How Eight Grantmakers Fund Civic Engagement and Democracy on College Campuses
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Back in April, I spoke with William Moses, the managing director of the Kresge Foundation’s education program, about a new round of grants to boost civic engagement among college students.
While working on that piece, I came across at least a dozen other grantmakers providing similar support. Like Kresge, many of these funders have prioritized galvanizing voter turnout on campus and amplifying students’ perspectives on issues like debt, climate change and social justice.
But the closer I looked, the more I was struck by the diversity of strategic goals across the field. Funders are bankrolling efforts including creating digital tools targeting specific demographics, think tanks exploring how Gen Zers view the political process, and ensuring that engagement sticks once graduates enter the workforce. What’s more, these efforts are unfolding against a charged political backdrop where state legislators are seeking to restrict ballot access with the midterm elections only six months away.
In other words, it seems like an opportune time for a roundup of community and private foundations — and, to a lesser extent, grantees and organizations cited by funder reps — working to increase civic engagement among this crucial demographic.
As we’ll see, it’s a pretty diverse ecosystem, but one that is held together by a set of unifying beliefs. Open Society Foundations’ co-director Laleh Ispahani summed it up best, calling student engagement and democracy “a challenging area to invest in, given inconsistent impact and the fact that, by its very nature, it’s constantly evolving and changing.” Nonetheless, Ispahani said, “It’s vital that it receive due attention from the philanthropic community, particularly given the major issues future generations will inherit — climate, rollbacks of fundamental rights, and perhaps a fight for democracy.”
High-level findings
I approached this issue by identifying funders that had previously provided grants to the kinds of student-focused organizations Kresge supports, including Young Invincibles, Campus Vote Project, Civic Nation, Fair Elections, Jolt Initiative, Native Vote, Rock the Vote and Civic Influencers.
In Kresge’s case, it’s funding its latest round of college student engagement grants through its education program and in partnership with its arts and culture and Detroit programs. I discovered that most funders adopt a similar approach, placing college engagement within a broader priority area — like education, civic engagement or youth engagement.
Of course, this list isn’t comprehensive. For instance, a rep at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF) told me that it supports organizations like the Youth Leadership Institute, whose efforts to build civic engagement may occasionally play out on college campuses. While this roundup does not include SVCF, that doesn’t mean SVCF or other funders — including corporate philanthropies — don’t award grants earmarked for college civic engagement. They do so, but often in an ad hoc or indirect manner. So with that as a prologue, let’s dive in.
New York Community Trust: Amplifying immigrant and undocumented student voices
The New York Community Trust, a community foundation, makes grants focusing on college students who are low-income, recent immigrants, undocumented, or from communities of color. Shawn V. Morehead, the trust’s vice president of grants, told me the goal is to “encourage college students to take an active role in significantly improving their communities, promoting racial equity, and advocating for services they need to thrive and succeed.”
Morehead noted that while undocumented young people and new immigrants face the typical challenges of paying for college, these pressures are “compounded by issues such as limited finances, public hostility toward immigrants, fears of deportation, and mistrust of government authorities.”
The trust has provided support to the New York State Leadership Council, a youth organizing program that creates campus-based teams to advocate for young immigrants. Another grant recipient, the New York Civil Liberties Union Foundation (NYCLU), used the trust’s support to create the NYCLU Campus Organizing Platform, which channels the concerns and energy of young people toward addressing issues like racial injustice, climate change and immigration. “It was the starting point for a number of voter registration and education drives,” Morehead told me. “The program sent students to the state capitol to talk to legislators about threats to civil liberties and immigration issues.”
Morehead heralded the related efforts of fellow New York City-based grantmakers such as the Pinkerton, Altman and Charles Hayden foundations, as well as the national, nonpartisan “My Vote Project,” which encourages young people to engage and educate their peers about local issues and elections.
Open Society Foundations: Cultivating local leaders and tackling “demographic divergence”
OSF has supported college-focused programs as part of its broader efforts to advance nonpartisan civic engagement among young adults. A majority of its work in higher ed centers on historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and other institutions with large, nonwhite student bodies. “However, not all young people attend college,” Ispahani said. “So OSF also supports programs that strategically engage lower-income young people and young people of color who are not on college campuses, even if campus-based engagement is the primary tactic.”
Ispahani told me that successful programs are “led by and accountable to the communities they seek to engage, and that is equally true for young citizens.” As a result, OSF has sought to elevate local leaders who can bring local knowledge to bear, resulting in more effective and better-integrated programs, Ispahani said.
The foundation’s work tackles two challenges facing nonwhite student bodies. The first is the dearth of programs that address what Ispahani calls “the diversity within the young adult demographic — race and ethnicity, gender expression and identity, income and education, immigration experience, and more.” In an effort to close this “demographic divergence,” OSF works with partners that focus on part-time community college students, develop digital tools that prioritize mobile users over computer users, and roll out nonpartisan messaging that resonates among young adults with different education levels.
