Ford Foundation Deploys $60 Million on a Bipartisan Bet That Democracy Is Infrastructure

Ben Ginsberg spent decades as the Republican Party's most prominent election lawyer. Bob Bauer served as White House counsel under President Obama. For most of their careers, they argued opposite sides of every major voting rights case in America. Now they run the same organization — Pillars of the Community — and the Ford Foundation just wrote them a check.

That pairing tells you everything about what Ford's new president, Heather Gerken, is doing with $60 million in freshly deployed democracy grants. This is not the familiar model of progressive foundations funding progressive advocacy organizations. It is a deliberate attempt to treat election infrastructure the way the federal government treats bridges and water systems: as nonpartisan public goods that need sustained investment regardless of who controls Washington.

The deployment, announced within Gerken's first 100 days as Ford's president, draws from her presidential reserves — discretionary funds that don't require the slow consensus-building of normal foundation grantmaking cycles. The speed matters. The 2026 midterm elections are seven months away, and the organizations receiving these grants need operational funding now, not after a twelve-month review process.

The Recipients Are the Strategy

The five named recipients reveal a theory of change that looks nothing like Ford's traditional grantmaking portfolio.

Pillars of the Community, led by Ginsberg and Bauer, works to strengthen electoral system trust by supporting election officials. The bipartisan co-leadership is the point — it signals that protecting election infrastructure is not a partisan project but a governance one. Their work focuses on the officials who actually run elections: the county clerks, registrars, and election directors who have faced unprecedented threats since 2020 and are leaving their positions at alarming rates.

Veterans for All Voters deploys 900 volunteers across all 50 states, engaging military families as poll workers while promoting civic responsibility. The veteran frame is strategic. In a political environment where nearly every civic institution has been coded as partisan, military service retains cross-partisan credibility. Recruiting veterans as poll workers simultaneously addresses the nationwide poll worker shortage and wraps election administration in an institution that most Americans still trust.

Campaign Legal Center, founded by former Federal Election Commission chairman Trevor Potter, advocates for voting access and fair democratic processes at federal, state, and local levels. Potter, a Republican appointee to the FEC, has spent two decades building the organization into the most technically proficient voting rights litigation shop in the country. The Campaign Legal Center's current docket includes challenges to restrictive voter ID laws, partisan gerrymandering, and dark money in elections — but its legal arguments are rooted in procedural fairness rather than partisan outcomes.

All Voting is Local works on election administration at the community level, focusing on the operational details that determine whether people can actually cast ballots: polling place locations, wait times, ballot design, language access, and provisional ballot procedures. These are the mundane mechanical failures that suppress turnout more effectively than any headline-grabbing voter suppression law.

We the Veterans Military Foundation focuses on building community leadership opportunities for military veterans, channeling the organizational skills and public trust of the veteran community into civic infrastructure.

$1 Billion in Context

The $60 million is not an isolated bet. Over the past decade, Ford Foundation's Civic Engagement and Government program has distributed more than $1 billion to nonpartisan democracy organizations — making Ford the single largest private funder of democracy infrastructure in the United States. That decade of investment has built a network of grantees with the organizational capacity to absorb and deploy new funding quickly, which is precisely why Gerken could move $60 million in her first 100 days rather than spending a year building a grant program from scratch.

The scale also matters relative to what other major foundations are doing. The MacArthur Foundation committed $100 million to democracy protection in mid-March 2026, deploying grants to organizations including the Campaign Legal Center ($10 million), Democracy Forward Foundation ($10 million), and Issue One ($4 million). The Movement Voter Fund committed $12 million for voter engagement in critical states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Georgia.

Together, these commitments represent more than $170 million in philanthropic democracy spending announced in a single month — a pace that rivals the emergency philanthropic mobilization of the COVID-19 pandemic. But unlike the pandemic response, which was reactive, this spending follows a deliberate strategy that the sector has been building since 2024.

The "All by April" Doctrine

The timing of these announcements reflects a structural shift in how philanthropy approaches election cycles. The "All by April" campaign, active since the 2024 cycle, pushes foundations to commit election-related funding at least six months before Election Day rather than scrambling in the final weeks. The logic is operational: grassroots organizations need time to hire staff, train volunteers, open field offices, and build voter contact programs. Money that arrives in September funds yard signs. Money that arrives in April funds infrastructure.

Tory Gavito of Way to Win has argued that the modern threat to voting access is "more often operational — like confusion over polling place changes — rather than headline-grabbing attacks." That framing explains why Ford's grants emphasize organizations that do operational work: training poll workers, supporting election officials, litigating ballot access cases, and fixing the procedural failures that quietly prevent people from voting.

The early deployment also reflects lessons from the 2024 cycle, when several major foundations delayed election-related grantmaking until summer, leaving organizations scrambling to build capacity in the final months. By contrast, the Texas primaries in March 2026 demonstrated how administrative changes — polling location confusion and voting hour restrictions — can suppress participation even in the absence of new restrictive legislation.

What Nonprofits Should Take From This

For organizations working in civic engagement, election administration, or voting rights, the Ford deployment signals several things about where philanthropic dollars are flowing.

First, bipartisan framing is now a competitive advantage in grant applications. Ford's recipient list is deliberately constructed to include Republican and Democratic credibility markers. Organizations that can demonstrate cross-partisan appeal — through board composition, leadership backgrounds, or programmatic design — are better positioned for the current funding environment.

Second, operational capacity matters more than advocacy. The grants favor organizations that do things — recruit poll workers, support election officials, litigate procedural barriers — over organizations that produce reports or run awareness campaigns. This reflects a broader shift in democracy philanthropy from messaging to mechanics.

Third, veteran and military engagement is an emerging priority. Both Veterans for All Voters and We the Veterans Military Foundation received Ford grants, signaling that foundations see veteran-led civic engagement as a strategic asset. Organizations with veteran connections or military community partnerships should consider how to integrate that dimension into their work.

Fourth, speed of deployment is becoming a selection criterion. Gerken used presidential reserves specifically because they allow faster disbursement. Foundations are increasingly looking for grantees that can absorb and deploy funding quickly — which means organizations need standing operational capacity, not just good proposals.

The Bigger Picture

The Ford grants arrive in a funding environment where foundations are scrambling to fill gaps left by federal funding cuts across virtually every domestic policy area. Democracy funding is different from emergency service funding — it addresses the legitimacy of the system that produces every other policy outcome — but it competes for the same philanthropic dollars. The fact that Ford, MacArthur, and others are committing hundreds of millions to election infrastructure even as nonprofits face existential federal funding losses suggests that major foundations view democratic governance as the foundational priority on which everything else depends.

Whether that bet pays off depends on the same thing it always does: whether the money reaches the communities where election infrastructure is weakest, where poll worker shortages are worst, and where administrative failures most often prevent people from voting. Platforms like Granted can help organizations identify and apply for the democracy and civic engagement grants that are flowing at historic levels this spring — because the window between now and November is shorter than it looks.