TRACKING DOWN WHO’S FUNDING ACTION
When the levers of policy aren’t functioning properly, movements build the will and the power of community residents, experts, elected officials and other leaders to realize huge gains for us all.
Yet despite their ability to positively influence change, leaders in the immigrant and refugee space have historically seen their efforts underfunded. Faced with few tools to hold philanthropy accountable, advocates turned to NCRP to research just which foundations have been funding the movement and at which levels.
The result in 2019 and 2020 were two studies that looked into how much money the sector was spending on the national and local level.
Won’t You Be My Neighbor:
Local Foundations, Immigrants
and Refugee Populations (2020)
This 2020 analysis from NCRP found that pro-immigrant and refugee nonprofits are proportionally underfunded by state-based grantmakers when compared to the demographic reality on the ground.
While immigrants and refugees represent 14% of the nation’s population, the share of local philanthropic dollars invested in this community from 2017-2018 was just 1% for service organizations and 0.4% for movement groups involved in advocacy and organizing. This is despite a series of aggressive anti-immigrant and refugee policies pursued by the Trump administration targeting both documented and undocumented people.
Click here for more information, including how to use an online dashboard featuring data from the top 100 foundations and top 10 local foundations in each state allows views to see how their state compares to others.
STATE OF FOUNDATION FUNDING FOR
THE PRO-IMMIGRANT MOVEMENT (2019)
In NCRP’s first Movement Investment Project brief, researchers looked into the national sources of funding for the immigrant and refugee movement, while also lifting up stories of foundation and grantee success.
Despite the steady rise in xenophobia and ant-immigrant rhetoric, barely 1% of all money granted by the 1,000 largest U.S. foundations between 2011 and 2015, was intended to benefit immigrants and refugees.
Organizing efforts received an even smaller piece of the very small movement funding pie. From 2014-2016, only 14% of dollars flowed directly to state and local groups and less than a quarter went to national membership networks that are directly accountable to local grassroots and impacted communities. The lion’s share went to national organizations doing litigation and federal policy advocacy through the courts and Congress.
