Trump’s war on philanthropy is a war on civil society. This donor network is fighting back.

The Trump administration continues to weaponize the federal government to attack President Trump’s critics and enact his authoritarian agenda, which includes waging war against the world of progressive philanthropy and the many civil- and human-rights-supporting movements, media organizations, and nonprofit institutions that depend on it. Leena Barakat, President and CEO of the Women Donors Network, speaks with TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez about Trump’s war on philanthropy and how philanthropic organizations like WDN are fighting back.

Credits:

• Post-production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

The Trump administration continues to weaponize the federal government to carry out President Trump’s wars on his critics, on the media, on the world of higher education, on federal workers, and on the administrative and regulatory functions of the federal government itself. And these attacks have understandably gotten more public attention over the past year, but what has gotten significantly less attention is how Trump’s allies and his administration are waging war against the world of progressive philanthropy and on progressive philanthropists themselves and the many civil and human rights supporting movements, media organizations, and nonprofit institutions that depend on them. The short-term and long-term impacts of this will be seismic, but we’re not talking about it enough. And so to talk about what this all looks like and how people are navigating it within the world of progressive philanthropy, I’m really grateful to be joined today by Lena Barakat, president and CEO of the Women Donors Network.

Lena, thank you so much for joining me today. To start, please just tell our audiences a little more about yourself, the Women Donors Network and the work that y’all do, and then tell us about how the Trump administration’s war on philanthropy is affecting you, the WDN, and the work that you do.

Leena Barakat:

Thanks, Max. It’s great to be here. As you said, my name is Lena Barracat. I am the president and CEO of Women Donors Network and our C4 affiliate organization, Women Donors Action. I have spent nearly two decades working of my career working across the grassroots, philanthropic and private sector to really move and shift resources and power towards communities that are fighting for justice. And 10 of those years has actually been, it started out as a young member of WDN to this moment. We’ve been around for 30 years. We are a national network of donors that are committed to using our wealth, our influence, our privilege, and our collective power to advance justice. And as a collective giving model, that has translated to over $160 million that has been moved across the field to frontline organizations. But our work goes far beyond just writing checks. As a donor network, we help our members really examine their relationship with their resources, their wealth and their power and help them leverage that more strategically.

So that has meant more funding of grassroots movements, building political power, organizing our peers across the sector, and preparing really for us, the next generation of women donors to lead and continue this work. And to answer your question, I think this moment, excuse me, has been incredibly clarifying for us. As you said, the administration is using their power to really intimidate all of us and create chaos and fear amongst nonprofits and make funders afraid of funding them. And so the result that we’re seeing is many institutions retreating and pulling back resources precisely at the moment communities need it the most. And so for us, you asked how is this sort of impacting us? We’re not taking the bait. It’s only sharpened our focus in this moment. We know that in this moment it is not just important to sustain movements and continue resourcing and funding these movements, but actually you go bigger, you go harder.

We need to scale these movements and organize not just ourselves, but the philanthropic sector to really stand together and again, to help donors in this moment and anyone in this moment to leverage every resource and form of influence and power they have, not just their money, but their voices and relationships to fight back. And that’s exactly what we’re doing.You mentioned the war on philanthropy. Now in terms of that, I feel like this is so much bigger than that, honestly. This is so much bigger than the war on philanthropy. This is really a broad, this is a war on dissent, and I think we have to talk about it. We have to talk about it. I think this is really about how, if you think about it from the perspective of the administration, it is absolutely in their best interest to create this climate of fear, to create fracture among us and atrophy within the sector and specifically within the social justice sector where you are seeing critical resources and services moving to communities that need it most, but also who are organizing around dissent and organizing towards justice, which is against this administration’s direct agenda.

And so essentially, what is their strategy to do that? If they want to really accelerate their agenda, they have to do what they can to cut this off at their knees, to turn off the faucet on the very resources that are fueling these movements to begin with. So therefore it has included attacks on progressive philanthropy, who’s resourcing these movements. And so as a result, this is exactly what we’re seeing. We’re naturally seeing an escalation of these attacks and funders and the response to that has been sort of an array of response across the spectrum. I think traditional philanthropy has unfortunately responded with a lot of hesitation, fallen in line with the fear, clenched their pearls and decided to reevaluate strategies, their risk and retreat from funding. And many of them have gone into, frankly, self-preservation mode. And I think the story in their minds is we need to protect ourselves if we’re going to protect everyone else, it’s no good if they go after us.

