In 2017, IP’s Tate Williams spoke with organizer, trainer, previous IP guest contributor and Chorus Foundation founder and president Farhad Ebrahimi, who was a little less than four years into overseeing the grantmaker’s spend-down.
Ebrahimi incorporated the foundation in 2006 with money that he received from his parents — and he never envisioned it would exist forever. In his conversation with Williams, he framed the spend-down as part of a larger vision to create a future “where foundations don’t exist as we think of them now, because we don’t accumulate huge piles of capital and then have small numbers of people decide what should happen with it.”
When I spoke with Ebrahimi via Zoom in mid-August, the Chorus Foundation was no more, having disbursed approximately $60 million from 2013 to 2023 to help organizations build political, economic and cultural power. As one would expect, he was in a reflective mood.
“I was a person who had been in this tremendously privileged and powerful situation, and thought, ‘I want to handle this differently,” he said. But spending down, in and of itself, is “a moral decision — it’s not necessarily a strategic decision.” If a spend-down is going to be strategic, it has to leave organizations less reliant on philanthropy than when the process began. The foundation also positioned grantee leaders as strategic partners throughout the spend-down and distributed funding through participatory grantmaking.
The experience left Ebrahimi, an outspoken, self-proclaimed “philanthropy abolitionist” whom IP Editor David Callahan named one of philanthropy’s most powerful heirs in 2022, all the more convinced that grantmakers should return power to the communities they serve, disburse unrestricted support and have that potentially charged conversation about turning off the lights.
“Spending down is such a wonky tactic,” he said. “It’s about taking a particular kind of financial structure and taking it through a particular trajectory. But if we can connect that to a transformational way of thinking about being in community, I think it can make the nuts and bolts stuff a lot easier to wrestle with.”
Embracing a “just transition”
Ebrahimi is the son of refugees. His father, Farhad, is Iranian and his mother, Mary, was born in Cuba. “The way they talked about their experiences had a huge influence on me,” he said. Their displacement underscored how “community self-determination was undermined by outside interventions in both of those countries.”
Growing up, Ebrahimi described himself as the “punk rock, kind of black sheep of the family. We never really butted heads, but being a leftie straight out of central casting, I gave my parents a hard time about all kinds of things.” He also grappled with “some confusing class circumstances when I was very young.”
Before Ebrahimi was a teenager, he was gifted money by his parents. It was a substantial sum, as the elder Farhad was the co-owner and CEO of the software company Quark, which was founded by philanthropist Tim Gill. “Because of this line of inquiry that my parents’ politics set down,” Ebrahimi said, ‘I thought, ‘This isn’t mine.’”
He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002 with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics with computer science. He endured a somewhat steep learning curve after incorporating the Chorus Foundation when he was in his late 20s. For starters, he never felt comfortable with the number on the foundation’s balance sheet. And while Ebrahimi was exposed to philanthropy through his parents — they supported a program studying the Iranian diaspora at the elder Ebrahimi’s alma mater, the University of California, Los Angeles — he didn’t have extensive experience in the nuts and bolts of private foundation grantmaking.
As a result, Ebrahimi initially took what he called “a more conventional approach” to philanthropy in the Chorus Foundation’s nascent years. He and his board picked a single issue, climate, and their strategy, on the whole, mirrored what their peers were doing at the time.
Over time, however, Ebrahimi said his “head learned what the heart already knew — this is not a question of policy or savvy PR, but one of power — political, economic and cultural power,” As a result, the foundation adopted what it called “a just transition to a regenerative economy” to build “new bases of political, economic and cultural power for systemic change.”
The term “just transition” has its roots in organized labor and was embraced by leaders in the environmental justice movement to ensure that the economy breaks from fossil fuel reliance in a way that doesn’t further concentrate wealth and power or leave workers jobless. The Chorus Foundation applied this just transition lens to support organizations building “an economy in which everyone can find meaningful work; an environment in which everyone has access to clean air, clean water, and a stable climate; and a democracy in which everyone has a say.”
The foundation’s grants database assigned grants to an “approach.” These approaches include Allies and Key Projects, Collaboration and Movement Building, Research, Cultural Organizing, Direct Action and Training, and Just Transition. The latter approach applies to four focus communities of Alaska; Eastern Kentucky; Buffalo, New York; and Richmond, California
Addressing grantee concerns
Over time, Ebrahimi came to view Chorus Foundation’s spend-down through the “just transition” lens, with the aim of shifting economic power to grantee organizations.
