While pro-democracy actors work to defend our democratic and electoral institutions in the near term, securing and strengthening our democracy also necessitates cultivating a longer term, affirmative orientation. DFN’s Better Futures Project is excited to announce the publication of a new toolkit, Becoming Futures Ready: How Philanthropy Can Leverage Strategic Foresight For Democracy, to build the strategic foresight skills of funders and to expand the field’s capacity to envision a bold, lasting vision for our democracy. 

Read the full toolkit here.

In this brief update of the January 2023 report, we summarize how the trends we observed have become even more worrying. With implications for every funder's work, authoritarian populists have strengthened their hold on government power and are using it to restrict freedoms across a wide swathe of American life. Regardless of the programs or issue areas you fund, whether you're socially conservative or progressive, we hope the report and update will act as a guide to the challenges ahead and encourage greater collaboration across programmatic and institutional lines in defense of liberal democracy.Rising authoritarianism in the U.S. has the potential to profoundly damage civil society and the philanthropy that supports it, damage that itself has the potential to further accelerate autocratic rule.

What Happens if It Happens Here? U.S. Philanthropy, Civil Society, and the Authoritarian Threat

The size, strength, and diversity of American philanthropy and civil society are unique in the world. These institutions have a key role to play in first stopping and then reversing the trend of democratic backsliding.

Authoritarians know this, which is why they have set their sights on civil society organizations and their funders. Groups working to ensure free and fair elections, reform police practices, or defend the rights of Muslim, Jewish, or LGBTQ Americans are among those contending with official harassment and threats of violence encouraged by politicians and rightwing media. Prominent funders have been targeted as enemies of “real Americans” and threatened with asset seizure. These examples, as well as the experiences of people in U.S. states and foreign countries undergoing democratic decline, tell us what might be coming. The warnings are all around us.

Changing the nation’s trajectory for the long term will involve work for which philanthropy and civil society are uniquely suited: helping Americans bridge divides and come together to build a fully functioning system of self-government. Doing so will demand taking on illiberalism on both left and right. In the near-term, however, philanthropy will have to contend with growing authoritarian factions on the right that are using government power, and even political violence, to gain and maintain control – and that threaten philanthropy and civil society itself. The danger comes from those who are no longer interested in the give and take of policy making, of negotiation and compromise, and who reject one of the key principles that make democracy work: the willingness to lose to the other side.

READ THE UPDATE>

READ THE ORIGINAL REPORT>

Over the last few years, the relationship between faith and democracy has been of growing interest to funders. While there has long been a robust debate in America about the proper relationship between government and religions, there is also a sustained and evolving relationship between faith and democracy. Plenty of headlines have spotlighted the ways they are influencing each other–both positively and negatively.

How are grantmakers to make sense of it all?

This new guide aims to explore the role of faith communities in shaping and making American civic life, while providing a framework for funders to engage with faith communities as partners in advancing a stronger and more inclusive democracy.

Who is this guide for?

This guide is meant for funders who are:

• Focused on democracy and civic life and want to increase their impact by engaging faith communities.

• Already investing in faith-inspired organizations but who are seeking a deeper understanding of the unique role those organizations play in the health of democracy and civic life.

• Anyone else who cares about the intersection of faith, democracy, civic engagement, and public life.

Read A Funding Guide for Faith and Democracy >>

Political violence is on the rise in the United States, and as we approach the 2024 election season, there are urgent interventions that can mitigate risks and prevent violence from further increasing. As we saw throughout 2020, elections and the post-election period can be flashpoints with particularly elevated tensions and increased risk of political violence. The violent attack on the US Capitol is forever etched in our minds, and it serves as a constant reminder of where our work begins as we look toward the 2024 elections. The increasing threats can be overwhelming, but with early and sustained investment in key antiviolence work, we can mitigate the risks of further violence over the next year and beyond.

Political violence and democratic backsliding—including declining institutional health and public distrust of institutions—are mutually reinforcing phenomena. The threat of political violence can chill civic engagement and voter participation, particularly among communities targeted by such threats. A heightened risk of political violence also endangers election administrators and election administration. In this guide we aim to present effective strategies and leading organizations involved in preventing and addressing political violence in hopes of increasing donor understanding of these issues and to catalyze action.

Email Carly Straus at carly@thirdplateau.com for access.

While questions about the size and role of government are highly politicized, most Americans are united in a desire for our government to be effective and efficient. Despite this, our national governing institutions are weakened by years of neglect and underinvestment. The federal government is beset with outdated systems ill-equipped for the twenty-first century and a demoralized and shrinking expert workforce. Partisan gridlock and insufficient resources perpetuate a vicious cycle in which national governing institutions struggle to deliver the results they aspire to, eroding public trust and therefore making it harder to secure the political support and resources they require to succeed. The historical lack of diversity in the senior federal workforce has led to programs failing to meet the needs of populations who are not represented in decision making processes. This lack of perspective in the design and implementation of programs not only limits their effectiveness, but also leads large swaths of the public to believe the federal government is not serving them or their families.

