’re going to counter it. It doesn’t end.”
The financial support that gushed from philanthropic groups in 2020 had been building for years. Over the past decade, foundations donated nearly $10 billion in the United States to try to boost civic participation, secure election reforms and educate the public, according to the philanthropy research organization Candid.