Organizations & Organizing
(More) background on the organizations I founded or co-founded in my career in philanthropy and voting rights.
Table of Contents
Intro
After ending my first job out of college as a tax preparer for H&R Block, a call from my mother about a youth-run foundation to support activism in San Francisco sparked the idea of organizing my peers to try the same in Boston.
I had learned something about organizing from my activist mom who on most days could be found at her desk planning events or raising money for her favorite causes and candidates. I’d also picked up some organizing principles volunteering evenings after a day of H&R Block at a free tax clinic sponsored by Chelsea Fair Share. Fair Share’s leaders, Mark and Barbara Splain, taught me the value offering a service as part of earning trust and providing a chance to meet people who might join your cause. In their case an organization to build power among Chelsea’s low-income residents. It was a lesson I took with me for the rest of my career.
Philanthropy Years - Change not Charity
The Haymarket Foundation and the Funding Exchange
Having grown up more as a volunteer than a leader of campaigns, my first organizing project was the Haymarket People’s Fund. I started out with advice from local faith programs that made grants to community empowerment projects. Their unique approach included actively engaging members of the community in awarding the grants. At that time, I was studying for a master’s degree in American Studies at Goddard College. My final paper became a blueprint for creating a foundation. The Goddard course also inspired its name, one that mixed the activist history I’d learned about the Haymarket Chicago protest for the eight-hour workday and Boston’s iconic 300-year-old Haymarket food market.
I followed the plan I created with my course instructor. First to meet with the traditional Boston foundations like those managed by the Cabots and then grantmaking programs run by activist churches and a fund called Resist. Their ideas were a starting point for us to meet with activists and organizers around Boston and eventually all of New England. Haymarket launched with our first hire, the wise and spirited Janet Axelrod. Not long after its first staff volunteers showed up, my look alight David Crocker and graphic artist Linda Hillyer.
Haymarket and the other alternative community funds that would form across the country sought to create a new generation of donors to support social change philanthropy. Under the banner of “Change not Charity,” we looked to invest in local organizations addressing the root causes of problems and taking steps towards more systemic and lasting solutions for the issues of the day. We hoped that our grants would give these local nonprofits the visibility and credibility that often results from association with the more established foundations.
Among those with inherited wealth that came of age in the social movements of the ’60s and ’70s, there was interest in funding those movements—but given the desire of many to remain anonymous, the challenge was to find them. I remembered the strategy of first offering a service, and found success in organizing gatherings for people with family wealth, providing a safe environment to discuss the personal issues related to coming into such wealth, including the impact on relationships, concerns about where their money came from, and how to have a conversation with their families or financial gatekeepers about using it to support activism.
Haymarket held its first local donor meetings in 1974 in partnership with the American Friends Service Committee. The Quaker network’s own donors had also asked for a personal retreat like this, with the assurances that the meeting would be private and free of fundraising. National gatherings began when our mentor, David Hunter of the Stern Family Fund, convened the donors he advised. Over time, the private meetings grew and would come to include activist leaders and guests who could offer their perspectives on social impact grantmaking. Through our formative years, we sponsored similar workshops and retreats—locally and nationally—that generated like-minded initiatives supporting a national trend towards social change grantmaking.
Along with the change in the types of grants came a shift in decision-making power. We broke from the private trustee model of grantmaking, where grants were approved by a board of family members or related legal and financial professionals, administered by a family office, opting instead for funding boards that would reflect the issues and communities where the grants were being made. It seemed more effective to have local leaders with grassroots organizing experience lead the process, and more in line with our values to have the process itself be an extension of community empowerment.
Haymarket’s founding board included activists like clerical worker Karen Nussbaum, who founded the organization 9to5, later made famous by the movie of the same name and Dolly Parton song; Walter Porter, Chair of the Boston association for minority firefighters; Robert Zevin, a lifelong activist and pioneer in the field of socially responsible investing; and Ann Froines, an advocate for women leaders. This model gave activists the opportunity to be grant makers. Other public foundations with a similar mission soon adopted this approach.
In another break with traditional philanthropy, we went public. Because we were new and had to find new donors to join in our cause, we turned to marketing and outreach. In lieu of TV ads and the Internet, we gained recognition by having a presence at foundation gatherings, as well as publishing Robin Hood Was Right, inspired and edited by author Adam Hochschild. The book, published in 1977, featured our funds and attracted a national audience with appearances on the Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue shows and coverage from the New York Times to Parade magazine, Esquire, and The Wall Street Journal, and more.
