After 40 Years, the North Star Fund Remains Highly Influential. Here's Why
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The East New York Community Land Trust at work. Photo courtesy of North Star Fund.
North Star Fund Executive Director Jennifer Ching says that many other funders tend to think of her foundation as being akin to the “crazy auntie” that no one wants at the Thanksgiving dinner table. But that doesn’t stop other funders from calling her, in hushed tones, to tell her about their angry board members — particularly the younger ones — and asking her to come and help them figure out a better path.
At first glance, it might be difficult to see why North Star would wield such influence over other foundations. Even with notable growth over the past five years, the funder’s net assets stood at just over $23.2 million in 2022. A quick Google search shows few news articles that mention North Star. Even its geographic reach is mainly limited to New York City and New York’s Hudson Valley. But in a philanthrosphere that’s struggling to keep up with the demands of next-gen donors, North Star’s example may just be a valuable piece of the puzzle.
For one, North Star Fund has been practicing participatory philanthropy for more than 40 years. Its board, staff, and two out of three of its volunteer-led funding committees are both multiracial and multigenerational. The funder didn’t wait until the police murder of George Floyd to move money for police reform and Black liberation, having launched the Let Us Breathe Fund after the 2015 police killing of Eric Garner. North Star embraces grassroots advocacy as a vehicle for social change, and its 2020-2023 strategic plan specifically cites dismantling internal and external white supremacy and shifting race, class and power dynamics as its goals.
Earlier this month, North Star announced its largest-ever commitment in multi-year grants: $3.3 million in three-year grants to 54 separate nonprofits across its three main funds, with an additional $1.2 million in one-year grants. The foundation has also raised its baseline grant to $20,000.
“We have spoken to a lot of other foundations to say, ‘You all could actually do multi-year grants, you’re really just choosing not to,” Ching said. “And when we really thought about it and did the financial planning, we realized we could do it, too.”
Over 40 years of “next gen” grantmaking
In a move that feels a bit like a foreshadowing of today’s Solidaire Network and Resource Generation, North Star Fund was launched in 1979 by a group of young heirs who pooled their wealth to create a community foundation dedicated to grassroots organizing in New York City. According to the funder’s website, as of June 2022, North Star had given out more than $100 million in grants to over 2,650 organizations through its own funds, its donor-advised funds, and philanthropic partnerships. One such partnership, with Change.org in 2021, moved $5.5 million to 35 Black-led nonprofits throughout the U.S.
Today, Ching said, North Star is supported by a community of about 2,400 donors, with more than half of its support coming in the form of individual gifts of under $250.
Grassroots power-building remains key to North Star’s work. The Let Us Breathe Fund, which specifically supports Black-led organizations working for community safety, economic investment and racial justice, makes grants in both New York City and the Hudson Valley. Rapid response grants are also available in the face of urgent threats or breaking opportunities. The Future of Organizing Fund, launched in response to COVID-19, ended in 2022 after awarding more than $3.6 million to 140 nonprofits.
In all of its grantmaking, North Star focuses on nonprofits dedicated to building “people power” via community organizing. And while the philanthrosphere as a whole is still calling on larger funders to center nonprofits led by impacted people, North Star’s No. 1 criteria for grantees is that they be led by the people who are impacted by the problems they’re working to solve. North Star is accepting applications for its next wave of grantmaking through April 14; Rapid response grants are on a rolling deadline. North Star administers the money, while funding decisions are made by volunteer-led committees of community organizers, including current and former grantees.
The foundation is also dedicated to place-based funding, noting that many New York-based funders insist on having a national geographic focus.
“I hold New York funders’ feet to the fire often because I say, ‘I get it, you want to be in Wisconsin, you want to be in Pennsylvania, you want to be saving the South, like it’s so sexy, but these issues are right in front of you,’” she said. “And then, we produce the Donald Trumps of the world, and we produce the Rudy Giulianis, and everyone’s like, ‘How did that happen?’”
Ching said that the foundation’s shift to providing significantly more multi-year funding was in part the result of feedback North Star received from its grantees. Like many nonprofits, particularly smaller organizations, North Star’s grantees told the funder that, even though North Star renewed many of them and had streamlined the process, “it was still a significant burden on them.” The funder was able to respond to those calls, she said, thanks to an increase in donations, including an increase in multi-year commitments from its own donors. North Star first made a limited number of multi-year grants in 2011 and had continued to provide a small number of such grants until this year’s shift.
Doing DAFs differently
Like other community foundations, North Star is a host to donor-advised funds in the area it serves. That may seem like it conflicts with the foundation’s commitment to shifting money and power, given the reputation for opaque wealth-hoarding DAFs have earned. However, like so many of its other practices, North Star has a different take on administering them. The foundation requires DAFs to be spent down within three years; recipients must be in line with North Star’s mission; and North Star is a partner in the Hate is not Charitable campaign through Amalgamated Foundation, which screens out anti-LGBTQ and other hate groups as potential recipients. North Star is also a member of the Initiative to Accelerate Charitable Giving, a coalition that seeks, among other things, to require that DAFs are distributed “within a reasonable period of time.”
Lessons for other funders
Despite North Star’s success with its highly participatory model — and despite the anger of younger foundation board members looking for more radical changes — Ching doesn’t necessarily recommend that every funder immediately try to model itself after her organization.
“It takes generations to build the kind of foundation and movement we have at North Star Fund,” she said. “I’m not sure that the solution to our most urgent and pressing challenges — moving substantial resources into movements at the front lines of crises like climate change or the expanding racial wealth gap — are best answered by every foundation examining their processes and constructing a labor-intensive participatory grantmaking model.”
Which is not to say that funders shouldn’t be changing the way they operate. Instead, Ching said, a simpler and more direct approach for foundations and philanthropists that are interested in a power-shifting model would be to move resources quickly into social justice funds like North Star, which has already built relationships with effective nonprofits on the ground. More generally, she said, “we need to become clear about who we are accountable to, and be deeply creative about how we are moving money.” Funders that are struggling with that creativity, which, as my colleague Philip Rojc has documented, is one of the sector’s big problems, might do well to take a deeper look into North Star’s model.
“We don’t have all the answers, but we try to keep asking the right questions,” Ching said. “And that’s why people in philanthropy keep turning to us.”
