Blind Plea - Listen Now: Good Things - How to Fight Back Through Giving

Episode Date: July 5, 2025

Good Things from Lemonada Media is a podcast about the good people in the world who are rolling up their sleeves and working hard to make things better. Each week, we'll be talking about this country's most complex and confounding issues in an effort to affect systemic change, with a rotating cast of incredible guests and Lemonada hosts. From the dire condition of the American foster care system to the decline of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives, protecting democracy, and more, we’re focusing on solutions – with the people putting them into action In this episode, as the federal government has been making unprecedented funding cuts, many communities are facing more uncertainty and less support. In response, the Marguerite Casey Foundation is making a bold move: they’re distributing $130 million this year to organizations working for racial and economic justice. In this episode, Carmen Rojas, the foundation’s president and CEO, gets into the reasons behind the move, which organizations will benefit and how this funding aims to fill critical gaps. This episode is presented by the Marguerite Casey Foundation. MCF supports leaders who work to shift the balance of power in their communities toward working people and families, and who have the vision and capacity for building a truly representative economy. Learn more at caseygrants.org or visit on social media @caseygrants.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Make life suck less with fewer ads with Lemonada Premium. Hi everyone, I'm David Duchovny. Join me on my podcast, Fail Better, where we use failure as a lens to reflect on the past and analyze the current moment. I speak with makers and performers like Rob Lowe, Rosie O'Donnell, and Kenya Barris, as well as thinkers like Kara Swisher and Nate Silver, to understand how both personal setbacks and larger forces impact our world. Listen to Fail Things. I'm your host, Maya Rupert.

We're living in a moment full of uncertainty for our country and for philanthropy. As the Trump administration has been making unprecedented federal funding cuts, so many communities have been left vulnerable and without the support of vital institutions. Amidst all of this, the Marguerite Casey Foundation is making a bold move this year, giving away $130 million. Where the government has stepped back, they're stepping in to support organizations fighting for racial and economic justice. Here to break it all down for us is Carmen Rojas,

the foundation's president and CEO. We'll get into the reasons behind our foundation's commitment to $130 million, which organizations will benefit, and how the funding will fill crucial gaps. Carmen brings the kind of optimism that I think we all really need right now. From sharing a recent win protecting immigrant rights in Tennessee, to how we can all advocate for government and institutions that actually work for people.

Carmen, welcome back to Good Things. Thank you so much for having me, Maya. So before we get into our conversation, I want to acknowledge that we're in really uncertain times for philanthropy, for our democracy. So what we talk about today, at the end of May, might change by the time this episode comes out, right? So with that in mind, I just want to flag that.

What's it like to be a leader in this space at this moment in time? How are you holding up? It's scary. It's scary to be a leader at this moment. I often wish I could offer some sort of powerful statement about bravery or boldness. And I wish I could summon a moving quote about the choices we make in hard times.

But like many of us, I am trying to just be super honest about my fear and just remember that courage is not the lack of fear, but instead that it's the decision to take action even if you are afraid. And I've been thinking a lot, I've been telling our staff and folks, you know, like I'm treating my visits with fear as like little opportunities to both remember my purpose

and remember why we do the work that we do. And so I've been thinking a lot about folks like Mahmood Khalil, Kilmar Armando Abreu Garcia, Yon Seyo Chung, and the countless others who've been kidnapped by our government in my heart like that. The fear is a helpful reminder of their precious lives and my their precious lives and my very real desire to have an antidote to my fear and not let this fear paralyze me or accept what's happening as a normal course of action or to imagine, like many people, including myself, did in the early days after the election that if only we got small or quiet or shut our eyes and let this moment pass without struggle then nothing would happen and I feel really clear that if that is the way we choose to act if we let fear be the driving force for our action then these folks are going to be the first of millions of community organizers,

social justice leaders, ordinary people who just love us so much, who are harmed by our government if we aren't courageous. So that is how I am waking up and grounding in myself every day with folks at Marguerite Casey. Thank you. How are you? Thank you for that very much. No, absolutely. I mean, I feel so much of what you just said I would echo.