And so that has looked like protecting their endowments and themselves and somewhat abandoning many organizations who have far less resources, who are far more vulnerable in this particular climate. And philanthropy or philanthropic survival, I would say is important. Of course it is. I’m not going to argue that it’s not, but it will never be more important than supporting the people and communities we exist to serve to begin with.

When you ask what has this done for us or how has it impacted us, it’s just given us a lot of clarity. Our work right now is really about how we are thinking about continuing to stand and defend these movements, organizing the sector and really building the power and capacity of our women donors to stand up and fight back. And the last thing I’ll say too on this piece is I think this is a movable moment. I think there’s a lot of reason for very good reason to be afraid. Inevitably, there’s a lot more risk in this moment. I won’t deny that for sure. But this is also a time of transformative thinking. As much as systems and old patterns are crumbling right now, one could argue it’s not totally a bad thing. These structures and institutions weren’t serving many of us to begin with.

And so while we’re seeing this sort of dismantling of so many old systems and structures and patterns in addition to our civil liberties, I think this is also a time to think about what do we want this future to look like and how do we get on the design team of what comes next? I feel like if structural racism and inequality can be designed, so can justice and I want to be on that team.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. Well, I mean it’s so refreshing to hear you say that because obviously The Real News is very open about the fact that we are a nonprofit news network. We’re a 501 right? We, like so many other independent media outlets that you watching this also subscribe to. We depend on the philanthrosphere as much as we depend on small donations from viewers like you. But when they’re coming after us, they’re coming after you because they don’t want us being able to report on the movements, the stories, lifting up the voices that we do so that you can see the truth.

Leena Barakat:

There’s a playbook to this. As students of history, you see the cycles and the patterns, the writings on the wall, it’s very clear. And in many ways it’s not as sophisticated as one might think. I think for the average viewer and public, I don’t expect everyone to be paying attention to this in the same particular way, but it does give us insight into how to respond and how to move in this moment. It’s not as unprecedented as one might think if you look at a larger context in history. Just as we were talking about thunder retrenchment, this is a tactic. This in and of itself is a tactic, but a tactic of part of what? What are they trying to do right now? I really want to think about what is the end game here? What is this? And ultimately in many ways and in the context of what we’re talking about with the philanthropic sector and the nonprofit movement and the broader movements for social justice, this is really about how we weaken the capacity and the infrastructure of our movement so that we no longer to disrupt our progress, to disrupt momentum.

You’ve heard many people say, I’m sure in the past that this is actually, this is what we’re seeing as a backlash to the tremendous strides and progress that we’ve made, the tremendous wins we’ve had in movements. And so when you think about how might they, what can they do to weaken the capacity and infrastructure of our movements, you think about it and for me, there’s three things that really come to mind. One, and again, student of history has been documented as part of this playbook. So what is in that playbook? One is to sow fear, employing tactics of fear and intimidation. This is creating false accusations, putting out a lot of information and disinformation, putting organizations and groups on lists and threatening to revoke their C3 statuses. You might recall last year, was it last year? Yeah, it was just last year, the bill HR 9495, this was otherwise known as the nonprofit killer bill.

This was a bill that was heinous bill that was put forward accusing a list of organizations, slandering them with accusations of terrorism and hate and antisemitism and all of the buzzwords you can imagine. To what end is to actually really create a funder freeze so that people stop moving resources to them, accusing them and then requests for investigation of these organizations to potentially strip them of their C3 statuses for any organization that is accused of wrongdoing without ever defining what the wrong is, without ever having to prove what that wrongdoing is. So these are some of the tactics that created a lot of chaos and fear and frantic behavior within the sector, which I think was very intentional on their part. They want to isolate these organizations. They want to isolate these movements, call them bad things so that no one goes near them. This immediately creates, this is a very destabilizing effect.

Number two is fracture. This is about the ways in which they have sewn a lot of fracture within our movements and tried to pin movements against each other. We’ve seen this across history and we don’t have to look that far back in history. This has been part of the playbook all along.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Divide and conquer, baby.

Leena Barakat:

That’s right. That’s all it is. That’s all it is. And so to pin movements and organizations and groups and communities against each other, and I think our biggest mistake historically has been falling for that, is actually giving into that. And three is capacity drain. So this is where you see lawfare tactics get into play. So HR 9495 also plays into that a little bit, but we’ve seen a slew of organizations all of a sudden get these lawsuits accusing them of fraud in their funding or in their behavior, suddenly needing to double down on their audits and trying to find anything. And most of these lawsuits have resulted in losses for them, but a win, a net win for them because it has drained the organization’s capacity, their resources, their time, it has distracted them away from what the work is. This is a tactic. So even though there’s a higher rate of losses, the organizations winning these cases and the opposition losing, ultimately they have won just knowing that a lot of time resources and capacity has been, and this is weakening the infrastructure of the movement.

