A few weeks after an abortion fund announced its support for a ceasefire in Gaza at the end of October 2023, a foundation that funded their work called for a meeting.

Representatives from Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies firmly but politely told the abortion fund it should no longer expect funding from the foundation, stripping the organization of hundreds of thousands of dollars in a region with multiple abortion bans that force people to travel long distances for care.

Charles and Lynn Schusterman Co-President Lisa Eisen published an op-ed earlier this year that made the foundation’s stance even clearer. According to Eisen, the foundation has always been transparent about its work in Israel, and the co-president suggested there are voices on the left and the right that are “extreme,” and that the foundation is seeking to strike a balance in a “hyper-polarized world” to “foster nuanced dialogue about Israel and Jewish identity and other pressing social topics.”

“It can also feel risky or even futile to push back against the extreme voices on both the right and the left,” Eisen wrote. “Yet pushing back in the name of our mission is what we must do: While others may see tensions between our work to advance gender, racial and economic equity and our work to strengthen the Jewish community and Israel, we see our Jewish values in action in both.”

The Schusterman Family Foundation portrays itself as a supporter of progressive issues while simultaneously donating to “hawkish, pro-Israel causes,” The Intercept reported. This includes more than $1 million in 2019 to the American Israel Education Fund, a charitable organization founded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). A report published in 2019, written and researched by Stephanie Skora and supported by Jewish Voice for Peace Chicago, the National Lawyers Guild, and Independent Jewish Voices in Ottawa Carleton, also found that the foundation has “an extensive history of giving to right-wing organizations.” The report was written to expose the pinkwashing practices of A Wider Bridge, an organization that purports to build “a strong relationship between the LGBTQ communities in North America and Israel.”

Leyla, a current employee at the abortion fund who is using a pseudonym for fear of further funding repercussions, told Prism the foundation made it clear during the meeting that the abortion fund’s support for Palestinians was the reason it was severing ties. Leyla’s workplace signed onto a letter alongside 68 other organizations encouraging those in the reproductive justice field to support Palestinian human rights. Leyla and her colleagues believed signing onto the letter aligned with their work, given the reproductive rights crisis triggered by Israel’s bombing of Gaza.

In the months since, the abortion fund has been the target of harassment on Instagram and has received a large influx of spam emails, leading Leyla to believe there is a larger, coordinated harassment campaign against the abortion fund because of its position on Palestinian freedom.   

The abortion fund is still reeling from Schusterman’s decision to cut funding. While the abortion fund hasn’t had to cut down on services yet, the staff members are mindful of the fund’s new budgeting parameters when speaking with callers. Additionally, Leyla says this has put added pressure on the entire team to make up for the lack of funding in the future fiscal years. As a healthline worker who helps people access abortion care, Leyla said she can’t help but feel the foundation never really cared about reproductive justice. 

“It really begs the question, when you give money to increase abortion access, what does it mean if you’re willing to take it away because of a stance against genocide?” Leyla suggested. “These donors like to think of themselves as ‘progressive,’ and then you look on their website, and they’re proudly funding Zionist projects, which aid in the settler colonial state of Israel.” 

In a statement to Prism, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies’ Chief Communications Officer Roben Smolar said that the foundation’s funding reflects the Schustreman family’s philanthropic priorities.

“Like many funders, we support grantees across a range of issue areas that are aligned with our mission and values,” Smolar said. “We may decide not to continue to fund an organization for a variety of reasons. We strive to be clear and in dialogue with our grantees about any issues that could impact funding, and if a decision is made not to continue funding, we strive to do so responsibly, aiming to ensure they have the support they need for the transition.”

Prism reached out to the abortion fund in question, and a spokesperson confirmed that Schusterman gave the abortion fund a large multiyear grant that was paid over the course of three years, but that the organization was not invited to reapply after the grant ended this year. “It was heavily implied that the reason for this was due to several staff and board members at the Schusterman Foundation being upset with our anti-genocide solidarity letter and them wanting to remove our funding in response,” said the spokesperson, who also requested anonymity.

In an Oct. 10 statement to Prism on behalf of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Smolar said that “out of respect for our grantees,” the foundation’s policy is to hold conversations with grantees in confidence and not discuss matters through the media.

“At a high level,” Smolar wrote, “we deeply respect the work many organizations are doing to provide much-needed access to abortion across the country and are committed to funding reproductive equity as a core part of our work. We made a series of emergency grants to abortion funds in anticipation of the Dobbs decision to boost their ability to ensure access to abortion. We made the strategic decision long before October 2023 to shift away from funding individual funds to a long-term approach that will advance broad-scale access across the country. We believe this is where we can make the most valuable contribution.”

