4 Years After George Floyd, Giving To Racial Equity Faces Challenges

The murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, triggered massive protests around the world against police violence and systemic racism.

Those events, in turn, prompted a surge in pledges from corporations, foundations, and wealthy individuals to advance racial equity in the United States.

Four years after Floyd’s death, there are major concerns in the philanthropy and nonprofit worlds that giving to support communities of color has regressed substantially, particularly in the wake of legal challenges to affirmative action and race-based grantmaking in the past two years.

In this moment of heightened sensitivity and concern, information on what exactly donors are doing when it comes to racial equity also is increasingly scarce.

Searching For Sources

Reliable data about what is happening across the charitable sector has been hard to come by historically, due to a variety of factors. Those include a shortage of philanthropic funding to gather and analyze such information and minimal demand for such data on the part of for-profit entities.

Filling the void has been Candid, a nonprofit that “provides the most comprehensive data and insights about the social sector,” according to its website. Candid was formed in 2019 by the merger of Foundation Center and GuideStar, two well-known entities that gathered information from and about nonprofits.

To track of all the funding announcements and pledges that began emerging in the summer of 2020, Candid launched a special section on Funding for Racial Equity to provide “continuously updated data” as well as news and analysis.

By Candid’s estimate, commitments for racial equity soared to $16.5 billion in 2020, up from $5.8 billion in 2019 and $6.1 billion in 2018. Those commitments slipped to $7.9 billion in 2021 but remained above pre-2020 levels, according to Candid.

Ben Francisco Maulbeck, a senior fellow at the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity, said the Candid data was widely quoted and analyzed in the sector, including in PRE reports.

Indeed, a 2022 analysis of the initial Candid data by Maulbeck and his PRE colleagues entitled “Mismatched” concluded that the amount of racial equity grants that actually went out the door in 2020 was only $3.4 billion, far below the numbers publicly pledged, as many donors were slow to follow through on their commitments. The analysis was based on the partial grants data available at the time and is likely an underestimate, Maulbeck said. But PRE is currently at work on an update now that the grants dataset is nearly complete for 2020 to 2022.

Backlash Against Philanthropy Perceived as Woke

The decline in commitments and grants that began in 2021 appeared to accelerate in 2022, according to surveys and comments from nonprofit leaders. The drop was due in part to increasing complaints from conservative groups against philanthropy that they perceived as woke and viewed as causing funders to provide excessive support to progressive causes – including racial equity.

Then, last June, the U.S. Supreme Court barred the use of race in college admissions. And in August, a lawsuit filed in Georgia alleged that grants to Black female entrepreneurs made by the Fearless Fund, an Atlanta-based venture capital firm, were discriminatory.

These and other legal challenges to race-based initiatives raised alarms that funders might grow nervous and further scale back their support for racial equity work to avoid getting sued.

It is hard to know if those fears have resulted in fewer donations.

Candid stopped updating its data on giving to racial equity in mid-2023. Although its site currently lists information on commitments made in 2022 and 2023, a spokesperson said the data are incomplete due to the time it takes for the IRS to release information from Form 990s, tax filings that require nonprofits to disclose their sources of funds and other details.

Candid does not plan to finalize the data for 2022 or 2023 because it plans to sunset its site on giving to racial equity on May 30.

“We are incredibly proud of the work we did to build out this special issue site in 2020 to track funding to support racial equity following the murder of George Floyd,” says Aleda Gagarin, Candid’s vice president of influence.

“The site was meant to capture the response during that specific moment in time, similar to other rapid response sites Candid has offered like Philanthropic response to coronavirus (COVID-19),” Gagarin adds. “These kinds of sites are meant to be time-specific and in response to public interest, but such data is also available in our Foundation Maps and Foundation Directory tools.”

Alternative Measures

In the meantime, other efforts are underway to try to understand funders’ mindsets and the quantity of their racial equity giving.

Shortly after the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision last year, for instance, the Center for Effective Philanthropy surveyed foundation leaders and found that few planned to make changes to their grantmaking and some were leaning into racial equity more deeply. CEP is releasing new data soon from nonprofits which examines whether these commitments from funders still remain.

But Elisha Smith Arrillaga, vice president of research at CEP, cautioned that surveys are not substitutes for hard numbers.

“Intent to give and actual giving are not the same thing,” Arrillaga said. “It’s important to truly understand how changes in actual grant dollars to nonprofits doing work in this area are shifting.”

Maulbeck and his colleagues at the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity conducted their own informal research through workshops and conversations with more than 100 organizers and foundation staff in late 2023 and early 2024.

In a February op-ed in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, they concluded that there had been “a regression in recent months from core racial-justice values at the very moment deeper investments are needed.”

Maulbeck said there is usually a two-year lag in official reporting from the federal 990 tax filings, so in the absence of the data that Candid had been regularly updating, it could be a while before the sector knows exactly how funding for racial equity has evolved in 2023 and 2024.

“In the past four years and even before that, some funders have looked seriously at how to address structural racism both in their grantmaking and in internal practice. Others are currently retreating from equity and justice language for fear of hypothetical future threats,” said Maulbeck. “We need more funders to do the thoughtful, bold work of making equity and justice core values in their institutions and their grantmaking, regardless of the latest headlines.”

In the meantime, nonprofits working to address the racism and systemic inequities that came into focus following the death of George Floyd may continue to struggle to direct funders’ resources where they are needed most.

“If we don’t understand or measure how much funding is going to racial equity,” said CEP’s Arrillaga, “it is truly difficult to understand if we are allocating the resources necessary to make real and sustained change.”