The California Donor Table (CDT) is a community of donors who pool and align investments in leaders, groups and systems that make lasting progressive political change beyond any single election cycle or issue campaign. Launched in 2005 as the Progressive Era Project, in 2020, CDT raised and distributed nearly $5.7 million to expand California’s electorate and help progressive candidates.
CDT is a project of Tides Advocacy, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, and has historically flown under the radar. But the rising organization is now stepping into the spotlight, powering key wins throughout the state. Three of CDT’s four endorsed state legislative candidates won. And CDT grantee partners in Black, Latino, and Asian American and Pacific Islander communities helped spearhead wins for progressive district attorney, county board of supervisor, and other local candidates.
“All these people had a commitment to racial justice and intersectionality,” explains California Donor Table Executive Director Ludovic Blain of CDT’s founding donors, adding, “They thought California was an interesting testing ground to build power in people of color communities in a majoritarian way.”
CDT’s rise should be seen within the context of a growing class of politicized giving. The c3 has become almost synonymous with the word “nonprofit.” But as we’ve reported, donors are also realizing that ignoring policy and electoral fights can come at a cost. And in a season of unprecedented threats to democracy, progressives might be even more inclined to look to 501(c)(4) vehicles to broaden the levers of influence they can pull.
Pulling in progressive donors
CDT’s founding donors include Susan Sandler, the daughter of the late stalwart progressive philanthropists Herb and Marion Sandler; her husband Steve Phillips, a Democratic donor and founder of Democracy in Color, a political media organization; and Quinn Delaney, founder of the Akonadi Foundation, which focuses on racial justice and recently committed $12.5 million to end the criminalization of Black youth and youth of color.
The donor table has expanded the five original donors to 45 donors today. The majority of donors are from the Bay Area, including Karen Grove, chair of the Grove Action Fund, who was introduced by Delaney. “I was becoming more politicized in my social change work, which was initially philanthropic advocacy and centered on abortion rights,” Grove told me. As Grove worked on abortion rights and became increasingly aware of the importance of intersectionality and racism, she wanted to amplify her impact.
Delaney’s work through CDT is in lockstep with some of the work she does through Akonadi Foundation, which she runs with her husband Wayne Jordan, a Black real estate investor in Oakland. Delaney says that they founded Akonadi and focused on racial justice because of their lived experiences and the racism permeating every American system.
“Over the years, I have added political change to my bucket of tools and theories of change on how we can get things accomplished,” Delaney began by saying.
Initially, she thought community organizing was her best bet. But as she dug in, she became increasingly involved in politics and working with candidates and other political organizations. CDT’s founders were all part of the Democracy Alliance and had seen other donors working within their respective states to fund and facilitate change. Where CDT stands out, though, is its emphasis on racial justice and leadership of people of color.
Mobilizing progressive power
California Donor Table initially took a county-based strategy and looked at where demographics have shifted in San Bernardino, Riverside, San Diego and Orange Counties. The founders did a deep dive into these counties to identify progressive organizations, who their leaders were, how they were organizing, and where to fill gaps.
“We were trying to create this synergy of multiple organizations who could all commit to working together around a vision of electing progressive candidates and pushing policies at both a county and state level,” Delaney explains.
Ludovic Blain, CDT Executive Director
Ludovic Blain, CDT Executive Director
About four years into the endeavor, Ludovic Blain signed on as the first full-time staffer. A veteran in the nonprofit and progressive organizing space, Blain once helped lead the democracy program at Demos, working on campaigns for Election Day registration and felon voting rights. He was excited to come to CDT and do work centered on racial justice.
The Bronx-born, Berkeley-living Blain holds a political science degree from CUNY, and is quick to upend some assumptions about the California political landscape, which he calls “complicated.” He explains that in red states, environmentally unfriendly businesses invest in Republican candidates. But the Golden State has a super-duper Democratic majority, meaning that these same corporations might actually be backing (moderate) Democratic candidates.
In California, Blain says, the best a Republican might be able to do is vote “no.” But a Black moderate Democrat who is, say, 40% aligned with business could help kill all the bills unfriendly to the corporate bottom line, all the while still flying the D flag.