Not all of the foundation’s partners were initially on board with the sunsetting plan. “We got a lot of positive feedback, otherwise we wouldn’t have done it,” Ebrahimi said. “But we did get some folks who challenged us with tough questions, like, ‘What are you leaving behind in the philanthropic sector? What are fundraising opportunities going to look like when you’re gone? What’s the dependency on private gift or investment capital going to look like?’”
What’s interesting about Ebrahimi’s rendering is that it suggests that organizations often share trustees’ concerns about a foundation spending down. “I appreciated those conversations the most,” Ebrahimi said, “because they helped us make it a strategic spend-down, so it wasn’t just like, ‘The rich kid gets to ride off into the sunset without his money.”
Like other sunsetting foundations I’ve profiled, the Chorus Foundation’s to-do list included moving the endowment into more conservative investments, increasing its annual payout, distributing unrestricted support, bringing some new grantees on board, and dialing back funding for others. Spend-downs can be top-down affairs, and I was particularly struck by how the Chorus Foundation democratized its decision-making across its four focus communities by rolling out a participatory grantmaking process and co-designing various tacks, strategies and processes with grantees and community leaders.
“These experiments allowed our grantees to exercise their muscles for collective governance of financial resources,” Ebrahimi said, “and these experiences set them up to take a leadership role in determining how power would eventually be handed over entirely when we finally stepped down.”
Criteria for a “strategic” spend-down
If it wasn’t obvious by this point, Ebrahimi isn’t the biggest fan of the perpetual foundation. Setting aside some funders’ colossal wealth and the ways it’s not being put to use, Ebrahimi also questioned how and why their money was acquired in the first place.
“Perpetuity of private philanthropy, to me, is the ossification of the extraction of capital and the exploitation of labor,” he said. “You cannot escape the legacy that the reason the money is there for Ford or MacArthur or Chorus, as much as we try to be good funders, is because there were individuals or families who benefited from the extraction and exploitation of others.” As a result, Ebrahimi believes it’s incumbent on funders to get their money into the hands of communities historically affected by that exploitation.
He also argued that the case for spending down must be complemented with policy interventions — “everything from tax laws and payouts to how donor-advised funds are structured, all in the context of, ‘Are we really shifting the way our economy works, how people get compensated for their labor, what taxes look like?’” These actions, he said, “would be steps toward building a world where the Fords or the MacArthurs would be required, through democratic decision-making, to take some of the same steps that folks like [the time-limited] Fund for Democratic Communities or Chorus or Kataly Foundation took or are taking voluntarily.”
But again, the sheer act of deciding to sunset doesn’t constitute a strategic win. Ebrahimi and Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, co-director of the Highlander Research and Education Center, elaborated on this idea in an article, titled “We Need a Strategy for Spending Down,” in the Winter 2024 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Any discussion about that decision, they argued, should consider a set of criteria, such as whether the spend-down will enable organizations to raise money from other sources and allow the foundation to support urgent work in a way that’s commensurate to that urgency.
During our call, Ebrahimi also envisioned a movement that would essentially encourage specific foundations to spend down. Such a movement could be led by organizations and aligned funders, or it could involve the creation of a new infrastructure and campaigns to promote strategic spend-downs. “For any of these approaches, though, the first step would be for a critical mass of folks in both movements and philanthropy to align around a shared agenda for the philanthropic sector,” he said.
That’s a tough ask. Funding leaders don’t want to be told, however gently, that their embrace of perpetuity isn’t necessarily the right call. “It’s hard for folks,” he said. “There are wealthy individuals and families that have tried to get good at giving for their entire professional lives.” A pro-spend- down movement also asks foundation staff to support a plan that puts them out of work, and while other leaders at sunsetting foundations have adroitly addressed this issue with protracted and extensive transparency, it’s the kind of conversation that many trustees would rather avoid.
Having thoughtfully shepherded the Chorus Foundation’s spend-down while understanding how many trustees operate, Ebrahimi is clear-eyed about his peers’ willingness to shutter their doors. But he also believes the moment requires that he continue to make the case to his former peers on the funding side of the equation.
Spending down “is not just a hip new thing for funders; it’s not like the woke litmus test,” he said. “It’s’ a tool for liberation if used correctly — and it’s also a total clusterfuck disaster if done inappropriately. So while there’s nothing about it that’s inherently good, it can be part of something that’s truly transformational.”
