Can one person, or a small group of people, make a difference in the face of injustice? The answer is yes, and they’re doing it all around us, every day. This is the spirit animating The Courage Project, which celebrates individuals and organizations that engage in what it calls “everyday acts of civic bravery.”
A new coalition of nonprofits and funders, The Courage Project honored its first round of awardees last month — eight organizations and individuals from across the country. And it announced its second, larger slate of recipients today.
The coalition behind The Courage Project, which started with a $5 million commitment, includes many of the country’s top philanthropies and charitable organizations: the Freedom Together Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the Marguerite Casey Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, Pisces Foundation, the Public Welfare Foundation, the Skillman Foundation, the Surdna Foundation, CFLeads and United Way Worldwide. Awards range from $10,000 to $50,000. Individual recipients can designate a nonprofit to receive the award; organizational awards will go to the participating nonprofit.
The idea for the project was first conceived by the Freedom Together, MacArthur and McKnight foundations, three funders whose presidents have been at the forefront of calls to action and solidarity in the face of the Trump administration’s policies. They launched “A Public Statement From Philanthropy,” a sign-on statement defending funders’ “First Amendment right to give,” which now has over 700 signatories. As the three foundation presidents, Deepak Bhargava, John Palfrey and Tonya Allen, wrote in a post in the Nonprofit Quarterly, “Complacency is complicity. Foundations must lead — not just with grants, but with guts.”
“Those presidents and others began discussing what they could do to put a spotlight on philanthropy,” said Angela Williams, the president and CEO of United Way Worldwide. “And philanthropy not just from the large foundation perspective, but from the notion that all of us are philanthropists, all of us actually have the opportunity to put giving and service to others into action. Many of us do that, and on multiple levels. So they had that conversation and decided to create The Courage Project and then invited partners to join them.”
United Way Worldwide was invited to join in part because of its reach. “They wanted to invite partners to help them source individuals and nonprofits that are doing incredible things in their communities, and they thought of United Way Worldwide because of our incredible footprint,” she said. “We are large in terms of size and revenue, but more importantly, we are large in terms of our penetration into U.S. communities. We actually have boots on the ground in about 95% of communities in the U.S.”
While not all of The Courage Project’s awardees are explicitly opposing Trump administration policies, many of them are. The inaugural round of recipients included community members in Annapolis, Maryland, who distributed books after the Naval Academy removed more than 300 titles; a teacher who refused to take down an “Everyone Is Welcome Here” sign from her classroom, and educators in a small New York town who rallied behind a family facing deportation.
The new slate of recipients is just as diverse, and includes an advocate for immigrant high school students in Atlanta, a Sikh community leader who organizes interfaith gatherings at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, where there was a mass shooting in 2012, and the Eastern PA Trans Equity Project, which provides services to transgender and gender-diverse people in 42 counties.
“The future is not finished, but it is for us to determine every day,” said McKnight Foundation President Tonya Allen when the first slate of recipients was announced. “These courageous leaders and organizations show us the path forward and inspire us to act in pursuit of a more perfect union.”
“It’s what we do.” Courage Project recipients in Sackets Harbor, New York, assist ICE detainees
News travels fast in the small community of Sackets Harbor in upstate New York. It didn’t take long for Jamie Cook, Jen Gaffney and Jonna St. Croix to learn that a local family had been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It was in late March when a mother and her three children (the children were all students at the local school), were swept up in connection with a law enforcement action at a local dairy farm. The family had nothing to do with the law enforcement complaint, but were turned over to ICE. The family was on the legal path to citizenship and regularly attended court hearings, as required.
Jennifer Gaffney is the superintendent of the Sackets Harbor Central school district; Jamie Cook is the principal of the local PreK-12 school; and Jonna St. Croix is a teacher and the president of the Sackets Harbor Teachers Association; two of the detained children were her students. When they got the news, the three contacted everyone they could think of to find out where the family was and to call for their release.
“For our initial response, we relied heavily on our state officials to provide assistance with getting answers,” Gaffney said. “We were focused on, where are they, are they OK, and when are they coming back? Our state officials did what they could do to try to get us answers, but they also struggled to learn anything concrete. The family was taken on Thursday and we found out on Sunday that they were moved from New York to Texas, and were going to be deported. That is when we really elevated our mobilization and developed a strategy for how we were going to up the ante with advocacy.”
