Democracy is in dire straits, both in the United States and abroad. But you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the giving of America’s top philanthropists. As a rule, most billionaire givers tend to steer clear of anything too progressive—particularly if it smacks of politics—and nonprofit giving to promote a more inclusive democracy checks both boxes.
Nevertheless, the heightened tensions of the Trump era and its immediate aftermath have prompted some major billionaires to lean into democracy funding and other progressive work in a way they haven’t done before. According to one of them, Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank, “Our democracy is made stronger when we hear from all Americans on the issues of our day whether they be national or local. This must happen more often than the presidential election cycle of every four years, because there’s no offseason for democracy.”
Blank, a Georgia-based billionaire who conducts his philanthropy through the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, is ramping up what looks to be a long-term commitment to democracy funding. An inaugural round of about $10 million in grants just went out from the foundation’s new democracy program area, and the grantees are a progressive bunch—places like the Black Voters Matter Capacity Building Institute, the Brennan Center for Justice and NEO Philanthropy’s State Infrastructure Fund, to name just a few.
There’s also a distinct focus on Blank’s home state of Georgia, a political battleground where the Home Depot co-founder already has a strong presence as both a philanthropist and owner of the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons and Major League Soccer’s Atlanta United. Although he’s a regular Democratic political donor, this new funding marks a sharp leftward turn for Blank’s typically mainstream philanthropic giving.
The fact that Blank’s foundation is embracing overt progressive funding now, and relatively late in its founder’s life—Blank is 79 years old—is yet another sign that the precarious state of American democracy isn’t lost on at least some major donors. It’s also another example of a more politicized philanthrosphere becoming less afraid to get behind grassroots civic engagement while it contemplates what is perhaps an even harder task: democratizing its own operations and outlook.
Progressive family, conservative co-founders
Among the billionaires who founded the nation’s largest home improvement retailer, Arthur Blank is the most politically progressive. But that isn’t saying much. Bernie Marcus, who also made his billions from Home Depot, is a Republican donor and avowed Trump supporter, while Ken Langone, who organized finances for Blank and Marcus’ big enterprise, also supports GOP candidates.
Blank, on the other hand, has a bipartisan track record as a political donor, but has thrown his weight behind mostly Democratic candidates in recent races. Like Marcus, Blank’s philanthropic giving hasn’t taken on much of a political tone in the past. Blank has donated over $800 million through his foundation over the years, mostly to mainstream causes like education, the arts, community development and aid for veterans.
For clues to Blank’s progressive leanings, look to his family rather than his business associates. In his memoir “Good Company,” he describes his late mother, Molly Blank, as “an artist and social justice warrior,” and he continues to honor her with a dedicated fund at his foundation. There’s also Blank’s ex-wife Diana Blank, whose Kendeda Fund represents the most progressive giving to come out of the Home Depot fortunes to date. Though the two have been divorced since 1993, family connections remain between their philanthropies—their daughter Dena Kimball is Kendeda’s executive director, and serves on the board of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation.
The Kendeda Fund is a notable philanthropy with an aggressive spend-down plan (it intends to sunset by the end of 2023), and while Arthur Blank’s foundation isn’t spending down, it’s certainly undergoing major changes. Chief among them is the recent arrival of top philanthropy wonk Fay Twersky as president and director early this year. This role comes in the footsteps of her last gig at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, where she spearheaded a multi-funder effective philanthropy initiative and co-chaired the Fund for Shared Insight.
Twersky’s entry on the scene is likely a prelude to more robust year-by-year giving from the Blank Foundation, as well as more concerted efforts to attract philanthropic dollars to the South. It’s also the beginning of a major restructuring at the foundation, which will deploy its grantmaking around three new priority areas—democracy, environment and youth development—while maintaining support for existing programs.
Battleground funding
These democracy grants represent the first round of funding from any one of those new program areas—a sign, perhaps, of the issue’s importance for the foundation going forward. And to be clear, these gifts aren’t really about bridge-building, inter-ideological dialogue or anything like that. This is full-throated support for the progressive voting rights movement.
“So John Lewis had an expression which he used on a regular basis. He said, ‘The most important thing you can do in protesting is vote, at the end of the day.’” That’s from a video produced by the foundation in which Blank makes clear his stance on voting rights, which he has stated are “sacred and must be protected.”
Grantees bear that out. National recipients include the Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause Education Fund, the Black Voters Matter Capacity Building Institute, Fair Count and NEO’s State Infrastructure Fund. The Center for Election Innovation & Research also got some money—it’s one of the nonprofits that received a big influx from Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s unorthodox election infrastructure funding last year.
But as tends to be the case with Blank’s giving, Georgia is the focal point for these grants. State-based democracy grantees include homegrown civic engagement hubs like the New Georgia Project, spearheaded by voting rights crusader Stacey Abrams, as well as ProGeorgia, the Georgia Alliance for Progress Education Fund, the GALEO Latino Community Development Fund, Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, and the ACLU of Georgia Foundation.
As we’ve seen, many of these groups are key players in a political battleground whose electoral contests often have national repercussions—as they did early this year when grassroots mobilization contributed to the victories of Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the state’s run-off races for U.S. Senate.
Blank appeared to acknowledge that fact in the video referenced above, saying, “Both on a presidential level and a congressional level, how Georgia voted had a major impact nationally.” At the same time, he stressed that this giving has no specific partisan dimension: “We’re not encouraging people, right, left, blue, purple, whatever it may be.”
Democracy, inside and out
Despite the fact that none of this new funding from Blank is “political” from a tax law perspective, it does represent the politicization of a billionaire giving operation that, until now, mostly constrained itself to less edgy funding. If Blank keeps this up, the hyper-local grants in particular could make an outsized difference in a state that is both a political battleground and the site of far-reaching wrangling over voting rights and voter suppression.
The nation’s wealthy tend not to be the most progressive of givers as a class, but recent events have prompted more of them into the fight for democracy—although the fact that the right to vote has become a distinctly progressive issue says perhaps as much about the GOP these days as it does about the giving of people like Blank.
Last year, numerous billionaires and multi-millionaires dove into democracy funding through efforts like the Democracy Frontlines Fund and One for Democracy. And even though Zuckerberg and Chan’s mega-gifts for election infrastructure got a lot of press—and critical attention from conservatives—a flood of money from progressive donors large and small no doubt helped bolster turnout a year ago.
Of course, much of that activity stemmed from a desire to oust Donald Trump. Democracy funding has always faced the problem of fall-off between election cycles, which makes these off-year grants from the Blank Foundation a good counterexample to the usual trend.
Meanwhile, Twersky’s leadership could prove instrumental as the Blank Foundation seeks democracy both outside and inside the organization. As a leader at the Fund for Shared Insight, she has been a voice for “listening” and for better power arrangements between funder and grantee, and the plan is to replicate some of that work at the Blank Foundation. Where the democracy grants are concerned, the foundation says it expects “to learn a great deal from these groups and have that learning inform our strategy on voting access and civic participation in Georgia and beyond.”
Taking cues from the grassroots will be crucial as new progressive philanthropists enter the democracy space armed with funding power that may be sorely needed, but still remains far from democratic.