In the wake of the publicity, young donors started 15 similar community foundations in areas like Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, and one in Los Angeles, Liberty Hill Foundation, founded by my sister Sarah Pillsbury. As we grew, it became clear that we would benefit from an association. Therefore, we created a national consortium called the Funding Exchange to support the growth of the local funds and to advance the conversation with other foundations around social change philanthropy.
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This is not the history of a single foundation. It is the story of many similar efforts that built a movement to reshape philanthropy and create a community of foundations that shared a common social justice mission. Together we promoted the benefits of strategic grantmaking that sought to advance, over time, longer-term systemic approaches to the issues of the day.
- For a history of the Funding Exchange, see the report Change, not Charity: A pioneer in social justice philanthropy.
Voter Engagement and Voting Rights
Among the foundations and nonprofits I worked with, it was often said that the resources they had were only a fraction of what government could potentially provide.
The long-term success of any nonprofit organization depended on a partnership with a responsive government, both representative and accountable to the communities they served. In other words, a healthy and functioning democracy.
In the 1990s, this trend was going in the wrong direction. Voter turnout hovered at historic lows. More than half of eligible voters didn’t vote in midterms, and even fewer voted in local elections. Most of the absent voters were low-income, young, or first time voters new to the political process.
If the nonprofit sector wanted to strengthen democracy and have their voices heard, one way was to help the people they served to vote.
However, at the time many nonprofits mistakenly believed that their charitable status meant they couldn’t talk to their clients and constituents about voting. The IRS never said that. The Treasury Department only said in a single sentence that 501c3 nonprofits, which most nonprofits are, cannot support or oppose candidates for public office. A sentence was added in the 1950s by then Senator Lyndon Johnson to protect educational and charitable 501c3 nonprofits from the quicksand of partisan politics, thus safeguarding the tax deductions for supporters and their ability to receive foundation and government grants. IRS guidance clearly stated that public 501c3 nonprofits may do any amount of voter registration and education, including helping people participate and vote, as long as they did so on a nonpartisan basis.
The nonprofit sector had largely left untapped their inherent capacity — as trusted messengers, deeply rooted in their local communities — to increase voter participation among the people they served and engaged. They have day-to-day personal contact with potential voters often missed by candidates and campaigns more narrowly focused on attracting already likely voters. What’s more, their non-partisan approach tends to work better with new voters seeking help and information.
BostonVOTE, MassVOTE
After a mid-career year at the Harvard Kennedy School focused on electoral reform, I had my first chance to work at a democracy organization, the Boston-based Commonwealth Coalition. The coalition, originally set up to help progressive reform-oriented candidates run for office, added three nonpartisan programs: one challenging the role of money in state politics, one encouraging people to vote in local elections, and the other to support women’s political leadership. In 1993, I was recruited to run the money and politics program.
One of my first calls was from Emerson College student Malia Lazu, about her effort to hold a concert for democracy on Boston Common, the city’s downtown public park. Malia had heard about the concert I’d helped produce, headlined by Bob Marley, to benefit freedom movements in South Africa. When the city turned down her request for a permit because it feared problems with a multiracial audience, she volunteered to work for us at the coalition, and was soon directing the “Voter Power” initiative.
We shared our disillusion with the state of politics, particularly its troubled history of racial bias. Too often, election outcomes were decided in primaries in districts designed to favor mostly white incumbents. On Election Day voters had few, if any, choices on the ballot, and too little reason to vote.
Malia and I met with Boston nonprofit and foundation leaders about a pilot program specifically focused on training nonprofits to integrate nonpartisan voter and civic participation into programs they already offered. We hoped that this civic venture would bring higher turnout and might encourage more candidates to run, despite the odds, resulting in more competitive elections.
Voter Power Becomes Boston VOTE
We renamed Voter Power, Boston Vote. Starting in Boston, we recruited a board of nonprofit leaders from the city’s lower turnout neighborhoods, including Kim Janey who, two decades later, would become the city’s first African American and woman mayor — herself a reflection of a changing political landscape.
Boston VOTE grew on the strength of its nonprofit outreach. By our second year, we had signed up more than 120 nonprofits serving the low turnout neighborhoods, including Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan, and Allston/Brighton. Boston VOTE reached out to service providers, neighborhood development organizations, advocacy organizations, community health centers, and the like to offer our nonpartisan voter engagement training.
We made a special effort to engage youth through our own Young Civic Leaders program which offered paid internships for high school students to work with local nonprofits and scheduled time to learn about lawmaking at the state house and city hall.
Many of our early partners developed their own voting initiatives, including Dunk the Vote: A multi-faceted civic empowerment group that had its start registering young black voters at youth basketball competitions. They went on to partner with us on a voter registration canvass called “Knock Across Boston.”