The abortion fund where Leyla works is one of many organizations that have lost funding due to public statements calling for a ceasefire or voicing support for Palestine. According to workers from nonprofit organizations that spoke to Prism, over the last year, risk-averse funders and Zionist foundations have withdrawn hundreds of thousands in funding and canceled future grants for nonprofits that criticize Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. 

Crushing power dynamics between foundations and nonprofits have long existed in the progressive funding space—and the genocide is illuminating the limits of foundations’ commitment to liberatory work. Even more troubling, many of the nonprofits that have had their funding slashed in recent months are led by women of color who serve communities of color. 

“Many organizations are reconsidering this parasitic relationship [they have] with these donors, and accepting the fact that not all money is good money,” Leyla said. “We have to be way more critical about where our money comes from. In the same way that the U.S. is funding this genocide and then simultaneously sending crumbs of aid to Palestinians, we can see how capitalism strips us of our bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom. And then we only get crumbs of aid in the form of nonprofit organizations and philanthropic efforts.”

Monitoring, withdrawing, and accusing 

At the DC Abortion Fund (DCAF), an organization that has been under fire since February for its antigenocide position on social media, one foundation rescinded its invitation for the fund to reapply for a $30,000 grant. According to a DCAF spokesperson, this means about 100 callers will go without abortion access. 

“The Morningstar Foundation did not invite us to reapply for funding, but we were on an autorenewal track with them up until all this,” the spokesperson said. “They specifically took issue with the fact that we called what was happening in Gaza a genocide. They told us that it was clear we had taken a lot of time to write this statement and that it wasn’t something that just happened, and therefore, they no longer could support us.”

In an email sent to DCAF on April 12 regarding its decision to rescind funding, Morningstar Foundation cited DCAF’s signing of an open letter linking reproductive justice and Palestinian liberation, as well as the abortion fund’s reported support for another letter aimed at canceling a local performance by Zionist Jewish singer Matisyahu. 

“We firmly believe that these statements are not relevant to the critical work of abortion access in the DC area,” said Morningstar Foundation’s email that was viewed by Prism. “Even as we respect the notion that organizations have freedom to engage in advocacy activities in a variety of ways, The Morningstar Foundation will not support organizations that utilize messaging we determine to be offensive, grossly inaccurate, and/or in opposition to our values.”

The Matisyahu open letter was organized by the Occupation Free DC Campaign, an abolitionist community organization working to end D.C.-Israeli police training exchanges. DCAF did not sign onto the letter as an organization, despite right-wing reports that the abortion fund led the campaign against the singer. Prism confirmed that a member of staff mistakenly signed the letter using her work email address. 

A DCAF spokesperson, who asked for anonymity for fear of further backlash, said the allegations surrounding the Matisyahu incident illustrate how monitoring and a lack of basic fact-checking can result in the loss of thousands of dollars in funding. 

“Staff now feel like we have to be perfect,” the spokesperson said. “We have experienced firsthand how one tiny mistake can be ran with and used against us for months. We are still getting harassing emails and calls about the ‘cancel Matisyahu’ letter. Unlike at larger organizations, there are only one or two folks fielding these harassing calls and emails, on top of trying to do our core work of funding abortion seekers during a crisis for our movement.”

DCAF has also been the target of a harassment campaign since their former senior operations and strategy director Allison Korman publicly alleged that DCAF’s support for a ceasefire was antisemitic. This internal conflict, previously reported on by Prism, stemmed from Korman’s disapproval of a post shared by DCAF on the organization’s Instagram stories last year on Indigenous People’s Day, Oct. 9, demanding “land back” and calling for a “Free Palestine.” 

Afterward, Korman demanded that all social media posts get her approval prior to publication. She also met with the fund’s larger communications team on Nov. 14 to formulate rules for DCAF’s social media. Staffers who spoke to Prism say it was clear that Korman did not want DCAF to post about Palestine at all. 

Korman quit DCAF on Nov. 21 and later aired her grievances with the organization in an April op-ed published by a conservative-leaning Jewish publication. In June, Korman launched a new organization—the Red Tent Fund—that is “guided by Jewish values and teachings.” Her new abortion fund is a response to what she characterizes as a reproductive rights movement that is “mired in antisemitism.” 

