In 2015, the Carnegie Corporation of New York made a grant to the National Academy of Sciences earmarked for studying voting and election security issues. Geri Mannion, the managing director of the corporation’s Strengthening U.S. Democracy program, sat in on some of the academy’s meetings.
“It was a who’s who of election security experts — ballot designers, demographers, political scientists — and they were worried about bad actors from within and outside the country penetrating voting systems,” Mannion told me in a July conversation. “There was money to address these concerns at the federal level, but it’s a big country, and that funding could only do so much.”
The anecdote underscores Carnegie’s interest in funding touchpoints on what Mannion calls the “voter engagement continuum.” Guided by the belief that engaged citizens must be cultivated over time, Carnegie’s democracy support flows to organizations focused on issues like civic education, census turnout and voter registration, as well as those that instill trust in underlying institutions, like voting security and electoral reform. The corporation is also zeroing in on combating polarization, cognizant that its civic engagement grantmaking will only go so far if a toxic climate alienates individuals from the political process and their fellow citizens.
Another hallmark for the corporation’s democracy grantmaking is the acknowledgement that cultivating civic engagement is a marathon, not a sprint. Nonprofits have long lamented how funders award grants in the frantic run-up to an election. But at that point, Mannion said, “it’s usually too late to make a difference.” Instead of shoveling money out the door in the 11th hour, Carnegie moved approximately $20 million in democracy funding across the previous two fiscal years (the current one ends September 30).
“There’s always more money coming in during an election year, but then funders retreat,” Mannion said. “People sometimes forget that the election isn’t the endpoint.” In an election that some in the sector are positioning as a make-or-break moment for American democracy, and one in which concerns over political violence and toxic polarization have only been heightened by the July 13 attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life, here’s a look at what one well-established democracy philanthropy is working on right now.
Civic education, participation and integration
The corporation’s grantmaking across the voter engagement continuum begins long before potential voters turn 18. “Carnegie has always been a big proponent of educating people about the importance of being an engaged citizen,” said Mannion, who began overseeing the U.S. Democracy program in 1998.
There have been some bumps in the road along the way. Mannion noted that in some school districts, cash-strapped administrators have dialed back civics education in favor of more STEM teaching. In an effort to counter these headwinds, in March, the corporation published a white paper, “Connecting Civic Education and a Healthy Democracy,” calling for greater investment in civics and documenting how cross-ideological coalitions are expanding civic learning.
Working at the confluence of education and democracy has long been a focus for Carnegie (the two issue areas map onto two of the corporation’s main programmatic areas), but there are also plenty of ways Carnegie is directly providing non-partisan support to organizations securing voting rights and getting people to the ballot box.
Since the Supreme Court’s landmark 2013 decision in Shelby v. Holder, which invalidated a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, dramatically reducing the federal government’s ability to curtail discriminatory voting practices in the states, Carnegie has supported a voting rights litigation working group housed at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which includes the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Asian Americans Advancing Justice and the Native American Rights Fund. Last December, the corporation awarded the fund a two-year, $2 million grant earmarked for core support of the working group.
The corporation’s also backed the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund, which facilitates Latino participation in the American political process. According to the corporation’s grants database, it’s given the fund at least eight grants totaling $3.4 million since 2004, including a three-year, $800,000 general operating support grant in 2022.
The daughter of Irish immigrants, Mannion referenced the Four Freedoms Fund, which embodies the corporation’s long-standing interest in helping immigrants integrate. Launched in 2003 with Mannion’s assistance, the funding collaborative is housed at NEO Philanthropy and supports state-based and regional immigrant-serving coalitions. The corporation has given the fund at least $75 million since 2008, including last December’s two-year, $5.2 million grant for core support.
Making voting easier and more accessible
Carnegie also funds organizations working to reform and modernize components of the civic architecture. Mannion mentioned two grantees in this space, both of which the corporation helped to stand up.
The State Infrastructure Fund, another funder collaborative housed at NEO Philanthropies, finances voting rights litigation and grassroots voter engagement. The second organization, the Brennan Center for Justice, is a nonpartisan policy institute that addresses weaknesses in American democracy through efforts to reform democratic institutions. Two years ago, the corporation gave the center a three-year, $700,000 grant for core support.
Mannion highlighted the Brennan Center’s advocacy for reforms that bring more people into the voting process, like automatic voter registration and drop-off voting, and reeled off other promising reforms, like ranked-choice voting, open primaries and nonpartisan redistricting processes, that can serve as a bulwark against gerrymandering. “In general,” Mannion said, “most people are dissatisfied with the current electoral system, and they’d like to see something different.”
