With a Big Commitment, Ford Looks to BUILD Gender and Reproductive Justice

Since the Ford Foundation unveiled its BUILD Initiative in 2016, it has supported a wide range of nonprofits working to combat inequality. UltraViolet, which promotes gender justice, is the most recent organization on that list. BUILD will invest $4 million in the organization over the next five years.

That’s a big commitment to the cause in coming years, which will surely be tumultuous, as attacks on reproductive rights, women, and transgender and gender-nonconforming people continue to intensify. It’s also a unique form of funding that seeks to help put the movement on firm footing — BUILD’s rare combination of capacity-building and long-term financial support.

Many social justice organizations have outsize influence but lack financial stability and the luxury of time and space to chart where they’re going and the best way to get there. Ford is trying to remedy that with its Building Institutions and Networks (BUILD) Initiative, part of the foundation’s broader effort in recent years to provide less restricted funding and help strengthen nonprofits with more flexible and supportive grants. BUILD’s goal, as the name makes clear, is to provide nonprofits like UltraViolet the resources they need to “become stronger and more resilient over time.”

BUILD grantees include nonprofits working in the areas of climate justice, Indigenous rights, improving conditions for low-wage workers, support for immigrants, and strengthening and diversifying the arts. Gender justice is also a priority for both BUILD and the Ford Foundation, according to BUILD Program Officer Shireen Zaman. “We are dedicated to supporting organizations that are fighting back against the anti-gender backlash,” she said. “And generally, across all our programs, we think think about gender and how it plays out through all the issues we work on and in all regions where we work.”

A report just out from Bridgespan emphasizes the importance of — and shortage of funding for — gender issues. In 2021-2022, according to the report, just 16% of the grants of $25 million or more that U.S. donors made to social change causes “named gender as an explicit focus of their grants.” The authors argued that by failing to more consistently bring a gender lens to their giving, “funders are leaving impact on the table.”

While the BUILD grant is the largest commitment to UltraViolet to date, Ford has supported its work with smaller grants over the years. “Ford has a real intention to integrate gender justice — alongside racial justice and disability justice — through all of their portfolio and programmatic work,” said Shaunna Thomas, UltraViolet’s co-founder and executive director. “Ford is one of the few organizations that have had the foresight and the willingness to fund gender justice properly. This grant represents a big downpayment for UltraViolet, but also for the movement we're a part of, which is crucial for women and gender nonconforming and trans folks right now.”

Inflection point

For UltraViolet, the $4 million BUILD commitment couldn’t come at a better time. The organization has been on the forefront of efforts to protect the rights of women and gender nonconforming people for over a decade. UltraViolet conducts online and social media advocacy campaigns to amplify and generate support for issues impacting women and LGBTQ+ communities, reproductive rights, workers rights, and criminal and racial justice. Other UltraViolet funders include Hewlett Foundation, Open Society Foundations, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Streisand Foundation, Wallace Global Fund, and Women Donors Network. (UltraViolet has a 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4); the Ford Foundation and BUILD only support the organization’s c3 work.)

“We think it's never been more important to strengthen the feminist and gender justice movement,” Thomas said. “The targeted attacks on women of color and LGBTQ folks, on all women and girls — it's extreme, it's hostile, it's very well-funded. It has been under-appreciated, I think, the degree to which attacks on women and gender nonconforming people and trans people have been an explicit strategy to undermine our democracy.”

But it wasn’t just its mission, or its history as a Ford grantee, that made UltraViolet a good fit for BUILD. Shireen Zaman described some of the other qualities BUILD looks for in its grantees.

“We have been doing the BUILD program for several years now, and one of the things we’ve learned is that it works well for an organization that wants to be an institution — an organization that wants to be around for the long term and has a trajectory and ambition for the future,” she said. “So we’re thinking about that inflection point. One of the things that is exciting about UltraViolet is that they are making plans in terms of expanding their work. Part of their BUILD grant will be focused on a new five-year strategic plan, and really thinking about the future trajectory of the organization. So this moment felt like an important time to make this investment.”

BUILD also seeks out organizations with leadership that is flexible and innovative. “We look for groups that are a part of an ecosystem we want to see strengthened,” Zaman added. “Certain organizations just play that role of helping to bring others along with them.”

The road to social justice

In a IP guest post, Kevin Simowitz, co-director of All Due Respect, and Chris Cardona, senior program officer at Ford, included a brief history of BUILD. “One of the reasons we launched the BUILD Initiative in 2016 is that in response to grantee-partner feedback, we realized that close to 80% of our grants were one-year project grants,” they wrote. “The road to social justice is not paved with those!”

Ford responded to that feedback by creating BUILD, and providing long-term, flexible funding focused on strengthening organizations. After funding over 364 grantees with its initial billion dollars, Ford committed another $1 billion in 2021, as IP previously reported. So far, BUILD has made 600 five-year commitments — $1.6 billion in 45 countries to date — and plans to invest $2 billion total over 12 years.

Ford commissioned an evaluation of BUILD by an external partner which concluded that “the ability to think, plan and implement led BUILD grantees toward increased organizational and financial resilience.” Eighty-three percent of grantees surveyed, for example, reported that their organizations were more financially resilient in 2021 than they were before they received the BUILD grant.

“The key takeaways we learned from that evaluation were that — and I find this pretty amazing every time I encounter it — the BUILD grant works really well,” Zaman said. “It works for small organizations, large organizations, it works well for organizations that are networks as well as more traditional nonprofits. And it works pretty well almost everywhere in the world.”

Pressure and conversation

In 2021, BUILD director Kathy Reich told IP’s Mike Scutari she hoped the program’s approach would set an example for others in the sector. “We need to keep the pressure on other funders to step up,” Reich said. “That’s something we didn’t do so much in BUILD’s first phase, but we’re very focused on it in the second — trying to move this field, which can be notoriously slow to move in the direction of larger, longer, more flexible grants.”

But that change continues to happen far too slowly, as representatives of four human rights funding intermediaries pointed out in a recent IP guest post. “When it comes to flexible funding, there seems to be more talk than action,” they concluded.

Still, Shireen Zaman is optimistic that philanthropy is moving in the right direction. She believes MacKenzie Scott’s deluge of large, no-strings-attached gifts are helping drive change, and she and her colleagues continue to spread the message.

“That's one of the roles of the BUILD team: We have a whole area of focus around engaging philanthropy,” Zaman said. “Myself and our director and a couple of other colleagues try to proactively reach out to funders we hear about. It’s a big part of what we do.”

UltraViolet’s Shaunna Thomas underscored the stakes.“It’s an incredibly fragile moment for our democracy,” she said. “We won’t achieve gender, racial, social justice or protect our democracy if funders don’t invest in this space and correct decades’ worth of underinvestment that have helped bring us to this fragile moment. And they need to think about institutional strengthening alongside the frankly more exciting programmatic work.”

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