And so when you think about that, when you employ these types of tactics, it is a very destabilizing effects. It slows down momentum and it creates the funder retrenchment moment that we are seeing in this moment. In the last few months alone, I would say since the spring, and just three organizations, three funding organizations, very well known and what has been historically seen as sort of stabilizing funding organizations have decided to reevaluate their strategies, reduce their sort of risk appetite and completely pulled out of funding a lot of the movement organizations we have seen. And those three funding organizations alone, and I’m only naming three, there have been many, have amounted to over $150 million pulled from our movements. And some of it is going into effect immediately. A lot of it won’t start until next year, which means Max, we’re sitting with sticker shock.

We haven’t even seen the material impact this is going to have on our broader movement. So this is, I think, part of that playbook. And for us, we need to see the writing on the wall and resist it immediately.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I hate to make light of any of that, but my impulse is to tell our viewers, but wait, it gets worse. They’re doing that to the media. Everything that you’re saying sounds like what we’re experiencing on the media side. You have the high profile attacks against corporations like ABC and Disney. You have the coordinated attacks on the corporation for public broadcasting and all the public media, but you also have attacks on independent outlets like Breakthrough News. They are going for everybody that they can in philanthropy and media and higher ed. And it even makes me think of the DOGE or Department of Government Efficiency so-called cuts to USAID. We saw organizations around the world that were dependent on USAID go under. A lot of people died and are dying because of it. Again, this isn’t a theoretical argument anymore. People have died because of it.

And a lot of us didn’t realize how many organizations around the world were dependent on that funding until it was frankly too late. And so there’s a comparison in my mind to what we’re talking about here to that. And I wanted to sort of ask if we could talk about those trickle down effects that this is having on the ecosystem of movements and organizations and institutions not just like ours, but so many others out there that depend on philanthropic support.

Leena Barakat:

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head there. I think if you want to talk about this, we have to actually understand the impact that this is having. I actually want to take us back to why and how the impetus of philanthropy’s existence to begin with. Why does philanthropy exist? It is truly, it is a sector, an institution, a method of actually filling the gaps of government. This is why philanthropy was created. It was intentionally created to fill the gaps of providing aid and services and care to help civil society in ways that the government could not step in and support. And so when you think about that, if philanthropy exists to fill the gaps of government and then the government’s going after philanthropy, this is having a material impact on the daily lives, the very basic livelihood of many, many individual people who have nothing to do with anything.

This is even outside, I would even expand it beyond a movement against dissent. These are just everyday communities, whether that’s here in the United States or internationally, who rely on these resources to live. And so whether that’s disaster recovery, providing critical healthcare, stipends, legal services, all of this is the kind of thing that is a baseline of dignity in our lives. And they have directly, cutting these programs have directly impacted that for everyone. And I think this is increasing the stakes and the tension in which we are operating right now. And so this is why it’s really important to note this retention doesn’t happen in a vacuum. This is happening part of this broader trend towards authoritarianism where institutions that once saw themselves as allies and supporters and service and care providers in this moment are suddenly… This is why that decision to recalculate or to pull back funding and recalculate their risk is actually inherently a political decision.

This is the quietly stepping back and normalizing retreat and trying to see that as a reasonable choice. This has a tremendous cost on everybody. And we’re seeing a lot of organizations right now say, “Well, we’re not political or we don’t want to get involved.” Everything is political when you are impacting the daily lives and the dignity of people and communities. And so the normalization of that is something that is exactly what we’re trying to disrupt right now. It’s exactly like we do not accept it. And this is what we’re trying to organize around. And that’s really sort of led to what has become co-founding the Block and Build Funder Coalition, is really to really disrupt the normalization of the retreat as much as possible. We founded the Block and Build Funder Coalition two years ago. So it was actually under the Biden administration. And I just say, I think people tend to subscribe what is happening in this moment to Trump.

It has accelerated in Trump, but this is a bipartisan problem, to be completely frank with you. So under the Biden administration, we saw a list of organizations that, it was Palestinian rights organizations and movement organizations and several funders of them put on the same list, requests for investigation, all the slander and accusations of terrorism and hate that we talked about earlier. And I knew that this was a test. This was going to be a test for how we responded to this was inevitably going to have an impact on everybody else. And so we launched the Block and Build Funder Coalition to really build a muscle around solidarity, to understand this concept that this is all of us or none of us in this particular moment, and to also hold the line on non-capitulation. And so the coalition now has grown to over 270 funding institutions.

