Overview
The 2000 Presidential Election strongly underscored both the importance of voting and the need to protect the integrity of the electoral process. And while the 2008 elections demonstrated the vibrancy of an engaged electorate, misinformation and special interest money still play an undue role in our democracy.
In the past, the Mitchell Kapor Foundation’s work has focused on voter engagement and elections protection. During those initial years of grantmaking, we learned much about the nuanced issues and challenges in this broad field of civic engagement and have been able to more specifically define our interests and potential contributions to the field.
Through our Voting Integrity and Civic Engagement (VoICE) program, we are interested in working with key partner organizations that are:
- directly increasing the electoral empowerment of low-income communities of color through leadership development, organizing, and issue advocacy, and/or
- improving the national elections infrastructure and systems – namely voter registration modernization, and campaign finance reform.
By focusing on these two areas, we are trying to ensure a greater vision: that people of color are fully and proportionately engaged in civic processes (organizing and voting) that impact the creation of public policy, and that the integrity of the election systems that we use to select public sector policymakers are robust and trustworthy. To be clear, we’re not necessarily working directly to change public policy; we’re supporting changes to the ways policymakers are selected and held accountable.
For our electoral empowerment work, we will prioritize key grant partners working in the San Francisco Bay Area, throughout the state of California, and nationally, in that order. Since elections infrastructure work is generally occurring at the federal and state level, we will prioritize federal/nationwide efforts above individual state work.
In order to remain in compliance withstrict IRS regulations, we make general support grants to organizations whose activities include lobbying. Foundation-supported grants may not be earmarked to fund lobbying efforts as defined by the IRS.
We will also provide limited support of one-time special opportunities and efforts, namely convenings and tech-related work.
