A Blueprint for Donor-Advised Fund Organizing

In April 2026, the federal government went public with a politicized indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), accusing the organization, which has mapped right-wing hate groups since 1971, of fraud. While many link this attack specifically to the Trump administration’s aggressive repression of social justice movements, it is in fact only the most recent in a wave that preceded Trump and began under Biden’s presidency. Other similar efforts to financially isolate leftist groups accused of wrongdoing with scant evidence have included attacks on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), Atlanta Solidarity Fund, and UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. The aim of these efforts is to chill political dissent by debanking left-leaning organizers and organizations, tying them up with baseless lawsuits, and essentially rendering them untouchable by risk-averse institutions.

Following the accusation against the SPLC and before a trial date had even been set, a group of the nation’s largest corporate donor-advised fund (DAF) sponsors summarily cut off grant funding to the organization, despite its work being used by many politically aligned DAF sponsors as a basis for their grant policies. Donor-advised funds manage the donations of organizations, families, and individuals, and are the fastest growing charitable giving vehicle in the country.

As the philanthropic sector organizes to push back, including through the Free Your DAF campaign, we can draw on lessons from previous organizing campaigns to expose Fidelity Charitable, the nation’s largest DAF provider, and pressure it to comply with movement demands. What follows is a retrospective of Unmasking Fidelity, a campaign coalition in which I organized through my work at Solidiare Network between 2021 and 2025.

Unmasking Fidelity: A Strategic Multi-Stakeholder Coalition

In February 2019, Sludge Magazine released a damaging exposé drawing attention to numerous Fidelity Charitable DAF accounts that were channeling funds to right-wing efforts, including the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. 

This exposé sparked the formation of Unmasking Fidelity, a national coalition anchored in Boston of grassroots movements, left researchers, and allied philanthropic networks including Asian American Resource Workshop, Crescendo (a project of MPower Change, Action Center for Race and the Economy, and Little Sis), Community Labor United, Muslim Justice League, Resource Generation, and Political Research Associates, with additional organizing support from Solidaire Network. “[C]ommitted to challenging Fidelity Charitable’s role in funneling millions of dollars through Donor Advisor Funds to organizations that promote and further systemic oppression globally,” Unmasking Fidelity set out to research what else Fidelity DAFs might be funding.

In 2019, the emerging coalition and its allies issued a letter and organized a subsequent meeting with Fidelity leadership wherein they demanded Fidelity Charitable publicly share its internal DAF screening policy, which determines in what circumstances the institution will or will not make grants. But Fidelity Charitable declined to release its policy. Unmasking Fidelity escalated efforts with a public letter in 2021 paired with a series of direct actions, including a personal delivery of the letter to the institution’s Boston headquarters.

With Fidelity Charitable still silent, in 2022 the coalition released “The People Disclose,” a report examining how the institution moved millions of dollars through DAF accounts to ten right-wing groups—many of which would later form the coalition behind Project 2025—including Turning Point USA, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and the Family Research Council. Highlighting Fidelity Charitable’s DAF funding to anti-LGBTQ and anti-trans organizations, anti-immigrant groups, organizations that fuel Islamophobia, and others that fund illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine, Unmasking Fidelity demanded that the DAF provider disclose its screening policies, divest funding from right-wing groups, and repair harm by investing in social justice-centered community organizing. 

Working in tandem with grassroots movement and research groups, donors in Resource Generation and Solidaire Network got involved in the campaign to build pressure on Fidelity Charitable. Using a toolkit produced by Unmasking Fidelity, donors contacted their Fidelity investment advisors to demand the institution implement a values-aligned screen to prevent DAF accounts from funding right-wing violence. They also issued a public letter supported by over 50 movement groups, with over 4,000 signatures. Through this tool the coalition gathered information from Fidelity Charitable account holders to organize leverage from donors with collectively approximately $2 billion in Fidelity assets.

This organizing helped spark important conversations among donors about the ways in which, despite its claims of “values neutrality,” Fidelity Charitable channeled DAF funds to domestic right-wing organizations. Furthermore, through the institution’s investment arm, Fidelity quietly invested funds parked in DAF accounts and sitting on the institution’s ledgers in global right-wing projects. Unmasking Fidelity’s work to educate donors about these practices set the conditions for a successful later organizing moment.

UNRWA Campaign: A Template for Winning

In 2024, in the wake of a mass starvation campaign and the “Flour Massacre” against the people of Palestine, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA)—a human rights organization that supports people in Palestine through providing food and shelter—was accused of widespread connections to the October 7th attack. Before a formal case was even brought, Fidelity Charitable and other mainstream DAF stewards, including Vanguard Charitable and Schwab’s DAF Giving 360, quickly moved to deplatform UNRWA and shut down grant funding to the organization. This event put in stark relief the uneven ways these DAF stewards applied their internal policies to greenlight funding to right-wing organizations, including some convicted of sedition, and block funding to humanitarian organizations with whom its top decisionmakers disagreed.

A broad constellation of movement and allied organizations—including Movement for Black Lives, MPower Change, Adalah Justice Project, and the American Muslim Community Foundation—mobilized to draw attention to the DAF providers’ actions and demand that UNRWA be reinstated as a legitimate charitable organization on their giving platforms.

Linked to many of the movement formations that organized the push, Unmasking Fidelity sprung into action, mobilizing its donor base to play a role in a mass pressure campaign to get Fidelity Charitable to reverse its policy decision. After one month of coordinated, sustained pressure, including both lateral pressure from aligned financial institutions and direct pressure from Fidelity DAF holders threatening to leave the institution (and in some cases actually leaving) unless Fidelity Charitable reinstated UNRWA, the campaign was victorious. This win would not have been possible without the leverage of organized donors working in tandem with frontline movements.

Lessons to Carry Forward

The Unmasking Fidelity case study provides a useful blueprint for current DAF organizing and movements contending with global finance infrastructure, including Free Your DAF, Drop Vanguard, and PayPal4Palestine. As the Free Your DAF campaign expands its organizing reach to include institutions, the following five lessons are particularly critical:

1. Philanthropy is strongest when working in close coalition with intersectional movement organizations, particularly those at the forefront of financial and political attacks, and when pursuing a diversity of tactics together.
2. Movement researchers and journalists are important allies in gathering and publishing receipts to advance organizing campaigns.
3. Aligned donors and funders often have the leverage necessary for winning campaigns, including through DAF activism and institutional pressure.
4. DAF donors with existing accounts at these institutions should exert both internal pressure to shift policy and external pressure through assessing when it’s more tactical to move their accounts to more aligned institutions, particularly in the context of a broader organizing campaign.
5. Especially in this political climate, our organizing should center not “neutrality” but justice as the compass for how philanthropic institutions move resources to communities under attack.

The moment demands that we get more sophisticated in our organizing as donors and funders. Campaigns like these offer us an opportunity to build real solidarity across class and identity, not just as individuals with DAFs, but as foundation staff, movement leaders, and community members.

In a sector too often detached from the very movement formations it resources, philanthropy must work to align our campaign designs and demands with the needs and intersectional analyses of frontline movements facing attacks. This means that so long as charitable status is conferred on organizations whose missions are far from benevolent, our aspirations must go beyond the freedom to give to any 501(c)(3) organization. We must organize institutions like Fidelity to stop funding authoritarianism in the US and abroad, implement screens to disallow charitable funds to be used to resource global violence and genocide, and organize donors at these institutions to resource collective wellbeing and justice. As we have seen from the Unmasking Fidelity blueprint, campaigns built on this solid foundation of collective solidarity have the capacity to win.