Despite years of internal turmoil and change, the Open Society Foundations wants the human rights sector to know that their movements continue to receive support from the organization, its president Binaifer Nowrojee said on Tuesday.
Foundations founded by billionaire investor George Soros, now led by one of his sons, Alex Soros, have historically been among the largest funders of human rights groups. However, as of 2021, they have closed some of their programs and reduced their staff as part of a major internal restructuring.
During the process, many grantees and other members of the human rights movement have been anxiously waiting to see where the chips will fall.
“The re-imagining has happened under the leadership of the new chairman of the board of the Open Society Foundations,” Nowrojee said, referring to Alex Soros.
“One of the reasons we really wanted to repeat widely with balloons and so on that we are still committed to human rights is because of this fear that has permeated the changes that somehow the Open Society Foundations no longer work. to work on rights, equality or justice,” he said ahead of Human Rights Day, which is celebrated by the United Nations on December 10.
Nowrojee offered few new details about OSF’s specific funding priorities, though the foundations committed $400 million to green jobs and economic development earlier this year.
Another new program focuses on protecting environmental defenders, which operates in a few countries such as Colombia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and will end in five years, said Sharan Srinvias, OSF’s director of programs.
“We did a survey of what other donors are supporting, and in general we saw that there is a gap,” he said of people who come under attack for defending land, water or other natural resources. “In particular, it is much easier for bilateral donors to support global organizations, which in turn are able to support well-known defenders of the rights of the capital region.”
One advantage of the limited time horizon, Srinvias said, is that his team awards mostly three- to five-year grants — longer than OSF’s typical grants — and offers grantees more flexibility. It also has some funds to respond to emergencies for human rights defenders around the world.
In 2020, OSF was the world’s largest human rights funder, distributed the most money and awarded the most grants. That’s according to the Human Rights Funders Network, a membership organization of grants that monitors the philanthropy of human rights groups.
“When major funders change their priorities, it can have a ripple effect. Their decisions could dramatically affect the human rights movements they once supported, especially in areas where they have long been victorious,” HRFN wrote in its latest Advancing Human Rights report in September.
To add to the atmosphere of uncertainty, another major human rights funder, the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, announced earlier this year that it would cease operations by 2028.
OSF’s board aims to employ a total of 600 people worldwide, Nowrojee said, down from the 800 reported in 2021.
Some of the changes made by OSF in the last three years include the abolition of the global public health program and the significant reduction of its programs in the European Union. It formed its area of work focused on Roma communities into a new organization and awarded final grants to many of its partners.
“You never want a charity to just do the same thing. You want a charity to run away from stuff,” Nowrojee said. “And so there are big areas of work where there were huge achievements that we’ve pulled back from, not because we don’t think they’re valuable, but the movements themselves have gotten stronger. “
People who worked in OSF’s public health program and some of their grantees have been talking about its impact for nearly three decades through an oral history project led by the University of Southern California’s Global Health Inequality Institute and funded by OSF.
Jonathan Cohen, who led OSF’s public health program and now works at USC, told an oral history project interviewer about OSF leadership’s decision in 2020 to take funding from its programs and reallocate it to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. .
“That setback in April should have been a signal to all of us that we don’t miss this world,” Cohen said of the public health program. “But of course you don’t accept it. You fight. You resist. You try to keep your program, which is what we did until we couldn’t.”
One of the movements that OSF had supported in its public health program was the Sex Work Projects network, a global coalition of sex workers. It was founded in 1992 partly in response to the killing of HIV-infected sex workers, said Ruth Morgan Thomas, who was the NSWP’s global coordinator for many years as part of the Oral History Project. He said he was sad to see OSF’s public health work end.
“I hope that when it re-emerges and its global strategy re-emerges, it will maintain its position and support for the realization of sex workers’ rights and inclusion in our societies,” he said.
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