We meet every single month and that are committed to really resisting authoritarianism, defending our movements on the ground and safeguarding our civil liberties as much as possible. And what that looks like more practically right now is, as I said, the normalizing of solidarity and holding the line on non-capitulation, this idea that it’s all of us or none of us and that we are stronger together than we ever will on our own. We can be more courageous together. And it also has meant that we are showing proactively, showing up proactively to frontline groups and really centering them in the agenda and the prioritization of our work right now, really understanding what they’re experiencing, what they are seeing, where the attacks are coming from, and making sure we are organizing ourselves as funders to fill in those gaps or to have strategic interventions to stop this as much as possible.

And that has also included providing safety and security for a lot of these organizations who don’t have the resources to safeguard their, whether it’s digital footprints or physical security. And finally, giving our movements and these organizations permission to build anew. We need to get off of this sort of crisis, this crisis loop that we are in and give our movements permission to actually dream about what comes next, to actually pilot their ideas and fund those resources. Because as I said to you earlier, this is actually very much a builder’s moment. And so it’s been work that has been incredibly purposeful in this moment. And I think some of the quiet impact of that has been the loud organizing around the philanthropic sector, shifting the culture in this moment to not be afraid, to go bigger, to go bolder, to be very clear, not to bend the knee.

And we’ve heard a lot of funders really say to us that they were really on the cusp of pulling back themselves just out of fear and knowing that they were part of something like Block and Build Funder Coalition, they felt less alone and it’s prevented them from doing that. And our message to them is keep funding, keep going. We’re stronger together than we are on our

Maximillian Alvarez:

Own. It’s wild listening to you talk about the Block and Build Funder Coalition because as someone who interviews workers around the country and around the world for a living, I’m like, sounds like what you guys got there is a union. And hey man, the old truths are the strongest for a reason. Yeah, injury to one, it is an injury to all. Solidarity will be our salvation. We are stronger together than we are alone. And I think those enduring messages are evident in the ways that people are fighting back across the spectrum of struggle, like working people on the front lines of their exploitative bosses or neighbors on the front lines of ice raids, people banding together at that grassroots level. But also it sounds like what y’all in the world of philanthropy are doing, what we’re hearing about folks like Mark Ruffolo and other artists and cultural figures banding together to stand up for Palestine or to stand against the sort of oligarchic takeover of the whole media ecosystem.

There is power in what unions and movements can teach us. And I really love that you take so much inspiration from the stories of our past because that’s what we do here as well. And it’s also, you named the elephant in the room, and I think we should talk about it here because we got to talk about Palestine. And you are Palestinian American and you have been an outspoken leader and advocate for social justice. We at The Real News have just been relentlessly covering the truth of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, not just since 2023, but since the existence of The Real News. And you and I both know they are trying to criminalize, punish, and smother any form of solidarity with Palestinians and label it as support for terrorism, any criticism of Israel and its genocide is antisemitism. So that’s where we are.

So what do we do about that?

Leena Barakat:

Well, first and foremost, I actually just want to, from the bottom of my heart, thank the Real News Network for doing that work, for being the truth tellers that you are, being an independent media news outlet. I know what a struggle that is right now and to cover a topic like this that has had a material impact on perhaps in the past your capacity to grow and get even bigger supporters. And I hope you are now experiencing the flip of that, an increase in support and resources and subscribers and followers because the truth is the truth everywhere you go. And I appreciate that that has held true for the Real News Network. Max, you said let’s talk about the elephant in the room, Palestine. Listen, Palestine isn’t the elephant in the room. It is the room. It is the room. Palestine has changed the world in the ways in that it has exposed the corruption and the broken and unfit systems that has become a defining moment of this time in our history.

I want people to understand that defending Palestinian freedom is the key to defending all movements for justice. It always has been. It always, always, always, always has been. That hasn’t new, that’s not a post 2023 thing. That is day one. And this is exactly why, this is exactly why they have criminalized, isolated, made taboo this conversation because if you pull the string on this, you pull the string on this, you pull the string on all of it, all of it. And who’s benefiting from that right now? They don’t want us to know. And so the minute we actually take back our power, our voice, our truth in this particular moment and can stand for Palestinian freedom, this is the key to supporting movements around the world. It will break down systems, it will break down and old patterns. And guess what? Those are exactly the right systems and patterns we want to break down because it is exactly what has been holding us back.

