2025-2030 Strategy

Pathways To Multiracial Democracy

Defeating Autocracy & Restoring Civil Society

About Movement Voter Fund

MVF is a clearinghouse that directs funding to organizations working to build movements, shift culture, expand democracy, and shape policy.

MVF works like a “mutual fund” for civic philanthropic giving, helping donors channel resources to the most effective groups around the country that are building a broad-based coalition for progress.

Executive Summary

We can defeat autocracy, restore civil society, and build toward a hopeful new era — but only if we organize a movement powerful, popular, and compelling enough to win hearts, minds, and sustainable progress.

Problem: Regressive movements are eroding the foundations of our democracy.

Regressive funders are serious about power. Through steady investment, they have built:

Grassroots power through groups like Turning Point USA and Leadership Institute.
Cultural power through groups like PragerU, Teneo, and a sprawling online media ecosystem.
Institutional power through groups like Heritage Foundation and The Federalist Society.

Solution: A broad grassroots movement to build a country where all can thrive.

To build toward a more just, equitable, and hopeful chapter for our nation, we need to invest now to:

Expand year-round local organizing, led by and for working people, people of color, youth, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ people, that builds a powerful and durable constituency for progress.
Scale up new media and digital organizing to win hearts and minds en masse.
Boost civic leadership that elevates the vision and power of the multiracial working class.

Long-term power takes long-term investment. That’s where MVF comes in.

There are no shortcuts. To achieve the future we want to see, we need to create the conditions for sustainable progress starting now. Join us in funding this work: movementvoterfund.org/donate.

Theory of Change

Ultimate Objectives: Defeating Autocracy and Restoring Democracy

Our most urgent challenge is to stop the erosion of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism.
But defeating autocracy is not enough. We must restore and strengthen civil society and make government deliver for all people, thus weakening the allure of strongmen and their ideology.

Measurable Results: Attitudinal Shifts, Good Governance, Policy Progress

We must maximize civic participation to push for a government that works for everyone.
But a participatory democracy can only flourish if we successfully enact bold policy change.
To fuel and sustain the progress we seek, we must reshape worldviews and shift public opinion.

Enabling Conditions: Organizing, New Media, and Civic Leadership

The foundation for lasting change is year-round, locally-rooted organizing around the country.
But, in today’s fragmented media age, we must pair local organizing with the scalability of new media, so we can amplify narratives of solidarity and democracy rather than fear and autocracy.
And, we must cultivate civic leaders who stand for the rights of all people, not just the wealthy.

Catalytic Interventions: Funding, Capacity Building, and Collaboration

It takes resources to build power that lasts. To fuel this work, we must expand the “funding pie.”
Beyond funding, we must also give capacity-building support to help strengthen groups’ work.
Finally, we need to incentivize and dramatically increase collaboration at all levels, so that our organizations and movements can operate as greater than the sum of their parts.

Key Goals, 2025-2030

Summary

Through 2030, we are focused on three key goals:

Defeat Autocracy: Undercut authoritarian consolidation of power by maximizing civil resistance, protecting targeted communities, and defending free and fair elections.
Rebuild Trust in Democracy: Expand and strengthen year-round organizing by and for working-class voters of all races, to stop the cycle of voter cynicism and civic disengagement.
Push for Policy Progress: Block regressive policies at all levels and advance local and state progress through ballot measures and legislative, executive, and judicial action.

The Throughline: Base Building

The core approach that underlies each of MVF’s key goals is base building: The work of increasing the depth and scope of leadership and commitment among members of an organized constituency.

Progress is only possible — whether local, state, or national — when it is built on a foundation of base building at the community level. This involves activities such as:

Recruiting among community members,
Developing trusted leaders in neighborhoods and workplaces,
Building collective identity and analysis, and, eventually,
Turning out their communities to vote.

These activities create powerful networks that can compel government officials and monied interests to come to the table after long ignoring communities they had written off.