DCAF lost 15 to 20 midlevel donors after Korman’s accusations of antisemitism went public, and the former employee continues to criticize the abortion fund’s unapologetically pro-Palestine stance. In a July interview with Jewish Insider, Korman said she created the Red Tent Fund in part so Jewish funders could support abortion access without pro-Palestine sentiment.

According to DCAF, the fund’s commitment to reproductive justice means supporting liberation for all—including Palestinians in Gaza. 

In a June interview with Prism, Ammal Awadallah, the executive director of the Palestinian Family Planning and Protection Association (PFPPA), said 64% of Gaza’s 36 hospitals were wholly nonfunctioning and that pregnant women in Gaza were at severe risk of delivering in unsafe conditions, having no choice but to give birth in shelters, tents, or homes “with no professional medical assistance or hygienic settings.” An estimated 15,000 pregnant women are at risk of starvation, Awadallah said, while 65% of those who’ve given birth did not receive any form of postpartum care.

This crisis should not be ignored by people in the U.S. who believe in liberation for everyone, according to the DCAF spokesperson. 

“While we are local to D.C., and our core work is providing abortion access, we believe in liberation for all people,” they said. “[I]n our opinion, it made complete sense that we would care about what is happening in Gaza—and that we would talk about the fact that there was a genocide happening, the same way we talk about other things happening in our community and across the world.”

What happened to DCAF is a larger phenomenon. Through anonymous interviews with workers and leaders at nonprofits, as well as consultants in the philanthropic field, Prism identified at least five BIPOC-led nonprofit organizations that lost hundreds of thousands in funding after publicly expressing support for Palestine. Most organizations are reluctant to discuss the issue publicly or name the foundations and donors that withdrew funding for fear of further retaliation. But consultants and workers in the field told Prism that organizations led by Arab, Black, and Indigenous people are having their social media monitored by donors and foundations. These same philanthropic organizations are also withdrawing funding from groups and accusing them of antisemitism because of their support for Palestinian resistance and a ceasefire in Gaza. 

“[These organizations] have been under heavy surveillance,” said Dalia, a donor organizer in the field of gender justice who is using a pseudonym for fear of retaliation. “Many of the organizations we work with are at the helm of [pro-Palestine] organizing. [T]he organizations we work with have told us that funders have approached them and explicitly said, ‘We want to renew you, we want to give you a three-year grant, but [not] if you say ‘from the river to the sea.’” 

Since Oct. 7, Dalia said “antidiscrimination clauses” that specifically prohibit grantees from “calling for the destruction of the state of Israel,” are more frequently appearing in grant agreements. One grantee told Dalia that a funder said the statement “from the river to the sea” is a call for the destruction of Israel. Clauses with similar language have shown up in grant agreements for organizations Dalia works with.

“We know that donors are looking at the social media [accounts] of our organization, and we know that they’re doing it for the organizations we work with,” Dalia said. “These organizations have told us that they have several funders who have expressed frustration, they have board members that have resigned as a result of their [pro-Palestine] stances. We are experiencing a destabilization of the field at the intersection of racial justice—that is being politically defunded—and anti-Zionist efforts, [which] as we know, go hand in hand.”

Citing a larger pattern of “political defunding of racial and gender justice movement more broadly,” Dalia said many of the organizations losing funding were never robustly funded to begin with, and it’s likely that some will not survive further financial destabilization.

“I spent the first two months after Oct. 7 on the phone every week, negotiating with organizations about what conversations they are going to have with their staff [and] how they were going to keep their staff safe,” Dalia said. “When we talk about organizations and what’s at stake—organizations are employers. So we’re talking about a lot of young women of color, young people of color, losing their livelihoods.” 

Risk-averse progressive funders

Vu Le, founder of the Nonprofit AF blog that chronicles the challenges of working in the sector, told Prism that funders have always used their power to influence how organizations do their work. 

“They want to be seen as moderate and sensible and reasonable,” Le said. “But what they’re doing is [acting] like the white moderate Dr. King warned us all about.”

There are foundations like Schusterman that are openly Zionist and fund projects in Israel with the stated mission of building “a future in which the United States and Israel live up to their highest ideals.” In other cases, foundations are simply risk-averse and do not want to fund organizations that make controversial or overtly political statements. According to Le, who founded and for five years led the Washington-based racial justice organization Rooted in Vibrant Communities (RVC), funders have always been a little too comfortable flexing their power over organizations that need resources to aid marginalized populations. 

