Moving Money + Power → Working-Class America
Fueling experiments for a new era
I’ve been reflecting on John Fabian Witt’s excellent NYT piece “How to Save the American Experiment.” It’s rightly been making the rounds among peers in the sector, and I’m grateful to Witt for excavating a pivotal yet often overlooked chapter from philanthropic history.
What I appreciated most about the piece is the call to foundations to do what political parties can’t: fuel experiments that go to the heart of our country’s social life and fund institutions that address material concerns for working-class Americans.
Witt argues that the current crisis of American democracy mirrors the tumultuous 1920s, a decade that, despite similar challenges of today’s political violence, inequality, and misinformation, ultimately led to a period of democratic renewal (the New Deal and later the civil rights era) rather than to fascist collapse.
The key to this turnaround, he writes, was not a political party but a vibrant, innovative civil society fueled, in part, by strategic philanthropy.
The central example in Witt’s piece is the American Fund for Public Service, or the Garland Fund, a foundation established in the 1920s that provided crucial “incubator funding” for “democratic renewal” and initiatives that aimed to make the material conditions for working people better.
As I read, I was struck not by a perfect historical analogy but by the enduring patterns of what truly transformative philanthropy requires. In that spirit of shared learning, here are a few insights I’ve been considering.
Community Governance
The types of folks who sit on the boards of large foundations today are often the very people who have benefited most from the extractive economy that needs to be reimagined and reworked. In contrast, what I found so interesting in Witt’s article was that he spotlights a powerful example of someone who inherited a lot of money and gave it to dynamic community leaders to govern the foundation.
Founder Charles Garland refused to accept his inheritance. Speaking to Harpers Magazine in 1921, he said, “It’s not mine. A system which starves thousands while hundreds are stuffed condemns itself. . . It is such a system that offers me a million dollars.”
Instead, he entrusted community leaders to redistribute that inheritance, and he stepped out of the way to fully allow that to happen.
That is so unusual in our sector, but I believe that’s what it takes.
And it takes people on foundation boards who are willing to invest in new ideas—who are not dependent upon the success of the existing system—to try new things that will challenge the outcomes of the status quo.
All $$ → The People
One of the Garland Fund’s most fundamental characteristics was its decision to move the entirety of its resources to the communities it served. In other words, to spend down its endowment.
I know, I know, I can’t write a Substack post without championing the spend down model. But here’s why—it’s such an excellent way for foundations to live up to our values of solidarity. I’d love to see more in our sector follow Garland’s, and more recently Gates’s, lead to deprioritize their institutions’ perpetuity in order to do what is needed to deliver for the communities they serve.
The Garland Fund’s approach to spend down over a period of about two decades offered a way to fuel rapid, high-risk innovation, which I believe is exactly the kind of leadership we need right now.
Fund Power-Building Strategies
This brings me to the last insight, which is that the Garland Fund did not treat civil rights, labor power, women’s rights, and media integrity as isolated issues. It demonstrated an understanding that the success of industrial unions depended on organizing across racial lines, which in turn required fighting Jim Crow. They funded a number of power-building projects in working-class communities, from labor publications to union strike relief funds, legal defense, and worker organizations that addressed racial as well as economic injustices, such as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first Black labor union in America to receive a charter in the AFL.
This part of the piece stood out to me because, by contrast, a lot of the work our sector does today is deeply mired in siloed issue areas, which, in my experience, makes it hard to build coalitions or coordinating bodies of foundations. Witt’s piece is a call to seek out where we can move beyond siloed issues to adopt integrated strategies that recognize how interlocking oppressions, extractive economies, and misinformation are intertwined.
What Are We Willing to Risk?
So, my call to action is this, and I believe it requires a fundamental shift in our posture: We need a foundation sector that is willing to let our institutions go in order to put the needed capital into true innovations for working families. We need people running foundations who are not wed to the success of the existing systems that are failing millions of our neighbors, who are more open to the new forms, new organizing, and new strategies that the crises we face demand. And we need to be willing to put aside treasured issue areas and treasured orthodoxies in service of building broader coalitions.
The Garland Fund’s legacy asks us to reevaluate what we’re willing to risk—and what we’re willing to share—to fuel the next great democratic renewal.
—G
More on Substack
The Truth About Panics by Timothy Snyder breaks down what we need to know about the White House’s recent “antifa” roundtable.
Manufactured Drama by Anne Applebaum dives into how the terror that Chicago residents are subjected to by federal agents is being weaponized to manufacture drama that the administration can use to further its narrative agenda of fear and division. “This isn’t merely performative violence, because the violence is real,” she writes. “But the performance matters a great deal.”
More Perfect Union’s latest exposé on The Hidden Reason Why Restaurants Are Getting Worse names the culprit taking over America’s food distro industry.