“Change, Not Charity”: The Rise of Progressive Philanthropy

The last 250 years of US history have seen a series of epic struggles to push our nation to live up to its founding ideals. Many of the key players in this long battle are well known: abolitionists, suffragists, labor organizers, civil rights leaders, and others.

The crucial role of such elites in shaping the American story sits uneasily within traditional frameworks of political analysis.

Less familiar are the wealthy backers who, again and again, have provided essential support to social movements.

Part of this history has recently received new attention with the publication of a book by John Fabian Witt, The Radical Fund, which chronicles how a small foundation endowed by a wealthy heir powered social justice work and labor organizing in the mid-20th century. The Garland Fund was the first of many grantmakers created in subsequent decades by wealthy progressives to advance social change.

The crucial role of such elites in shaping the American story sits uneasily within traditional frameworks of political analysis. The rich are routinely cast as the opponents of equality by progressive commentators, and that current is especially strong today, amid a new wave of left-wing populism.

But a more nuanced look at US history finds that wealthy elites have been divided from the earliest days of the republic. The far upper class has always included both conservative reactionaries and liberal reformers, and even some radicals. Today, these divisions are starker than ever, as billionaire mega-donors on the left like George Soros face off in a struggle for power against right-wing tech oligarchs and the ever-active Koch network.

The Soros family may be the best-known backer of progressive causes, but they are hardly alone. The ecosystem of grantmakers on the left backed by living donors is larger and more powerful than ever. It includes multi-billion-dollar endowed foundations like the Freedom Together Foundation—created by Barbara Picower—and lower-profile but very deep-pocketed funders including: Foundation for a Just Society, backed by an heir to Jim Simons’ hedge fund fortune, the Kataly Foundation, created by Regan Pritzker, and many others.

Old Money, New Politics

This ecosystem has been growing steadily for decades. A good place to pick up the story of how wealthy progressives have helped shape US politics is in the 1970s, when a loose network of wealthy heirs came together to establish philanthropies like the Tides Foundation, the Liberty Hill Foundation, the Bread and Roses Community Fund, and the North Star Foundation. Many of these heirs were part of families that had created iconic American businesses. I described their journey into progressive activism and philanthropy in my 2010 book, Fortunes of Change.

Stewart Rawlings Mott was among the most well-known liberal heirs of the era. Mott was the son of Charles Stewart Mott, who was for many years the largest shareholder in General Motors. After graduating from Columbia University in 1961, Stewart stirred up his first controversy when he returned to Flint, Michigan, and established a Planned Parenthood birth control clinic. Soon, he was fighting with his father as he tried to push the family foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, in a more liberal direction.

In 1966, he left Flint for New York City, where he first lived on a Chinese junk ship on the Hudson River before buying a Manhattan penthouse. He established his own foundation and began to attract widespread attention for his support of left-wing causes and his flamboyant lifestyle. He was among the main financiers of Eugene McCarthy’s antiwar candidacy in 1968 and appeared at a G.M. annual meeting to criticize the company for not opposing the war in Vietnam. In 1972, Mott ranked among the largest political donors in the country, thanks to his $400,000 contribution to the McGovern campaign (which earned him a place on President Richard Nixon’s enemy list, with the notation “Nothing but big money for radic-lib candidates”).

Through his organization, People’s Politics, Mott supported progressive work on women’s issues, race, civil liberties, and good governance. In the wake of the Vietnam War, he focused on reforming the Pentagon by bankrolling the Project on Military Procurement and the Center for Defense Information. Mott also founded the Fund for Constitutional Government, a group that sought to bring greater accountability to Washington and that still operates today.

Mott was about as good a rich friend as liberal activists could hope for, and when he died in 2008, Ralph Nader—the former General Motors nemesis and a frequent beneficiary of Mott’s largesse—commented that Mott “was about the most versatile, imaginative philanthropist of his time.” What Nader admired most about Mott was that he was a “pioneer,” willing to take on issues that the big foundations weren’t yet ready to touch, thereby pushing the envelope of liberal philanthropy. (Mott also ran a small family foundation that spent down and closed in 2022.)

George Pillsbury was another key figure in the wealthy liberal circles of this era. Pillsbury’s name was even more famous than Mott’s, because it graced flour packages in many U.S. homes, although Pillsbury was not nearly as rich. He inherited $400,000 while still at Yale and promptly focused on giving away nearly all of it to left-wing causes. “My view,” he would say later, “is that this money should rightfully have been going to employees of the Pillsbury Corporation over the years, but was skimmed off and ended up in trust funds for people such as myself. I felt it was not my money.”

