The Powering a New Economy Fund is a collaborative fund that supports multiracial community & labor formations united behind pro-worker public investment and policy reform campaigns.
Three Focus Areas
The Fund supports an emerging field of expanded public initiatives, led by state strategic alignment formations, that aim to remake markets in key economic sectors to increase worker power and lower prices.
Decades of austerity budgeting have fueled a crisis of democratic legitimacy. Solving this crisis requires expanded public investment in new initiatives that address the root causes of skyrocketing living costs.
Strategic Alignment
A growing cross-issue, multi-racial movement infrastructure—loosely understood as ‘strategic alignment formations’—has been aligning disparate community and labor forces around a shared long-term agenda.
In recent years, this agenda has crystallized focus on a transformative state project of new public initiatives backed by progressive forms of revenue.
The Fund supports strategic alignment formations paired with progressive revenue campaigns in New York, Michigan, California, and Arizona.
Public Initiatives
The project ahead, for democracy and economic justice funders alike, must focus on rebinding people’s civic participation to a version of government that solves their most pressing problems.
This requires advancing a small number of public programs that are not just popular but actually address seemingly intractable problems, like skyrocketing housing, healthcare, and energy costs. New public options attack the root causes of the cost of living crisis.
The Fund supports efforts to create, expand, and implement new public programs in the care, energy, and housing sectors in New York, California, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania.
Worker Power
Public initiatives and economic regulations can (and must) strategically reinforce workers’ efforts to organize their workplaces for better pay and benefits.
Some community and worker organizations are partnering more closely with organized labor to concentrate organizing efforts on strategic industries and workplaces, connecting workplace campaigns to public policy reforms designed to increase production and create more union jobs.
The Fund supports these kinds of worker organizing movements in Louisiana, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and New York.
How We Work
The Ford Foundation and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation currently support the Fund.
The Fund is housed at the New Venture Fund, where it distributes grant funding twice yearly, once in the spring and once in the fall.
The Fund is governed by a Movement Oversight Committee (MOC) of funders and movement leaders. A subset of leaders on the MOC also serve on the Advisory Board and approve grant recommendations. Movement leaders hold a majority of the voting seats on the Advisory Board.
The Movement Oversight Committee consists of Sochie Nnaemeka, Doran Schrantz, Sarah Johnson, Sabrina Fong, Harmony Goldberg, Lauren Jacobs, Cortney Sanders, and Jhumpa Bhattacharya.
Ethan Frey serves as the Fund’s Manager.
Our Impact
$15M+
in grants awarded to 21+ organizations across eight states since 2022. The Fund leverages significant other funding from partner donors that maintain long-term grant programs in several of the target states.
Unrestricted Funding
is provided to all grantees over two-year grant cycles. The Fund is currently in its third cycle of funding in each state.
Building Public Goods
is the most effective way to address economic precarity. Philanthropic impact is maximized by scaling efforts through the public sector.