Goal #1: Defeat Autocracy

The second Trump administration has extorted law firms for pro-bono work, incarcerated international student activists for speech, gutted the civil service, deported immigrants against court orders, and curtailed journalists’ access. These attacks on freedom of speech, human rights, and civil society reflect only some of the most visible examples of rising authoritarianism in the United States.

In the short term, maximizing civil resistance is our primary tool for protecting targeted communities and pulling democracy back from the brink of authoritarianism. But long-term survival of democracy depends on galvanizing public anger into participation and turning first-time activists into leaders for the long haul. An intermediate priority is safeguarding free and fair elections in 2026 and 2028 with the broadest possible coalition.

→ Key indicators of success: Mobilization for civil resistance, public opinion shifts, and the integrity of states’ election administration and certification processes.

Turning Civil Resistance into Long-Term Power in Michigan: Grassroots groups in Michigan formed a resistance coalition to coordinate mobilizations against federal overreach on issues ranging from immigrants’ rights to freedom of the press. This coalition provides intentional on-ramps for new volunteers and creates feedback loops between nearly 100 Indivisible chapters across the state and social media influencers who are part of Michigan for the Many. Together, the Indivisible chapters and Michigan for the Many are telling a story about what ordinary people can do to counter the consolidation of federal power while organizing to limit the influence of corporations on state politics.

Stopping the Conversion of County Jails into Detention Centers in New Jersey: Private prison companies are buying up state and county jails to operate federal detention centers, which is the most efficient way to ramp up deportations. Make the Road New Jersey organized to block the sale of a vacant jail in Union County in the county’s request for proposals. Pressuring municipalities and states can slow down the expansion of physical infrastructure for deportations.

Protecting the Results of Free and Fair Elections in North Carolina: The 2024 election finally came to an end in May 2025 when the North Carolina Supreme Court race was finally certified, and Allison Riggs was sworn in as an associate justice. Two independent recounts showed that Jefferson Griffin lost to Allison Riggs by 734 votes, but he refused to concede and attempted to invalidate 60,000 ballots. Common Cause Education Fund, Southern Coalition for Social Justice, and base-building organizations in North Carolina launched a historic ballot curing initiative after the 2024 election to protect the rights of voters who cast provisional ballots. The successful organizing, litigation, and communications campaign created a playbook for future efforts to safeguard election certification.

Goal #2: Rebuild Trust in Democracy

Voters often complain to candidates, “You only contact me right before the election, but then I never see you again.” Traditional campaigns use last-minute, transactional marketing tactics to turn out voters as if they were customers, not citizens, creating disillusionment with the political system.

This problem is particularly acute in low-income communities, where elected officials regularly neglect residents’ needs but historically have taken their votes for granted.

Booms in funding fuel short periods of hyperactivity before elections, but then elected officials return to ignoring residents’ needs, breeding voter cynicism and low participation. Busts in funding in between elections leave voters neglected, unorganized, and uninformed in a fragmented media ecosystem rife with disinformation.

In contrast to the transactional approach, year-round organizing generates trust and develops leaders. Base-building organizations can re-engage millions of disaffected voters and build long-term power as public opinion on federal policies shifts drastically, and conventional conservative/liberal issue polarization fades into irrelevance.

→ Key indicators of success: In addition to measuring the impact of short-term mobilization on voter participation, MVF is collaborating with the Democracy & Power Innovation Fund to measure power building, such as the density of leadership networks and the frequency of volunteer participation.

Leading Conservative Organizations Don’t Face “Boom-and-Bust” Funding: Right-wing funders do not abandon their base-building organizations in years without federal elections. Funding for Turning Point USA, a 501(c)(3) that organizes students to promote right-wing viewpoints, stayed steady from 2022 to 2024. Steady revenue for PragerU, a 501(c)(3) which creates bite-sized videos espousing a conservative worldview, allowed them to scale expenses from $45 million in 2022 to $55 million in 2023 and $68 million in 2024.

This steady funding allows conservative groups to develop long-term leaders, test and promote effective staff and content creators, and build durable infrastructure.

