A nonprofit law group dedicated to protecting the rights of Southern voters of color had more on its plate this year than just the 2024 presidential election. The Southern Coalition for Social Justice supports voter registration drives and monitors election certification. Staff attorneys help run a legal hotline for voting irregularities. Teams challenge electoral maps and restrictive laws deemed unfair. It’s costly, year-round work that senior counsel Mitchell Brown considers vital to participatory democracy — but also work that gets less attention outside of high-profile campaign cycles, underscoring the importance of year-round giving to strengthen democracy.

“A lot of people exert a lot of energy during the presidential year and it falls off for the next three to four years,” Brown said, regarding year-round giving to strengthen democracy. “That can’t happen. Because there’s a lot of changes that are occurring in between those four years between presidential elections.”

“There are no more off years anymore,” he added.

The coalition benefited this spring from a progressive philanthropic network organized around the belief that democracy is an exercise — not a given — in need of constant support and year-round giving to strengthen democracy. Led by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, petitioners pledged to reverse existing boom-and-bust dynamics where money floods politically engaged nonprofits late into election years only to dry up afterward. Beginning with the “All by April” campaign to move money early, the effort is continuing with the “Election Day to Every Day” push to shore up next year’s funding.

However, according to interviews with other nonprofit leaders in the left-leaning civic space, the philanthropic sector at large has not heeded the call for year-round giving to strengthen democracy. For the nonprofit leaders experiencing budgets as usual, the anticipated pattern of funding drop-offs is raising stakes many leaders felt were already heightened by the fraught political climate.

With reported security threats and staff burnout, Democracy Fund President Joe Goldman said it’s especially inefficient to spend millions training people, developing skills and creating a knowledge base only to cut nonprofit budgets and “throw it away.” Despite what Democracy Fund said was widespread agreement that democracy is under threat, the organization found that many funders had no plans before September to help grantees prepare for the post-election environment, further demonstrating how vital year-round giving to strengthen democracy is.

Read the full article about year-round giving to strengthen democracy by James Pollard at The Associated Press.