$100M to Curb Polarization; Soros Fund Shifts Focus; Giving to India

Here’s What Else You Need to Know

George Soros’s Open Society Foundations is going back to its roots and focusing more on fighting human-rights abuses around the world through a network of local offices that are close to the problems. Spending on grants for the international work will rise by about $75 nillion a year, Alex Daniels reports. But to shift more money to overseas work, the funds are laying off about 200 employees. Soros will also devote more funds to so-called big bets following the lead of other foundation efforts, such as MacArthur’s 100&Change, which last month awarded $100 million to a nonprofit that fights homelessness.

The catastrophic wave of Covid-19 in India has prompted donors to send millions of dollars to the country. Money is coming from wealthy individuals such as technology leader Vinod Khosla, who awarded $10 million, and from grant makers like the Rockefeller Foundation. Smaller donors are giving, too. Texas philanthropists Raj and Aradhana Asava last week offered to match up to $25,000 in donations to support pandemic relief in their native India. So far, the couple, who have long given to programs in India but more recently emphasized the need to support U.S. food banks, have raised about $10,000. Raj Asava says the couple is “very confident we will blow past the goal.”

Now that the crises of 2020 have prompted an influx of new donors, charities are experimenting with the best ways to keep them giving again and again. That is a big challenge because although the overall number of donors in the United States grew by 7.3 percent in 2020, donor retention rates have been steadily declining, writes Eden Stiffman. Among the approaches: The nonprofit First Book doubled the number of donors who give monthly. And the fundraising arm of the Centers for Disease Control, which attracted 15,000 new donors last year and tens of thousands of new social-media supporters, is investing in new technology and hiring additional fundraising staff members and consultants to make the most of the moment. Says Laura Croft, the organization’s vice president of advancement. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that we’ve had this type of awareness.”

Donors can bring about a revolution in gender and race diversity on boards, just as investors have done at private companies, say authors of a new study. In an opinion essay based on their study of college and hospital trustees, Carolyn T. Adams and Vikki Kramer, say that donors should push for better balances in the boardroom because it leads to more effective governance. Part of the solution, they say, is to stop thinking about trustee slots as a perk for people who give large sums of money and find another way for those donors to serve the institution. “Assigning fundraising to a separate board is preferable to reducing financial requirements for trustees who are women and people of color,” they write.

Also worth reading this weekend: We last saw Bill and Melinda Gates at a gathering the foundation held to share information about its work to spark more donations from everyday donors, an important part of its philanthropy that often gets less attention than the Giving Pledge effort to persuade billionaires to give big.

The news of their divorce also prompted us to take another look at Stacy’s interview with Melinda French Gates just as she was releasing her 2019 book The Moment of Lift. When asked what advice she had for her daughters on philanthropic decision making, she said: “Listening is one of the most important parts of our job. It’s the only way to truly understand people’s lives — to learn who they are, what they want, what they believe, and what barriers are standing in their way. The day we stop listening to people and trying our best to understand their context, their values, and their needs — that’s the day we stop being able to do anything to make the world better.”

That’s good advice for everyone working to change the world. We hope you have a peaceful weekend.

— Stacy Palmer and Dan Parks