Goal #3: Push for Policy Progress

Conservative lawmakers have eroded democracy to entrench their power at the federal and state levels, such as partisan gerrymandering schemes that have shut voters out of representation for decades at a time.

These power grabs have paved the way to repealing the most consequential victories of the 20th century, including civil rights, abortion access, and environmental protections.

Removing structural barriers to policy progress, creating state-level policy agendas, and co-governing with elected officials are essential components to making concrete improvements.

→ Key indicators of success: We can measure our state-level progress by tracking the defeat of regressive policies and the passage of bold policy agendas, ballot measure victories, and the removal of structural barriers to federal policymaking.

Replicating the “Minnesota Miracle”: In 2023, lawmakers in Minnesota passed a sweeping agenda that included 100% clean energy, paid family and medical leave, universal free school lunches, and driver’s licenses for all.

This legislative package was passed within the first six months of 2023, but was only made possible after a decade of neighborhood-level base building by local MVF grantee partners like ISAIAH, allying with labor unions, and developing leaders around the state.

Replicating this success is possible in several other states by 2030.

Enabling Conditions for Multiracial Democracy

Prioritizing Youth and the Multiracial Working Class

Since its inception, MVF has focused on organizing communities of color, youth, and working people, who have the potential to transform democracy and usher in progressive policy and cultural change.

Now, in the face of a media environment that is more fractured than ever, MVF is scaling our support for work that engages these communities in a “hearts and minds” approach to creating a shared worldview.

Strategies that cultivate shared belonging are the best defense against “strongman” leaders who scapegoat immigrants, LGBTQ people, and other communities to threaten civil society and democracy.

MVF’s priority continues to be increasing the participation of the multi-racial working class, who hold the keys to a participatory democracy.

Strategic Grantmaking Areas

We believe the multiracial working class can exercise power when:

People organize locally, in coordination with national movement-building strategies;
Public narratives that promote democracy and solidarity become more popular than those that promote authoritarianism and fear; and
Civic leaders stand for the rights of their communities and govern with their support.

MVF is focused on creating these enabling conditions for lasting power by funding work to:

Expand Local Organizing: A grassroots-first approach builds power locally, creates powerful state-level alliances, and creates the conditions for state and federal policy change.
Scale Up New Media: Amplifying a worldview based on solidarity and democracy, not fear and autocracy, using new media and digital engagement to meet people where they are online.
Boost Civic Leadership: Identifying and developing authentic civic leaders, and building strong “co-governing” relationships between elected officials and the communities they serve.

Area #1: Expand Local Organizing

Grassroots-First Approach: Community-level organizing is the foundation for sustainable power and progress. MVF’s grantmaking prioritizes local base building, upon which we can then layer state and national advocacy and communications strategies.

Drawing on deep familiarity with local “ecosystems” of 501(c)(3) organizations, MVF State Advisors have built relationships with hundreds of locally rooted groups who are building strong bases. State Advisors advance short-term imperatives and long-term power building through grantmaking recommendations.

MVF also funds a smaller portfolio of national organizations, such as People’s Action Institute, Center for Popular Democracy, and Indivisible Civics, to tackle challenges facing democracy across the country.

Leveraging Base Building for Voter Participation, and Voter Participation for Base Building: Large-scale voter mobilization programs allow community organizations to cast a wide net, which can then help them expand base-building efforts.

Meanwhile, the base-building process helps organizers see what issues and messages resonate with communities, develop trusted local leaders, and, in turn, inform effective voter mobilization strategies.

These mutually-reinforcing approaches to base-building and voter engagement, informed by qualitative and quantitative data, will allow MVF grantee partners to grow their ability to shift narratives and set the policy agenda.

State Ecosystems Boost Fieldwide Capacity: Base-building organizations are at the core of MVF’s grantmaking strategy, but these organizations rely on statewide coordinating organizations to level up key shared functions such as research, training, operations, and communications. As a result, MVF supports grantmaking for strong “state ecosystems” to support base-building organizations.