I'm so grateful to hear you talk about these sort of visits with fear as opportunities. Thank you for that reflection and seriously, and thank you for naming everyone. I think that's really important. We've got to keep doing that. Yeah. So, I think so many of us hear, you know, about all the cuts that the administration is making. We heard about Doge, we heard, right? But it doesn't always get connected to people. What impacts are you seeing on the ground from some of these cuts?

Yeah, a ton. At first, I thought it was just that the administration was seeking to weaponize the power of the government in order to fight its stated enemies, right? And a number of nonprofits that provide critical services to people across the country are in the crosshairs of this administration. And since the release of the budget reconciliation and the start of this conversation, I had to go one step further and say,

not only are they seeking to weaponize the government against its enemies, this administration is actively seeking to steal directly from the poorest amongst us to pad the pockets of the richest. And all while starving organizations that provide the really important resources to fill the holes that the administration keeps digging for us. So like, let's talk about previously committed resources, federal funds that our government committed to organizations to fight climate change. On the one hand, it means the loss of jobs that these organizations have to fire people. On the other hand, it's the long-term debt of deepening our reliance on polluting fossil fuels.

When we cut funding to public schools, again, we lose jobs and kids who depend on school as a place to eat, on school as a place for care where they can go after school if their parents have a job, will then be left on their own. So we fund an organization called Work Money that supports people to connect to benefits. They've supported 8 million people to access funding and benefits for supplemental funding for food, for utilities, for healthcare.

And the proposed funding cuts to vital programs like Medicaid, which as you know, provides a critical lifeline to healthcare for millions of people. And the proposed cuts to SNAP, which feeds millions of families, creates significant worry. It's like uncertainty. People are going not only to be harmed, but will be killed because of the proposed cuts of this administration. Then there are the issues that are not like the bread and butter, like the food, the care issues.

But I also think that they are important issues to name given the work that we support. And it's the work that this government has done to openly question longstanding and hard fought laws, freedom of speech, freedom of legal representation, citizenship rights for those of us born here. The administration and its political leaders that follow it have introduced over 40 anti-protest bills in 22 states since the start of this year. We're not even talking about 2020.

I think we see 2020 as like a paramount moment, but 40 anti-protest bills, really not only limiting our freedom of speech, challenging this idea that we have the right to debate publicly about our beliefs. This administration has really taken action against that. And we think that any effort to criminalize or dismantle the sector is not only unconscionable, it strikes at the heart of what it means to be American. Organizations that teach people what their rights are, that provide legal aid, that offer food, that offer housing are key to the fabric of our society. And the violence that this administration is enacting on these organizations is really unconscionable.

Right, right. And that's the thing. It's so many of the things that we were proud of, sort of civically, right? The partisan issues across the board. Now we're seeing those are the things that are being taken aim at. I think you said it so well. It's not just what we're losing with the program. It is getting at something deeper than that when you attack at the core of things that

we have held so dear. Yeah, and I think the hard thing right now is that we are being asked to walk and chew gum at the same time, that we have to defend these promises that we've made to each other. So like Medicare, SNAP, public education, the set of rights that protect against racial discrimination, gender discrimination in the workplace, in public space, in service provision, those are promises that we've made to each other. And to essentially hold organizations, the resources of organizations hostage because they have a commitment to diversity, to equity, and to inclusion is a crime.

And we want to support organizations to fight. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more on Good Things. Hey, I'm Reshma Sajjani, founder of Girls Who Code and Moms First. I consider myself a pretty successful adult woman. So why is it that in midlife, as I'm about to turn 50, I feel so stuck? Join me as I try to find the answer on my so-called midlife from Lemonada Media. I talk to experts and extraordinary guests

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I think a stray bullet flew past me because I hear the whew. It was that horrible feeling of dread. Something's wrong. Four years ago, my dad was killed in a mass shooting. My podcast, senseless is about moving forward after the unthinkable. Senseless from Lemonada Media, premiering June 17th. Your foundation recently announced a huge increase in funding this year, a total of $130 million. Now, that's about five times more than previous years. What led you to that bold move?

