With a multi-billion-dollar endowment, dozens of offices around the globe and a network of hundreds of sponsored organizations, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) may be the single most influential nonprofit organization in the world. Only a few foundations are comparable in the scope of their work, their reach and their bank accounts, though Soros far outpaces them as a basis for conspiracy theories.
So paranoia aside, what exactly does Soros’s gigantic network do with all that money?
At first glance, OSF is a massive, impenetrable operation, but in actuality, the group is fairly straightforward in both its mission and strategies. Here are the basics.
What’s in a Name?
By 1979, the billionaire hedge fund magnate had grown bored and depressed with adding zeros to his bank account and wanted to use his vast wealth to do something more fulfilling. Soros, who survived Nazi occupation in Hungary and then fled Soviet rule, sought to create a foundation advancing what his former teacher Karl Popper called “the open society.” Popper championed liberal democracy and theorized that a society cannot thrive if it closes off critical or dissenting thoughts from individuals, citing such examples as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Throughout the 1980s, Soros and his foundation largely focused on promoting democracy in Eastern Europe, where communism had begun to crumble. As the Soviet Union finally collapsed, the Soros Foundation morphed into the Open Society Institute in 1993 (eventually changing its name again to the Open Society Foundations), expanding its focus throughout the world, and becoming increasingly involved in projects in the United States.
Leadership and Staff
Since its founding, the foundation has had three presidents, the current being Patrick Gaspard, a former White House staffer, Democratic National Committee director and U.S. Ambassador to South Africa.
The organization is governed at a higher level by the global board, which includes, among others, Gaspard; Soros himself, who serves as chair; longtime Bard College President Leon Botstein; Michael Ignatieff, a former Canadian politician, academic and the president of Central European University (a college Soros founded in Budapest in 1991); Soros’s daughter Andrea Soros Colombel; and Soros’s son Alexander Soros, the board’s vice chair and the person many consider to be the heir apparent to his father’s philanthropic endeavors.
Along with the global board, OSF is also advised by seven geographic boards staffed by experts and leaders in their respective regions, and 15 “thematic” boards, whose members advise on specific foundation programs.
Day to day, the organization’s operations are managed by a global staff of nearly 1,000 people in dozens of offices around the world.
Where the Money Goes
The Open Society Foundations’ primary work consists of funding organizations it sees as promoting small-d democratic values; OSF also grants scholarships and fellowships. The foundation has distributed billions of dollars of Soros’s money, with portfolios in the United States, Latin America, Europe, Eurasia, Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa. Soros has typically donated between $800 and $900 million each year to his foundation, but in 2017, transferred a staggering $18 billion of his personal fortune to OSF.
According to its website, OSF has made more than 7,000 grants since 2016 alone.
The organization has written checks for a seemingly endless list of liberal organizations in the United States. These range from civil rights and civil liberties organizations like the ACLU and NAACP Legal Defense Fund, to Planned Parenthood, Center for American Progress, Sierra Club and the Type Media Center, among others. Open Society recently pledged $130 million to coronavirus relief efforts in New York, and another $220 million to racial justice organizations in the midst of the George Floyd protests.
Despite Soros’s reputation in the states, the majority of OSF’s expenditures actually go overseas, funding a range of projects from the billionaire’s homeland of Hungary to Northern and Southern Africa, Asia, and basically anywhere else imaginable. Soros’s global work has been frayed in controversy in a number of countries, including Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (a beneficiary of a Soros scholarship as a young man) targeted the billionaire and the NGOs he’s funded in his 2014 and 2018 campaigns, accusing Soros of plotting an immigrant invasion.
The strategy behind Open Society’s work is one of investment, often pledging hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars over multi-year periods, giving organizations a sense of guaranteed funding and stability. This was exactly the thought process in the organization’s recent pledge to racial justice groups.
“The demands being made now will not be met overnight, and we know the gaze of media and elected officials will turn in other directions,” OSF President Patrick Gaspard recently told the New York Times.
“But we need these moments to be sustained. If we’re going to say ‘Black lives matter,’ we need to say ‘Black organizations and structures matter.’”
The “Big Mystery”
Despite OSF’s straightforward and relatively transparent accounting for its activities, the organization nevertheless winds up at the center of an endless array of shadowy conspiracy theories. Much of this is due to Soros, an outspoken public figure who has spent lavishly on Democratic politics in addition to his philanthropic work. As conservatives have sought figures to paint as enemies, Soros has repeatedly become a target.
Soros has likewise been a boogey man for many authoritarian-leaning leaders around the world; along with attacks from Orbán, Russian President Vladimir Putin has also publicly gone after Soros, expelling the Open Society Foundations from the country. OSF will likely continue to be demonized by would-be autocrats in the U.S. and abroad, especially as the organization has witnessed the rise of more authoritarian global politics, making the “Open Society” part of the group’s mission more literal than ever. As this new wave of right-wing politicians grows, it’s likely that the conspiracy will only widen.
Open Society Foundations is, at its core, a foundation, which primarily means giving people money and letting them get to work. As Inside Philanthropy reported in 2017, OSF doesn’t spend a lot of time tooting its own horn, nor does it heavily promote the profile of its leadership and staff. Such are the blessings of a multi-billion-dollar endowment coming from a single, devoted patron, one whose wealth will influence global politics, economics, education and just about every other part of society for decades, perhaps even centuries, to come.
