The New Majority Fund at NWF

Our Mission The 21st century has begun with the American electorate deeply divided, national power in the hands of militant conservatives, the country isolated from the rest of the world, and the planet itself in the balance. This is a troubled and reactionary time, when we must choose whether to concede or to rebuild a progressive vision of America.

We choose to rebuild and so do many others. As a public charity, The New World Foundation has focused on the frontline ways people connect to civic participation and political action. We are supporting activity all across the country that multiplies our present strengths, connects to the new electorate, and opens the ground for new majorities to grow. Outside the Beltway, we are seeing landmark victories and deep advances underway, but clearly, much greater investment is needed.

The New Majority Fund at NWF aims to expand the flow of funding to the frontlines. The Fund is open to individual donors, family funds, foundation re-granting, and foundation partnerships. It is a place where we can compare notes on rapidly evolving work, create space for experimentation and new ventures, and compound the impacts of our grantmaking.

Program Strategies

The Fund will support two kinds of grantmaking:

Growing Anchors and Alliances means expanding the funding stream to the new majority efforts that are springing up in major metro centers, and across counties in rural states. Our focus is on alliances that connect constituencies, old and new, by forging pro-active, multi-issue policy agendas, linked to voter education and outreach campaigns. These are the groups building the infrastructure for political participation out of which new electoral alliances are forming, and in turn, new majorities can grow and govern. In our survey of this field, we see four layers of funding, all requiring solid field knowledge of stages of development, local potentials, and capacity building issues:

• Established Anchors that have made substantial impacts on metro and state electoral participation and are mentors to other groups at the state, regional and national level.
• Emerging Anchors that are building solid metro infrastructures and are ready to expand their agendas and alliances, acting as hubs for statewide efforts.
• Networking Structures, collaborations and training programs that share models and methodologies across parallel groups, that build internal organizational capacity in the field, and that increase funding access.
• Start-up Structures that are building new partnerships, staffing up, learning from mentors, developing strategies and initiating programs.

Linking Resources to Action designates five initiatives, already underway, that address opportunities to add constituency strength and organizational capacity to new majority efforts. Our approach is to develop and fund projects in each area, working with partner grantees from the metros and states, testing new models and informing future work for the entire field.

• New Constituencies: Projects in five states are experimenting with how to link constituency associations with existing metro alliances. Three priority groups are:
• Community college students
• Human service professionals
• New congregations
• Local Elected Officials: Current projects review best practices nationally and develop three levels of work connecting metro and rural state alliances to LEOs:
• Recruitment and accountability programs with CBOs
• Policy training and support
• Affinity networks by locale, region, issue and constituency
• Civic Leadership Circles: Established anchor organizations are expanding technical assistance to metro alliances across the country to create:
• Cross-constituency civic leadership institutes and academies in metro centers
• Documentation of best practices and curricula, including web-based resource centers
• Media and Communications: Based on the '05 NWF Media Audit of frontline organizations, projects in four major metro areas and two rural states are building messaging capacity by expanding:
• In-house media staffing and inter-group coordination
• Message research and development
• Radio, cable and internet production
• Communications networks with membership bases and partners
• Information technology for databases, targeting, polling and evaluation
• The Grassroots Money Matrix: Moving to scale requires more foundation investment but also much broader revenue streams from local bases. Three pilot projects already in process look at fundraising potentials in:
• Credit-union giving programs
• Alumni donor bases developed from campus organizing
• Dues-paying membership structures in 501(c)(4) organizations

Fund Structure The New Majority Fund intends to make grants totaling $3 million annually and welcomes both large and small donors, as well as institutional contributors. Staffed by New World's senior program officers, the Fund's operations are governed by the NWF Board, which includes many leading practitioners from the field.

Contact Us: Colin Greer, President