The second demographic challenge is high turnover in both organizational leadership and among people served — to be expected, since those constituents are college students. Nonprofit leaders move on to other roles while the students they serve graduate, enter the workforce, and gravitate towards other priorities. While there’s “no fix” for the turnover problem, Ispahani told me that the wider implementation of vote-by-mail has ameliorated concerns that students will become disengaged once they graduate. “Unfortunately, this method has been under consistent attack since its wide uptake in 2020,” Ispahani said.
“There’s a range of groups — independent c3s, independent projects, networks — doing great work in this space,” Ispahani told me, citing OSF grantees like Jolt Initiative, Voto Latino, the Youth Engagement Fund, the Alliance for Youth Organizing, and its member organizations MOVE TX, North Carolina Asian Americans Together, Ohio Student Association, and LIT in Wisconsin.
Ispahani also mentioned two non-grantees: the Fair Elections Legal Network’s Campus Vote Project, which “has a strong community college component,” and the HBCU Student Action Alliance in North Carolina.
Lumina Foundation: Exploring the impact of an increasingly educated citizenry
Lumina’s mission is to promote post-high school access and attainment while centering racial equity and justice. As its work expands, its leaders are beginning to identify what Terri Taylor, the foundation’s strategy director for innovation and discovery, called “the societal benefits we can expect when more people earn quality credentials.”
To this end, Taylor told me that Lumina has begun to explore “what a healthy democracy needs from the people it governs and what conditions allow for all people to serve as active citizens that build and rebuild democratic systems. What are the settings, abilities, and skills that support people to work to strengthen democracy and help them resist autocracy?”
These abilities and skills may include the “belief that second chances are possible,” “an ability to sort truth from misinformation,” and having “respect for others and differences among us.” To cultivate these qualities in students, the initial phase of Lumina’s democracy and active citizenship work centers on four areas: conditions for democratic participation; learning for active citizenship; equity and justice; and response to supremacist ideologies, dehumanization, propaganda, polarization and mis/disinformation.
Taylor directed me to a handful of Lumina grantees, including the policy think tank Next100, which produced “a troubling yet compelling national survey of millennials and Gen Zers showing that they feel especially disconnected and believe federal, state, and local governments don’t care about them.”
Taylor also cited the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education rubric, which establishes baselines for students’ demonstrated performance on civic outcomes. The Lumina grantee is “experimenting with two approaches to scale: working at a state level with all the public institutions in Utah and working at a national level with institutions selected through a competitive RFP,” Taylor said.
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: Integrating engagement with the humanities and social justice
In 2020, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced it would be placing a new focus on social justice in its grantmaking. But it typically shies away from funding frontline groups organizing students or getting out the vote. That said, the foundation’s approach is worth mentioning, since it tackles issues like civic engagement and voting rights through the lenses of the humanities and social justice.
In February, Mellon announced Humanities for All Times, an initiative that will provide over $16 million in awards to 12 liberal arts colleges to support “newly developed curricula that both instruct students in methods of humanities practice and clearly demonstrate those methods’ relevance to broader social justice pursuits.”
Two months later, the foundation issued a call for concepts for universities engaged in research and/or curricular projects focused on civic engagement and voting rights, race and racialization in the United States, and social justice and literary imagination. Mellon plans to allocate up to $10 million for this call for concepts.
In the “civic engagement and voting rights” area, Mellon sought “scholarly and/or curricular projects that illuminate the significance of voting rights controversies in any period of US history.” Mellon said it especially welcomed projects that “focus on the role of college and university communities in expanding voter access, whether historically or in the contemporary moment.”
“This call is designed to support the essential function of the humanities in clarifying and addressing some of the most intractable issues confronting U.S. society, past and present,” said Phillip Brian Harper, Mellon’s higher learning program director. “We seek to highlight and enhance the humanities’ capacity, not only for incisive analysis, but also for the sort of visionary creativity that engenders more just and equitable futures, while recognizing the wide range of institutions that foster this valuable work.”
The application deadline for the call for concepts has passed, and staff will make final grant recommendations to Mellon’s board of trustees at its December 2022 meeting, for a January 1, 2023 start date. The effort falls within the foundation’s Higher Learning program area.
Joyce Foundation: Debunking the myth of the young voter “enthusiasm gap”
The Joyce Foundation aims to increase young voter turnout, which tends to be lower among 18-29-year-olds. This interest reflects its broader goal to improve racial equity and economic mobility for the next generation in the Great Lakes region. “This includes ensuring that the next generation has a voice in making decisions about elected officials impacting their future,” said Carrie Davis, the foundation’s democracy program director. “It also stems from our Democracy Program’s goal of increasing voter participation, especially for populations that have historically faced barriers to full participation.”
