How the Sunsetting Swift Foundation Supports Indigenous Communities

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We periodically publish quick overviews of grantmakers on our radar, looking at recent developments and key details about how they operate. Today, we’re looking at the Swift Foundation, a family foundation dedicated to Indigenous rights, food sovereignty in Indigenous communities throughout South and North America, and biocultural diversity. Here are a few things to know about the Santa Barbara-based foundation, which earlier this year announced it would sunset by December 2028.

Its founder and president is a committed conservationist

The foundation was established in 1999 by conservationist and organic farmer John Swift with funds from the sale of his family’s shares in UPS.

On the foundation’s site, John, who also serves as foundation president, talks about how his time providing vaccines to Guatemalan children and working on an agro-forest project in Papua New Guinea “reinforced my understanding of the role Indigenous people and nature play in biodiversity.” He also said that his Conservation of Natural Resources professors at UC Berkeley left an impression by sounding the alarm on climate change many years ago.

“Coupling these understandings with my conviction that a woman’s ability to access family planning as a basic human right challenged me to focus my philanthropy on a holistic view of conserving cultural diversity and Indigenous ecosystems with regenerative agriculture and community wellbeing,” he says.

It has been increasing its annual payout

For a few reasons, 2009 was a pivotal year for the foundation. John’s mother’s foundation donated its assets to the Swift Foundation, tripling its size. John’s daughters Sonja and Karen joined the board, along with its first non-family member, Okanagan author and scholar Jeannette Armstrong. The foundation also expanded its mission to support Indigenous peoples as “crucial leaders in protecting bicultural diversity,” and rolled out its first mission-related investment policy.

Ten years later, the board expanded so that non-family members now constitute a majority. The board also made the unorthodox decision to double its annual payout from the legally mandated 5% to 10%, and a closer look at the foundation’s Form 990s shows that it has kept its word. For the fiscal year ending December 2018, the foundation disbursed $2.5 million. That amount gradually increased in successive years — $3.2 million in 2019, $4 million in 2020 and $4.7 million in 2021, for a 47% increase over 2018.

Intriguingly — but not entirely surprising, given the stock market’s performance in recent years — the fair market value of the foundation’s assets increased by 10% from 2018 ($60.5 million) to 2021 ($66.8 million). The foundation did not receive a penny in incoming contributions during this four-year span.

It’s laser-focused on Indigenous organizations

“We prioritize and predominantly fund the work arising from Indigenous people and their local communities, as well as local and/or community-based organizations who are responsible to their home places in solidarity with neighboring Indigenous communities,” the foundation’s site says. “We emphasize funding support for work based on a holistic and integrated approach grounded in local knowledge and expertise. We honor Indigenous peoples’ free, prior, and informed consent and self-determination.”

The foundation does not accept unsolicited proposals, although it “will respond to inquiries as we are able to.” Most first-time grants are between $20,000 and $35,000, while longer-term grants generally range between $40,000 to $80,000. The foundation funds one-time programmatic grants, “while prioritizing long-term partnerships with multi-year general support funding.” While the foundation’s site does not include a grants database, it does provide an extensive list of its grantee partners. (Emails to the foundation were not returned.)

From 2019 to 2021, according to tax filings and supplementary documents, the foundation disbursed grants to 50 organizations, 46 of which were based in the U.S. At $1.4 million, the largest grant went to international regrantor Global Greengrants Fund, earmarked for “small grants to grassroots organizations.” This grant was an anomaly, as most fell within the $30,000 to $60,000 range.

Grants were earmarked for a variety of purposes, including legal defense of territory and Indigenous rights, advocacy, economic development, environment law and land stewardship. Recipients included Friends of the Earth (Washington, D.C.), the International Indian Treaty Council (Tucson), NDN Collective (Rapid City, South Dakota) and the Wildlife Conservation Society (Bozeman, Montana).

It’s a big proponent of mission-related investing

In 2009, the foundation began transferring a major chunk of its endowment into mission-related investing. Five years later, a then-29-year-old Sonja told Forbes that the foundation viewed its investments through the lens of social or environmental impact, even if it meant generating lower returns.  

Sonja told Forbes that when she joined the board, she thought, “‘We have this endowment, it’s there for the social good, how can we ignore the investments? How can we just talk about the grants and not look at the whole picture?’ It just always came across as a contradiction to me.”

The foundation’s first order of business was to move the roughly $2 million in cash earmarked for grants to community banks. “This way, the money is being cycled out within local communities,” she said. “It’s not just going to Bank of America supporting fracking and coal companies and whatever else they support with the loans they’re making.” While Sonja considered this “an easy way to make a little paradigm shift,” she said, “it surprises me how many foundations still resist that.”

A 2019 study from Foundation Source suggests that resistance hasn’t ebbed. The report found that while 88.2% of respondents said their foundations were “somewhat” interested in impact investing, 48.9% said that “none of their foundation’s investment portfolio is currently allocated to impact investments.” Only 3.3% of respondents’ foundations had 100% of assets in impact investments. The study cited “lack of knowledge about the topic or concern about returns” as the reasons why foundation leaders were reluctant to engage in impact investing.

Currently, 30% of the Swift Foundation’s endowment has been allocated toward mission-related investing. Its directors identified three primary mission themes: supporting biological and cultural diversity, addressing climate change and enhancing the health of communities globally. For example, investments applying to the latter theme flow to institutions involved in microcredit, community development and loan funds, public transportation/alternative transport companies and companies that produce, distribute and/or sell organic food products.

It plans to sunset by December 2028

In February, the board decided to sunset the foundation by December 2028. “After several years of reflection and engaged work with communities,” the foundation’s statement read, “Swift Foundation determined this work is best achieved outside of the traditional philanthropic paradigm by directly strengthening Indigenous leadership, self-determination, and catalyzing a transference of family wealth to Indigenous wisdom keepers and cultural bearers living in Indigenous homelands and communities.”

It’s a refreshing and relatively rare sentiment. Even after doubling its annual payout, the board decided to put the balance of its assets in the hands of its grantee leaders who can allocate it according to their organization’s needs. This means that the foundation will disburse $67 million within the next six years. Market turmoil notwithstanding, math suggests the foundation would move about $11 million out the door per year, which is a 140% increase over the $4.7 million it disbursed in 2021.

The foundation is in the process of developing a “comprehensive detailed timeline” for the spend-down and will work closely with grant partners throughout the process. I suspect that just as the foundation gradually increased its annual payout beginning in 2019, it will take an equally incremental approach to spending down, rather than more than doubling its payout right out of the gate. “By moving into a spend-down at this urgent moment in history,” John said, “Swift Foundation is able to provide significant resources to our partners and help envision a stronger future for all concerned.”