Laments over civic polarization have always been with us, and today, they’re depressingly commonplace in the U.S., reflected in polling data as well as in any number of anecdotes about politics severing families and friendships. It’s become a truism to say we’re more divided than ever. And that reflects poorly on a sector whose purpose from the beginning—at least in part—has been to foster space for social engagement distinct from commerce and government.
Where philanthropy is concerned, the whole notion of bridging civic divides is tricky terrain. On one hand, civil society organizations have long tasked themselves with the work of bringing people together around shared interests, values, creeds and places. But at the same time, grantmakers often pay too little attention to how those efforts can privilege certain groups and silence others, giving rise to biased and exclusive viewpoints that get passed off as general wisdom.
It’s no wonder, then, that many in the civic sector now look askance at this sort of work. That’s true in this era especially, when rhetoric of “fine people on both sides” has drawn false equivalencies between people who want to find common ground and those operating in bad faith.
“People mean different things when they say ‘bridging divides,’ both in terms of what that means in practice and what the result might be,” said Kristen Cambell, executive director of Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE). “Bridging divides has become a catch-all term in some ways, and when not clearly articulated, can mean anything from dinner table conversations to countering extremism.”
Whether they’re involved with PACE or not, a number of funders have been supporting efforts to make space for a healthier democratic discourse. Their likelihood of success is up for debate, but at the very least, these are efforts undertaken with good intentions. Here are a few prominent funders in this space.
Einhorn Collaborative
Established as the Einhorn Family Charitable Trust in 2002, this grantmaker’s goal has always been to “help people get along better.” Founder David Einhorn, president of investment advisory firm Greenlight Capital, has written that engaging with people “from different vantage points and backgrounds—especially across the ideological spectrum” is crucial in a country of growing polarization.
As its current name suggests, the Einhorn Collaborative seeks to partner with other funders and nonprofits toward the goal of addressing America’s “crisis of connection.” That involves efforts well removed from the realm of political ideology, like Pediatrics Supporting Parents, as well as efforts like “The Builders,” which involves support for narrative and research-based work toward fostering greater human connection. Einhorn is also in the process of developing a funder collaborative to address problems of polarization, fear, distrust and hatred, to debut this year.
William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
Bridging the partisan divide has long been a focus for Hewlett. Back in 2014, the foundation rolled out the Madison Initiative, a $50 million exploratory grantmaking effort inspired in part by the fourth U.S. president’s famous warning against “the mischiefs of faction.” The three-year program placed an explicit focus on propping up American democracy, deploying a wide spread of grants to think tanks, campaign finance reform advocates, media organizations, universities and more.
More recently, Hewlett has taken its typically voluminous approach toward evaluating the initiative, which then set the stage for its current U.S. Democracy program. Though U.S. Democracy is the Madison Initiative’s successor, there has been less overt focus on polarization and “bridging,” though the grants still read as an overture to bipartisanship. There’s also significant focus on congressional effectiveness and good lawmaking, which are worthy goals, but a very tall order given a Congress in which hyper-partisanship renders bills on vital causes like voting rights dead on arrival (in the Senate, anyway).
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
This 80-year-old institution has sought to embrace change, with pledges to divest from fossil fuels, embrace intersectional movement building, and, last year, to expand and center funding for democracy, racial justice and economic justice. In addition to the kinds of grants for Black-led organizing and election protection we saw from many funders in 2020, RBF has also been funding toward goals articulated in “Our Common Purpose,” a report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship.
RBF supported the report alongside the S.D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation, producing a lengthy list of recommendations for the rejuvenation of American democracy. Of note is Strategy No. 4—expand civic bridging capacity. The idea there is to ramp up philanthropic support for “the hyper-local world of libraries, playgrounds, public parks, community gardens, churches and cafes.” While the pandemic has forestalled the usefulness of that sort of funding, RBF has given to places like Citizen University, iCivics, the American Promise Education Fund and The Great Reset.