Part of Blain’s work is helping donors understand these nuances, and understand that not all Democrats, and even not all POC Democrats, are the same.
“We need to be creating a pipeline of good folks who can be running for higher and higher office. And our work through the donor table is amplifying this message to donors. Our goal isn’t to beat Republicans. It’s to elect progressives… It’s both about ideology and identity, so it takes a lot of donor engagement and education,” Blain explains.
Wins on the ground
Right now, CDT is laser-focused on building up a robust ecosystem of progressive leaders and organizations, giving money to local groups of color to allow them to make political strategies and communities, and then aggregating that around the state to project state power. This bottom-up approach, Blain believes, provides a clear path for continued progressive wins both at the state and even national level.
“Many of the country’s largest Democratic donors are here in California, where we have an outsized influence in Democratic politics. About 20% of Democrats in congress are from California.”
Consider that back in 2012, a 39-year-old Georgia state legislator named Stacey Abrams came to the Bay Area with an ambitious plan for turning Georgia blue. Sandler and Phillips were impressed enough to provide seed money and introduce Abrams to a wider network of donors.
And now here we are.
As for candidates that California Donor Table has directly backed, consider Assemblymember Eloise Gomez Reyes for the 47th Assembly District representing San Bernardino and Riverside. She works in what’s known as the Inland Empire, due east of Los Angeles. Back in 2016, Reyes defeated incumbent Cheryl Brown, a business-aligned Black moderate Democrat, and offers a good case study for the kind of needle CDT threads.
Born in the Inland Empire to Mexican immigrants, Reyes recalls early moments in junior high school when she knew she wanted to be a leader; her family hired a Spanish-speaking attorney, but Reyes even then knew that the lawyer wasn’t doing right by them. So she went to law school, worked for a big labor firm in Downtown Los Angeles, and then opened up her own practice in the Inland Empire—the first Latina ever to do so. As her profile rose, people in her community encouraged her to get into politics, and the rest is history.
“The California Donor Table is willing to help the community elect the people the community wants to help. Instead of coming in and saying this is your savior. It is empowering community on a grassroots level to help them elect their representative,” Reyes told me.
San Bernardino and Riverside Counties are at least 50% Latino, but as in other regions of California, that demography hasn’t always translated into political representation. Why? Well, this is a longer story of California’s nonpartisan election laws, Ludovic Blain explains, allowing a candidate to win with 50% plus one. This makes it very hard to beat incumbents. So the first step in bucking this trend was to run candidates to mandate fall elections. The second step was to find viable Democratic candidates and help them win.
CDT has invested the longest in San Diego County, since 2009, and it’s where they’ve made the most progress. Now, the County Board of Supervisors is majority Democrat, including some progressive Democrats. The mayor of San Diego is also a Democrat, and congressional districts are going back and forth.
The work continues
In 2020, California Donor Table gave to grantee partners touching issues including census count, criminal justice reform, immigrant rights, work protections, environmental justice, youth empowerment, and COVID support. Grantees include Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice in the Inland Empire, Community Water Center in the Central Valley, and statewide group AAPIs for Civic Empowerment Education Fund.
Along the way, part of the work has been making sure donors are aware of the kind of election reform that needs to happen. Indeed, sometimes groups working in different arenas might have to come together to address a structural issue. In San Bernardino, for instance, some Black and Latino communities are in unincorporated zones. So groups came together to construct municipalities, then did electoral work to try to win races, and then finally had people to hold accountable.
This work is not a quick fight, but a long slog.
For Blain and CDT’s team, it’s these partisan c4 strategies that allow donors to see the bigger picture of what can hold back their policy goals.
Looking forward, Blain has one key message as CDT continues to add donors so that it can do its work on the ground: “The education for donors is that some of their privilege comes from their money, and instead of giving money to politicians, they should instead give to groups so that we can center these groups on the ground. And so then, when a donor considers whether to give next time, it won’t be based on how politician treated donor, but how the politician treated the group.”