Joyce supports groups in the Great Lakes states — Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio — and national organizations working in those states. It also supports peer-to-peer voter engagement among students, campus voter outreach, and nonprofits that provide students with accurate local information about voter registration and the voting process.
“We need to provide student voters with accurate information about how to participate and have resources in place if they encounter barriers,” Davis told me. “We also need to make sure this information reaches all students — not just traditional four-year residential colleges and universities, but satellite campuses, community colleges, trade schools and other institutions that often don’t get the same attention or resources.”
Davis heralded the work of two groups. One is the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition, a network of nonpartisan national organizations providing direct support, training and materials to student groups and campuses to boost voter engagement. The other is the Fair Elections Center, which uses litigation and advocacy to remove barriers to voting and works with campus communities through its Campus Vote Project.
“We want to bust the myth about the so-called enthusiasm gap,” Davis said. “Young people are incredibly engaged, and they often have a broader view than older generations of what counts as ‘civic engagement.’ It’s time we acknowledge, celebrate and heed the many ways young people engage.”
Latino Community Foundation: Making the political personal
The Latino Community Foundation (LCF) has a mission “to unleash the power of Latinos in California.” It seeks to cultivate a movement of Latino philanthropists, invest in Latino-led organizations, and build civic and political power in a state where residents under 18 make up 22.5% of the population, according to the 2020 Census. “They are the voters of tomorrow, and that is why LCF is committed to investing in community leaders who are unleashing the civic power of our youth,” said Christian Arana, the foundation’s vice president of policy.
Over the last 10 years, LCF has led voter registration campaigns, invested in nonprofits working directly with Latino youth, and utilized social media to make voting relevant. “We have found the way to make voting exciting is by making the political personal,” Arana said.
During the 2018 midterms, LCF invested in grassroots organizations like 99 Rootz, which mobilized Central Valley college students to register to vote, and hosted the only nationally-televised governor’s debate in America at the University of California, Los Angeles.
In 2020, LCF upped its grantmaking to youth-serving organizations working to mobilize college students across the state. The foundation partnered with Univision to host a student town hall on the election and the Census at Cal State Fullerton in Orange County, and worked with other Latino nonprofits and the California Secretary of State to register students and conduct Census outreach at the University of California, Merced. LCF also co-hosted a youth debate watch party at L.A.’s Loyola Marymount University with the PBS NewsHour on the heels of the Democratic presidential debate.
“Through the collective efforts of LCF, its grantees, our Latino Giving Circle Network, and other community partners, youth voter turnout is at record levels,” Arana told me. “As a result of our campaigns, like our #YoVoyAVotar campaign, the turnout of Latino youth voters increased by 200% in the 2018 midterm elections. In the 2020 election, the wave of new and youth voters significantly increased again in places where LCF prioritized funding and outreach. A record 73% of Latino eligible voters are now registered.”
The LCF’s $50 million Latino Power Fund seeks to build on that momentum. “This is an investment into the lifeline of Latino communities: Latino-led grassroots organizations committed to progressive social change,” Arana said.
Ford Foundation: “Always-on” engagement and relationship-building
The Ford Foundation supports several youth-led organizations that are catalyzing civic participation among young people, including the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, Youth Engagement Fund, Funders Collaborative for Youth Organizing, and the Alliance for Youth Organizing.
Manuela Arciniegas, program officer for civic engagement and government at Ford, cited research from grantees like CIRCLE and the Youth Engagement Fund illustrating how engaging youth actively throughout the year and focusing on relationship building is “more effective than one-off approaches timed to election years and helps set people on course for a lifetime of active, meaningful civic participation.”
The foundation aims to translate civic participation into legislative action. “Young people care deeply about civic participation and their communities,” Arciniegas said. “They are often most directly impacted by policy changes and have policy agendas of their own, but are disincentivized and deprioritized by funders and policymakers.” Arciniegas also mentioned other impactful funders and organizations in the field, like the Movement Voter Project, the Libra Foundation’s Democracy Frontlines Fund, EquisLabs, Voto Latino and Valiente Fund.
Foundation for California Community Colleges: Giving students a seat at the table
The Foundation for California Community Colleges, a 501(c)(3) organization that supports the state’s network of community colleges, has a unique spin on the question of student civic engagement. Rather than awarding grants, it offers a menu of student engagement activities, including experiential leadership opportunities in decision-making, focus groups on emerging student programming or system-wide initiatives, and platforms to speak to legislators, government officials, and educational leaders.
Regem Corpuz, the foundation’s student engagement liaison, told me that these activities “allow the student voice and experience to shape initiatives, programming, and support at a systems-wide level, impacting all students in the community college system.” Student engagement work is “ever-changing because the conditions our students face are ever-changing,” Corpuz said, echoing the sentiments of many of the other funders I spoke with. “The foundation strives to be in tune with the changing landscape of higher education, to be responsive and work in the best interest of all our community college students.”