Yeah. So we have been preparing for this political moment. And just to be frank, like I don't even know that 24 months ago, we thought it would be as extreme as it is right now. But we knew- I don't think anyone did. No. So I don't want to give off the sense that all of us, we were reading tea leaves. But we knew because this administration was not signaling, they were shouting their intentions, right? And so if money is our

tool, is our superhero power, then we needed to increase the amount of money that we gave. So as you mentioned, so in a normal year, we give out anywhere between 25 and $30 million. And this year, we made a commitment to grant $130 million. And we wanted to focus on a set of fundamental rights, right? The freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly. And we wanted to protect our freedom to give, that the freedom to give is a part of our

freedom of speech, right? And we think this is a moment for institutions and individuals to give to the organizations and causes that support our communities. I think oftentimes they are invisible. They are like these promises that we can take for granted in each other. And today is a day that we need to show up for them because they've shown up for us, right? Like think about folks in LA after the fire, who showed up for the cleanup?

It was nonprofit organizations in Kentucky after these crazy storms. Who shows up? It's nonprofit organizations. When a family is hungry, when a kid needs care, you know, book programs, I think about the programs that were so key to my life. Would I have known as a kid that it was a nonprofit organization that came and offered like a reading program at my school? But they, they seeded a love of the written word in me. And I think for us as an institution, we want to protect our freedom to give to these organizations. Right.

It's beautiful. I love that. So before we get more into the funding for this year, I want to maybe take a bit of a look back at some of your organization's success stories and why continued funding is an investment in the future. And I'm thinking specifically about the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, which you fund, recently had a big success and defeated a bill, at least for this year, that would have taken away funding that allows immigrant kids to go to

public school. That's right. Can you share more about that story? Yeah. The Tennessee Immigrant Refugee and Rights Coalition, or TURC, organized a massive resistance across the state of Tennessee to kill a bill that would have ripped away the right to public education for the kids of immigrants, forcing schools to check immigration status and to deny enrollment or to charge tuition, to sort of privatize a public good

to students without documentation. And community organizing killed the bill, like you mentioned, Maya, for this year. But, you know, sometimes a year is the bubble of oxygen that we need. I think a number of people have heard the amazing story of Lynn McFarland, who was arrested and carried out of the state's Senate hearing room, while saying, I fought for kids and what lawmakers are doing here is wrong. And this has happened throughout Tennessee over the course of this year. And this is one of those key examples, right?

Like this is Turk bringing people together in their community to realize, to deliver on the promise that we've made not only to ourselves as adults, but to future generations of school as the place for learning for all of us here. And I'm really proud that our funding has been able to fuel the work of TURK. And we know no fight is over. You know, like I am the Angela Davis School of Freedom being a constant struggle. And I want us to remember what happens when we win to like revel in the victories and

then moments like this and days like today and months like these months, it's easy to be subsumed. And here is a group in Tennessee, not in New York state, not in California, not in Massachusetts. For folks who often look at the South as a place that is unwinnable, a group of people came together and imagined a different future for their kids and won. And I think we have to rest in the laurels of that. I love that. I absolutely love that. Yeah.

So let's get back to the exciting announcement around funding for this year and start looking forward. With that $130 million, are there specific areas that you're going to be prioritizing? Yeah. So the first thing we did is we gave everybody, all of our existing grant recipients more money. So that means that organizations like Kansas City Tenants Union can help keep tenants in their housing in Kansas City. It means like organizations like Firelands Workers United and Washington State can help keep people housed in rural Washington States.

We've added more resources to organizations like TURK. We've provided some defensive research. So the reason I mention Mahmoud Khalil and the set of students who've been kidnapped by our government is that we have been supporting an organization called Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility, or CLEAR, which has been acting as the legal counsel for these students. These are a long-term grant recipient of the foundation. And in this moment, we wanted to make sure to supercharge their efforts to ensure that everybody has due process and legal representation.

I think the other sort of body of work that we have supported outside of our core community organizing work has been about information. We have been hearing for the last decade about how our information ecosystem has changed, right? So like, you know, Maya, like the political landscape has transformed hand in hand with the information landscape.

And we know that we can fund community organizing, but without supporting the organizations that help to bear witness to this organizing, it may not matter, right? So we funded the National Trust for Local News to acquire 10 newspapers throughout Texas. We supported a digital newspaper called Deep South Today to expand their investigative journalism in news deserts throughout the South. And they are doing really amazing work, sort of building up investigative journalism and partnership with the New York Times in places where that

journalism is not only fought against, it's often criminalized. Like journalists are being sued in places like Mississippi. And then we've, you know, supported the work of More Perfect Union, which as you know, has more than 400 million yearly viewers to help working people have accurate information about how our political leaders are planning to cut critical services and benefits to them. Okay, hold tight everyone. We're going to take one more quick break and we'll be back with more good things.

