At IP, we have long covered the JPB Foundation, including profiles of the charismatic founder and former President Barbara Picower and an interview last year with new President Deepak Bhargava, who discussed an organizational shift toward centering democracy and movement-building programming for this endowed foundation with a longstanding commitment to social justice. One of the country’s largest and most influential funders, this 501(c)(3) seeks to expand multiracial democracy by protecting and strengthening base democratic institutions and finding innovative ways to combat authoritarianism and its assaults on the rights of people of color, immigrants, women and LGBTQ+ people.
IP circled back with this major player in the democracy giving world (with assets of around $4 billion) that has, by its own accounting, given tens of millions of dollars to grantee partners involved in civic engagement and democracy defense work. JPB Foundation was an early signatory to the Democracy Fund’s All By April campaign, which was a natural fit with its focus on giving to grassroots groups early to ensure that nonprofits on the ground have the resources they need to engage in communities.
The foundation has also responded to this year’s challenges, including mis- and disinformation and political violence in this election cycle. The foundation supports the Four Freedoms Fund, which is working with the Haitian community in Ohio that’s been subject to extremist violence. (For more on the Four Freedoms Fund, see Martha Ramirez’s December 2023 IP story.)The foundation also backs the Trusted Elections Fund, which works with grassroots groups across the country to guard against election-related violence and threats.
The organization, though, is all about the long view. Its overarching message around pro-democracy giving is to give consistently — not just in election cycles — to ensure the stability and growth of civic engagement groups across the country in vulnerable and historically marginalized communities.
As the election looms, IP reached out to Arianna Jimenez, who joined the organization in February as senior vice president for democracy, gender and racial justice. Jimenez brings more than 20 years of experience in the labor movement to the role. She’s the former political director of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West in California, where she led successful campaigns on healthcare, immigration, the minimum wage and ran a multistate ballot measure strategy of pro-democracy reforms.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How would you describe the JPB Foundation’s approach to democracy programming?
We’re trying to balance the acute challenges for this election year with long-term, chronic challenges, so we have been attentive to moving tens of millions of dollars in civic engagement work at the same time that we’re working on developing a longer-term strategy that links the democracy work to communities that are working to build power.
The democracy ecosystem and philanthropy has been very focused on short-term election and civic engagement work: GOTV, voter registration. Those are incredibly important pieces, but without longer-term engagement in states and communities, there’s not an opportunity to build the kind of power necessary to build a strong democracy that meets the needs of all communities.
We want to impress upon people the importance of getting out of the boom-and-bust cycle of focusing on election years and impress upon people the importance of giving stable, multi-year grants, year over year.
Can you highlight some pro-democracy grantees the foundation supports and why they matter?
Grantee groups doing important work include NAKASEC, a national network comprising five grassroots groups that support and empower the Asian American community. They are a great example of an organization that is working to do civic engagement, to make sure that the Asian American community has the culturally appropriate and language resources they need, and also that they are facilitating deeper, longer-lasting democratic participation among that community.
ISAIAH in Minnesota is a great example of what an organization building for a more healthy democracy looks like. They work in deep relationship with communities, year over year. They have a faith-based part of their organizing. They have a secular part of their organizing. They’re working to build relationships and connection across differences, which is a really important part of a healthy civil society. And they work on democracy issues, as well as issues of pay equity and other things that are important to the community.
We are also supporters of LUCHA in Arizona. They have done deep and long-lasting work with immigrant communities there, in particular, Latino immigrants. [Note: JPB funds LUCHA’s affiliated 501(c)(3), Arizona Center for Empowerment.] We also support [the national organization] CASA. They are a membership-building organization that does work with largely black and Latino immigrants, both in civic engagement work and in terms of building power year over year to protect against attacks on those communities, and toward an inclusive democracy.
2024 is the 100-year anniversary of Congress passing the Snyder Act, colloquially known as the Indian Citizenship Act, which granted U.S. citizenship to Native Americans born in the U.S. We support IllumiNative, a woman-led, native racial and social justice organization. They do work to build power with Native American communities year round, and support GOTV and ballot access to native communities.
How is Deepak Bhargava’s leadership informing the JPB Foundation’s democracy work?
