"Not Standard Corporate Philanthropy." Progressive Values Drive the Amalgamated Charitable Foundation
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Amalgamated Bank’s longstanding progressive stances carried over into the much-newer Amalgamated Charitable Foundation. Hiram Rios/shutterstock
Amalgamated Bank has been around for a century. Meanwhile, the Amalgamated Charitable Foundation, which only got off the ground in 2018, seemed like a natural philanthropic progression for the venerable bank, known for its roots in union activism.
“When I first came to the bank [in 2016], we started talking about the need for a values-aligned philanthropic partner for social change,” said Anna Fink, a philanthropy veteran who previously worked for the New World Foundation and the Wyss Foundation, and helped birth the foundation she now heads.
Those discussions came to the conclusion that “the same values of collective action and financial acumen that guided the founding of the bank by immigrant workers 100 years ago could also really be applied to philanthropy,” Fink said.
The Amalgamated Charitable Foundation is distinct from most corporate-derived philanthropies in that it isn’t afraid to get behind unabashedly progressive work — in fact, that’s its bread and butter. “I think the unique synergy between the bank as a financial institution and the foundation opens up a lot of potential to address major issues that we see before us — things like the racial wealth gap, climate change, democracy — and innovate solutions in bold and interesting ways,” Fink said.
Amalgamated Bank CEO Priscilla Sims Brown agreed, calling the foundation’s creation, which preceded her arrival at the bank, a stroke of “sheer genius.” Over the years, she said, Amalgamated Bank had already expanded its horizons beyond serving its own customers and promoting workers’ rights to “include lots of different progressive organizations” and causes.
For example, the bank has pledged not to lend to fossil fuel companies. “A third of our lending is sustainable lending of some type, whether that's geothermal, wind [or] solar,” Sims Brown said.
Long known as a union-owned bank, Amalgamated is now publicly traded, but its largest shareholder remains a labor union, Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union. At the end of 2023, the bank reported total deposits of $7 billion.
But labor unions are only a part of Amalgamated Bank’s customer base. For example, it has become the bank of choice for Democratic candidates, party committees and PACs, now holding more than $1 billion in political deposits. It’s not just the bank’s ideology that brings in the deposits — it’s also Amalgamated’s commitment to responding quickly to the needs of campaigns.
As a result, despite the economic turmoil of recent years, the bank has prospered, and its foundation has also thrived. Since the Amalgamated Charitable Foundation’s launch five years ago, it has “grown exponentially,” Fink said, “moving more than $500 million out the door to social change organizations, and drawing in and partnering with individuals, institutions and social change field leaders to move money in really innovative ways.”
“Not standard corporate philanthropy”
Since its inception, the Amalgamated Charitable Foundation has granted out $531 million, with its grantmaking totaling $184 million in 2023. But things didn’t start out so big: At its creation, Amalgamated Bank gave the foundation about $1 million in seed money and the bank continues to do all its corporate giving through the foundation, which calls the bank its “financial partner.” The amount of its annual gift varies with the bank’s results from year to year, but never dips below $1 million, Sims Brown said.
The rest of the Amalgamated Foundation’s cash flow comes from other sources. Like a number of progressive-leaning funding intermediaries, fiscal sponsors and DAF sponsors that have grown in prominence recently, the foundation and its offerings cover a lot of ground.
“Our foundation is really not standard corporate philanthropy,” Fink said. “We see ourselves as part of an ecosystem and really use all the tools in our toolbox to support social change. We offer donor-advised funds, we manage pooled funds, which we call combined impact funds. And we work with institutions like large private foundations, other public foundations, as well as individual donors to solve problems and fill gaps.”
Amalgamated appeals to many givers, Fink said, because it aligns with their values, and they can be sure that none of the money in Amalgamated’s DAFs is going to any groups that violate those values. In 2019, the Amalgamated Foundation launched the Hate Is Not Charitable Campaign, charging that some of the largest managers of DAFs had not done enough to prevent their DAF donors from giving millions of dollars in tax-deductible contributions to hate groups as identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Groups benefiting from those DAF donations included anti-Muslim, anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigrant and white supremacist organizations.
“Using tax-deductible dollars to support hate groups undermines a shared value of democracy inherent to the logic of promoting the public interest. Promoting hatred is the opposite of public good,” the foundation affirmed at the time.
