Foundations start campaign to defend philanthropy amid federal scrutiny
The Council on Foundations says nonprofits need to close a public understanding gap as federal pressure and partisan attacks rise.
By Daniel Okafor · Business Editor
4 min read
The Council on Foundations launched a national campaign Monday to promote the role of charities and foundations in American life. The effort comes as the group says nonprofits face sharper scrutiny from the federal government and populist political movements, with policy fights threatening money that supports local services.
The campaign, called Generosity Builds, is tied to the nation’s 250th anniversary, according to reporting by the Associated Press. The Council on Foundations, which represents about 1,000 nonprofits, says it wants to counter the view that philanthropy is mainly a vehicle for wealthy donors to fund politics or misuse money.
Kathleen Enright, the council’s president and CEO, told the AP that the sector has a “perception gap.” She said many people use nonprofit services without recognizing them as such, citing hospitals, churches and student honor societies as examples from her own week.
A 2023 report from the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy found that about 1 in 20 adults said they or an immediate family member had received nonprofit services in the prior year, according to the AP. Enright argued that figure understates how often Americans interact with charitable institutions.
Federal fights raise the stakes
The council’s campaign follows recent fights in Washington over nonprofit funding and taxation. Enright told the AP that negotiations over President Donald Trump’s tax and spending bill last year included proposals for new taxes on private foundations that, in her view, would have diverted resources from communities if enacted.
The AP reported that the Trump administration has frozen, cut or threatened a wide range of social service grants involving nonprofits. The White House has described some spending as government largesse marked by corruption, waste, fraud and abuse.
The Justice Department also charged the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights nonprofit criticized by Republicans over its tracking of extremists, with defrauding donors through payments to informants, according to the AP.
Vice President JD Vance criticized major philanthropic institutions before taking office. As a 2021 Senate candidate, he described the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation and Harvard University’s endowment as “cancers on American society,” according to the AP, and argued that some nonprofits functioned as social-justice investment vehicles.
Enright told the AP that claims portraying nonprofits as politicized or wasteful represent a small portion of the sector rather than typical philanthropy. The AP also reported that trust in nonprofits has remained higher than trust in many other sectors across surveys, though nonprofit impact can be hard to measure and explain.
Local examples anchor the message
Kathryn Thomas, vice president of communications for the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation in Flint, Michigan, told the AP that the sector has not faced such a difficult environment in nearly 60 years. She pointed to federal funding cuts and congressional efforts to raise taxes on foundations’ investment income.
The campaign will highlight local giving and community work rather than focus only on billionaire donors, the AP reported. Enright said the council wants to show that many donors have modest surplus resources and choose to put them into their communities.
One example cited by the AP is the Gulf Coast Community Foundation in Sarasota, Florida, which supported a 10-apartment affordable housing complex for military veterans that opened last year. Jon Thaxton, the foundation’s director of policy and advocacy, said Sarasota has a high number of veterans without housing and high real estate costs.
Thaxton told the AP the foundation helped secure land, gather $2.2 million in donations, obtain $800,000 from the city and win support from members of Congress. Phillip Lanham, the foundation’s president and CEO, said the project endured several election cycles and the pandemic.
The Council on Foundations also plans to feature earlier examples of ordinary philanthropy, according to the AP, including an 18th-century sailor whose estate helped create a Boston hospital for sick and injured sailors and a formerly enslaved man who donated land in North Carolina for an African Methodist Episcopal church.
Lillian Kuri, president and CEO of the Cleveland Foundation, told the AP that philanthropy should be presented as open to ordinary people as well as large donors. The Cleveland Foundation, established in 1914, also announced investments this week in a fund to convert vacant industrial land into job-ready sites and a fund tied to major Northeast Ohio companies.
This story draws on original reporting from Fortune.