When MacKenzie Scott published her first big list of grants back in 2020, one category that caught our eye was the $55 million she donated to bridge divides and promote empathy. Bridge-building work is an interesting corner of philanthropy, one where many of the same funders show up time and again. It also speaks to one of the most fraught questions facing the social sector: what can philanthropy do, if anything, to weave the nation’s civic fabric back together?
In her most recent grant drop, Scott returned to bridge-building work with a $4 million contribution to a funder collaborative called the New Pluralists. Launched roughly a year ago, the collaborative has drawn together many of the nation’s leading funders dedicated to this cause. It also recently released an RFP for what it calls its “first major public investment in the field”: a total of $10 million for community-based work to address division. The grants are a major first step toward the New Pluralists’ long-term goal of moving $100 million to achieve its aims over the next decade.
What exactly are those aims? As of right now, they’ve been defined in loose terms. The collaborative makes a point of acknowledging the complexity of its task, and has spent significant time and resources assembling a large panel of nonprofit “field builders” to help shape its strategy. It cites a few pillars: narrative change and storytelling, opportunities for people to connect across differences, and building the field.
The kind of bridge-building the New Pluralists are pursuing cannot be faulted for its nobility and high-mindedness. And there’s a sense in which this work reflects a core contention of the American social sector — that voluntary civic association and a healthy democracy are mutually reinforcing.
But you also have to wonder — does this stuff ever really work? Can philanthropic gifts offer much of a bulwark against the tide of polarization engulfing U.S. society? Is the New Pluralists’ grantmaking strategy, focused for now on local ways to directly reduce civic division, the right path to take? And underlying it all, does bridge-building risk prioritizing a polite “civility” over actually dealing with injustice?
Who are the New Pluralists?
It won’t be a surprise to hear that the New Pluralist collaborative got its start while President Donald Trump was in the White House. As Einhorn Collaborative Executive Director Jenn Hoos Rothberg tells it, a cross-ideological group of funders came together for an exploratory meeting in February 2020, interested in doing more to “walk the talk” on bridging the nation’s divides. They included Einhorn as well as the Charles Koch Institute, the Fetzer Institute, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
The grantmakers explored the idea for a year, and gathered numerous nonprofit field leaders and additional funding partners along the way. The collaborative’s hard launch came in May 2021, with 10 funders then on the books. That number has since expanded to 12. As one might expect, it’s an ideologically diverse list.
Stalwart bridge-building funders have joined in force, including Einhorn, Hewlett and Fetzer, as well as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund on the more progressive side. There’s also Stand Together Trust (formerly the Charles Koch Institute), Acton Family Giving, the Klarman Family Foundation, the Lubetzky Family Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Schultz Family Foundation, the Aronson Family Foundation and the Walmart Foundation.
The final three, along with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, are affiliate partners that agree to commit at least $250,000 a year to the collaborative, “preferably for at least two years.” The rest are governing partners that have agreed to contribute $1 million a year for two to three years. Collectively, these governing partners play an active role in shaping the New Pluralists’ funding strategy — though all partners agree to provide general support.
Note that the New Pluralists doesn’t count Scott and her husband Dan Jewett among their governing partners, even though I believe their gift was the collaborative’s largest so far. Note also the prominence of family philanthropy in the mix, a fact that the funders appear to embrace. Religion and spirituality is another theme, and several on the list fund in that lane, including Fetzer and John Templeton. The collaborative’s executive director Uma Viswanathan has a progressive-leaning philanthropic background, with previous program officer roles at Robert Wood Johnson and Kellogg.
“Getting real about pluralism”
The collaborative has been pretty quiet on the funding front since its launch a year ago. But this isn’t the first time it has delved into grantmaking. An experimentation and collaboration fund, launched in 2021, has backed a number of organizations on the New Pluralists’ list of field builders, places like The People’s Supper, the Center for Rural Strategies, Millions of Conversations, and the Millennial Action Project.
