In recent years, the Oakland-based nonprofit PolicyLink has quietly become one of the better-funded left-wing advocacy groups in the country. Despite relatively limited national name recognition and a radical ideological agenda that might perhaps best be characterized as racial socialism, PolicyLink’s revenues more than quadrupled from 2019-2023. Much of this has been attributable to funding from institutional philanthropy, including some of the largest and most prominent private foundations in the country.
Major growth
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. . . the Democratic Socialists of America’s 2023 revenues were less than one-tenth those of PolicyLink that year.
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PolicyLink was formed in 1998 (some sources say 1999) by Angela Glover Blackwell, who had previously been a senior vice president at the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2001 it reported total revenues of $4.8 million, which had grown to $11.5 million by 2008. Revenues thereafter fluctuated mostly in the lower 8-figues—never exceeding $19 million—until 2020, when they suddenly exploded to $62 million. This was followed by a record $83.4 million haul in 2021, and $46.1 million in 2022. In 2023, PolicyLink reported $66.5 million in total revenue, with net assets of nearly $120 million. In 2024, its revenues were $48.2 million and its assets were $111.2 million.
To put these recent numbers in context, PolicyLink’s 2023 revenues were larger than those of the Center for American Progress, and greater than those of Greenpeace and its affiliated Greenpeace Fund combined. It brought in more than twice what the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Bipartisan Policy Center, and the Center for Popular Democracy did that year, and more than four times what the Economic Policy Institute reported. PolicyLink’s somewhat reduced 2024 revenues were still greater than those of Community Change, and more than twice those of Color of Change and its affiliated Color of Change Education Fund combined. Notwithstanding all the national media attention the group receives, the Democratic Socialists of America’s 2023 revenues were less than one-tenth those of PolicyLink that year.
Much of PolicyLink’s growth has been driven by grants from major philanthropic foundations. Over the two-year period from 2022-2023, these have included the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ($6.2 million), the Packard Foundation ($4.5 million), the Foundation to Promote Open Society ($3.5 million), the Gates Foundation ($2.9 million), the Ford Foundation ($2.6 million), the James Irvine Foundation ($2.5 million), the Kresge Foundation ($2.3 million), the Hewlett Foundation ($2.3 million), and the Skoll Foundation ($2.2 million). Other seven-figure funders during that two-year period included the California Endowment, the Bloomberg Family Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Freedom Together Foundation, the Surdna Foundation, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. It’s a list that reads almost like a who’s who of left-leaning Big Philanthropy.
PolicyLink’s largest institutional funder from 2022-2023 appears to have been Blue Meridian Partners, which granted the group over $24 million during that time, plus a further $14.8 million in 2024—its sixth-largest grantee that year. Blue Meridian Partners is major philanthropic collaborative that spun off from the now-defunct Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, which gave it over $600 million from 2020-2022 as part of a planned spend-down and transition. Blue Meridian’s general partners (which include some prominent foundations and MacKenzie Scott) make a $50 million initial commitment to the collaborative, while impact partners commit at least $15 million. Blue Meridian’s website states that it has raised over $4.5 billion total.
Additional funding for PolicyLink has come from donor-advised fund providers such as the GS Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund for Wealth Management ($8.2 million from 2022-2023) and the Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust ($3 million from 2022-2023). PolicyLink also has an affiliated 501(c)(4) PolicyLink Equity Action Network, but it reported just $10,876 total revenue in 2023.
A left-wing worldview
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PolicyLink has elsewhere endorsed the concept of a national Homes Guarantee, though which the federal government would guarantee housing to everyone, and Americans would have the right to sue the Department of Housing and Urban Development to obtain one.
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All of this philanthropic money being routed to PolicyLink is made more interesting by the group’s ideological position, which is situated at the leftmost wing of the major public policy nonprofit spectrum and centers around a vision that might best be characterized as racial socialism. PolicyLink believes that “racial and economic inequality are the defining issues of our time,” that “bold, targeted, race-conscious strategies” are necessary to achieve “equity,” and that this in turn will function as “the key to prosperity.”
Much of PolicyLink’s website features rather vague aspirational language that is difficult to translate into concrete policy proposals. It speaks of bringing “a revolution of our souls to the systems and structures of our democracy,” and sees itself as among the “founders of a future that has not yet existed, but is ours to create: a nation that finally governs for us all.” Believing that the United States and its institutions are fundamentally flawed, its ultimate goal is “to transform our democracy and economy, closing the chasm between those for whom this nation has always worked and those who have yet to reap its benefits.” Elsewhere, through its many projects and initiatives, PolicyLink has sketched out its objectives with more specificity.