“We’ve had funders in the past not like our use of ‘white supremacy,’” Le told Prism. “Which is an issue when we’re trying to address white supremacy.” Foundations have no real incentive to promote real change, Le said, because if nonprofits succeed in ending inequalities, foundations—and consequently, the whole philanthropic sector—would become irrelevant. 

Foundations and wealthy funders are interested in keeping the world as it is—and many have no qualms about using coercive tactics to silence nonprofits that venture into more radical work that actually seeks to address the power dynamics that cause oppression. There are no real mechanisms in place for nonprofits to hold foundations accountable for these actions, and there are certainly no regulatory laws to keep the philanthropic circle from using this power imbalance to push nonprofit organizations away from radical politics. 

“Funders have all the resources, so they’re not scared of anyone,” Le said. “A joke that some of the funders make is that funders have no natural predators. There’s no one that they would respond to, there’s no one who is keeping them accountable.”

When it comes to risk-averse funders, there is no real way for nonprofits to address the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, said Rebecca Vilkomerson, the former executive director of Jewish Voices For Peace and the co-founder of Funding Freedom, an organization that supports Palestinian liberation.  

“It’s not a coincidence that people think of Zionism and Jewishness interchangeably,” Vilkomerson said. “There’s been a real effort to do that … but I think it’s very, very important to disentangle them.”

Experts who spoke to Prism—including Vilkomerson, who has worked in social justice organizations for two decades and is on the board of the antifascist organization Showing Up for Racial Justice—said the Zionist movement has successfully redefined antisemitism to include criticism of Israel. As a result, the Jewish state is now widely seen as a stand-in for Jewish people, which is used to justify the slaughter of Palestinians. “Criticizing a state—any state, including Israel—for human rights violations or apartheid or an ongoing genocide is not antisemitic,” Vilkomerson asserted. 

There are funders who want to change philanthropy for the better. Funders for Palestine, for example, is a call to action by people in philanthropy who want to address the criminalization of the Palestinian cause and defend “the rights of Palestinian civil society organizations to carry out their crucial work.” In a similar vein, Jewish people in philanthropy also wrote and signed an open letter admonishing foundations for taking away grants from pro-Palestine organizations. 

“There are new formations that are coming out of this time,” Vilkomerson said. “Funders for Palestine is a great example where for the first time, funders are trying to organize transnationally to help break those silences. There’s some individual donors and donor networks who are really stepping up, as well as individual foundations and funders who are trying to educate themselves. The whole story is not repression, there’s also good organizing that’s happening and potential for changes in the way that the sector works.”

According to nonprofit workers, these efforts are desperately needed. The amount of power funders have over nonprofits results in censorship, the withholding of needed funds, and severed relationships between important funders and organizations that simply want to denounce the genocide. More broadly, this unequal power dynamic consistently softens radical movement work as organizers fear no longer having resources for the most marginalized communities if they make political statements that funders disagree with or view as controversial. Over the last year, more organizations have been forced to grapple with these circumstances. 

Take, for example, the actions of the Sigmund Rausing Trust (SRT), which published a statement on its website on Feb. 26 defending its decision to cancel two grants due to breach of contract. The foundation alleged that two unnamed organizations broke a clause pledging to “avoid glorifying or promoting violence or using language that is inflammatory or discriminatory.” The statement accused the organizations of supporting violence and expressing “pride” in the attacks of Oct. 7. The SRT also rescinded invitations to apply for further funding to three organizations, including a feminist organization that published a statement about the attack that included a sentence the foundation characterized as a “controversial”: “We affirm the right of all oppressed peoples to self-determine their resistance.”

“To morally condone atrocities against civilians is not compatible with the human rights and feminist values which inform our grant-making, and the group would not have received further funding from us,” SRT’s statement reads.

According to reporting and an email viewed by Prism, one organization that was uninvited from applying for SRT funding and was also criticized for its “controversial” pro-Palestine statement was the Frida Fund, which supports the work of young feminist organizers around the world. 

On Oct. 18, 2023, the Frida Fund created a post on Instagram affirming the Palestinian right to resistance and calling for a ceasefire. 

“We stand strongly against the persistent oppression, displacement, and human rights abuses inflicted upon the Palestinian population,” the caption reads. “We are in solidarity with those resisting such oppression and fighting for justice against the Israeli settler colonial state.” 