The foundation also offers its donors a view of DAF giving that differs radically from that of other DAF sponsors, which have been accused of fostering the “hoarding” of tax-deductible dollars meant to go to nonprofits. Unlike foundations, DAFs don’t have any annual payout requirement. Fink, however, said the Amalgamated Foundation wants to spend donations quickly. When it began operation, it asked DAF donors to give away at least 10% of their funds annually. The foundation then embraced the #HalfMyDAF campaign, urging donors to give away half the contributions in their funds each year. The 2023 #HalfMyDAF campaign moved a total of over $17 million to nonprofits. Meanwhile, the foundation’s own DAF payout has been impressive. “Our average DAF payout rate is 75%, which is more than three times the national average,” Fink said.
Money out the door
Amalgamated also put together systems specifically aimed at getting donor money out in the field as quickly as possible. The foundation created funds to assist front-line workers during the pandemic, help Puerto Rico residents after Hurricane Fiona, support groups assisting immigrant families at the border, and finance efforts to reduce income inequality. The foundation also uses the JustFund platform, which aims to make the process of applying for grants simpler for nonprofits. In addition, it has used its relationships with nonprofits and with foundations, leaders in the field and consultants to amass expertise that can be shared with donors.
Larger foundations have taken notice. Together, according to Candid, the James Irvine Foundation, Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation alone have given more than $50 million to the Amalgamated Foundation since 2021.
The foundation confines its giving to domestic U.S. nonprofits, but its philanthropic aims are progressive and timely. According to Candid, in 2022, it gave nearly $9 million to Way to Rise, a nonpartisan nonprofit committed to advancing multiracial democracy, particularly in the South and West, and which is affiliated with the 501(c)(4) progressive donor hub Way to Win. The foundation also gave more than $8 million to All Voting is Local, seeking to protect the freedom to vote. Other significant grants went to the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the Transgender Law Center.
The foundation hopes its approach helps the entire philanthropic ecosystem, Fink said. She pointed to the success of the Hate Is Not Charitable campaign, which has been endorsed by dozens of funders, including other prominent progressive philanthropic intermediaries like the Tides Foundation and Proteus Fund. “We tried to hardwire the systems and the platform that we provide at the foundation to support best practices in the field, like defaulting to general support,” Fink said. In that vein, she stressed the importance of relationship-building with nonprofits and trust-based philanthropy.
Working in sync
The bank and foundation often operate in concert to advance the same progressive goals. A good example is how both organizations mobilized to respond to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion.
As an employer, the bank announced that it would cover employees and their dependents for their travel or child care if they needed to leave their state to access reproductive healthcare. Meanwhile, the foundation hosted the Critical Reproductive Access Fund, a grassroots fundraising effort led by Amalgamated Bank employees but open to both individual and institutional donors. The fund then quickly moved financial assistance to groups helping women access reproductive care.
Amalgamated Bank also offers banking services to Planned Parenthood, many other abortion providers, and the sponsors of abortion funds, and made loans to providers that had to move their clinics out of state. As a shareholder, the bank has tried to engage other publicly traded organizations in conversations about their reproductive health policies. The bank also endorsed the “Don’t Ban Equality” initiative and other reproductive rights initiatives.
“We see the value of moving the money to front-line organizations and field initiatives that really need it,” Fink said. “And if you see yourself as part of an ecosystem, that ecosystem feeds itself and continues to grow — it grows based on relationships, it grows based on trust. So it is not about locking up the dollars. It’s about building a vibrant ecosystem where money is moving through.”
Both Fink and Sims Brown are bullish about Amalgamated’s future — both organizations — as agents for good. Fink said more opportunities for growth are ahead. “We’ve only scratched the surface in terms of the impact we think we can have, and the power across the foundation and the bank to leverage and galvanize more resources to support social change.”
Or, as Sims Brown put it, Amalgamated is proving that “you can do well and do good at the same time.”
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to reflect the fact that the Amalgamated Foundation launched the Hate Is Not Charitable Campaign, and to clarify the total dollar figure for the 2023 #HalfMyDAF campaign. Figures for the foundation’s overall giving have also been updated to reflect 2023 totals.