Upping the ante meant increasing their outreach to state officials and organizations. “In between class periods and on our lunch breaks, we started making hundreds of phone calls,” Cook said.
“We reached out to the New York State School Boards Association,” Gaffney said. “I reached out to the New York State Council of School Superintendents. We reached out to the Attorney General’s office. We reached out to the New York ACLU. We reached out to the New York State Office for New Americans. The people at the Immigration Coalition were rock stars in terms of their leadership and guidance to our district throughout the whole process. And New York State United Teachers were just an amazing resource for our district, and really helped elevate this into the state and national spotlight.”
The team made so many calls that one legislative staffer begged them to stop. “They said, ‘We are working on helping you. We are confident that the children will be returned. Please stop overwhelming our offices so we can continue our work,’” Gaffney said.
Support for the campaign was widespread: Close to 1,000 people attended a rally opposing their removal (Sackets Harbor has a population of just 1,400). Following the rally, there was a march past the nearby lakefront home of Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar.
Not everyone in the local community supported the family’s return. A few counterprotesters, some of them carrying Trump signs, met the marchers at Homan’s house. Others went online to oppose the educators’ campaign. “There was a lot of discourse, and in all honesty, a lot of hate thrown in the direction of our school district and at the family themselves,” Gaffney said.
Two days later, the family was released and returned to Sackets Harbor. Gaffney, Cook and St. Croix don’t know exactly why the family was released — in a local news report, Homan denied that it had anything to do with community pressure — and are just happy to have them home.
The educators were pleased to learn about The Courage Project award, but seem embarrassed by the attention. “We want to clarify that this was not a political issue to us in any way, shape or form,” Gaffney said. “This was about our kids and wanting them back in school. It’s what we do. It’s our mission, it’s our vision, it’s written in our district goals. We want our kids to feel safe and connected and to have a sense of belonging and a sense of security. We were simply living up to our goals.”
The three educators are careful to protect the identity of the family because they are concerned about their safety and long-term status. Now, they just want to focus on healing for everyone involved. “I can confirm that they are back in our community and they’re back in school and getting the support that they need,” Gaffney said. “This is where they need to stay.”
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The Courage Project’s symbolic significance at a fraught time
The Courage Project is not expressly political, nor are the recipients, but it is hard not to consider this effort against the backdrop of the administration’s actions since the inauguration.
In the case of immigration, for example, one of candidate Donald Trump’s signature issues, there are indications that many Americans, like those in Sackets Harbor, aren’t happy about masked men snatching relatives, friends and neighbors out of their communities and sending them away. The administration promised to deport dangerous criminals; instead, it is often taking people who are following the law and showing up for their immigration hearings.
Meanwhile, several other Courage Project awardees are standing up for first amendment rights, like the coalition from Annapolis that responded to a book banning, and the sixth grade teacher in Idaho who refused to remove a sign in her classroom that read, “Everyone is Welcome Here,” and elected to leave her job instead.
Other Courage Project recipients are individuals and organizations who are serving their communities in ways that have no direct connection to current political hot buttons, but provide examples of compassion at a time when it seems to be in short supply. Laundry Love, for example, partners with local laundromats at over 300 locations around the country to give people experiencing homelessness a way to wash their clothes. And the United Way of South Sarasota County launched an initiative to provide legal aid for elderly and low-income families.
The second slate of Courage Project recipients includes a young community leader in St. Paul, Minnesota, who started an organization that provides personal items to people experiencing homelessness. Another, the organization We the People Warwick, in Warwick, New York, is working to bridge divides between members of the community through dialogue and storytelling.
It’s significant that the major foundations and organizations behind The Courage Project are elevating examples that offer a counter to the Trump agenda, particularly in light of the reticence of many grantmakers to make their voices heard as progress on their core priorities is undermined. And while one might ask whether an effort like this isn’t more symbolic than practical as a means to bolster American civics, symbolism itself can make a difference.
“Democracy is nurtured in communities across this country,” Freedom Together President Deepak Bhargava said when the first Courage Project recipients were announced. “Even in the most challenging moments, courage is contagious.”
At a time of deep polarization and pessimism, The Courage Project aims to amplify that message and inspire others. “It’s so important, in times like these, for us to highlight hope and humanity,” said United Way’s Angela Williams. “Let’s not take our eyes off our neighbors and our families.”
