Eddy Zheng’s resume doesn’t resemble that of your typical foundation leader — not even close. Zheng, whose family immigrated from China when he was 12, was arrested at the age of 16 and charged with kidnapping and robbery. He was incarcerated for 19 years, and essentially grew up in jail. When he was finally released from prison in 2005, he didn’t walk free: He spent two years in ICE custody, awaiting deportation. He was finally pardoned by California Gov. Jerry Brown in 2015 and became a U.S. citizen in 2017.
Today, Zheng, the “first formerly incarcerated ‘juvenile lifer’ to serve as founder of a philanthropic foundation,” heads the New Breath Foundation (NBF). NBF is a regranting foundation that channels funding from big institutional funders as well as individual donors toward grassroots organizations working for the rights of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (AANHPIs) facing incarceration, deportation and violence.
A number of funders support criminal justice reform (although that funding has dwindled after a peak in 2020, as IP’s Dawn Wolfe has reported). Other funders support immigrants and refugees, including for legal services. But the New Breath Foundation has carved out a unique philanthropic lane for itself: AANHPI communities caught up in the criminal legal and immigration systems. This is an underfunded niche within an area that itself doesn’t receive much support. According to NBF, less than 0.2% of national foundation funding goes to support AANHPI communities, and only a little of that tiny fraction supports those impacted by the U.S. immigration and criminal justice systems.
Driven by his own experience, Zheng is determined to raise awareness — and resources — for a group that has received little of either. “That’s why we started the New Breath Foundation,” he said in a recent interview. “We’re working to create a seat at the table and cultivate resources for grassroots organizations working on issues of incarceration and deportation.”
“I’m not supposed to be here”
How did Eddy Zheng go from incarcerated adolescent to foundation leader? “I’m not supposed to be here,” Zheng wrote in a NBF blog post last year. When he was arrested, Zheng’s English was still halting; in prison, he mastered the language, joined Toastmasters, wrote poetry, and grabbed every education opportunity he could. The writer Hua Hsu, who later wrote a profile of Zheng for The New Yorker, met him while volunteering as a tutor at San Quentin and described him as “desperate to learn.”
Zheng’s studies and his experiences as a prisoner and immigrant facing deportation made him realize that his was a badly underserved population. He wrote that when he first exited the system, “there were less than a handful of AANHPIs on the national level talking about the impact of mass deportation or incarceration in the AANHPI community.” He saw the need for an organization like New Breath that could advocate for that community but had no resources to create it.
Then, in 2016, a documentary on his life, “Breathin’: The Eddy Zheng Story,” was released. “We literally started from zero, just from a vision, and when the film came out, a high-net-[worth] individual who saw it offered support,” Zheng said. That anonymous donor agreed to match whatever funds Zheng was able to raise, and the New Breath Foundation, officially launched in 2017, grew from there.
Today, NBF’s list of funders includes the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, Crankstart Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation, Libra Foundation, San Francisco Foundation, MacKenzie Scott, Meadow Fund, Stupski Foundation, Surdna Foundation and The California Endowment. In 2021, NBF also launched its We Got Us Fund, a donor-advised fund housed at the East Bay Community Foundation. The fund prioritizes grassroots AANHPI organizations with annual budgets of less than $1 million. The goal of the fund is to raise $10 million by 2025.
NBF’s grantees include a wide range of organizations, including Asian Health Services, API Rise, Chinese Progressive Association, Khmer Girls In Action, Lavender Phoenix, South Asians for Black Lives, and VietLead, to name just a few. Since its founding through 2023, NBF has awarded over $6.2 million in grants across 14 states, according to its 2023 annual report.
Letting lived experience lead the way
In philanthropy today, centering community voices and listening to those closest to the issues has increasing currency, with a rising number of funders emphasizing the value of trust-based approaches to giving. Eddy Zheng’s perspective has been shaped by his lived experience as an immigrant who spent years in prison and immigration detention — and so has his own trust-based approach.