This is not just in Palestine, this is here. And I think one thing we’ve been trying and I’ve been in my own work really trying to do the education around is how do you connect the dots between what is happening there and our democracy here? And years ago it was so hard and so hard for people to really see that. It wasn’t just me being a Palestinian. Yes, I am a Palestinian. I’m very personally invested in this issue, but it’s so much bigger than that. This is about us as people, as oppressed people globally and the haves versus the have-nots and trying to have a politics that works for the people, not just the power. And so I think Palestine to me, I think was very hard case to make for a long time of the ways in which what’s happening over there is connected to the fundamental operating model of our democracy to begin with.

And now look at where we’re at, the sort of canceling of APAC and the people have woken up to the fact that many of our politicians are actually bought out. What? This is actually a democracy. What does that mean? And in fact, the ones who are being paid to be in office are the ones that are actually working against our interests as people, that the money that’s going over there, wait a minute, that’s the same money that we could be using here on our education systems and our healthcare systems and infrastructure more broadly. What are we doing? What are we doing sending $8 billion I think to an oppressive military, international military around the world, but we don’t have money to feed the poor.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Our schools are crumbling. Yeah.

Leena Barakat:

A hundred percent. What is that? He’s out there writing checks of money. Do you have money we don’t have? So I think that’s what this has exposed. And this is where I have a tremendous amount of confidence. This is where I have tremendous amount of hope. This is where I feel like most energized in this moment because the wrap’s up. We see it as a people, we see it and we won’t unsee it now. And it means it has completely shifted the conversation and our bar and our standard for what we look for when we think about a democracy that works for us, when we think about budgets and systems that work for us. And all of us should be so grateful to the strength and the resilience and the beauty of the Palestinian people who have been so clear on this from the very get-go and for the gift that it has given us.

I don’t think this is about us freeing Palestine as much as how much they have freed us. And I hope that’s something that gets really seen and recognized one day.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, that was beautifully and powerfully put, Lena, and I appreciate you for saying it. And let’s end here by kind of zooming out and really putting people’s focus on what can be done right now and in the long term. What is Women Donors Network doing? What can people watching this do to change the outcome here?

Leena Barakat:

Right now in this moment, the most important thing you can do, the most important thing any person, any listener, anyone in the world, this is all of us, can do is to not give up your power. And what do I mean by that? Your hope, your sense of hope in this moment. Your disillusionment for the future. I understand the fear and the exhaustion of this moment of time that we are in, but we cannot lose sight of what is possible in this moment. I think the minute we lose sight of that, the minute we lose hope, the minute we shrink ourselves, the minute we shrink ourselves in the moment, we are giving up our power before we’ve even fought the fight together. And so that’s the second part of this, is don’t go it alone. Do not soak alone. Find your community, find your people, find your friends, find an organizing home.

Find an organizing home. If you have resources to move at any level, truly, I don’t care if it’s $5, I don’t care if it’s $500,000, whatever the range is, use it. Find a philanthropic home and find your political home right now. This is a time of the people. This is the time of the people. This is our time to rise up. There is more of us than there are of them. And they don’t want us to know that. They want us to forget that. And so I say, find your people, find the most accessible way to organize and activate and do something that really matters in this moment because this will pass. This system will crumble. I am certain of it. I am so certain of it. History tells us that it will. Where do we want to be when that happens? What do we want to say that we have done when that happens?

And how do we have a stake in what comes next? Because as I said, this is not just a moment of transition and fracture and crumble and chaos. It is, but it is also a builder’s moment. It is also a transformative time. So how do we think about what comes next? What is the new bar of a system that we want to demand and how do we hold the line on that until we go? And so that for me is really important that we are together. We are not alone. We don’t lose sight of the future.

And we take a reconstructionist approach to this moment. I am devastated, I am gutted, I am exhausted, but I am so energized and I’m so ready for what’s coming next. And that’s the energy I want us to all carry together as we do this. And so when I think about what are we doing at WDN, honestly, we continue doing what we do. We don’t stop. We go bigger and we go harder. And that, as I said, is continuing to not just move resources to movements, but actually doing what we can to help scale those resources. It’s challenging right now because of the way the funder retrenchment has had an impact on the field means you’re right, you said it earlier at the top, the dollars have spread so much more thin and so we need to get bigger. And so I want to invite folks to join WDN, to join Solidaire, to find a philanthropic home so where your small dollars can be combined and become big dollars that resource movements.

That’s what we do at WDAN. Tha’s what Solidaire is doing. So find a space for that. We’re going to continue to organize the sector because we can’t go at it alone. There’s no one organization that’s going to take this moment on. It’s going to be all of us. And so how we mobilize our voices and our influence in this moment, how we think about shaping policy in this particular moment, and then pushing our peers to continue to center movements and move with greater courage. So don’t be afraid, be a part of something that comes next. Go bigger, not smaller. That’s what I would say.