I am incredibly excited about his vision and expansion to multiracial democracy and the way that has been centered as the defining challenge of our time, and his commitment to philanthropy as a crucial pillar of support and building an expanded multiracial democracy. The challenge ahead of us now is implementing that vision; I’m really excited to be here.
If we are to have a healthy democracy, that includes putting women, Black people, immigrants, LGBT people at the center of our democracy. A healthy democracy is inclusive of historically marginalized communities. When we think about democracy, we’re really thinking about building power for communities that historically have been denied it.
Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, wrote in the New York Times recently about the importance of leadership in philanthropy in times of crisis. It’s going to take everybody to address the grave systemic flaws in our democracy; it’s going to take more than filling short-term gaps and election years, as important as that can be right now.
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How does your personal experience and professional background inform your work?
I grew up in New York City in the 1970s in an immigrant and mixed-race family. I believe in the version of America that is inclusive, just, equitable and bends toward freedom.
I come out of the Service Employees International Union. I was most recently the political director of a large, private-sector healthcare local. I spent my adult career, up until this point, working to engage working-class people of all stripes in civic engagement, with the idea that when we change who participates in our democracy, we change the outcomes for our democracy. The structural barriers to participation are vast. As my own political education evolved over time, I started to understand what working-class people are up against. Working-class people lead complicated lives, and it takes time to reach folks, and it takes more than one conversation. People have a lot of challenges to voting and some of them are intentional and some of them are structural barriers to participating in elections.
And so this next step in my own career is thinking about, what are the structural obstacles to working class people having the democracy that they deserve?
Can you speak to the highlights of the September Boston Review essay you co-authored with Deepak Bhargava as part of a forum on the case for more parties (and as a response to this piece)?
We wrote in that piece that our system of government has many deeply undemocratic features — like the electoral college, like the Senate, like a Supreme Court that’s subject to political capture. All of those systems are rooted in slavery and elite fear of mass participation, and they manifest today in the will of majorities being blocked on issues like gun control and abortion access. The main point that we were trying to land in that piece is that there is no single silver bullet to fixing our democracy because of these structural challenges and that any kind of policy fix misses the point.
Participation in membership organizations — like unions, churches, Parent Teacher Associations — those play an essential role in nourishing our democracy. That’s where people get to practice democracy. That’s where people get to feel part of something larger than themselves, more connected to larger society. Democracy can bring us together, but as those organizations and institutions have declined, we see the result of that in the fractures in our democracy today.
Over the long term, we think about growing the strength of a pro-democracy alignment across pillars of civil society: faith, business, labor — and that includes working-class people of all stripes and people from historically marginalized communities at the center of that movement.
What keeps you up at night?
Authoritarianism is on the rise and there are huge threats to our democracy that are very concerning that go far beyond what is happening in this particular election cycle, and really get to the dissolution of civil society, the fragmentation of us as members of that society and attacks on our institutions, including attacks on our right to protest, as well as the attacks we’re seeing on the elections themselves. But as Deepak always reminds us, no election-based reform is going to fix the larger trend toward authoritarianism. That is going to take all of civil society to strengthen our democracy.
This is an incredibly serious time in our history, and I think the trend toward authoritarianism is not to be underestimated or misunderstood as just a problem of this one election. How we build toward a stronger, more resilient democracy in which historically marginalized communities, women, workers, LGBT communities, Black folks and immigrants are included and represented will take the work of all of us.
What gives you hope?
I believe in the power of regular people to do extraordinary things. If my years in the SEIU taught me anything, it was that the American people are resilient and creative. I look to our grantees who are doing inspiring work, and who are resilient in the face of incredible challenges, they are just unflappable. I see it as our responsibility in philanthropy to support their work and have their backs.
Any final thoughts you’d care to share?
Philanthropy needs to support base-building organizations every year. Our job isn’t electoral politics; our principal job is building power for people who historically have been denied it. That is the expanded mission statement of the JPB Foundation and the focus of this new leadership team.
One way that historically marginalized people are able to express their power is by voting. But it’s not the only way, nor should it be. JPB takes a much more expansive view of democracy to include not only elections, but government and the institutions that organize civil society. We’re focused on how the JPB Foundation, and philanthropy generally, take responsibility for supporting and building a healthy democracy in every state, every year.
