With the general election right around the corner, nonprofit organizations and philanthropic funders are ramping up their efforts to mobilize voters. Organizers, however, emphasize that this type of work should be a long-term endeavor in empowering communities. We’ve seen widely successful examples of this in states like Arizona and Georgia, where statewide and local organizations have been credited for increasing voter turnout while also building political power for underserved and marginalized communities.
In California, a new example of this is PIVOT, a three-year, $25 million collaborative fund. The initiative calls itself a “first of its kind” partnership dedicated to strengthening the state’s power-building ecosystem and advancing racial justice by investing in year-round voter organizing and supporting leaders, organizations and movements so they can advance structural reform in the state.
In an initial round of grants, PIVOT is awarding $7 million to 14 organizations in multi-year grants. Grant amounts range from $250,000 to $1 million and are for specific projects, with grantees including AAPIs for Civic Engagement, Bay Rising, California Black Power Network, Million Voters Project and MOVE the Valley.
Not to be confused with a similarly named fund backing nonprofit news outlets led by people of color in Georgia, California’s PIVOT is guided by a steering committee made up of seven funders and seven organizers. The philanthropies involved are the Akonadi Foundation, California Community Foundation (CCF), Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, East Bay Community Foundation, Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, California Endowment, San Francisco Foundation and Weingart Foundation. CCF will be providing fiscal and administrative management for the fund.
“We believe that the first set of grants really reflects our approach to building local infrastructure and strengthening statewide organizations,” said PIVOT’s director, Diana Colín. “These organizations are working on racial justice and multiracial issues, prioritizing and engaging AAPI communities, Black communities, Latinx communities, young people, immigrants and rural communities. Colín added that PIVOT wanted to make sure that regions that have been historically underresourced were a priority within its grantmaking.
Taking trust-based philanthropy to the next level
Although its initial round of grants did, in fact, come as an election kicks into gear, PIVOT is aiming to resource long-term civic engagement — work that will carry forward through and beyond the 2024 contest. PIVOT also hopes to help organizations build their own infrastructure so that they may have independent revenue and aren’t as dependent on philanthropic resources.
The idea for PIVOT began in 2020, when funders and organizers gathered to coordinate and share practices on how to increase funding for power-building and voter engagement work. Between the onset of the pandemic, the conversations around racial justice, the Census and the general election, it became clear that there was a need for deeper investment in power-building to advance structural reform.
“What we realized is that we needed to provide a pathway to putting governing power into the hands of the people…We realized we were only getting civic engagement dollars every four years during a general election, and that was not going to be enough to really get our people the world that they deserve,” Colín said. “It had to be integrated voter engagement, year-round funding, and resources coming to these organizations.”
According to Judith Bell, steering committee member and chief impact officer at San Francisco Foundation, these types of boom-and-bust cycles of funding don’t allow organizations to build the necessary infrastructure for voter engagement to push long-term change.
PIVOT’s journey has been a long one. As a bit of a window into its process, PIVOT realized it would have the funds to begun its grantmaking after fundraising and learning sessions between funders and organizers. After getting the word out about the fund, PIVOT invited 35 organizations to apply for a grant. An ad hoc committee reviewed all the submissions based on a criteria that included things like scale, clarity, innovation and regional equity, among others.
One of PIVOT’s more unique aspects is that it’s guided by a steering committee of seven funders and seven organizers, with both groups seeking to share power equally. “It really started with a recognition that we needed a different kind of relationship between funders and organizers, that it needed to have a depth of trust, that it needed to have a sense of funders serving the field and serving in partnership and understanding of the needs… so that we could join together to achieve the kind of transformative change that’s needed in California,” Bell said.
“The goal is to take trust-based philanthropy to the next level,” Colín said. “It’s forging deep partnerships, developing grantmaking strategies, collaborating to raise pooled fund dollars and turning them into grants and to really decide how we use these funds.”
As a group, the steering committee settled on three big bets for its grantmaking: organizing infrastructure, narrative infrastructure and independent revenue. For this first round of grants, PIVOT is prioritizing the first two big bets.
The projects that PIVOT is supporting speak to its broader power-building mission, and do not all necessarily focus specifically on voter engagement around the 2024 election. AAPIs for Civic Empowerment, for instance, is developing a statewide APPI Ethnic Media Hub, which will create ongoing and integrated communications infrastructure to train community leaders. California Black Power Network is creating a multiracial coalition to expand conversations around reparations and mobilize community power and voices to urge the state to introduce and pass reparations legislation. And Communities for a New California Education Fund is using narrative power-building to mobilize Latina voters in the state in the hopes that they in turn can mobilize entire families to vote.
“These are projects that other funders would usually think are too bold or too risky,” Colín said. “And so we’re saying it might work. It might not. But let’s try it. And if it doesn’t work, how do we learn from it and what else do we need to do to get this right?”
Bay Rising
One of PIVOT’s other grantees is Bay Rising, a regional coalition that works to build power for Black, Latino and Asian working class communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Coalition members work across climate justice, education and renter organizing, to name a few areas — and all work to increase voter turnout within their communities, educate voters, build the capacity to run electoral campaigns and build leaders. The coalition is anchored by three local grassroots groups: Oakland Rising, San Francisco Rising and Silicon Valley Rising.
“What we found is a lot of organizations have newer organizers with one or two years of experience, but they’ve never actually worked on a campaign,” said Bay Rising’s executive director, Kimi Lee.
PIVOT’s grant will be used to support the creation of a fellowship program in which new organizers will receive training to become campaign managers. Members of the program cohort will work together on a campaign and develop their skills, while also building relationships and supporting one another.
“The organizers are the ones that are doing a lot of the work on the ground, and it can get really hard because they’re up against such huge factors,” Lee said. “So having a cohort that they can turn to get support, get advice in the moment — we think that that is going to help them be better organizers and help our different movements and our campaigns moving forward.”
For Lee, long-term funding is crucial for creating change and shifting power. “We’ll get money in defense and never get money for offense,” Lee said. “It’s rare that we get money to actually plan and think about and put forward our strategy. Unfortunately, that’s the tendency… what gets left out is building organizing, building a foundation, and building the infrastructure to be able to do the work year-round. And so that’s what makes it hard.”
“Guided by the needs of the field”
In addition to its grantmaking, PIVOT is looking to learn from its work. “We also host what we call quarterly learning sessions, and we really talk about the multidimensional power, innovation strategies, scenario planning, the needs of the field, and everyone is in the space together,” Colín said. “So in the long run, we envision a philanthropic landscape that is practitioner formed and guided by the needs of the field.”
During the quarterly sessions, organizers and funders can share what’s happening on the ground, giving them a space for analysis and to learn about different models and approaches. Lee pointed out that this is especially helpful for any funder or donor looking to explore what this type of work can look like and who they can support.
“When funders and organizers are in trusting relationships, they can honestly talk about what is and what is not working. And PIVOT really represents the possibilities for what can happen when those relationships are developed,” Bell said. “When organizers and funders lean into them and then take that understanding and apply it… that really can change not just the way funding decisions are made but change the infrastructure for change in California.”