For proof, look no further than the 2020 election, which had the century’s highest turnout and offered a case study in how philanthropic funders could contribute to efforts to make voting easier and more accessible. “We could always have that level of availability,” Mannion said. Less than four years later, however, some states have rolled back pandemic-era reforms, reflecting the continued divisiveness of anything around the fundamental issue voting in our charged political climate.
“One of the biggest issues is that voting seems to be polarizing,” she said. “It used to be something that both parties were proud to support. The last time the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized, it was signed by huge majorities in the Senate and House, and by George W. Bush. I don’t see how that could happen nowadays, and I think it’s very disappointing.”
Preparing for November 5
Mannion’s opening anecdote about sitting in on meetings with election security experts illustrates yet another dimension of Carnegie’s democracy grantmaking — ensuring the integrity of elections. If lack of confidence in the system makes voters stay home on election day, the engagement continuum breaks down.
Mannion, who I spoke to prior to the assassination attempt on Trump, called the upcoming election “the first major election where God only knows where things are going to come from.” She pointed to three grantees poised to confront potential threats and “bring things back down to a normal temperature so people can engage in their civic duty.”
The first, Protect Democracy, aims to ensure election integrity through litigation, media coverage and election monitoring. The corporation gave the organization an 18-month, $300,000 general support grant in March. Three months later, it awarded the Campaign Legal Center a two-year, $300,000 general support grant. Established in 2002, the center is a nonpartisan organization that “employs litigation, policy advocacy and strategic communications to protect and expand Americans’ democratic participation rights.”
Campaign Legal Center is addressing a worry that’s keeping Mannion and other democracy funders up at night — how AI can influence elections. Mannion mentioned she came across a story showing how Arizona officials ran a series of tests using AI and deepfakes to see how the technology could promote conspiracy theories before and during the 2024 election. “You can’t tell if it’s real or fake,” she said, “and it’s easy to see how this technology can be manipulated around the election.”
A third Carnegie grantee focused on mitigating election-related disruption is the Trusted Elections Fund. Launched in 2019 as a fiscally sponsored project of the New Venture Fund, it’s a nonpartisan, pooled donor fund that addresses issues that arise during elections. For example, it provides rapid response funding to grantees confronted with election or personal security issues. In March, the corporation awarded the fund a 15-month, $500,000 grant for core support.
Combating polarization
Last year, Dame Louise Richardson became the Carnegie Corporation’s first female president, following an interim period after the 2021 passing of longtime president Vartan Gregorian. In April, Richardson, who had spent 14 years in Europe before returning to the U.S. to lead the corporation, told my colleague Connie Matthiessen that she was shocked to see how political polarization intensified during her absence.
“I think polarization is altogether worse here and it threatens everything we try to accomplish,” Richardson said. “So at Carnegie, I have sought to introduce polarization as the lens through which we look at our grantmaking.”
In January, the corporation listed a tranche of grants to “fortify our democracy by strengthening forces of social cohesion and reducing political polarization in American society.” Mannion cited one of the recipient organizations during our conversation, the Trust for Civic Life. A grantmaking collaborative that receives support from the Omidyar Network, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the trust funds organizations strengthening civic life in regions that haven’t traditionally received substantial philanthropic support, such as Central Appalachia, the Black Belt and tribal lands.
Mannion said she’s “excited” about the trust because it’s crafting a refreshing counternarrative about the state of civic discourse in the country. The trust shows that there’s so much energy and leadership out there, and people are not as polarized at the ground level as you may be led to believe,” she said. “You see people helping each other out and not asking what their political leanings are before they do it.”
Mannion’s optimism is tempered by the fact that after spending 36 years at the corporation and 26 running its U.S. Democracy program, funding for democracy and associated lines of work — reducing barriers to voting, ensuring election integrity, dialing back polarization — remains a niche area. “I would say, writ large, that democracy is very underfunded,” she said.
To her point, IP found that grantmaking related to democracy and civic engagement accounts for roughly half of 1% to 1.5% of total giving, with some commentators attributing the figure to donors’ fear that their giving could be perceived as political. A Democracy Fund report released early this year put the figure lower, at around 0.7% of total grantmaking in 2022, although those findings also noted a significant increase in overall giving (between 42% and 61%) in the four years prior.
It’s also possible that some donors look at grantmakers like Carnegie, with its decades of experience and approximately $4 billion in net assets, and decide to stay in their lane, perhaps believing that the civic engagement space is sufficiently covered.
But these aren’t normal times, and Mannion hopes funders will scrutinize the status quo. “If you’re a healthcare funder or an environmental funder, you should be a civic engagement funder,” Mannion said. “It should be done across the country because frankly, voting and engagement should be a priority for every issue-based group. It shouldn’t just be left up to those of us at the national level.”