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and the investigators all desperate to find them. You will want to listen closely. Maybe you could help investigators solve a mystery. Dateline, Missing in America. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Beyond funding or in addition to funding, what other forms of support is the foundation offering to help organizations navigate? What is a really difficult, confusing, just very uncertain time? Yeah.

You know, when people think about philanthropy, if people think about philanthropy or foundations, it's often the grant making work. It's this, the giving away of resources. And most foundations give away anywhere between five and 10% of their resources. But the balance of that money, the 90 to 95% of their resources are actually invested in the market. So we invest in companies, we invest in fund managers. And one of the things that I'm really proud that we were able to enter this new year with is to look at our endowment investment and say that it is 100% aligned with our mission. And to actually say a couple of things

that are important to us are reflected in the way that our endowment is managed. So we have over 50% of our endowment is managed by women and people of color. We have divested from weapons, weapons of mass destruction. We've divested from those companies that in this moment are acting as parasites on our federal government and stealing our information, stealing our resources to again, pad their pockets. So we've actively divested from those companies. And I feel like if we just did the grant making

without doing this investment work, without making sure this investment alignment actually happened, it may be working at cross purposes. And in this moment, I feel we are completely aligned and how we are using, again, our superpower, which is the dollars that we are stewards of at Margaret Casey Foundation in complete alignment. That's incredible. That's great.

So it sounds like this is about, it's more than philanthropy, right? And so much of what you're doing, it's, it is, you're really holding the government to account, right? Like, I mean, this is what you're describing here. I feel like it kind of, it, it melds together two of the things that I feel like we really do need right now. It's what you keep calling the superpower of the dollar.

But it is also about actually making sure that the government is showing up for people in the way that it should be. Yeah. You know, there's no... Let's just take the SNAP and Medicaid cuts. Taken together, they're around $1.1 trillion. It is a number that is unimaginable and unfillable by all of the charity and all of the work pool together.

All of the philanthropy, all of the I feel good, all of the I want to give money because it feels good to me. I think that philanthropy has a unique role and function, which is to practice, to experiment, and that our government delivers on the promise of each of us to care for each other, right? And so there's no amount of philanthropy, no amount of charity that can fill these gaps. What philanthropy at its best can do, can help plant a seed in people's imagination that the public, that the government should be working to make their lives better. And I think a lot about our, we have an initiative called Public Dollars for the Public Good,

mostly because a lot of people just imagine like the government money just, it's either taking money away from people. It's like, I'm stealing from there to put it in the big bank account, or it just magically appears. All of a sudden, it magically appears. All of a sudden it magically appears. And what makes me so upset about this moment is that a number of people who have become billionaires because our public investments are now trying to pull up the ladder behind them and say, well, now that we are rich, we are no longer held on the hook for delivering on this promise that we made for each other.

I think philanthropy can play such an important role, one, again, in seeding in people's imagination the possibility that public resources should be making their lives better. Two, they can challenge the use of public resources that harm or exploit them. So when our government is using money to subsidize private prisons or detention centers, when our government is using money to help private companies access all of our precious private information so that they can exploit us, that's something that we should be supporting people to come together and challenge. And then the third thing and the most important thing is to start to offer, like in this universe of experiment, a greater array of public goods and options for those things that we know

people need to live a good and decent life. Housing. People need, you know, we've been really lucky to support an experiment around a public grocery in Illinois. You know, people need food and they need quality food. There are a whole host of things that we know that when government provides an option, it crowds out exploitative and harmful private options. The state of California is now producing insulin because pharmaceutical companies were exploiting people. There are a set of things that our government should be providing for us. And I think that

philanthropy plays a role in creating a realizable examples to contest for public options. Absolutely. And I think it's such an interesting point you make. So much of the work in getting people, because it becomes invisibilized, part of the problem is we don't even necessarily see the ways that government is working for some people and not working for others, right? It just becomes a part of what we see every day. So some of the work has to be in just exposing that and letting people see that these companies would not exist without public support. What is owed back?

