BLM by Mike Gonzalez

Author:Mike Gonzalez [Gonzalez, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Tides itself has a long, lefty pedigree. It was founded with money from the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in 1976 by Drummond Pike, a 1960s activist. Today it receives funding from a bevy of leftist funders, including the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the many foundations controlled by billionaire George Soros and his family, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and a bunch of different Rockefeller foundations. Tides then disburses these funds not just to BLM but also the ACLU, Democracy Now!, and so on.19

The money from the foundations controlled by the Soros family alone could keep Tides, and others like it, in business for years. In July 2020, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations announced a $220 million commitment to what it termed social justice groups. Patrick Gaspard, the president, told an interviewer, “Now is the moment we’ve been investing in for the last 25 years.” Gaspard added that “it’s time to double down. And we understood we can place a bet on these activists—Black and white—who see this as a moment of not just incrementalism, but whole-scale reform … we need these moments to be sustained.”20

The Thousand Currents/Tides Foundation/NoVo axis is hardly the only philanthropic source of funds to all the multifarious outfits that make up BLM. In 2016, the Ford Foundation announced, for example, that it had partnered with Borealis Philanthropy, the Movement Strategy Center, and Benedict Consulting to found the Black-Led Movement Fund (BLMF). The BLMF would “make six-year investments in the organizations and networks that compose the Movement for Black Lives,” said Ford in its statement.21 The number that the Ford Foundation proposed to give to M4BL—which, lest we forget, is so openly committed to ending capitalism that it doesn’t bother to scrub its website—was so gargantuan that the Ford Foundation appears to have scrubbed the sum from its own website. It can still be found at such publications as Fortune. Here’s what the announcement originally said: “The BLMF’s strategy is supported by two other components: the first is the Blackprint Strategy, a collaborative process underway to identify movement needs and resource priorities to bring $100 million in new resources to the Movement for Black Lives.”22

Despite this success with the Ford Foundation, M4BL has had trouble raising money. “For years, many foundations have considered it to be too radical,” wrote Julia Travers for Inside Philanthropy. Then in 2020, M4BL nearly doubled the previous year’s fundraising levels and began to attract “more attention from institutional grant-makers.” Travers writes that on June 8 “a group of leaders from the nonprofit and funding worlds held a call on philanthropy’s role…. Close to 700 people participated, including many members of M4BL. The organizers called on philanthropy to provide the racial justice network with $50 million this year. In 2019, M4BL raised $2.7 million.”23 By the time Travers wrote her profile in July 2020, M4BL had already raised $5 million.

Yet some skittishness persisted, so M4BL felt it had to do something. Sometime around Groundhog Day 2021, M4BL suddenly changed fiscal sponsors.

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