An Occasional Note From the Director of U.S. Programs

Ann Beeson is director of U.S. Programs at the Open Society Institute.

In the last ten years, OSI's U.S. Programs has committed over $800 million to support individuals and organizations that advance a more open society in the United States—one that allows all people to participate actively and equitably in political, economic, and cultural life; encourages diverse opinions and critical debate; protects fundamental human rights, dignity, and the rule of law; and promotes broadly shared prosperity and human security.

OSI's strong record of support for justice and opportunity in the United States inspired me to join U.S. Programs this year as director, after several years as associate legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. During my first six months at OSI, I worked with my excellent, dedicated staff to take a fresh look at OSI's existing programs. We met or spoke with a number of our grantees, funding partners and other experts. What has most inspired me during the process is the passion of our grantees and the people they serve. Eddie Morales of the Center for Community Change, aged twenty-seven, wowed me with his sophisticated plan to develop a new generation of leaders for community organizations across America through Generation Change. Judith Browne-Dianis and Penda Hair of the Advancement Project impressed me with their work to organize communities of color around barriers to voting and quality education while simultaneously promoting grassroots approaches to social justice among elite allies.

Simon Lazarus, of the National Senior Citizens Law Center, told me about his exciting work to develop a progressive alternative to the federalist encroachment on rights and to mobilize more Americans to understand the importance of an independent judiciary in our democracy. Galen Sampson, an OSI-Baltimore Community Fellow and noted chef, introduced me to his Dogwood Deli and Restaurant, which provides culinary arts training to ex-prisoners and people recovering from drug addiction—and also serves a fabulous fresh-cut potato chip.

What emerged from my meetings and numerous other interviews conducted by OSI staff was a strong sense of the core threats to open society today and a number of promising solutions for addressing them. The threats include increasingly punitive national security, criminal justice, and immigration policies; decreasing transparency and accountability in government; entrenched structural racism; enduring inequality; massive and growing rates of incarceration; and the eroding image of the United States in the world.

Straitjacket on Democracy

What links together the challenges to open society in the United States today? It all boils down to one pivotal fact. Too many Americans are straitjacketed from full participation in our democracy. Communities of color and immigrants are too often actively excluded from participation in their own governance, and are sidelined along with women and young people even in progressive policy debates. An expanding web of secrecy and lack of transparency in government denies Americans the information necessary to make informed decisions. Fear is preventing Americans from making rational decisions about our response to terrorism, globalization, and crime. Our crumbling education system glorifies testing over critical thinking, and the cult of rugged individualism has eclipsed the collective responsibility to provide for the common good.

Civil society must accept some of the blame for the straitjacket—and the responsibility to deconstruct it. Organizations advocate primarily through issue and sector silos and fail to collaborate to build collective power for large-scale change. Advocates compete to engage constituents on narrow issues instead of working together to organize people to press for broader change on their own behalf. Civil society has failed to push the envelope for reform, confusing the goal of building a fair society with the short-term electability of politicians. Many have deemed the South, a region heavily populated by poor people of color, politically irrelevant. That’s a far cry from an open society strategy. We will fail to be effective on a range of issues—from health care to immigration to national security—if we fail to engage the people most victimized by current policies in developing strategies for change.

Building on OSI Strengths and Charting New Directions

To build on our current work, OSI U.S. Programs is developing a range of new funding initiatives to tackle these challenges head-on. We'll provide more details as we develop the programs and begin funding in the coming year. For now, I am delighted to offer a snapshot of our exciting new programs.

The Transparency and Integrity Fund will unite under one umbrella OSI's past support for advocacy on the independence of the judiciary and the media, election systems reform, and the politicization of government science policy. The fund will include new support for restoring integrity in key executive agencies, revitalizing Congress's oversight role, and addressing the impact of the growing privatization of government functions.

The Democracy and Power Fund will expand on OSI’s successful efforts to engage and mobilize youth, immigrants, and communities of color. It will provide capacity-building support to organizations that are engaging critical constituencies, nurturing new leaders, and generating new ideas and innovative solutions to address threats to democracy.

In addition to these long-term funding initiatives, U.S. Programs is embarking on two special cross-program campaigns that will provide expanded resources to address urgent threats to our democracy and human rights. Stay tuned early next year for news about our Campaign to Promote Opportunities for African American Boys and Men and our Campaign to Restore Human Rights and Promote a Progressive National Security Policy.

The new funds and campaigns will complement our ongoing programs. Through the U.S. Justice Fund, OSI will continue to lead the fight to end over-reliance on incarceration and harsh punishment and to ensure equal justice in America. The Justice Fund supports a range of criminal justice reforms, and has pioneered sentencing alternatives, reentry programs, and justice reinvestment strategies. The Justice Fund also works to eradicate structural racism, to promote a sound immigration policy, and to advance the rights of women and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

The Strategic Opportunities Fund will continue to provide flexible funding to respond rapidly to unanticipated threats, and to support research and development on emerging issues. Current initiatives include our ongoing response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and the crisis caused by predatory subprime lending targeted primarily at communities of color.

The OSI-Baltimore regional office will continue to serve as an effective laboratory for place-based work on our core priorities. It uses an integrated approach to reverse the negative dynamics at play caused by failing schools, pervasive drug addiction and a broken criminal justice system.

We will be phasing out the Progressive Infrastructure Fund, established in 2004. While we will no longer provide grants through that fund, we expect many of our progressive infrastructure grantees to be eligible for ongoing funding through the new Democracy and Power Fund or the Transparency and Integrity Fund. Our program officers will be in touch with current grantees with more details about the transition early next year.

In shaping our funding initiatives, we have tried our best to capture the sense of urgency and optimism that our grantees bring to the formidable challenges to open society today in America. We will continue to rely on the leadership and partnership of our grantees and other experts as we hone our plans.

What We Hope to Accomplish

Together with our grantees and partners, OSI intends to tear apart the current straitjacket on democracy. We will prioritize the dismantling of structures and policies that perpetuate exclusion—whether they are felon disfranchisement laws that deny the right to vote to one in three African American men, zero tolerance rules that force children out of school, immigration policies that punish rather than reward the hard work of new Americans, criminal justice policies that lock up over two million people at a time, overly broad national security laws that make it a crime for Muslims to practice their faith by giving money to charity, or economic policies that deny all low-wage workers a chance.

We will support the development of progressive immigration and national security policies, innovative reentry programs and alternatives to incarceration, structural election reform to ensure that every vote counts, fellowships and public education that encourage critical thinking, and economic policies that give everyone a fair chance. By promoting transparency, we will empower more Americans to become informed participants in our society. Holding the government accountable for its failures and abuses will help to heal the damage to vital institutions and restore public confidence in the ability of government to provide for the common good.

OSI will build the collective power of individuals and organizations to develop and demand solutions to advance open society in the United States. We will invest in the capacity of organizations to work for long-term social change through policy reform and shifting public debate.

In short, we will use our resources to ensure that every human being in the United States can participate fully in an open society and enjoy all that life has to offer.

We look forward to working with you in the new year and beyond to implement our vision for a fair and just America.