One major former PolicyLink project that has received earmarked support from numerous foundations (including Ford, Freedom Together, Open Society, Robert Wood Johnson, Rockefeller Brothers, Hewlett, and Kellogg) is Liberation Ventures, which advocates for racial reparations in order to counteract what it claims are our current “white supremacist systems.” It also makes grants (at least $6.5 million since 2021) to other groups that do so. Though its website still identifies it as a fiscally-sponsored project of PolicyLink, Liberation Ventures appears to have secured its own 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status in 2024. That year, PolicyLink reported transferring $1.67 million to the group.
Liberation Ventures’ highest priority is to implement reparations at the state and local levels, and to conduct “grassroots organizing on a mass scale” to persuade Americans that they are the “logical and inevitable antidote to racial injustice.” Eventually, it would like to see reparations paid out at the federal level as well. In 2025, Liberation Ventures calculated that it would require an additional $220 million in philanthropic funding over the ensuing decade to achieve its objectives.
Another similarly-named former PolicyLink project which recently spun off to become an independent nonprofit is Liberation in a Generation. Founded in 2018, it was fiscally sponsored by PolicyLink until 2024, when it received its own tax-exempt status from the IRS. PolicyLink transferred more than $1.4 million to the group in 2023, and an additional $3.5 million in 2024. The Ford Foundation awarded a new $1 million grant to the group in 2025, having previously given PolicyLink $400,000 for the project in 2023. Other funders have included the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, the Hewlett Foundation, and more.
Liberation in a Generation claims that Americans are currently being subjected to an “oppression economy” in which “white elites and their institutions use racism to steal from, exploit, and exclude people of color from wealth and power.” Its objective is to build what it calls a “liberation economy,” in which the government guarantees income, wealth, employment, housing, healthcare, college tuition, and more to everyone. Doing so, the group believes, will “foster an economy where people of color can thrive and preserve abundance for future generations.”
While it was still housed at PolicyLink, Liberation in a Generation released a remarkable report outlining a concept it called “radical pragmatism.” Arguing that “the economic liberation of people of color is our nation’s most critical project,” the paper called for overhauling America’s current “racialized systems” with the “express purpose of materially benefitting people of color.” The federal government, according to the report, must “envision a rearrangement of the economic system” and “reimagine how [it] meets the economic needs of people of color.” The report dismissed initiatives such as job training and remedial education programs, financial literacy and housing counseling, prisoner reentry programs, and more as “misguided people-fixing strategies,” and declared that only “solutions that seek to fix systems, not people, can deliver economic liberation to people of color.” It also spoke of the need to “build, consolidate, and impose our political power,” and criticized philanthropies for allegedly shying away from partisan politics “to protect the tax benefits enjoyed by their wealthy donors.”
PolicyLink’s Spatial Futures Initiative advocates for the redistribution of land and housing to “historically marginalized communities” as another form of reparations. Ultimately, the initiative aims to “repair, abolish, and transform the current housing and land justice paradigm” so that “homes and land are for the people, not commodities.” PolicyLink has elsewhere endorsed the concept of a national Homes Guarantee, though which the federal government would guarantee housing to everyone, and Americans would have the right to sue the Department of Housing and Urban Development to obtain one. It also supports universal rent control.
Yet another campaign led by PolicyLink called Job Guarantee Now! calls for “publicly-financed jobs for everyone who wants to work.” Under such a program, all adults would have a legally-enforceable right to a unionized government-funded job with generous benefits. The campaign claims it would especially benefit certain categories of people such as ex-criminals, the homeless, individuals with disabilities, and those who cannot speak English. It lists professional childcare and senior care, preschool staffing, construction and renovation, and emergency natural disaster relief among “example job guarantee projects.” The federal government would be responsible for arranging new employment even for those who were fired for “persistently fail[ing] to meet basic performance standards, or…threaten[ing] others’ safety.” In addition to PolicyLink, more than 100 groups have signed on to a coalition calling for a federal job guarantee along such lines.
Radicalism rewarded
Needless to say, this is quite radical stuff, and it illustrates just how far apart the public policy mindset of many major American philanthropies is from that of the American taxpayers who are incentivizing their grantmaking through the tax code. PolicyLink has embraced a left-wing worldview in which the government dominates huge swaths of society and the economy, and wields that power with an explicit eye toward the immutable racial and ethnic characteristics of its citizens. For this, it has been rewarded with tens of millions of dollars in annual funding from some of the biggest charitable foundations in the country. What are ordinary Americans supposed to make of that?
