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President's Letter

We Are Now the Freedom Together Foundation

We are excited to reintroduce ourselves: The JPB Foundation is now the Freedom Together Foundation.

As we continue to live into our expanded vision and mission, we are excited to have a new name that embodies our values. Freedom Together supports people who have been denied power to build it, so they can change unjust systems and create a more democratic, inclusive, and sustainable society.

“Freedom” is the keystone value in American civic life. The struggle for freedom has shaped our country for the better. From the founding of the nation to the civil rights movement and the fight for women’s equality, freedom dreams have been a north star and a unifying aspiration.

The meaning of freedom has always been fiercely contested. As historian Eric Foner explains in The Story of American Freedom, “Freedom is the oldest of clichés and the most modern of aspirations. At various times in our history it has served as a ‘protest ideal’ and as a justification of the status quo. Freedom helps bind our culture together and exposes the contradictions between what America claims to be and what it actually is.”

The “Together” in our name emphasizes, as so many movements have done, that freedom is best understood as a collective undertaking. There is a version of freedom that is narrow and cramped, and that justifies greed, exclusion, and selfishness. We believe that freedom is a shared aspiration and endeavor, achieved by organized people working together, and that it is only fully realized when it’s a reality for all.

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While we have changed our name, we will continue to honor the pillars of the foundation’s success since its founding. Our touchstone values of authentic collaboration, listening and learning, a commitment to equity and justice, and a willingness to make bold “big bets” to tackle big problems were established by our visionary founder and President Emerita, Barbara Picower. They have been, and always will be, at our core.

As detailed in our new report, Beyond the Grant: A Decade of Philanthropy at The JPB Foundation, we practice philanthropy with both patience and a fierce sense of urgency. The foundation’s ethos has been defined by a commitment to partnership with the communities we seek to support. The JPB Foundation distributed $2.7 billion and made 3,900 grants from 2012 through 2023. We’re immensely proud of what we, and more importantly our grantees, have accomplished. And we’ve learned important lessons that will inform our future work.

In looking forward to our Foundation’s next chapter and name, I’ve thought about how freedom is both an external condition and an inner state, and the two are mutually reinforcing. Nina Simone famously defined the state of freedom as both an absence — “no fear, I mean really no fear!” — and by a presence, an ineffable, liberated way of seeing, feeling, and being in the world. Our country’s history teaches us that in challenging moments, we are called to be courageous. Achieving freedom in the world requires active cultivation of an inner state of resolve. As Simone understood, fear is the enemy of freedom. We all have experiences of overcoming fear from which we can learn. A touchstone experience for me was coming out as a gay man in the darkest period of the AIDS crisis. I learned the crucial lesson that we overcome fear and find courage in community, in solidarity, and in action with others.

With that lesson in mind, I recently co-authored an opinion article with partners at Open Society Foundations and Democracy Fund. We argue that, in this moment, philanthropy has a special responsibility to stand up for its values and support civil society and vulnerable communities. We commit, and encourage our peers, to back efforts that:

  • Defend the safety, security, and well-being of communities and organizations;
  • Defend against abuses of power that undermine democratic institutions and values; and
  • Build the durable power of grassroots, pro-democracy organizations and broaden the coalition committed to an inclusive, multiracial democracy.

At Freedom Together, our Board has authorized spending up to approximately double the required minimum payout for private foundations for the next two years to help realize our mission, and to protect and strengthen democracy. This will include support for short-term rapid response, for example, expanded funding to immigrant communities and other communities that have been long-standing priorities of the foundation and now face looming attacks. We recognize that queer and trans communities also face immense challenges. While work on LGBTQ+ issues has not been an area of focus for the foundation in the past, we will fund work in this area beginning this month. Supporting communities under threat is important on its own terms, and also because a loss of freedom for these groups inevitably enables a loss of freedom for everyone.

Freedom Together is also firmly committed to the medium- and long-term work of rebuilding a civic infrastructure for democracy from the ground up, by expanding support for community and worker organizing, strengthening movement infrastructure, and supporting work to bring people together across lines of difference for social change. Democracy means little if it is not grounded in people’s everyday concerns and aspirations for a better life. We all have some hard questions to ask about how to build a broad-based, majoritarian movement in this country, and what beliefs, practices, and habits we might need to nurture and let go of to get there together.

We are part of a great lineage of social change, including ancestors who overcame fear, doubt, and even despair, and achieved extraordinary things under circumstances far worse than what we face today. Around the world, people take huge risks to stand up for what is right, and we can learn from them, too. I was deeply moved, for example, by Alexei Navalny’s prison diaries. He asks, “Why live your whole life in fear, even being robbed in the process, if everything can be arranged differently and more justly?” Indeed. We can take inspiration and cultivate courage by grounding ourselves in this proud tradition of freedom makers that reaches across space and time.

As challenges mount, we are committed to achieving freedom together.

With gratitude,

Deepak Bhargava

President

Freedom Together Foundation

Freedom Together Media Highlights

Career Opportunities at Freedom Together

All positions can be found here.

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