- Mass Council for Human Service Providers: A founding partner, it had its own Care VOTE program to encourage human services employees, clients, consumers, board members and friends to register and vote.
- Chinese Progressive Association (CPA): CPA tripled neighborhood turnout in its first city election. It became an advocate for fair redistricting and translation for ballots and for city hall hearings so all residents could fully participate.
- Codman Square Health Center: One of the first health centers to participate in voter engagement. It used dedicated volunteers and staff to offer voter registration on site and at community events.
- Madison Park Community Development Corporation: It hosted Rox Vote, a coalition of Roxbury-based organizations to help residents register and vote, host candidate forums, and promote youth civic leadership.
- Mass Immigration and Refugee Advocacy Coalition: MIRA registered new voters at citizenship ceremonies and supported civic engagement and advocacy in partnership with its 130 organizational members, many of which also worked with MassVOTE.
- Chelsea Human Services: An early partner, it organized community canvasses to promote voting and recruited young poll workers. Today the city’s large Latino population is fully represented on its city council and school committee.
- Boston Election Department: We partnered on efforts to provide voter education in lower turnout areas and eventually came to sit on their community advisory board.
A Civic Uprising
More Voters
- Turnout rose in city and state elections for each of our first five years in the 12 Boston neighborhoods with historically lowest voter participation.
- Turnout growth averaged 30 percentage points compared to only 4% in the neighborhoods with already higher turnout.
More Candidates
As turnout rose in the city’s more diverse neighborhoods, so did the diversity of candidates. For the first time, in 2004 Boston elected a Latino candidate, Felix D. Arroyo, for a City Council at-large seat. The Boston Globe called it “an unprecedented leap in voting by minorities in Boston.”
The next year, Cape Verdean candidate Andrea Cabral became Boston’s sheriff. “Coming on the heels of last year’s victory by city councilor Arroyo, it signals a shifting landscape in Boston’s voting public. … a new era in Boston politics.” –Boston Herald
Boston VOTE Becomes MassVOTE
As interest grew in other cities such as Brockton, Lowell, Lawrence, and Worcester, we changed our name to MassVOTE and expanded our work statewide on voting and voting rights.
- Civic Engagement Initiative: A collaboration, first with Boston foundations, grew to make grants to nonprofits for voter outreach in several metro areas in every region. Nonprofit participants tracked the people they contacted to evaluate their impact on turnout of new and infrequent voters.
- Census and Redistricting: A collaboration with our largest statewide partners to increase census participation and monitor drawing of new election districts.
- Voter Access and Fair Elections: In 2000, Massachusetts lacked options many states already had to vote early, use online registration, or let voters correct an error in their registration when they went to vote. To address these issues, we joined with nonpartisan organizations like the League of Women Voters, Common Cause, the Lawyers for Civil Rights, and the Mass Public Interest Group to form what became the Election Modernization Coalition. The coalition won a series of reforms including Early Voting, expanding mail voting, online voter registration, automatic voter registration, and allowing 16 and 17 year olds to pre-register to vote.
- Taking on Racial Gerrymandering in Boston and other Cities: We weren’t lawyers, and had no plans to make our first foray into voting rights with a lawsuit, but when confronted with evidence of racial gerrymandering in Boston we took on the challenge. We had recently decided to purchase newly available redistricting software in order to monitor the make-up of the new 2002 district lines which the legislature was about to draw for Congress and themselves. We invited an attorney from the Lawyers for Civil Rights Boston to help us discuss its impact on the Boston neighborhoods where we were working. The story became one of racial gerrymandering in Boston, a federal lawsuit by black voters, the indictment and disbarment of the House speaker and, ultimately, justice for the targeted communities. (For the full story)
- We continued our collaboration with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights to challenge biased voting methods in Springfield and Lowell. For decades their winner-take-all, at-large voting method allowed a small group of white voters to retain full control of the City Council and School Committee. As a result, voters in a few neighborhoods determined the outcome of most all municipal seats, who got hired for city jobs, and which neighborhoods received services. In both cities, the plaintiffs we represented won their case for fair elections. (For more)
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With thanks to Avi Green and Cheryl Clyburn Crawford who took over leadership of Mass VOTE in 2005. For more about its current work, visit its website.
