SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
philanthropy
Now More Than Ever, Philanthropy Must Back the Groups Fighting Corporate Power
Do not pull back because the political moment got harder; that is precisely when this work needs you most.
Jun 25, 2026
Amazon wanted to build 250 diesel generators in a working-class Minnesota community and skip an environmental review that would have scrutinized emissions and pollution. A local organization decided to fight anyway, banded together with others, and won.
That organization was CURE, a grantee of the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, and last year's fight was about more than a data center. It was about whether Amazon could run 250 diesel generators next to a retiring coal plant in Becker, Minnesota without answering for what it meant for the air and water in a community already in the middle of an energy transition.
Those generators would have produced 600 megawatts of backup power, without the environmental review that would have examined their emissions impact. The community had no interest in absorbing the pollution costs of Amazon's AI ambitions.
I have spent 25 years in this work, first as an organizer and now as someone who helps fund it. What happened in Becker does not surprise me. CURE did not win because it got lucky. It won because someone had invested in that organization years before Amazon showed up, building the staff, the community relationships, and the knowledge of how a state utilities commission actually works. That is how organizing operates. The results are visible. The groundwork is not. And right now, that groundwork is being torn up on purpose. Philanthropy helped build it. Now it needs to decide whether it will defend it.
For many of the organizations we fund at the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, ours is the first climate grant they have ever received. That is not a boast. It is an indictment of how philanthropy has allocated its resources.
I saw what patient investment makes possible in the early 2000s, when I was part of an immigrant women's organization in San Francisco called Mujeres Unidas y Activas. We had four staff members and a big dream. Over the next decade MUA grew to 40 people and became one of the founding members of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which we built alongside a dozen other domestic worker groups who came together in Atlanta and decided to act as one.
The alliance went on to help win legal protections for the nannies, housekeepers, and home aides that federal labor law had excluded since the New Deal. None of that came from a single breakthrough. It came from funders who stayed in it long enough to see something grow.
That infrastructure is being dismantled right now, and the attacks are not accidental. When voter registration drives signed up new voters by the thousands, lawmakers in several states moved to criminalize the groups behind them.
Nick Tilsen founded the NDN Collective to defend Indigenous rights and land sovereignty in the Dakotas, and that work made him a target. He faced aggravated assault charges and the prospect of more than 25 years in prison for monitoring a police encounter in Rapid City before a jury deadlocked and all charges were dropped earlier this year. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which has tracked hate groups for more than 50 years, was federally indicted on fraud charges in April. You do not need to ban organizing if you can make it too expensive and too frightening to sustain.
What disappears when this work gets defunded does not make the front page. A permit gets quietly approved. A workplace complaint never gets filed. A hearing happens and no one is there to speak. Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and working-class communities have always been powerful. What they have not always had is the sustained investment they deserve.
For many of the organizations we fund at the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, ours is the first climate grant they have ever received. That is not a boast. It is an indictment of how philanthropy has allocated its resources, and it has to change. We call on donors to fund grassroots organizations now.
Fund them for years, not grant cycles. Do not pull back because the political moment got harder. That is precisely when this work needs you most.
Republicans hold complete control of state government in 23 states today, Democrats in 16. That map does not change through advertising. It changes through patient, ground-level organizing in the places the political class has written off, on a timeline of years, not election cycles. Cutting that work now is not fiscal discipline. It is a strategic concession.
Climate, democracy, and economic justice are not separate fights. They are the same fight, and the communities on the frontlines of all three have been saying so for years. “Affordability,” the latest political buzzword, is not new or distinct from these ongoing fights. In Becker, what was at stake was clean air, democratic accountability, and a community's right to shape its own energy future. CURE understood that. The question is whether the people and institutions with the resources to back that kind of work will understand it too, and soon enough to matter.
I still think about those four staff members at MUA, and what became possible because someone believed in the work long before there were results to show for it. Frontline communities are not waiting to be rescued. They are building, organizing, and winning. The question is whether philanthropy will stop watching and start investing.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Philanthropy Must Evolve
How we redefined business as usual to move $500 million.