Along the way, Pillsbury crossed paths with other young trust-funders —including Mark Dayton, heir to a department store fortune, whom he had known growing up. “We were all drawn in by the social movements of the times,” Pillsbury said. “It was hard to be untouched by what was going on.” He was especially influenced by Obie Benz, heir to the Daimler-Benz auto company fortune, as well as to the Sunbeam bread fortune

After graduating from Middlebury, Benz moved to San Francisco, where he started the Vanguard Public Foundation in 1972, which raised money from wealthy young people to fund cutting-edge activism and direct services to poor and marginalized groups. Pillsbury found the model inspiring and decided to draw on his network to create a similar pass-through foundation.

Thus was born the Haymarket People’s Fund in 1974, which was initially funded by Pillsbury and a half dozen wealthy donors. By 1977, Haymarket had emerged as an important source of cash for activist organizations, moving nearly $300,000 to 110 groups that year.

“Change, Not Charity”

The creation of the Vanguard Public Foundation and the Haymarket People’s Fund generated a sense of purpose and belonging among liberal heirs. “It was a very hard time to be a wealthy person in your twenties,” Alida Rockefeller Messinger recalled to me when I interviewed her for my book in 2009. “Our peer group was speaking out against wealth and where we came from.”

Messinger—the daughter of John D. Rockefeller III—joined up with Vanguard and became one of its first staff members. “It was an incredible education for a young person. It was like a philanthropy training ground.” She then got involved in organizing other heirs, moving in one of the more rarefied precincts of liberal politics. “We were all in our early twenties with inherited money,” she said. “That became the core of a group of people who grew and evolved over the years.”

The expanding movement of young, rich donors committed to “change, not charity” led to the creation, in the late 1970s, of other pass-through foundations: the Liberty Hill Foundation in Los Angeles (founded by George’s sister, Sarah Pillsbury) and the North Star Fund in New York, co-founded by newspaper heir Toby D’Oench.

In 1979, George Pillsbury and others created an umbrella organization, the Funding Exchange (FEX), which included all of these groups. By 2009, the Funding Exchange encompassed fifteen foundations and a national office that together channeled $15 million annually to progressive groups. Again and again over the years, the Funding Exchange was the “first on the scene” in backing causes that were too radical for mainstream foundations, such as anti-globalization activism, the living wage movement, gay and lesbian rights, and environmental justice organizing by poor communities. (FEX ceased operating in 2018, but many of its original members are still going strong.)

A Rising Tide of Progressive Giving

Even as the Funding Exchange network grew during the 1980s and the 1990s, a far larger progressive funding octopus emerged in San Francisco: the Tides Foundation.

The wealthy left-wing heirs of the ‘60s generation helped build a funding machine that transformed activism in the United States, nurturing a vast universe of social change groups that might not otherwise exist.

Tides was founded in 1976 by Drummond Pike, the son of a California investment banker who had fallen in with a group of activist heirs in 1970 as associate director of the Youth Project in Washington. The Youth Project had spun out of the Center for Community Change and was set up to channel money from young wealthy donors to progressive groups fighting for social change.

Among its funders was Alan S. Davis, the son of the insurance mogul Leonard Davis, who later recruited Pike to run his Shalan Foundation. Not long after Pike had taken that job, he was approached by a wealthy young couple from New Mexico who wanted to donate anonymously to social justice organizations and needed a foundation to handle their money. Pike created the Tides Foundation to help them, working with Jane Bagley Lehman, a Greenwich-born heir to the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco fortune.

Tides grew rapidly to become the premier pass-through fund for wealthy West Coast liberals who didn’t want to start their own family foundations. By 2009, Tides was handling $75 million a year for wealthy donors, much of which funded social change work focused on everything from Asian American rights to global warming to youth justice. In 2024, it made $442 million in grants.

Building Power

The wealthy left-wing heirs of the ‘60s generation helped build a funding machine that transformed activism in the United States, nurturing a wide array of social change groups that might not otherwise exist. But this giving turned out to be merely a warm-up for the much larger-scale progressive philanthropy we’ve seen emerge over the past decade or two.

Beyond major progressive foundations, a growing number of intermediary groups help move funds from wealthy donors committed to social change, including the Solidaire Network, Borealis Philanthropy, and the Proteus Fund.

There are rich ironies at play here. In the name of redistributing wealth and power, a tiny group of the most privileged members of U.S. society often decides which social justice groups—and causes—thrive, and which wither. Addressing this contradiction was among the core goals of members of the Funding Exchange, which created structures to share power with community leaders, such as the North Star’s Community Funding Committees. Since then, a long list of progressive funders have worked to shift more power to grantees, with varying levels of success.

Still, the larger story here is about the complexities of class and power in the American story. The long history of progressive philanthropy and its sharp acceleration in recent years challenge common narratives about who’s been for or against social progress in the fight to realize America’s promise.

None of this means that the existence of vast fortunes and extreme inequality is acceptable. But this history showcases how unusual suspects and unexpected allies can play a crucial role in the fight to create a more just society.