The Voting Rights Act Lost Its Backstop—Philanthropy Must Help Build What Comes Next

In 2018, before any philanthropy dollar was pointed at it, my organization, ProGeorgia, started organizing Black voters in Georgia around a five-person utility commission that almost nobody had heard of.

The Public Service Commission sets electricity rates. It determines how much a family in Southwest Atlanta pays to keep their lights on during the August heat. In its nearly 150-year history, only one Black person had ever been elected to it. We believed that was not an accident, but rather the kind of structural exclusion the Voting Rights Act was designed to address.

Four years later in 2022, a federal judge agreed with us, ruling that Georgia’s method of electing PSC commissioners unlawfully diluted the votes of Black Georgians. The Eleventh Circuit reversed it. Then, earlier this year, the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, and by a vote of 6 to 3 eviscerated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act—the federal protection that made cases like ours possible in the first place.

ProGeorgia is a statewide nonpartisan civic engagement table that coordinates dozens of community groups and moves resources to the grassroots. As its CEO, I have spent almost a decade regranting millions of dollars to community organizations doing this work on the ground. I know what infrastructure looks like because I have watched us build it. And I know what philanthropy looks like when it treats that infrastructure like a campaign, because I have watched us scramble to survive that, too. The question now, in the weeks after the Callais decision, is whether the funding community—which says it cares about democracy—will fund in a meaningful way.

Section 2 was the federal protection that prevented states from drawing district lines or designing election systems that diluted the votes of communities of color. After Callais, that backstop is gone in any meaningful sense. What is left is what organizations like ours across the South have spent years building: coalitions of partner organizations embedded in the communities they serve, moving millions to grassroots groups and organizing around down-ballot races that determine people’s daily lives.

We did not build this infrastructure because the federal government had our back. We built it because we could see it didn’t.

The PSC fight shows what it looks like in practice. In 2022, the same year funding flooded in to protect Raphael Warnock’s Senate seat and thereby preserve federal power, my organization was struggling to attract the attention of investments in our state. Philanthropy should not look at this as an either/or, but rather a yes/and—we need to be protecting democracy at all levels of government. Yes, sustaining congressional power is imperative. But people in Georgia also care about their power bill. Systems can be built to do both, which is what we focused on. We directed funds for organizations to knock on doors, make phone calls, send mailers, hold community meetings, and work through trusted messengers in churches and nail salons—not to hand people information, but to have real conversations about the PSC’s importance.

This helped voters connect the dots between a five-person commission most of them had never heard of and the bill sitting on their kitchen table. The top of the ticket still came with Warnock’s win. So did the down-ballot turnout. When you treat voters as people whose lives are organized by issues rather than by candidates, they vote the full ballot. The work was possible because Section 2 gave it somewhere to land. The recent SCOTUS ruling has taken that away, and now we risk future wins across levers of power due to that decision.

One of the main results we’ll see is vote dilution, or the practical mechanism of racial gerrymandering. It is how a state lets people of color cast a ballot while ensuring those ballots cannot elect candidates of their choice. Section 2 was the statute that made vote dilution actionable in court. After Callais, that tool is gone for redistricting and at-large election systems like Georgia’s PSC. The ruling reportedly sets up the largest projected drop in Black congressional representation since Reconstruction. Brookings has detailed how the decision will reshape majority-minority districts nationwide.

This is a redistricting wave hitting during an active election season, and these coalitions are on the front line of it right now, which begs the question of philanthropy: are you funding the work of democracy as infrastructure, or as a campaign?

The harder number to count is the damage at the state legislative, county commission, school board, and utility commission level, where Section 2 has done most of its quiet work over the last 40 years. Most of that work has happened in the South through coalitions built across racial justice, immigrant rights, reproductive justice, environmental justice, and disability justice; through workgroups that see down-ballot races before the field; through relational infrastructure with voters that does not start at the beginning of an election cycle and end on Election Day; through regranting structures that move resources to community-rooted organizations that funders cannot reach directly. Over my tenure at ProGeorgia, we have regranted more than $19 million to our partner organizations from 2020–2024.

We did not build this infrastructure because the federal government had our back. We built it because we could see it didn’t.

The scale of what has already unfolded since April 29 makes the urgency concrete. Louisiana suspended its congressional primaries mid-election to redraw maps. Florida’s legislature passed new maps the same day the ruling was dropped. Tennessee eliminated its majority-Black congressional district within days. This is not slow erosion. This is a redistricting wave hitting during an active election season, and these coalitions are on the front line of it right now, which begs the question of philanthropy: Are you funding the work of democracy as infrastructure, or as a campaign?

The question philanthropy keeps asking organizations like ours is, what have you done lately? The question it needs to start asking is, what would it take to maintain the progress you’ve made?

Campaigns have an endpoint. Infrastructure requires ongoing investment. The boom-and-bust pattern that drives a flood of funding in presidential years and a drought in off years is the structural condition that leaves us under-resourced when moments like Callais arrive. We are asked, every two or three years, to re-justify the value of work that has been doing what it does for a decade. Each cycle restart costs senior leadership attention, costs program staff hours that should be spent on the work, and costs the institutional memory that walks out the door when funding gaps force layoffs.

What would it take to change that? The answer is not complicated:

• Three-year general operating grants, renewed without a full application restart
• Regranting authority trusted to the coalitions that have the community relationships that funders do not
• A funding floor that does not evaporate in odd-numbered years

Democracy work still receives less than 1 percent of total philanthropic giving, a proportion that has not meaningfully changed since 2022. After Callais, the ask is not a new program. It is a decision to treat what already exists as worth sustaining.

Accountability does not require a cycle restart. It can be built into the funding model itself. Outcomes can be examined, strategy challenged, and rigor expected, without pulling the rug out from under the work every two years. The question philanthropy keeps asking organizations like ours is, what have you done lately? The question it needs to start asking is, what would it take to maintain the progress you’ve made? Those are different questions. Only one of them produces the kind of infrastructure that survives a Callais ruling.

Some funders, such as Neo Philanthropy, the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, The Hive Fund, Grantmakers for Southern Progress, Groundswell Fund, and the Peter E. Haas, Jr. Family Fund, have understood this for years and have been making the kinds of investments the moment now requires.

This includes multi-year funding that is meaningful even in non-presidential years; separate support for caregiving, health, and wellness needs so organizations are not forced to treat burnout as an afterthought; and general operating support with a long runway that gives groups the flexibility to adapt as events change. They also understand that when emergencies hit—whether it is a special session on redistricting or a sudden voting-system crisis—organizations need funders who are willing to move quickly, provide additional resources, or connect them to others who can. That kind of support has to include communications infrastructure too, so groups can speak to broad audiences and turn everyday people into action year-round, not just during heavy investment cycles every four years. But funders with this vision are not the norm, and it is not hyperbolic in these times to state that sustained support is needed for democracy to survive.

We started organizing for the Public Service Commission in 2018 because we could see what the community needed before anyone was paying attention. We built relationships, ran voter education, did the work between cycles when the money was thin. In 2022, Black Georgia voters showed up for a utility commission race most people still cannot name. The lights are still on. This civic infrastructure has been building for this moment for years. It is here. The question for philanthropy, the only question that matters right now, is whether it will be funded to stand.