Jun 10, 2026
For too long, philanthropy has hidden behind the twin gatekeepers of fiduciary duty and perpetuity to avoid giving more when communities need it most. Last year, the Marguerite Casey Foundation provided a one-time fivefold increase in funding to meet a deepening moment of crisis. We learned this was a lifeline to many organizations facing increasing attacks and whose funders were pulling back from supporting racial and economic justice organizing.
The damage we’re seeing—from cuts to essential government services and ICE raids to a corrupt federal government orchestrating the largest transfer of wealth from the poorest people to the richest in our nation—will have impacts for a generation. Philanthropy must provide resources at a scale and with a fervor that meaningfully responds to the reality of the world around us.
Yet, at a time when funders should be doing more, The Center for Effective Philanthropy recently documented a stunning disconnect: the vast majority of philanthropic leaders believe everything is fine, while the nonprofit sector is suffering job losses, burnout, and uncertainty. To address this gap between foundation comfort and community suffering, our sector must evolve how we move money.
A foundation more concerned with preserving its endowment than in meeting its mission must question whether it is living into its charitable purpose.
The traditional philanthropic model limits annual giving to 5% of a foundation’s total assets. A commonly cited reason for this approach is fiduciary duty. Foundation trustees and leaders invoke fiduciary duty to shut down conversations about increased payout: "We can't give more than 5% of our assets because we have to exercise fiduciary responsibility."
But after a series of deep conversations with our board, examining legal frameworks and sharpening our definitions, we arrived at a different conclusion: fiduciary duty is a duty to mission. So if our mission is to transform the government so it delivers on the promise of a good life for all people then right now is precisely when we need to make the deepest commitment we possibly can. Increasing our annual grantmaking by 50% to a minimum of $500M over the next decade is how we’re putting into practice our sharpened understanding of fiduciary duty to mission.
The second assumption we examined was the unexamined belief that foundations must exist forever by growing their endowments at any cost, even when that cost is investing in corporations that work at cross-purposes to our mission. Perpetuity, often written directly into a foundation's bylaws, is the second gateway where conversations about increased payout often go to die.
The logic sounds reasonable on its face: to last forever, a foundation must preserve and grow its endowment infinitely. But a foundation more concerned with preserving its endowment than in meeting its mission must question whether it is living into its charitable purpose. We hope that our commitment to give $500M over ten years will serve as a powerful proof point for our sector that a vastly increased payout and perpetuity can and must coexist.
If our mission is to transform the government so it delivers on the promise of a good life for all people then right now is precisely when we need to make the deepest commitment we possibly can.
Through rigorous investment stress testing, we found that most foundations can, in fact, drastically increase their payout even while adhering to a commitment to perpetuity. When we took a closer look at our own bylaws, it became clear that our perpetuity clause doesn’t define “perpetuity” as endless upward growth of the endowment. Instead, perpetuity simply means lasting forever—it says nothing about getting larger forever. Our sector has confused endless growth with existing over the long-term. At MCF, we’re untangling the two and showing how a foundation can last indefinitely while also spending down its endowment to a predetermined level. The two are not in conflict.
Instead of a grantmaking formula determined by a rigid percentage of total assets, we now operate from a sharpened approach: fiduciary duty centers mission, and perpetuity means building durable community power, not endlessly growing our own money for an unpromised tomorrow. We are not alone in this realization or practice. Many of our philanthropic partners have been giving above and beyond the 5%, realizing that "forever" has become an excuse for "not now."
The crises we’re facing are too big for business as usual. Our invitation to foundation leaders reading this: let’s evolve our practice of fiduciary duty and perpetuity so we can move the money to the community organizers, scholars, municipal leaders, and meaning-makers creating a future worthy of living.
Keep ReadingShow Less
How Billionaires Like Marc Benioff Use Philanthropy To Skirt Around Public Scrutiny
Benioff has given over $1 billion to San Francisco, but this money has an agenda: to keep critics off his back.
Oct 23, 2025
Marc Benioff is a classic case of a bad-faith billionaire philanthropist. He donates hundreds of millions of dollars to the communities he lives in—San Francisco and the Big Island of Hawaii—to skirt around public scrutiny.
Benioff, a Bay-Area native whose net worth hovers under $9 billion, and his company Salesforce have donated over $1 billion to San Francisco—as of October this year. As for Hawaii, where Benioff bought land in 2000, he and his wife Lynne have graciously given $250 million in philanthropy. Most of this money has gone to building or expanding hospitals.
