Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Winter 2008
Public Interest Projects, a nonprofit organization of
which Michele Lord is executive director, serves as the conduit for the
Fund (along with a number of other collaborative funds) providing professional
staffing, technical assistance and oversight of the many grants. “In
contrast to a national foundation, the collaborative is nimble,”
she points out, “so it can turn on a dime.” It can deliver
the precise amounts of money needed quickly to solve a crisis, where a
large foundation might have to wait for the next quarterly board meeting
to get funding approval, and it might be too late.
“Four Freedoms Fund grantees and partners have shown great flexibility
and resilience in the face of a rapidly changing social and political
climate,” the Fund’s program officer Naomi Abraham writes,
“especially given the volatility of immigration policy, growing
anti-immigrant attitudes and ordinances at the local and state level and
the recent failure of federal-level immigration reform.” The ongoing
importance of allocating the Fund’s resources in a way that bolsters
the priorities of grantee and partner organizations cannot be overstated,
according to Abraham, and she cites several examples to prove the point:
• In recognition of the unique political opportunity the 2007 debate on immigration reform presented for immigrant and refugee communities, the Fund invested over $2,700,000 in additional funding to existing and new grantees;
• In 2006, the Fund quickly moved more than $100,000 in discretionary funds to national partner organizations for pro-immigrant mobilizations in Washington D.C.;
• The Fund also plays a critical convening role, providing opportunities for grantees to address topical issues with a cohort of local, regional and national organizations. Often, these are the only opportunities groups have to co-strategize face-to-face on critical matters such as how to respond to the recent, and growing, backlash against immigrant communities.
The Fund is both responsive to the field’s time-sensitive needs and committed to longer-term efforts to fully integrate immigrants into all aspects of American society, Lord explains. The donors are very disciplined and committed to seeing ahead, taking risks and creating diverse relationships with grantees. “It’s a great group with a unique chemistry,” she says, “and a huge amount of trust and faith exists between staff and donors. The Four Freedoms Fund helps everyone find a way in, and our continual assessment of the work helps inform the grantmaking.” As a bonus, new or less experienced funders are given the rare opportunity to learn together, which one younger member likened to a Ph.D. class in philanthropy.
Grantees of the Fund are primarily goal-oriented state or local groups with a history of accomplishments such as organizing immigrants to take leadership positions and speak on their own behalf, or turning local mobilization into lasting change through civic participation. A number of groups have a history of working with under-represented constituencies such as Arabs, Muslims and South Asians. Grantees are encouraged to protect civil liberties and human rights by addressing detentions, deportations and due process and to connect immigrants with native-born potential allies and address the tensions between them. They are also urged to play a role in national strategy and advocacy formation and to target selected geographic areas that have large and/or growing immigrant populations.