What do we owe, right? What do we owe each other? You know, and I also think about things that like people don't think about, right? So like you take private mailing companies, UPS, FedEx, they get to choose where they're going to deliver mail to. They're like, I don't actually feel like going down that rural road, driving 20 miles to that one random house where that one family lives. But the United States Postal Service is a lifeline to communities that

are rural in this country. And I think that it's incumbent upon us as people who believe in a government that should be working for us to make visible every day all of the ways that the government does deliver on the promise and holds it accountable when it doesn't. Right. Right. So let's talk about that. What should we be doing? What can we do to really push for government to use public dollars to support institutions, our communities? What can we do in a moment like this? Yeah, I think one is say it out loud. You know,

I've been really proud of seeing the work that More Perfect Union is doing, naming the defunding of our National Park Service and the number of people who have been fired, the closing of parks, the limit of hours, the more trash in our parks that, you know, the vast majority of families in this country can't afford to get on a private jet and go to their private fifth house on vacation. Most people just go to a national park. And so I've been really proud at the ways that organizations have said, this is what our government does for us to make visible. I feel like that is the number one thing.

The number two thing is become a part of an organizing group. Join an organization. I don't have the illusion of grandeur to believe that it is because of us, that Turk, for example, exists. People in Tennessee would have got together, have gotten together for generations to fight for a better life for Tennesseans and for all of us. I feel like supporting and joining community organizing is super important. I think the third and most complicated thing to do is to actually name when government has not worked for us and to be okay naming that, right? Like that the government isn't sort of this inorganic expression of our best selves. At its best, it is a reflection of hard-fought wins

and victories for people who believed that you and I should have equal speaking rights in this country, equal access to economic opportunity in this country, access to housing, that we should have the jobs that we have, and if people try to keep us out of those jobs, then there should be legal recourse for that. I feel like one of the things that is tricky in this moment is to meet people's skepticism about this promise,

and to meet it with not with skepticism in return, or anger in return, or rejection in return, but to meet it with recognition and invite them into a different possible future. I really appreciate this conversation because I feel like we're talking about some very difficult things, but we haven't lost sight of the fact that there's hope, right, embedded in all of this.

So before we wrap, let's make sure we get to end on a note like that. Tell me something good. Oh, gosh, so many. I had this conversation this last week with a peer of mine in Michigan who is working with educators across the state in schools where the majority of their students are undocumented and they're afraid, they want to take action, but they feel afraid. And one of the people stood up in a meeting and said, you know what I wish?

I wish somebody would make billboards for public education like they've done from national parks. And I was like, oh yeah, that's good. Like we can do that. Like we as's good. Like, we can do that. Like, we as an organization and partnerships with others can do that. The good thing is actually like feeling the fear and doing it together, you know, to feel the fear together and then to fight. I think the promise of the United States is one worth fighting for. And millions of people across the country get together every day and fight for them.

And I want to be standing shoulder to shoulder with them in that fight. I love that. Yeah. Thanks, Maya. Truly, thank you, Carmen, for the work that you do, for the way you're seeing this moment and showing up in this moment. And just thank you for being here with us today. This was fantastic. I really appreciate this conversation.

MAYA RUPERT Thank you, Maya. Thank you so much for having me. MUSIC This episode is presented by the Marguerite Casey Foundation. Learn more at caseygrants.org. Thanks so much for listening. I'm your host, Maya Ruppert. This series is produced by Lisa Fu and Hannah Boomershang. Our supervising producer is Luna Danish. Mixing and sound designs by Noah Smith. Jackie Danziger is our VP of Partnerships and Production. Production support from Maggie Crouchure. Executive producers are Stephanie Whittles-Wax

and Jessica Cordova-Cramer. Help others find our show by leaving us a rating and writing a review. Follow Good Things wherever you get your podcasts and listen ad-free on Amazon Music with your Prime membership. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. [♪ music playing, fades out, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music Parents, we know the child care crisis is not just another headline. It's a daily struggle playing out in millions of homes across this country.

I'm Gloria Riviera, and this is No One is Coming to Save Us. This season, we're demanding a child care system that actually works for kids, parents, and educators. We mean, pre-birth to five, full day, nearby, easy to apply. No one is coming to save us. Season five from Lemonado Media, out now.