But his philanthropy has an agenda: to keep critics off his back.
Another big-money billionaire, Mark Cuban, whose net worth sits around $6 billion, shared his thoughts on philanthropic efforts like Benioff’s over the weekend during an episode of Real Time with Bill Mahr. Sitting beside Andrew Ross Sorkin, Cuban said he prefers to donate anonymously and questions the intentions of those who do differently.
Instead of focusing his time crafting an apology, Benioff used his shot to yell about how much money he has given to the community.
“Why would you put your name on a building or a hospital if not for leverage, for power, for influence?” he said.
Well said, Mr. Cuban. Power, influence, leverage–and an opportunity to excuse bad behavior–are exactly what Mr. Benioff seeks in spending so much, tax-deductable, money on children’s hospitals with his name plastered on the side.
This became clear in the aftermath of Benioff’s poorly received–yet hardly surprising–comments to the New York Times earlier this month, in which he suggested his former-foe-now-friend, President Donald Trump, send the National Guard to San Francisco.
“We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” Benioff said.
The fallout was immediate. Local leaders condemned his comments, and Ron Conway, a Democratic donor and Silicon Valley venture capitalist, publicly resigned from Salesforce Inc.’s Philanthropic Foundation.
“It saddens me immensely to say that with your recent comments, and failure to understand their impact, I now barely recognize the person I have so long admired,” Conway said in an email to Benioff last week.
Benioff, for his part, has been trying to walk back his comments—by bragging about how much money he has donated to San Francisco: “No one is doing more philanthropy in San Francisco this year than I am,” he told the San Francisco Standard after his controversial comments hit airwaves across the country. “Nobody has given more than my family. Nobody has given more than my company.”
Instead of focusing his time crafting an apology, Benioff used his shot to yell about how much money he has given to the community.
And this isn’t the first time he’s tried using his philanthropy to get out of hot water. When NPR reporter Dana Kerr went to report on Benioff in Hawaii—and his suspicious spending spree on real estate—the billionaire tried to persuade her into writing a positive story.
“He started texting me all the time. His texts were all about the philanthropy that he’s doing in Hawaii… He also connected me with people who know about his donations so I could talk to them,” Kerr said on an NPR podcast in March 2024. “The whole thing really felt like a pressure campaign.”
Sounds similar to his strategy with the SF Standard last week: reminding reporters of his philanthropic history to deter criticism. What happened to honesty–or apologies?
Benioff waited an entire week before apologizing for his National Guard comments–on where else but X.
But the damage is done. Reverberations from his mini scandal remain around the country. Questions of whether Trump is going too far, even for Republicans, by sending the National Guard to blue cities abound.
During a televised mayoral debate in New York City last week, all three contenders—Democrat Zohran Mamdani, Independent Andrew Cuomo, and GOP candidate Curtis Silwa—said they would not support Trump sending the National Guard to the city’s streets as mayor.
Trump has, so far, sent the National Guard to “fight crime” in five US cities—all led by Democratic mayors: Washington, DC; Los Angeles, California; Portland, Oregon; Memphis, Tennessee; and Chicago, Illinois. Lawmakers from those states have said military presence is not necessary, except for Tennessee’s Republican Gov. Bill Lee.
The president continues to threaten other cities with military presence, and in some cases, has taken it a step further: In Boston, led by Mayor Michelle Wu, he’s raised the idea of moving the FIFA World Cup. (Trump is good pals with FIFA president Gianni Infantino, who was curiously present at the Gaza Peace Summit.)
Meanwhile, Benioff’s magazine Time, which he purchased in 2018 “to help address a crisis of Trust,” just put Trump on its cover for the second time this year.
Trump, however, hates the picture.
“Time Magazine wrote a relatively good story about me, but the picture may be the Worst of All Time,” the president wrote on Truth Social in the early hours of Wednesday.
While our commander in chief addressed his cover photo, he has yet to comment directly on Benioff’s request. Instead, he’s built up a lie around the billionaire’s contentious comments, citing, falsely, that “government officials” in California have called for the National Guard’s deployment.
“We have great support in San Francisco,” Trump told FBI Director Kash Patel at a White House conference this week. “So, I’d like to recommend that for inclusion, maybe in your next group.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular