Samuels and others acknowledged that the very nature of relying on funding from foundations is uncertain and the advanced notice and tie-off grants eased the process significantly. A spokeswoman added that it was able to evacuate 270 of the group’s Afghan employees and their families in recent weeks.īut Mr. Indeed, the foundation said it expected to spend more on public health and on refugees this year than last.
Some grantees will be picked up again by other parts of the organization when the restructuring is completed. “Losing one of the pillars of the philanthropic world’s support would really be a major loss, which we’re very hopeful would not happen,” he said in an interview. Samuels, remain in limbo, hoping that when the restructuring is over, they will begin to receive grants again. Like many groups funded by the foundation, the center, and Mr. The revamping included little input from people working directly with grantees, employees said. They described a corporate-style streamlining recommended by the Bridgespan Group, the Bain & Company nonprofit spinoff. Soros’s priorities, but also those of outside consultants with a more homogeneous vision for what has always been a uniquely complex institution. Some staff members, including many associated with the employees’ union in the United States, have come to view the changes as not just about Mr. “We’d lost that more strategic purpose and sharp edge of ‘Hey, the stuff we really care about is under assault all around the world and we just need to get a lot more strategic about addressing it and confronting it.’” That was the luxury of what, then and now, remains a very generously funded foundation,” Mr. “In its early days, the foundation was much better at adding things than closing things. Malloch-Brown, 67, the group’s new president and a veteran of the United Nations, the World Bank and the United Kingdom’s foreign office, is steering the organization through the transition period. Soros declined through a spokesman to be interviewed for this article.
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Soros has funded for decades wants to refocus while he can still weigh in on the question that many large philanthropies face, which is how to keep the vision of the founder alive after he or she is gone? He is a year older than Warren Buffett was when he recently stepped down as a trustee of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Lurking in the background of every discussion is the fact that Mr. “We’ve been a little bit peacetime generals at a time where, actually, we’re in a war again.” “From a high-water mark in the early 2000s, we’ve really seen a recession of democracy and human rights,” Mark Malloch-Brown, the president of the foundation, said in an interview. Soros’s work on progressive causes has made him a target of right-wing conspiracy theories.Īnd in 2018, in his native Hungary, Open Society was forced to close its office under intense pressure from the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a onetime recipient of a grant from the group. In the United States, that means that Mr. Now, with its founder in his 90s, the foundation - and the world - confronts rising authoritarianism and deeply divided civil societies. The changes at the Open Society Foundations are a painful but necessary adjustment, its leaders say, because that march has halted.
Soros watched the world march in fits and starts toward the vision of open, pluralistic democracy that he has embraced since he was a young Hungarian Holocaust survivor studying philosophy. The foundation set aside an enormous $400 million for what amounted to severance payments to organizations around the world, and more than 150 foundation employees took buyouts as part of the restructuring.įor years, Mr.
Many of the nonprofit groups that relied on support from Open Society were getting what were called “tie-off grants,” a final year or so of funding to ease the blow of getting cut off. What that actually meant in practice only became clear amid a flurry of phone calls between concerned nonprofit leaders and foundation staff in the days that followed. So, the email said, “the nature of many partnerships will shift.” The left-leaning foundation - started by the billionaire investor George Soros and today the second-largest private charitable foundation in the United States - was beginning a transformation, as officials there refer to their restructuring plan. The mass email that went out to Open Society Foundations’ grant recipients in the United States in March began with an upbeat note about “how resistance is translating into real progress.”
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