Recognizing a Powerful Force for Democracy, OSF Backs Native-Led Organizations
/How do you create and protect a multi-racial democracy? By making sure that every community has a voice—and the resources to make that voice heard.
That’s the thinking behind Open Society Foundations’ recent $10 million round of grants to Native American-led organizations over the next five years. The funding represents one of the largest single philanthropic commitments made to Native communities. It will support work to build civic participation, promote voter outreach and access, and create equitable policy reforms.
The investment is also an effort to fill a huge funding gap: Native Americans receive less than half of 1% of annual philanthropic dollars, according to Native Americans in Philanthropy. This could be changing: MacKenzie Scott recently invested in several prominent Native organizations, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Ford Foundation have also made generous commitments to Native causes, as IP reported. But the sector still has a long way to go, with few foundations making Indigenous communities a top priority.
OSF’s new commitment is actually an effort to build on the work of one of those foundations. The Wallace H. Coulter Foundation has consistently supported Native American organizations (Coulter also funds Asian American and Pacific Islander causes, among other priorities). But the Coulter Foundation is preparing to spend down as of 2024.
“Coulter would very much like to see their commitments be leveraged and continue to bear fruit,” said Laleh Ispahani, co-director of Open Society-U.S., which made the grants. “We’ve spoken to them at length and are picking up their mantle in respect to their Native work.”
OSF hopes other funders will join them. “This investment recognizes and seeks to spur the rising political power of Native communities,” said Ispahani. “These groups deserve multi-year support that will allow them to expand, experiment and advance equity. However, while these grants are significant, we know that they do not come close to meeting the needs, and it is our hope that our philanthropic partners and peer funders will make similar investments.”
Power building
Open Society Foundations, billionaire George Soros’ sprawling philanthropy, is active in 120 countries. The organization is currently undergoing a major transformation and no small amount of internal discord, as IP has reported, but remains one of the world’s largest philanthropic backers of democracy.
Back in 2015, when IP described OSF’s grand cause as “a vibrant civil society,” rising authoritarianism was already threatening that mission around the world. That threat is even starker today, after four years of Trump assaulting democratic norms, culminating in the January 6 attack on the nation’s capital.
Counter-movements pushing for multi-racial democracy have also sprouted up globally—some of them supported by OSF. The new grants to Native-led groups are part of the foundation’s “Power Building” strategy, a 10-year effort “to forge and protect a multi-racial democracy by supporting power within and across Black, Indigenous and other communities of color,” says Ispahani. Open Society-U.S. launched the strategy in 2020 with $220 million in investments in organizations and leaders in Black communities.
Years of genocide and generations of systemic racism have marked the Native American experience since Europeans first arrived in North America. Today, 1 in 3 Native Americans in the U.S. live in poverty, with a median income of $23,000 a year.
But Native Americans are pushing for more influence on issues that impact their communities, as OSF’s Ispahani points out.
“You’re seeing a wave of activism that is on the upswing—activism around water protection, the pipeline at Standing Rock, and activism around sports team mascots and cultural appropriation issues more broadly,” she said. “There is also an increase in civic engagement. Native Americans have been credited with impacting the local, state and national elections.”
Ispahani cites the first Native American women elected to Congress in 2018, Sharice Davids of Kansas and Deb Haaland of New Mexico. She points out that in Arizona, Navajo voters played a key role in the 2020 election, overwhelmingly supporting President Joe Biden. Biden would go on to appoint Haaland as secretary of the interior, the first Native American cabinet member.
“All of this is evidence, I think, of growing political strength and visibility nationally.”
Obstacles at every turn
Native American Rights Fund (NARF), one of the new OSF grantees, aims to increase that political strength and visibility. NARF works on a variety of fronts to protect Native rights and resources through “litigation, legal advocacy and legal advice,” according to its website. The organization will use the OSF funds to support its ongoing voting rights work, according to NARF attorney Matthew Campbell.
NARF created the Native American Voting Rights Coalition, which explores and challenges barriers to voting Native people face. In 2020, the Coalition published the report, Obstacles at Every Turn, which identified many of those barriers. NARF also challenges state restrictions on voter access.
Campbell believes the NARF’s work and similar efforts are having an impact. “We’ve seen that the Native vote can play a key role,” he said. “In the last election, we saw in Arizona, Alaska, Washington and Montana how important the Native vote is. So I do think these efforts are paying off.”
Campbell concedes that success has sparked a backlash, “We’re also seeing states that are hostile or want to create barriers to the vote responding by creating more barriers, so the work is eminently important, that’s for sure,” he said.
Flexing power
Janeen Comenote is the executive director of the National Urban Indian Family Coalition (NUIFC), another OSF grantee. Comenote calls urban Indians “the silent majority of Indian Country.” In fact, 70% of all Native Americans live in urban settings. Comenote points out that Native American communities and their needs are often invisible to most other Americans, and that this is particularly true for Native people in urban settings.
“The American education system often portrays us as a noble people of the past: We’re all in teepees and on horseback with the wind flying through our hair. We’re not portrayed as contemporary people,” she said. “That’s also applicable to our reservation counterparts, but for urban folks, it takes a different flavor because in cities we are often only 1 or 2 percent of the population, so we have to fight really hard to be included in broad policy work and to have our voices heard.”
NUIFC works to raise the voices of urban Native people by increasing voter registration and access, improving education, and boosting participation in the census.
“The need for civic engagement has become increasingly clear to us,” Comenote said. “In the 20 years I’ve been doing this work, what I’ve noticed is that those organizations that have strong civic engagement know the policy arenas and know how to flex power in order to meet the needs of their communities.”
The OSF grants are unrestricted and multi-year, a new approach for the foundation and part of its power-building strategy. For Comenote, multi-year, unrestricted grants are the “Holy Grail” of funding opportunities.
“You can quote me in big letters on that—I can’t even really explain how helpful it is,” she said. “We have so much work ahead of us to educate our communities about the importance of participating in a democracy that Native people helped develop. With multi-year funding, we can look at 2024, we can plan a few years down the line. We can do really good work because doing really good work doesn’t happen in a one-year grant cycle.”