Tides Foundation
OVERVIEW: The Tides Foundation is a left-leaning philanthropic organization that supports environmental causes, civic and voter engagement initiatives, women and girls and immigrants’ causes through its collective action funds. It also runs financial sponsorship programs for nonprofits working in the social justice realm.
IP TAKE: The Tides Foundation is a large and important funder, but it is size and structure make it difficult to trace the comings and goings of its funding. Not a traditional grantmaker, Tides provides fiscal sponsorship to more than 80 “changemaker” organizations and makes grants through donor-advised and pooled funds that work broadly across themes of social justice and equity. It works with organizations of all sizes and tends to provide unrestricted support, evidencing its commitment to “shifting resources and power to historically excluded communities.”
The bulk of Tides’ giving is conducted through proactive methods, but it occasionally issues requests for proposals. The best way to keep up with opportunities is to sign up for Tides’ monthly newsletter.
PROFILE: Established in 1976, Tides Foundation was created by progressive political activist Drummond Pike, who served as its CEO until 2010. Based in San Francisco, California and New York City, the foundation is part of the Tides collection of organizations, which is made up of several separate legal entities: the Tides Foundation, the Tides Center, Tides Advocacy and Tides Converge, which represents a merger of the Tides Two Rivers Fund and Tides, Inc. The Tides Center is an incubator and support system for smaller social justice organizations. Tides Converge, meanwhile, provides community workspaces and administrative services for nonprofits in San Francisco and New York City. Tides Advocacy, an affiliated but independent entity, is a liberal lobbying organization that works to further social justice and advocate for policy reform.
The Tides Foundation is the grantmaking branch of the larger organization. Its work focuses on helping historically marginalized communities gain the “social, political and economic power” they need to achieve a “just and equitable future.” The foundation’s stated mission is to “work in deep partnership with doers and donors to center the leadership of changemakers from these communities, connecting them to services, capacity building, and resources to amplify their impact.” Tides runs innovative giving programs offering different types and levels of support to an array of nonprofit clients and donors. Its vehicles include donor-advised funds, collective action funds, social change leader funds and impact investing programs. It also provides strategic advising for both nonprofits and donors.
A significant portion of Tides’ grantmaking occurs through initiatives that run pooled funds to “leverage the collective power of multiple donors to supercharge their donation — and their impact.” The foundation’s current funding initiatives include the Healthy Democracy Fund, the Women’s Environmental Leadership Fund, the Advancing Girls Fund, the Frontline Justice Fund, the Immigrants Belong Fund and the Stronger Together Fund. Grantmaking addresses overlapping areas of democracy, civic engagement, women and girls, climate change, immigrants and philanthropy. Tides’ giving is global in scope.
Grants for Civic Engagement and Democracy
The Tides Foundation’s Healthy Democracy Fund supports “the leadership of historically excluded communities to fight voter suppression, increase voter turnout, and foster political engagement to create a healthy and inclusive democracy.” Established in 2019, this fund has supported about 110 organizations with approximately $17 million in grants. Recently, the program has named 11 “priority states” where “disadvantaged people face barriers to exercising their democratic voice.” These priority states are Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin. The initiative also names several strategic priorities for its current grantmaking.
The initiative recognizes the importance of Down Ballot elections and voting, where low-income voters are less likely to participate than their high-income counterparts, and where “elections can have outsized impact on the validity of future federal elections as well as people’s everyday lives.”
Another priority is support for Pathways for Citizenship & Civic Participation. Giving here focuses on “organizations rooted in immigrant communities that connect English to speakers of other languages and citizenship classes with voter registration, education, and engagement.”
The initiative also makes grants to counter Voter Suppression at the state level, including advocacy and policy for voting rights and the reversal of restrictive voting laws enacted since the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision.
Healthy Democracy also works to counter Mis- and Disinformation Targeted at BIPOC and Young Voters. Grants support efforts to “prepare and inoculate trusted community organizations and leaders against these mis- and disinformation campaigns” and provide leaders with “the tools and training to monitor mis- and disinformation and counter false narratives if and when they begin to spread.”
Finally, Healthy Democracy supports initiatives to Activate Gen Z and Millennial Voters, whose turnout at the polls tends to be less than 30%. Here, Tides support programs and initiatives for organizing and voter registration at highs schools, college campuses and other community organizations.
Grantees of the Healthy Democracy initiative include Take Action Minnesota, One Pennsylvania, Rural Arizona Engagement and Poder LatinX, which works in Florida, Georgia, Arizona and Washington to grow “Latinx electorate through citizenship and voter registration programs.”
Grants for Women and Girls, Climate and Clean Energy
The Tides Foundation configures women prominently in its social justice grantmaking, especially in the area of climate justice, where it runs the Women’s Environmental Leadership Fund. Another initiative focuses on Advancing Girls and a third initiative, the Frontline Justice Fund, makes grants for those communities and groups that are most “impacted by climate environmental hazards.”
