Four Freedoms Fund: A Pioneering Foundation Partnership Advocates for Immigrants, Carnegie Results
A collaborative of major funders now in its fifth year is powering up grassroots immigrant groups in twenty-eight states. Grown from five member foundations to eight, they have found a new way to work as a team: sharing ideas, learning from one another, leveraging funding and forging dynamic strategies to engage immigrants and refugees in American civic life.
Although foundations aren’t known for joining forces, in some circumstances partnership more than pays off. A good example is the Four Freedoms Fund, launched in 2003 to energize American democracy by actively supporting and engaging the country’s newcomers. Its founding members, Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, Open Society Institute, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation1, national funders who had all been working individually on behalf of immigrants, took the unprecedented step of combining their funds and developing a joint strategy to support immigrant advocacy at the state and local level. “It was a way to be more responsive and strategic, and most importantly, to get more bang for the buck,” says Geri Mannion, Carnegie Corporation program director, U.S. Democracy and Special Opportunities Fund. “We had to respond quickly and efficiently in a challenging and constantly changing political environment, where the needs of the grantees were great and growing, which meant we had to come up with a way of doing things differently.”
1 The American Dream Fund (ADF) is a locally focused immigrant integration initiative of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, a charter donor to the Public Interest Projects’ Four Freedoms Fund. Knight created the ADF as a partner fund to focus specifically on its 26 grantmaking communities.
Written by: Karen Theroux. Theroux is an editor/writer in the Corporation’s Public Affairs department with many years’ experience in educational publishing and communications.
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