Zheng believes philanthropy has a lot to learn, and on its website, NBF says it is “changing how traditional philanthropy works by funding directly impacted communities.” In a 2023 article titled “Letting Lived Experience Lead the Way” for The Center for Effective Philanthropy, Zheng laid out some of the intentional steps he takes to create and build relationships and establish trust.
For one thing, NBF works to minimize onerous reporting requirements and provides grantees with technical assistance and other support. There’s also a participatory element here: NBF’s Community Advisory Committee, which includes AANHPI formerly incarcerated leaders, survivors of violence, community organizers and community members, informs the foundation’s grantmaking strategy.
“Once you’re a New Breath grantee, you’re always a grantee,” Zheng said. He elaborated on this point in his CEP article: “That means that even after they receive our funding, we continue to uplift their work, they’re still included in our grantee convenings, and we continue to introduce them to other resources when opportunities arise. In addition to their grant, we connect them to other funding opportunities and potential partners with whom we have established relationships.”
“He’s a national treasure”
The Heising-Simons Foundation has supported the New Breath Foundation since 2019, and Rose Cahn, a program officer with the foundation’s Human Rights program, has known Zheng for over a decade. Before joining the foundation, she worked as an immigration lawyer and knew Zheng as someone active in the world of immigration advocacy. They were both awarded Soros Justice Fellowships through the Open Society Foundations and served on each other’s advisory boards.
“I have worked with and alongside Eddy in a number of different capacities, and now that I am at Heising-Simons, we have the good fortune of funding his work,” Cahn said. “Eddy’s reputation precedes him, obviously. He’s a national treasure.”
Justice for immigrants is part of the Heising-Simons Foundation’s Human Rights portfolio, as IP’s Martha Ramirez reported recently. “Our strategy is to fund people rather than issues, and to fund power-building among directly impacted communities to challenge systems of criminalization and incarceration, and to reimagine what justice looks like,” Cahn said. “The power-building of impacted communities is our north star, and Eddy and New Breath do that by not just giving money to grantees, but engaging in elbow-to-elbow partnerships to build up their capacity so we can have a full ecosystem of groups that are thriving.”
Cahn pointed to Zheng’s leadership role. “Eddy understands the importance of leadership in impacted communities because he’s one of those community members who fought for so long to get a seat at the table,” she said. “He is not content to get a seat for himself. He makes space for others at the table; he’s one of those leaders that helps build the leadership of others, as well.”
NBF’s 2022 annual report includes this observation from Angie Junck, who directs Heising-Simons’ Human Rights program: “Criminalization does not operate in a silo. It overlaps with race, class, gender and immigration status to compound its harmful effects, resulting in incarceration, deportation, family separation and trauma,” she wrote, adding that NBF embodies that intersectionality. “They are people leading in their communities to really address intergenerational cycles of harm. They’re finding solutions to end it, to heal it and to reimagine other possibilities.”
Amplifying voices
Zheng’s fight for a seat at the table has included acknowledging his crime and facing down the stigma that he’s experienced — outside his community and within it as well. He pointed to the stereotype of Asian-Americans as the “model minority,” and the pressure many families feel to project a flawless and successful image. Zheng’s parents concealed his incarceration for years, making excuses when he missed family gatherings; his grandparents died without ever knowing he had been arrested. Zheng is frank about his crimes and has also worked to make amends; he apologized to the family whose home he invaded, while acknowledging the inadequacy of the gesture. As he told The New Yorker, “I could save a thousand people,” but it would not erase the family’s “life sentence of suffering.”
By speaking openly about his past and what he’s learned, Zheng is making it easier for others to speak up. In doing so, he is helping to make an invisible community more visible — for society overall and specifically for philanthropy.
“Funders are rarely pathfinders — they frequently follow where the movement is at,” Cahn said. “It takes people speaking up and articulating the ways that they’ve been left out of mainstream narratives for funders to understand that those voices need to be amplified. New Breath Foundation is a crucial part of that amplification effort, making it safe and accepted for the AANHPI community to normalize the fact that they have also experienced criminalization. It has helped empower other individuals and other groups to own their own power and their own voices.”