“At first blush, pluralism can be a fuzzy and abstract concept that feels intangible and hard to act upon,” Viswanathan wrote in a March update. “So in 2022, we’re going to be focused on getting real about pluralism.”
Part of that involves an interdisciplinary literature review and an ethnographic storytelling project (whether those constitute “getting real” I’ll leave up to the reader). But the biggest item on the collaborative’s agenda right now is its $10 million community grant opportunity, for which it’s currently accepting applications.
This is local funding, first and foremost. Grants ranging in size from $100,000 to $500,000 will go to groups with “trust and credibility” in local communities, with an emphasis on locations where divisiveness is on the rise. The New Pluralists have a particular interest in resourcing local leaders working to build trust among diverse people, storytelling opportunities that challenge local cultures of division, and actions drawing diverse community stakeholders together.
There do not appear to be any geographic restrictions for these grants, except that they support U.S. work. There are two open application deadlines: July 15, 2022 for an October funding round and August 31, 2022 for another round in December.
Does this stuff ever work?
Overall, it’s good to see philanthropic funders coming together “across difference” and backing projects that will no doubt reduce some of the political and ideological polarization besetting American communities. At the same time, in a world where a single television broadcast, or even a single tweet, can stoke polarization nationwide, it’s worth asking whether a mostly local approach can achieve much.
We’ve written many times about the dangers of an overly local approach to economic development — that broader nation-spanning forces can swiftly undo years of painstaking local funding — and there’s some truth to that when it comes to polarization. There are powerful forces using mass disinformation and intentional provocation via social media, traditional media, and other channels to pull more Americans toward a sinister vision for the future of the country.
All the while, the approaches of efforts like the New Pluralists are fairly conservative, not in the political sense (though that applies to some funders involved), but in that they tend to follow a pretty conventional philanthropic format. The New Pluralists have taken their time gathering stakeholders and soliciting the advice of experts, meticulously considering their strategy, and engaging in exploratory funding before releasing their first big RFP.
They’re very much following in the footsteps of other efforts to mend our sense of unity and civil society, efforts that reflect philanthropy’s long history of non-ideological, above the fray approaches to problem-solving, a status quo that we’ve argued often limits philanthropy’s potential (here’s one example, and here’s another).
At some point, you have to wonder if the pursuit of pluralism or bridging divides as a goal in itself will ever work, as opposed to viewing it as a necessary means to achieve more concrete outcomes that may enjoy broad popular support — say, human rights, equality, curbing climate change, reducing gun violence, or protecting the right to vote.
In a recent interview with IP, political science professor and Niskanen Center Senior Fellow Steve Teles expressed some doubts about this facet of the New Pluralists’ approach. “I’m slightly skeptical of efforts to solve the problems of polarization and mistrust too directly,” he said, going on to argue that specific issue areas where people can agree on common ends may be more fertile ground for bridge-building than backing bridge-building itself.
Whether or not Teles is right, there’s a bigger question lurking in the background here: is tackling polarization even the right thing to prioritize? The group is careful to point out that “New pluralism is not about passively accepting diversity, merely tolerating differences, skirting uncomfortable topics, or preserving the status quo. It doesn’t require sacrificing deeply held beliefs or compromising to meet in some gray, featureless middle.”
Viswanathan, for her part, characterized the New Pluralists’ work as a new approach to an existential problem. “Can we succeed? That’s a real question,” she said. “Our approach — of funders and field leaders collaborating closely to strengthen a field in service of culture change — is novel. So we’ll learn and no doubt adapt along the way. But we need to try. Our divisions are an existential threat. Alongside the many imperatives for repairing our democracy, we need to spread pluralist norms and values. This is about mending our badly frayed social fabric. It’s critical to progress on all other fronts.”
Still, there is something inherent in the idea of prioritizing civility and agreement that runs the risk of overlooking malevolent forces that are driving our disagreement. If we’re convinced that one set of anti-pluralist ideological actors is intentionally subverting American democracy, perhaps some polarization is warranted.
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to include comment from New Pluralists Executive Director Uma Viswanathan.