Democracy Desk: Joyce Foundation Creates Rapid Response Fund for Democracy Grantee Partners

In October, the Democracy Program team created a $100,000 “Safety Fund” designed to assist state Democracy grantee partners throughout the Great Lakes region with safety and security planning before and after election season. This rapid response fund provides nonpartisan organizations with up to $5,000 for strengthening their office’s cybersecurity and physical safety plans during a particularly contentious presidential election year and post-election period.    

Democracy Program Director Carrie Davis said creating the fund was a natural extension of the desire to be “creative and responsive to the needs of the field” this year and beyond. It’s also a salient opportunity, she said, for other philanthropic organizations to step up and provide similar support where it’s needed at the state and local level.  

An attorney and longtime organizer and strategist, Carrie has led the Foundation’s Democracy Program for seven years. She had additional thoughts about the work of grantee partners supporting free and fair elections, as well as philanthropy’s role in ensuring that the work can continue to be carried out safely and effectively. 

JF: Talk a bit more about the idea for creating the Safety Fund? 

CD: Sadly, in recent years there has been an increase in threats directed at election officials and civic groups working on elections. While we as a country need to recognize that spewing threats of violence at our neighbors is not the right way to solve political disagreements, in the meantime we need to take steps to make sure all of our election workers – state and local election officials, poll workers, and civic groups doing voter education – are kept safe.  

Planning for a highly contentious 2024 election cycle and potential post-election issues therefore had to include safety plans. For state and local government officials, that often meant partnering with law enforcement or enacting new policies to make sure polling places and election offices were kept safe. For the civic sector, it meant developing support systems so that nonprofit organizations had a place to go for help. One of the biggest obstacles, though, is that nonprofits run on very lean budgets and may not be able to afford safety costs – such as hiring an IT firm to do a cybersecurity assessment, subscribing to a service that scrubs online personal data to prevent doxing, installing security cameras outside their office, or de-escalation training for staff. We created the Safety Fund to help grantees cover those expenses. 

 JF: Sometimes philanthropy can be slow to move on some of the best ideas. How did this one get implemented so quickly? 

CD: Honestly, it was a team effort, and many staff across the foundation pitched in to make it happen. A few years ago, Joyce created a fast-track process to be able to move grants more quickly to address time-sensitive needs. So there was already institutional recognition that sometimes we need to move quickly, and that culture makes a big difference.   

Our Democracy team had been talking about election safety plans really all year, but as we got closer to Election Day and were expecting a potentially volatile post-election period, we wanted to do more to help our grantees. Our Democracy and grants management staff sketched out a streamlined process for current democracy grantees to apply for the one-time fund and brought it to our President and VP for approval. Once approved, the Democracy team finalized the application form, the grants management team set it up in the online portal and tested it – and amazingly it went from approval to launch in two weeks! 

JF: Talk about the landscape for Democracy grantees. Were there specific incidents and/or threats that led you to believe a Safety Fund was the best course of action? 

CD: We first saw this problem emerge in 2020, when we heard from election officials in red, blue, and purple communities about the threats they were receiving. Sadly, that has continued, as has been documented by some of our grantees. Unfortunately, that didn’t turn out to be a one-time occurrence and instead it has become the new normal.  We heard from several partners in various parts of the country about staff and volunteer canvassers who were threatened.  Additionally, experts who monitor extremist group activity had warned that we could see a surge immediately after the election if it was contested. Every voting group in the country had to factor safety plans into their voter outreach this year. These groups were experiencing significant anxiety but were still fiercely committed to being out in community helping people vote. They’re my heroes. 

JF: By now you’ve been through several election cycles. How did 2024 differ, if at all, from others you’ve experienced? 

CD: Oh my gosh, where to start? There were certainly some firsts. This was the first presidential election where one of the candidates for president announced months before the election that they wouldn’t accept the results. We expected partisan actors allied with major candidates to try to block certification of election results, some even announced so in advance such as one such actor in Kalamazoo, MI that was sued by one of our grantees. Several trends we’ve seen in recent years were also supercharged. Elections have gotten more and more litigious, and this year there were a ton of pre-election lawsuits on every issue under the sun, including filing placeholder lawsuits to be able to quickly run into court on or after Election Day.  

The biggest issue by far this year was the absolute avalanche of misinformation and disinformation. Back in 2020, most online platforms had some sort of content standards for removing dangerously false information. This year, they were almost nonexistent, and false information and conspiracy theories were everywhere, including this example where Michigan’s Secretary of State got into an online debate with Elon Musk over misinformation about the state’s voter registration list. All those ingredients together create confusion and distrust.  

JF: Can you talk about how you came to be in this role? How did you combine your passion for democracy and free and fair elections with public policy philanthropy? 

CD: I’ve been working on elections and effective government for my entire adult life in many different capacities, starting in my younger days volunteering on campaigns and interning with an advocacy group in DC. I got hooked back then and knew that this is what I wanted to do. I had the privilege to work for a member of Congress, and I got to see firsthand the difference elected officials could make when they were truly responsive to their constituents. I also spent a lot of time driving around a gerrymandered district and wondered why on earth someone drew it that way. I spent several years as an ACLU staff attorney in Ohio where I worked on a lot of voting rights cases, but I also talked with election officials and policymakers about what could be done upstream to prevent problems before they turned into lawsuits.  

I continued much of that work as executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, where we educated voters, advocated for better policies, co-led Election Protection efforts in our state, and when needed we were plaintiffs in lawsuits or launched ballot issue campaigns to change the rules, like we did (or at least tried to do) with redistricting reform. When I was a brand-new executive director, the best piece of advice I was given is that if the only time you talk to your funders is when you are asking for or reporting on grant funds, you’re doing it wrong. I didn’t plan to go into philanthropy, but after many years and different roles in the field, I grew to appreciate how good relationships between nonprofit leaders and funders could truly be partners in the work.  

JF: What can other funders learn from rapid response funds like the Safety Fund? What more can/should philanthropy be doing to undergird nonpartisan Democracy organizations? 

CD: Three pieces of advice: (1) The work we all care about depends on people and organizations being able to do that work. We need to listen to our grantee partners about new needs that are emerging and step in to help. (2) Safety and security need to be viewed as a normal part of nonprofit democracy groups’ budgets. Just like philanthropy has come to recognize that it’s essential to fund overhead for nonprofits to be able to do their work, we need to recognize that cybersecurity and safety plans should be a standard part of nonprofit budgets. (3) Until that becomes a regular part of budgets, funders can help our grantees begin to incorporate security best practices in their work. If you have year-end or discretionary funds available, consider providing add-on funds to your grantees for them to do a security assessment and strengthen their cyber and physical security plans. There are a variety of pro bono and low-cost services set up to support the nonprofit sector, and we can help our grantee partners utilize those supports. As the saying goes, “we keep us safe,” and philanthropy needs to be part of that “we.”