Nonprofit VOTE
In the Beginning
I had no immediate plans to replicate the work of MassVOTE in more states, but others did. In 2005 I was approached by friends Marcia Avner and Jon Pratt of the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits, who ran a similar statewide program for their members. They suggested we work together to create a national initiative that other states could join. It happened to coincide with a call from the San Francisco Tides Foundation’s Catalina Ruiz-Healy, offering MassVOTE $50,000 to start similar initiatives in Oakland and other cities and states. This was followed by another grant, again unsolicited, from the Funding Exchange to do the same in New Mexico and Pittsburgh.
- When it Comes to Voting Rights, Philanthropy Needs to Act Like Every Day Is Election Day
What soon made it possible to reach out to the nonprofit sector nationally was a $100,000 renewable grant from Geri Mannion, Managing Director of Strengthening U.S. Democracy at the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Geri had long wanted a national initiative to tap into what she saw as the “sleeping giant” of the growing nonprofit sector to increase voter turnout among underrepresented communities and strengthen democracy. She believed, as we did, that harnessing the everyday contact that community-based nonprofits had with people less likely to vote could increase their likelihood to vote and to encourage their family and friends to do the same.
Activating the Nonprofit Sector
With offices in Minnesota and Boston, we reached out to other state nonprofit conveners to see if they’d join what we then called the Nonprofit Voter Engagement Network or NVEN. At the same time, we started to develop a strategy for what it would take to reach and engage a national audience.
State Partners
Nonprofit associations in Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Maine, and Louisiana were among the first to join NVEN, followed by nonprofit networks in Arizona and Greater Pittsburgh. We began to hold annual meetings for members to hone our trainings and to strategize how we could grow the network nationally. Among the most memorable was the 2008 meeting held in New Orleans. We were inspired not only by the city’s ongoing fight to recover from Hurricane Katrina, but by our irrepressible state host, Ashley Herad of the Louisiana Alliance for Nonprofits. Throughout the retreat, as we moved through the city’s streets, she made us circle up and take a knee to double our commitment to move forward.
As more states came on board, a diverse subset of state partners joined a field program to evaluate our approach and impact. Each partner identified and managed a cohort of local community-based nonprofits to register voters and collect voter pledge cards onsite or at their events. They would track who registered and/or signed a pledge to vote. The data allowed us to measure our impact and draw lessons to share in our webinars and trainings.
National Partners
Soon, our first national networks began to join, led by the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities, a long-standing national network of settlement houses, neighborhood centers, human service agencies, and grassroots organizations focused on economic empowerment and neighborhood engagement. The second was the National Association of Community Health Clinics. Initiated by its advocacy director, Marc Wetherhorn. It established the Community Health Vote Program, with voter engagement resources and guidance shared with its 1,200 community health centers. They were followed by national partners like Goodwill Industries, Feeding America, and YWCA, all agreeing to incorporate voter engagement into their communications strategies and to promote our monthly webinars and online resources to their local and state affiliates.
Our national growth accelerated with the support of sector leaders like Tim Delaney and the National Council of Nonprofits, which convened state associations in the 50 states, and Diana Aviv and the advocacy team at the Independent Sector (IS), with its membership of national nonprofit networks and foundations. It was at an IS conference that we met Steve Taylor, vice president of United Way Worldwide. He asked us to create a voter engagement toolkit tailored for local United Ways. Their director of advocacy and policy, Lindsay Torrico, joined our leadership council. Sector convenors like the Council on Foundations and the Regional Associations of Grantmakers (now called the United Philanthropy Forum) also joined. We saw the results, as more of their affiliates signed up for a webinar training, joined us on National Voter Registration Day, and invited us to present at their national conference.
Partnerships with Election Officials
In 2009, we were invited by the National Association of Secretaries of State and soon after the National Association of State Election Directors to be an official partner for the nonprofit sector. Their staff and members valued the nonpartisan guidance and training we gave nonprofits. We found our commitment to nonpartisanship opened doors, not just to the Secretaries of State, but to a wide variety of state and national partnerships and initiatives – the largest of which was National Voter Registration Day, and how we became one of the event’s founders and its primary manager.
National Voter Registration Day: A Celebration of Democracy
In 2012, Nonprofit VOTE joined the leading nonpartisan voter registration organizations to establish National Voter Registration Day. Celebrated on the fourth Tuesday of every September, it quickly gained momentum as a nonpartisan civic holiday celebrating our democracy. Each year, organizations, volunteers, and local election offices “hit the streets”—online and in the field—in a single day of coordinated field, technology, and media efforts. Support for the day comes from the largest nonpartisan registration groups as well as media companies like Google, Reddit, MTV, Tumblr, and Facebook, and thousands of grassroots community partners. Along with the sponsors, 4,589 community partners signed up in 2020, recruiting 31,474 volunteers to conduct drives and stage events. That year, more than 1.6 million voters registered or updated their registration on National Voter Registration Day.
