Collaboration: Alliance Building Across Movements

PIP's collaborative funds serve an increasingly wide range of partners who focus on social justice issues. As PIP grows, so do opportunities to tap into the synergies between these like-minded funders, grantees and experts. PIP is uniquely positioned to identify and incubate strategic cross-fund and cross-movement opportunities-to explore solutions that connect over programmatic constraints, create capacity, share knowledge and expertise, and support the broader social justice movement.

Through its own strategic planning, and in conversations with its collaborative funds' donors and grantees, PIP is exploring ways to leverage the great potential of strategic cross-fund, cross-movement alliance building. Current efforts include:

• Capacity-building initiatives-standalone projects supporting the broader field, such as the FFF's Strategic Communications Initiative, which leverages the FFF's relationships with advocates, experts and others working in the immigrant rights field to build communications capacities, launch proactive communications strategies and create mechanisms for responding to attacks. This initiative partners with foundations and national, regional and local immigrant rights groups, most of them FFF grantees.

• Cross-movement, alliance-building research and analysis-such as the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity's work to assess current efforts to build alliances between African Americans and immigrants, and to investigate the real and perceived points of tension between them. Likewise, the "Overcoming Wedge Issues and Building a Culture of Civic Engagement" panel, co-hosted by the Funders' Committee for Civic Participation (FCCP) and the Four Freedoms Fund (FFF), explored successful alliance-building between widely disparate groups working in different states, uncovering new connections and knowledge-for use by funders and the field alike-to create effective change through civic engagement and alliances between communities.

• Joint-funding initiatives-grantmaking at the intersection of PIP's collaborative funds' interests, including the CPER/FFF initiative for improving educational opportunities for immigrant children, and the FFF/USHRF initiative to use a human rights framework for supporting immigrant rights projects.