Tides’ Women’s Environmental Leadership Fund “elevates and invests in women and nonbinary leaders who are addressing the root causes of the climate crisis in communities of color, which are disproportionately impacted.” Launched in 2020, this program has awarded about $5 million in grants to 68 organizations in 22 states and Puerto Rico. The program has provided a broad array of grant types to its recipients, including unrestricted, general operating, project, rapid response and multi-year support. Grantmaking focuses on developing BIWOC leaders, including cis and trans women and two-spirit, non-binary and gender nonconforming people. Other priorities include projects and initiatives that focus on “root causes and impacts of climate change and solutions-based approaches to systemic change” and centering “the voices of community members historically and systematically overburdened by climate change.”
Grantees of this initiative include Native Renewables, Fenceline Watch of Houston, the Farmworker Association of Florida, the Black Environmental Collective and Rise St. James, which works to stop the construction and expansion of chemical plants in the area of Louisiana known as “Cancer Alley.”
Advancing Girls was established in 2020, when the NoVo Foundation transitioned its girls grantmaking program to Tides, which, in turn, shifted the program’s focus from more general support for adolescent girls’ causes to targeted support for “girl-led change in the U.S. and the global south.” The program articulates commitment to a gender-expansive definition of girls that includes “cis-girls, gender-nonconforming, and transgender girls” between the ages of 11 and 25, as well as an acknowledgement of the intersectionality of girls’ identities and the social issues they face. The program names four strategies for its work:
Pooling aligned donors to invest in “the leadership, health, and well-being of adolescent girls and young women of color globally”;
Including the “perspectives and ideas” of girls in “decisions on resource distribution and programmatic investments”;
“Providing multiyear, general operating grants” to organizations that are led-by members of the groups and communities they serve; and
Creating spaces within the nonprofit sector “where adolescent girls, young women and adult allies can come together to build relationships across geographies, environments, and cultures to learn from each other and build capacity and collective power to move social justice for girls and young women of color globally.”
Grantees of working in this area include Radical Monarchs, Alliance for Girls, Black Girl Ventures and the Young Women’s Freedom Center in San Francisco.
Tides’ Frontline Justice Fund focuses on grantmaking “that equips communities impacted by climate environmental hazards with the critical resources they need to take on big polluters in the courtroom and beyond.” Awarding its first grants in 2022, the program has made over $4 million in grants to about 50 organizations across 27 states and Puerto Rico. In terms of geography, funding prioritizes but is not strictly limited to the Southeast, the Gulf South, Texas, Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley. Other priorities include support for legal action, BIPOC communities, frontline communities, rapid response grants and sustained support for “legal or regulatory advocacy campaigns.”
Grantees of the Frontline Justice Fund include the Carrizo Comecrudo Nation of Texas, Louisiana’s Descendant’s Project, the North Carolina Climate Justice Collective, the Memphis Community Against Pollution and Concerned Citizens of Cook County, Georgia.
Grants for Immigrants and Refugees
Tides’ Immigrants Belong Fund, also known at I-Belong, invests in “the storytelling power of immigrant communities and proximate leaders at the forefront of community change.” Grants work to counter xenophobia through media and research aimed at developing “a better understanding of common fear-based mis/disinformation tactics.” This fund also works to create “collaborative events and spaces for leaders to develop innovative, pro-immigrant media and storytelling content that can disrupt false and harmful narratives.” The program awarded ten inaugural grants of $100,000 each to organizations that took part in the fund’s “Community of Practice pilot program.” The program has since extended collaboration to an additional 25 organizations. While there are no definitive plans for additional grantmaking, the program “look[s] forward to announcing future grantmaking updates” and invites grantseekers and others to sign up for updates about grants and collaborative opportunities.
Grantee participants in the pilot Community of Practice program included the American Business Immigration Coalition, the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, the Texas Civil Rights Project and Aliento Arizona, among others.
Grants for Philanthropy, Racial Justice and Indigenous Rights
The Stronger Together Fund makes grants to strengthen the capacity of “community leaders and changemakers” that fall under Tides’ fiscal sponsorship umbrella. This grantmaking emphasizes “groups that are assisting historically underserved communities so they remain responsive to their communities.” It also works to counter “inequities within the philanthropic sector can stunt and destabilize nonprofit organizations.” The program has so far supported 93 organizations with unrestricted support with an average grant size of about $23,000.
While the foundation does not name which organizations have received Stronger Together grants, organization that are fiscally sponsored by Tides include the Women and Justice Project, the Harlem Empowerment Project, Opportunity Youth United, the California Coalition for Reproductive Freedom and Rivers Without Borders, among many others.
Important Grant Details:
Because of its many different kinds of partnerships and giving structures, it is difficult to ascertain dollar amounts for Tides’ giving.
According to its website, “Tides has managed project and grantmaking activities totaling more than $3 billion since 1976” and has “sponsored and provided backbone services to more than 1000 nonprofit ventures.”
A searchable database of Tides’ partners shows both individuals and institutions with grantmaking funds at Tides, as well as the fiscally sponsored organizations incubated at Tides.
In addition to grants, Tides offers strategic, fiscal, technical and other types of support to social justice organizations. To get involved, see the foundation’s What We Do page and sign up for updates on opportunities.
The process to become fiscally sponsored by Tides is outlined in detail here and here. After checking eligibility requirements, applicants will need to complete the Partner with Us digital form.
It is worth noting that Tides does not accept unsolicited proposals or requests for funding.
General inquiries for the Tides Foundation may be submitted via its contact page.
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