Trainings and Resources
The Trainings
When we started, most nonprofits lacked practical advice on what they could do to help people vote and educate candidates on their issues. Our web and in-person trainings clarified the ban on partisan activities, like endorsing a candidate or telling people who to vote for. They then highlighted the common nonpartisan activities nonprofits could undertake around elections to help people participate and vote.
The trainings would also feature the benefits of doing voter engagement for the nonprofit and communities they served, and strategies to help them imagine how they could integrate this into their ongoing services and outreach without inventing another program.
The Resources
Perhaps my greatest contribution in my years at Nonprofit VOTE was creating the basic materials and resources that became the foundation of our guidance and trainings. I had help from leading experts in the field, most notably our attorney John Pomeranz, and Greg Colvin, former co-chair of the American Bar Association Subcommittee on Political and Lobbying Activities of Exempt Organizations. Our online resources and monthly web trainings are accessed by nonprofits year round in all 50 states.
The Evaluation of Impact: Measuring How Nonprofits Help People Vote
Every year, Nonprofit VOTE sees an increase in the number of nonprofits accessing our resources and signing up for its trainings, with resulting increases in voter engagement in those communities. A 2021 survey by the Urban Institute (see "America's Nonprofits Get Out the Vote" for more) found that one in five of the nation’s 875,000 registered nonprofits now offer voter registration and education.
It’s important to also learn more about who they are reaching and if it is helping increase voter participation. To find out, starting in 2012, Nonprofit VOTE enlisted a diverse set of state partners to manage a cohort of local nonprofits to track their voter engagement.
The participating nonprofits logged the people they registered to vote or who signed a voter pledge card and discussed their plan to vote. State voter files allowed us to do an independent analysis of the demographics and turnout rates of those we contacted to all other registered voters in the same area. The findings have consistently shown:
- The people the nonprofits reach are disproportionately younger (ages 18-25), lower income, and black, hispanic, or of color.
- The voter turnout for those we contacted varies from 5-15 points higher for the nonprofit voters, compared to all others. Nonprofits have had their largest impact on raising turnout in midterms.
- Turnout increases are highest among those least expected to vote, based on their demographics and voting history.
Voter Turnout Trends and Voting and Elections Policy
Our partners were also interested in turnout trends and the impact of election policies. Has voter turnout gone up? What states are highest and what states are lowest?
After our first national election in 2006, Nonprofit VOTE partnered with the U. S. Elections Project, the official source of state and national turnout, to research and publish "America Goes to the Polls." The report, issued after each national presidential or mid-term election, tracks the change in national turnout over time. It ranks the 50 states in percentage of voter turnout and correlates that to state election policies. (See 2018 and 2020 editions).
In every national election, the most consistent finding has been the wide differences in voter turnout between states that make it easier or harder to vote. Voter turnout is 10-20 points lower in the states that cut off voter registration four weeks before the election and/or make it harder to use mail ballots or early voting. In contrast, states with the highest turnout have same-day voter registration and convenient options to vote early.
For a closer look at these and other pro-voter polices, visit our Democracy's Top Ten page, a list of election policies that give voters a better and more equal opportunity to cast a ballot and have it count.
Moving Forward
Recently, in spite of restrictive voting laws and a pandemic, voter turnout reached its highest level in 100 years in the 2018 midterm and 2020 presidential election. The reaction to a polarizing president was one reason. Greater mobilization and turnout among voters often overlooked by campaigns was another. MassVOTE and Nonprofit VOTE were glad to be part of this, along with their partners and other similar efforts dedicated to helping people register and vote.
Record turnout has brought a new wave of partisan laws in states with a history of voter suppression, to make it harder to vote. Organizations like Nonprofit VOTE and MassVOTE will continue to support community-based efforts to help people navigate and oppose any added restrictions meant to disenfranchise voters.
At the same time our partners advocate not only to vote but also for elections policies that reflect the fundamental principles of what it means to be a democracy - like the ten policies featured in the on our Democracy's Top Ten page. Time-tested policies almost every advance democracy has in some form, as do many of our states.
In my view, the greatest lesson of the era we are in is that we can’t as a nation address the larger social and economic challenges of the day without an elected government that is both functional and a representative democracy. We need leadership that makes it possible to create and maintain polices that ensure every citizen has unimpeded access to the vote and a system that offers meaningful choices and ensures representation. The ten election policies featured in the Voting and Democracy page may not solve every problem, but they can provide a foundation to move forward and build upon; as many states have already done.