MVF grants have seeded and supported operations hubs, strategy coordination tables, shared communications capacity, and nonpartisan issue-advocacy campaigns. MVF State Advisors convene organizations to budget and plan together, and to organize new donors in coordination with in-state funders and state donor tables.

Area #2: Scale Up New Media

The age of legacy media is ending. Up until now, many civic engagement organizations have struggled to adapt to the new, fragmented, algorithm-first digital landscape. Most locally based organizations, which excel at in-person organizing, lag in adopting decentralized, digital organizing strategies. Meanwhile, bad actors spread disinformation, fragmenting and demobilizing MVF core constituencies.

Elevating State Stories to Shift the National Dialogue: States have become critical battlegrounds for digital information warfare, such as disinformation on the Texas floods in July 2025. MVF State Advisors are pioneering investments in new-media initiatives that strengthen collaboration and build rapid-response amplification networks. Using models such as a “Microinfluencers for Fair Taxes” pilot by the State Revenue Alliance in New Hampshire, MVF is elevating state-focused stories with national potential by investing in tables that include media, creators, strategists, and organizers.

Multimedia Online Engagement: Often, nonpolitical messengers are far more effective at reaching audiences than politicians. MVF supports content creators, housed within movement organizations, to meet voters where they are, such as Addition Project’s organizing on Facebook Community Groups and posting on Subreddits. These tactics can transform civic messengers into cultural catalysts. By cultivating networks focused on new media to support these campaigns, creators and their messages can be tested online and amplified by broader networks to engage voters and shift broader narratives.

Amplification: A unified narrative ecosystem amplifies messages across platforms and personalities, scales local wins into national stories, and counters disinformation. MVF will convene media figures, movement leaders, communication experts, and content creators to build a rapid-response network. Together, these strategists will establish a shared rubric for setting priorities and coordinating amplification strategies to create narratives that successfully break through to the broader public.

Area #3: Boost Civic Leadership

Developing Trusted Leaders: While partisan campaigns often “parachute” into communities, deluge voters with ads, and leave little behind after Election Day, community organizations recruit leaders in neighborhoods, workplaces, and congregations to build long-term power. MVF grantees identify leaders with strong relationships and develop them through trainings on power building, workshops on tactics like ballot curing and deportation defense, and organizational leadership cohorts.

Co-Governing to Win Transformative Policies: In a relationship known as co-governance, elected officials engage in collaborative relationships with local organizations to design, plan, and implement policy priorities. Movement organizations then mobilize their bases to demonstrate the political will to pass transformative policies, often over corporate opposition, to improve the lives of working people.

Catalytic Interventions

To bring about the full potential of our grantee partners’ work, MVF is working in earnest to:

Expand the overall “funding pie” to local organizing and pro-democracy movement building.
Strengthen organizations and fortify whole movements through year-round capacity building.
Maximize collaboration across organizations at both the state and national levels.

Intervention #1: Expanding the Funding Pie

Donors and funders give hundreds of billions of dollars to charity each year. If we could redirect even a fraction of these philanthropic resources to pro-democracy organizing and movement building, we could solve so many societal problems “upstream.”

Right now, less than 1% of philanthropic giving in the United States supports democracy, which includes voter engagement, protecting voting rights, independent media and journalism, and election administration. Meanwhile, federal funding for a wide range of nonprofits, from public radio stations to immigrant legal services, has been decimated, cutting off the general public from critical information and leaving the most vulnerable communities with few resources.

For these reasons, MVF is here not only to move money, but to shift the culture of philanthropy by building a movement of donors and funders committed to supporting deep, long-term organizing.

MVF is organizing funders across issue areas and geographies to invest in systems change, community organizing, power building, and advocacy to protect communities and civil society.
Our Donor Organizing Team supports MVF donors to become volunteer donor organizers, who then, in turn, host events and launch fundraising campaigns to identify and bring in new donors.
Our Philanthropic Advising Team works with donors and funders to make the most strategic investments possible in democracy, from grassroots organizations to national alliances.
Our Program Team advises local, state, and national grantmaking strategies, so that 501(c)(3) funds can have the greatest impact on short-term democracy defense and long-term grassroots power building.