Highly functioning national governing institutions are more likely to restore the public’s trust and faith in democracy’s ability to deliver for all Americans. The effectiveness of our governing institutions matters on a basic level for making good use of public resources, delivering essential services, and ensuring that citizens experience the value of civic institutions. On a more existential level, our governing institutions need to be equipped to respond to the increasingly complex challenges of our time, including battling a global pandemic, managing a rapidly changing climate, modernizing our nation’s infrastructure, and mitigating the impacts of phenomena like inflation. Michael Lewis, author of The Fifth Risk, has noted that the “United States government manages the biggest portfolio of [catastrophic] risks ever managed by a single institution in the history of the world.”

READ MORE>

On November 21, 2022, PACE and DFN hosted a webinar to present newly developed evidence from four organizations–three of which were grantees from PACE’s Faith In/And Democracy Fund. During the webinar, each speaker presented evidence from their work and then participants engaged with the speakers in breakout room conversations.

VIEW HERE>

Building a robust, high functioning pluralist democracy in the U.S. capable of ushering in better futures for Americans requires us to think boldly and move away from reaction, apathy, and surrender. The extraordinary times we live in, full of rapid change, uncertainty and possibility, call upon us to identify and lift up positive disruptors who dare to dream and imagine what could be.

DFN’s report Imagining Better Futures for American Democracy is a call to action to imagine what our democracy could become. Informed by dozens of interviews with visionary thinkers and doers from a variety of fields and viewpoints, including futurists, activists, thought leaders, creatives, artists, religious leaders, and funders, the report shares their insights on why positive visioning matters, discusses how those visions of better futures relate to democracy and governance systems, and asks how we can inspire more Americans to dream bigger and develop a sense of agency to bring those ideas to fruition.

Read the full report here>

Below are the report’s key findings and recommendations:

Findings:

• Enthusiastic and emphatic agreement that positive visions of the future matter tremendously because they help us to imagine better alternatives, motivate us, and guide us to achieving positive societal outcomes. They also reinforce the idea that we have agency to shape our individual and collective futures and those of our descendants.

• Several points of disconnection – 

  • Few interviewees saw governance as critical to achieving the better futures they articulated, or had thought about how to improve and reimagine democracy.  

  • The future-oriented community seldom connects with the democracy community.

  • America lags in experimenting with new forms of future-oriented governance models and thinking.

  • The people we interviewed are also disconnected from each other, although there are some hubs and communities of practice that provide connective tissue that some interviewees are a part of.

• Many obstacles (e.g., complex problems from the local to the planetary, conflict-driven media and political environments, dystopian narratives, racism and othering) currently stand in the way of positive visions of the future emerging at scale.

• Positive stories about the future and narratives of mutuality and abundance exist but are barely breaking through in mass culture.

Recommendations:

While we have a strong foundation on which to build – great ideas, visionary leaders, real-world experiments, powerful stories about better futures, and media campaigns – we need more infrastructure and connective tissue to gain traction and impact.  Accordingly, we recommend three types of strategies:

Strengthen the positive visioning ecosystem by investing in infrastructure and relationships 

There are numerous ways to build and support an emerging ecosystem and to create connections between those broadly engaged in positive visioning and those working specifically on democracy issues. We recommend more networking, collaboration, and mapping, more productive chances to convene donors and working groups around the future of democracy, and greater use of futures thinking tools to change mindsets.

Model what’s possible and fund experimentation

We want to explore how to adapt governance innovations from outside the U.S. that incorporate a futures orientation, a longer planning horizon, and an intergenerational fairness lens. We also see promise in funding innovative efforts to strengthen and invigorate democracy in the U.S., especially at the state and local level, by using technology, engaging youth, creatives, game designers, and speculative fiction writers, and tapping into collective imagination exercises.

Strengthen narrative systems & amplify positive, futures-oriented content 

We need strategies that elevate and sustain narratives of abundance, interdependence, and mutuality and that amplify current bright spots for greater impact. Content also matters. We need more of it that’s positive, inspiring, and hopeful about what we can build together. That means influencing which stories are told, by whom, and how.

Read the full report here>

This guide was produced hoping to orient funders to the different ways civil society actors are thinking about and addressing the problems of affective polarization and eroding social trust. We broadly outline some of the major theories of change for advancing social cohesion, explore ways funders can support these strategies, and conclude with a set of open questions with which the field still needs to grapple.

Our hope is that funders — whether brand new to this set of strategies or already investing in them — will come away with clearer understanding of this rapidly proliferating space. We also hope funders will see the research and theory undergirding many of these initiatives and recognize this work for what it is: a serious and vital project for sustaining and restoring the health of American democracy. 

READ MORE>

This rapid issue brief, based on DFN's research and conversations with experts, practitioners, and experienced funders, will help donors get oriented to the current state of the field and explore frameworks for using their resources to combat disinformation. The report includes detail on strategies to combat disinformation by increasing accountability for creators and purveyors of disinformation, building healthier media ecosystems, and increasing public resilience to disinformation. READ MORE>