According to Frida Fund’s annual reports, SRT gave the nonprofit organization $50,017 in 2022 and $368,505 in 2021, though SRT has donated to the Frida Fund since 2016. At the beginning of August, the Frida Fund announced it was restructuring due to “acute and devastating shifts within key funding spaces” that reportedly resulted in the loss of $2.5 million in funding since the last quarter of 2023. Consequently, the fund had to lay off several employees. According to online records viewed by Prism, the Frida Fund had 38 employees in September 2023. As of Oct. 2024, the organization has 25 employees. 

Neither SRT nor the Frida Fund responded to Prism’s request for comment.

According to advocates, organizations like the Frida Fund that operate in the intersection of gender and racial justice are more likely to speak out about Palestine—and they’re the most likely to be punished for it.

“They’ve felt moved and compelled to speak up on Palestine because they see the connections between what is happening in Gaza … with the issues that they are working on at home,” Vilkomerson said. “And so they’re facing punishment from their funders because their funders were not prepared and are trying to control the speech and the actions of their grantees.”

‘Progressive Except Palestine’

Funding organizations that are openly pro-Palestine has always been a challenge. Vilkomerson says that certain progressive organizations are known as PEP: progressive except Palestine within the nonprofit space.

According to a 2022 report about philanthropy and the Palestinian freedom movement, written by Vilkomerson and published by the donor organizer group Solidaire Action, the overall funding space is “lopsided” when it comes to funding Palestinian solidarity. 

“At the federal level, the U.S. provides Israel with at least $3.8 billion per year, almost entirely in military aid, more than any other country since World War II,” the report notes. “While funding for Israel is guaranteed yearly, U.S. aid to Palestinians fluctuates yearly, is not guaranteed, and in recent years has hovered at around $350 million in mostly humanitarian and ‘recovery’ aid to mitigate the harm of Israeli attacks funded in no small part by the U.S.”

This aligns with what Julia, a woman of color who currently works in philanthropy, has experienced in her six-year career in philanthropic and nonprofit spaces. Julia (who is using a pseudonym for fear of retribution) has witnessed these funding issues firsthand. Palestine has long been a controversial topic for organizations to speak on publicly—even before the events of Oct. 7, 2023. 

“No organization would be actually willing to say things about Palestine. It was just an untouchable [subject],” Julia said. “Philanthropy has been used as a propaganda machine to further expand the power of Israel.”

Citing powerful organizations like the New Israel Fund and the Anti-Defamation League, which conflate anti-Zionism and antisemitism, Julia told Prism that philanthropic and nonprofit spaces are used to spread Zionist propaganda and that philanthropy, in particular, enforces unjust power structures. 

“Philanthropy in itself is a tool used to disrupt democracies, and it’s not just about Palestine because I feel like that exceptionalizes Palestine. This is actually happening all over. These things are just not discussed,” Julia said. 

Part of the problem is the lack of accountability in the philanthropic sector. In the 2017 edition of the book “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded,” published by the feminist organization INCITE, contributor Andrea Smith reveals that in 2000, the Ford Foundation retracted a $100,000 grant from INCITE after the organization issued a statement of solidarity with Palestine. Foundations’ power over nonprofits allows them to dissuade organizing and other efforts they don’t approve of, and nonprofit organizations that work at the intersections of gender, race, and colonization too often end up in the line of fire. 

While the Ford Foundation is currently a large donor to the Frida Fund, from 2003 to 2013 the foundation distributed $40 million to civil society NGOs in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza via the New Israel Fund. However, in 2013 the Ford Foundation announced it would no longer fund Israeli NGOs, citing changing priorities and a need to reevaluate “how best to contribute toward democracy and development in the region.” In October 2023, the foundation said it was supporting “immediate humanitarian relief efforts in Gaza and the Middle East.”

The Ford Foundation did not respond to Prism’s request for comment. 

Israel’s genocide is forcing a new generation of nonprofit workers to navigate philanthropy’s “progressive except Palestine” approach to funding, but Smith’s essay serves as an important reminder of the work that’s possible outside of foundation funding. 

In her piece, Smith describes how the money the Ford Foundation pulled from INCITE put the organization in a “major financial crisis” because the funds were already committed to the group’s national conference, leaving them with just weeks to raise $60,000.

“And yet we managed to do this,” Smith wrote. “So, we learned on one hand that foundations can indeed control your organizing, and on the other hand, there are other ways to resource movements when we think outside the foundation universe.”

[Editor’s note: The Ford Foundation funds Prism’s workers’ rights and economy vertical.]