Racial Justice
The fight for civil rights and greater racial equality stands as among the left’s great achievements of the last 60 years. Yet much work remains and many of the hard-won gains in this area are under attack by conservative activists and courts.
Donors can make a real difference in sustaining forward progress for racial justice in areas such as criminal justice, wealth inequality and persistent segregation. Below, we’ll explain how donors should think about racial justice, the best avenues for supporting the ongoing fight for equality, and tips for getting started.
Why Donate for Racial Justice?
While the term “racial justice” has been largely associated in recent years with movements responding to police killings of Black Americans, the broader struggle for racial justice goes beyond police violence. A long legacy of racial discrimination in areas like housing, education, and access to capital has created persistent inequities in opportunities and life outcomes for people of color. Yet even as the urgent need remains for race-specific remedies to deep injustices across multiple sectors of American life, the Republican Party has grown more explicitly racist in recent years, while the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has taken unprecedented steps to roll back the gains of the civil rights movement. Communities of color are under attack, and progressives need to help these communities build power to protect themselves and push for more equitable treatment.
Where to Donate for Racial Justice
Groups focused on organizing and electoral work in communities of color. To help build power, donors should focus on giving to grassroots work in three particular buckets. The first is national umbrella groups that fund general organizing in communities of color across the country. This includes organizations like Community Change, Center for Popular Democracy and BLM Grassroots, an independent collective of local Black Lives Matter groups. The second is electoral groups specializing in voter contact and turnout in distinct constituencies and communities. This includes organizations like Black Voter Matter Fund, Mi Familia Vota and APIA Vote. Finally, donors should support organizing on key issues that disproportionately impact communities of color, such as criminal justice, labor, and segregation in housing and schools. Blue Tent’s other issue briefs offer guidance on how to give in these areas.
Organizations engaged in advocacy and litigation. After organizing, taking on policies and laws in the halls of power is the next most important aspect of fighting for racial justice. Donors should look to support organizations with longstanding reputations, relationships and institutional knowledge and are adept at the inside game of fighting for legislation and challenging unfair laws or legal doctrines. Organizations that best fit this bill are the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (which share common history but have operated as entirely separate entities for decades), as well as UnidosUS, the national Latino civil rights groups. Donors should also consider supporting groups specifically fighting battles over issues like voter suppression, gerrymandering and other attacks on democracy that disproportionately target communities of color. Groups specializing in this sort of work include the Brennan Center for Justice and FairVote, among others.
Groups using research and messaging to change the narrative. Upstream from organizing and advocacy, think tanks and media-savvy nonprofits are working to change the way policymakers and people in general think about issues of race and identity. Organizations like Policy Link and Demos work on building the intellectual and ideological heft behind more equitable policies and approaches to politics, while groups like Accelerate Change and Color of Change focus on changing the way the media deals with issues of race. Accelerate Change works to invest in and scale new media properties, while Color of Change, among other work, builds campaigns to influence establishment media. Color of Change also engages in a fair amount of broader advocacy.
For Donors Getting Started
Consider a funding intermediary. As always, we recommend that donors who are eager to get started but unable to invest a lot of time in research and vetting look to intermediaries that distribute money to carefully selected groups. Movement Voter Project is a great option for a wide array of grassroots organizing, in particular its Black-led organizing fund. Black Voters Matter, mentioned earlier, also serves as a funding intermediary, channeling support to many local Black-led organizing groups. The Center for Popular Democracy, also mentioned above, engages in regranting of funds to groups that donors would be unlikely to find on their own. Solidaire Network is another funding intermediary that helps donors get money to front-line racial justice groups.
Make sure you understand the different types of nonprofits and political groups, and what that means for your giving. The examples we cited above include different types of organizations, from standard 501(c)(3)s to the more politically minded (c)(4)s. Donors should read up on the different limits and tax incentives when it comes to giving to these groups, especially when looking to give through a foundation.
Think about your giving in the bigger picture. The right has historically used race to divide working-class Americans, making it hard to build a strong left-of-center coalition that can achieve gains across a range of issues. Given this, the fight for racial justice should not be seen as a standalone issue, but rather as a foundational challenge that affects nearly everything that progressive donors care about.