Civic engagement nonprofits say democracy needs support between major elections. Do donors agree?

NEW YORK– A nonprofit legal group dedicated to protecting the rights of Southern voters of color had more on its plate this year than the 2024 presidential election.

The Southern Coalition for Social Justice organizes voter registration drives and monitors election certification. Staff attorneys help run a legal hotline for voting irregularities. The teams are challenging electoral maps and restrictive laws deemed unfair. It’s expensive, year-round work that lead attorney Mitchell Brown sees as vital to participatory democracy – but also work that gets less attention outside of campaign cycles highly publicized.

“A lot of people put a lot of energy into the presidential year and it diminishes over the next three or four years,” Brown said. “That can’t happen. Because a lot of changes are happening between these four years between presidential elections.”

“There are no more gap years,” he added.

The coalition benefited this spring from a progressive philanthropic network organized around the belief that democracy is an exercise – not a given – requiring constant support. Led by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, the petitioners committed to reversing existing boom-bust dynamics where money floods into politically engaged nonprofits late in election years only to dry up afterward. Beginning with the “Everything by April” campaign to move money sooner, the effort continues with the “Election Day to Every Day” campaign to shore up funding for next year.

However, according to interviews with other nonprofit leaders in the left civic space, the philanthropic sector as a whole has not responded to this call. For nonprofit leaders experiencing business-as-usual budgets, the anticipated downward trend in funding raises issues that many leaders believe are already heightened by the tense political climate.

In the face of reported security threats and staff burnout, Democracy Fund President Joe Goldman said it was particularly ineffective to spend millions to train people, develop skills and create a base of knowledge only to cut nonprofit budgets and “throw them away.” Despite what the Democracy Fund considers to be a general consensus that democracy is under threat, the organization found that many donors had not planned until September to help grantees prepare for the post-election environment.

“We need to show them we support them,” Goldman said.

Grassroots nonprofits – both “501(c)3” groups, named for the section of the tax code under which they were organized, which are completely prohibited from partisan politics, and organizations “501(c)4s,” who are permitted limited partisan activity — believe their bottom-up approach positions them well to engage their communities in local politics.

This could take the form of in-depth prospecting. Unlike political canvassers who knock on doors and call numbers to influence votes, in-depth canvassers have longer conversations with strangers about their concerns and desires. The idea is to make connections that will ultimately change hearts and minds on controversial topics. Or, it could look like mobilizing residents around specific issues in their backyard.

Groups that spent 2020 doing such work felt burned out afterward, according to Women Donors Network President Leena Barakat, whose group signed the Election Day to Every Day petition. The election saw a high turnout. But money and energy were running out, she said, and there was little capacity to maintain political engagement in democratic processes. As 2024 approached, many civic-minded nonprofits were still catching up in terms of staffing levels. Any financial windfall this year would not have been enough to organize effectively in just six months.

“They don’t just show up on Election Day. They are there to truly understand and respond to the needs of their community throughout the year,” said Women Donors Network President Leena Barakat, whose group signed the Election Day to Every Day petition. “Funding them only for elections is incredibly transactional and less effective in the work we’re trying to do. Change evolves at the pace of trust.

Supporters of this effort suggest that the financial support needed to make these connections is limited in part because the work goes unnoticed by funders. Philanthropists tend to prefer projects that can be measured easily and quickly, noted Katherine Ponce, senior research director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. But Ponce said the work of developing relationships and building trust is difficult to quantify and happens slowly.

Explicitly electoral work understandably receives a lot of resources during election years, according to Alice Evans of the Southeast Immigrant Rights Network. It makes sense to focus on efforts like get-out-the-vote events, she said, but it also makes it more difficult for SIRN to support what she called “very much democracy.” The nonprofit coalition of more than 50 immigrant and refugee-led groups provides leadership training for leaders of immigration-focused organizations and “Know Your Rights” toolkits for their communities.

Evans, who oversees fundraising, said she was preparing to organize under conditions that would become “more hostile” under the new Trump administration; SIRN is preparing a “rapid response fund” in anticipation of immigration crackdowns.

“For a democracy to work and be healthy, we need people to understand their rights,” Evans said. “Understand and assume their role in the co-creation of democracy. And instead, I think these days we often feel like we understand democracy as this transactional thing that we sort of receive.

DoSomething is a nonprofit organization that encourages youth participation by providing opportunities to volunteer and organize. But DeNora Getachew, CEO of DoSomething, said donors told her that youth was not a strategic investment, even though 41 million Gen Zers were eligible to vote this year.

Money flowed into the philanthropic sector in the first half of the year, said Katie Tynes, DoSomething’s vice president of development, but the overall spigot seemed to tighten in the second half. Tynes said she has also seen funding shift from 501(c)3s to 501(c)4s. While there is room for both types of tax-exempt organizations, she said, it’s troubling because the former tend to do more people-centered, grassroots work while the latter have more political agendas.

Anecdotally, Getachew said he’s seen a drop in funding this year for nonprofit groups like his focused on ongoing civic engagement.

“This very cyclical, very transactional rush to register young people to vote, get them to vote and say goodbye to them in the meantime – if we don’t develop the civic muscle of young people from the beginning and then ensure that “Whatever they exercise that muscle consistently, I think we’re going to have a big challenge with the viability of our democracy in the long term,” she said.

The “Everything by April” campaign nevertheless achieved some success. The Democracy Fund reported generating $79 million in new 501(c)3 grants for election-related work and $61 million in money disbursed ahead of schedule. Brown said the Southern Coalition for Social Justice was able to hire three new attorneys thanks to the influx of donations spurred by spring efforts to provide funds earlier in the election cycle.

But two of them are fellows, he said, and SCSJ has an expanded docket of redistricting cases to handle.

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