Intervention #2: Strengthen Organizations

MVF’s Capacity Building Program gives our partners the tools, skills, and support to strengthen, sustain, and scale their work. Our team has created a network of capacity-building providers to tailor support to hundreds of state and local organizations. Our program offers support in four major areas:

Data, Tech, and Systems: MVP offers free and discounted access to a Tech Tool Stack designed to optimize voter organizing efforts while saving precious time, money, and people power. MVF’s Director of Movement Tech & Data builds custom dashboards for grantees to share data on voter contact and organizing, allowing them to demonstrate their impact and enabling MVF to see real-time improvements in organizing. MVF convenes a Technology Infrastructure Working Group of tech providers, organizations, and tool developers to deepen collaboration and achieve broader alignment on shared strategies to address the growing need for movement-led tech infrastructure.
Leadership Development: Talented spokespeople and organizers are often promoted quickly to lead organizations, but lack expertise in fundraising and ensuring financial sustainability. MVF funds two cohorts, each with 40 organizations, to coach emerging leaders on fundraising and financial management best practices.

Narrative and Communications: MVF contracts experts who coach organizations to tell their communities’ stories to a broader audience and create crisis communications plans.

Safety and Security: MVF is an anchor investor in the Nonprofit Legal Defense Task Force through the Alliance for Justice. This national hub of trusted legal experts supports advocacy and organizing groups navigating complex civil, criminal, and compliance challenges.

The MVF Capacity Building Program helps organizations build durable, cross-movement power within their ecosystems. Frontline organizations, particularly those working at the intersection of protecting communities and defending democracy, face coordinated threats from national policymakers, media figures, and think tanks on their nonprofit status, access to federal and institutional resources, civil rights, and basic dignity and humanity.

To meet the urgency of this moment, our program is prioritizing youth, immigrants, BIPOC communities, LGBTQ+ people, and religious minorities. Fortifying these frontline movement organizations strengthens civil society and democracy for everyone.

Intervention #3: Maximize Collaboration

In this time of rising authoritarianism, MVF is building alliances and funding pilots so leaders can learn how to organize, communicate, and govern effectively. In addition to supporting organizing at the local level, MVF is identifying and seeding pilots whose impact can scale and replicate in other contexts. Learning from these experiments will show where we can make the highest impact interventions on resetting political, cultural, and social dynamics to move from rising authoritarianism to multiracial democracy. Some of these projects include:

Coordinating Federal Issue-Advocacy: Seed-funded by MVF and led by our allies and partners, Alliance for Congressional Accountability is a new coalition of local and national organizing groups coordinating a lasting organizing presence to educate and energize constituents on federal issues. Their overarching goal is to hold members of Congress accountable to serve their constituents, rather than billionaire donors and corporate interests.
State-Level Digital Power: We are pioneering investments in new-media initiatives that strengthen partner collaboration and build rapid-response amplification networks. Using models like the Narrative Justice League in Minnesota, we will invest in coalitions (that include members, media, content creators, strategists, and organizational leads) that shift both local politics and the broader national conversation — scaling impact from the ground up.

Thank You for Your Partnership

MVF is grateful for your partnership in the urgent work of defeating autocracy and, through patient dedication and steady investment, ushering in a new era of multiracial democracy.

Together, we can shift public opinion, organize working people of all races, and pass bold policies that improve people’s daily lives and create a future that we all deserve.

If you see yourself or your philanthropic institution as part of this vision for change, please reach out to us at info@movementvoterfund.org. We are ready to partner with you.

Movement Voter Fund conducts its grantmaking through a fund at Tides Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Contributions are deductible for federal income tax purposes in accordance with applicable law. Please consult your tax advisor for guidance. Financial and other information about Tides Foundation’s purpose, programs, and activities can be obtained by visiting the Tides Foundation website.