The Fetzer Institute
This grantmaker takes its name from its founder, the late John Earl Fetzer, whose success in broadcast media coincided with a deep personal interest in faith, religion and philosophy. Fetzer’s spiritual bent can be seen in the institute’s current work, which includes research on religion and spirituality in the U.S., regional support for churches and other local organizations in Southwest Michigan, and efforts to bolster the health of U.S. democracy.
That eclectic mix of support lends itself to bridging work. One example is Faith In/And Democracy, a partnership between Fetzer, PACE and the Democracy Fund to encourage faith-based engagement across religious and cultural lines. The initiative got its start in the fall of 2019. Covering it at the time, I noted that “it’s about mostly Christian congregations and faith leaders facing up to the angsts of the Trump era.” Another relevant Fetzer grantee is the One America Movement, a campaign to “combat toxic polarization” by working across religious communities.
Knight Foundation
Knight’s consistent leadership as a journalism funder, propping up local news outlets in particular, earns it a spot on this list. Alongside its arts and place-based funding, which also speak to human connectivity, Knight’s journalism grantmaking has helped keep local and investigative outlets afloat. Sure, journalism doesn’t always serve a bridging function, but it is an alternative to rampant online misinformation. In that sense, any philanthropy that supports fact-based reporting of reasonable depth and gravitas is a bulwark against one of the factors of modern life that contributes the most to polarization and even extremism.
The Whitman Institute
The Whitman Institute isn’t the largest funder on this list, a fact accentuated by its spend-out, which is set to wrap up next year. But this modest progressive grantmaker has been an important voice in the world of bridging and relationship-building philanthropy. Its grantees include media organizations, movement building groups, democracy advocates and narrative projects pursuing social change. In collaboration with a group of other philanthropies, Whitman also stood up the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, a five-year initiative seeking to recognize and reorient the power imbalance between funders and grantees.
MacKenzie Scott
A willingness to challenge philanthropic norms has also characterized the giving of MacKenzie Scott, a newcomer to bridging work whose resources have the potential to substantially shape how this corner of philanthropy evolves. In her initial outlay of $1.7 billion last summer, MacKenzie Scott chose to include $55 million for “empathy and bridging divides.” Looser definitions of bridging could also cover plenty of other Scott grants in areas like democracy and racial, gender and LGBTQ equity.
Just a few Scott grantees that fit the bill include the Millennial Action Project (which advocates for “post-partisanship” among that generational cohort), Encore.org (bridging generational divides), Facing History and Ourselves, Interfaith Youth Core, the Solutions Journalism Project, the On Being Project, the Othering and Belonging Institute, and With Honor, which promotes political leadership by veterans to reduce polarization.
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Scott’s interest in bridging divides is no doubt a welcome development for a philanthropic niche that, frankly, often seems inadequate to the task of actually making headway against rampant polarization. But even Scott’s money may have little effect against the forces pulling us apart.
Kristen Cambell of PACE spoke about bridging funding as falling into two buckets: bridging for understanding, which involves fostering relationships, listening and human connection; and bridging for outcomes, involving persuasion, education and advocacy. Most of the funding efforts above fall into the first category. The second is a much larger world, encompassing many funders who chafe at blanket terms like “civility” or even “bridging” itself as ways to accommodate world views they see as illegitimate or antithetical to their values. The Democracy Fund’s “declaration of independence from bipartisanship” this past summer comes to mind.
A third approach to bridging divides could be efforts to counter extremism—not as in building bridges to extremists, who’d be uninterested anyway, but in terms of finding common ground around what constitutes a bridge too far. A common impulse after events like the Capitol siege is to try to understand where the extreme behavior came from: Not a useless thing to do, but a dangerous one when there’s no reciprocity.
Bridging funders will have to grapple with where they stand on that point. In the words of Decker Ngongang, who led an exploration into bridging work for PACE and penned several essays following its conclusion:
“The philanthropic sector can leverage its collective leadership to allow for good-faith debate by helping distinguish between good-faith actors with different but principled perspective—and bad-faith or self-interested actors whose values are not rooted in core democratic principles such as equality, liberty and opportunity for all.”
