I've spent more than two decades at The Boston Foundation helping donors figure out how to put their values into practice. Before that, I ran grant programs at the Massachusetts Bar Foundation focused on legal services for the poor, and before that I worked at the Council on Foundations in Washington, where I first learned how the philanthropic sector thinks about its responsibilities to the public. That entire career has been built on a simple premise: that charitable giving, done thoughtfully, is one of the most powerful tools we have for building the kind of society we want to live in. Which is why the past few weeks have felt, to me, like a genuine test of whether philanthropy means what it says.

My phone and inbox have been busy. Donors and professional advisors have been reaching out to ask about something they've been reading in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and last week in a letter to the editor in the Boston Globe: that some of the largest donor advised fund providers in the country, including Fidelity Charitable and Vanguard Charitable, have stopped processing grants to the Southern Poverty Law Center following the Trump administration's indictment of the organization on federal fraud charges last month. They want to know what TBF is doing with our donor advised fund program. And they deserve a straight answer.

We are continuing to process grants to the SPLC. We have done so throughout this period, and we intend to keep doing so.
I want to explain why, because I don't think "an indictment is not a conviction" is quite enough, even though it's true and it matters. The SPLC still holds its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. That status is determined by the IRS through its own independent process, and no such review has been initiated here. But beyond the legal technicalities, there's something more fundamental at stake, and it has to do with what we believe philanthropy is actually for.

The SPLC has spent sixty years doing work that most institutions were unwilling to do: winning landmark legal victories against the Ku Klux Klan, tracking domestic hate groups when no one else was paying close attention, and building what became the most widely cited authority on extremism in the United States. Our donors have made more than 300 grants to the SPLC over the past two decades. Several were made in just the past two weeks, by donors who, knowing what they know, wanted to reaffirm their support. That's not a constituency I'm inclined to let down over charges that a number of serious legal observers, including former DOJ Fraud Section chief Andrew Weissmann, have publicly questioned on the merits.

Weissmann and others have noted that the actual criminal charges center on roughly $14,000, an amount that stands in striking contrast to the sweeping language of the indictment, and that the case lacks the specific donor misrepresentations that have supported successful fraud convictions in comparable matters. Many in the legal community have placed this prosecution in a broader pattern of the current administration targeting progressive civil rights organizations. TBF shares those concerns. We'll be watching this case closely as it moves through the courts.

I understand why some DAF providers made the choice they did. Managing liability is a real consideration for large financial institutions, and I'm not here to tell Fidelity or Vanguard how to run their programs. But TBF is a community foundation, and our job is different. Our Board of Directors has adopted a clear policy against supporting organizations engaged in hateful activities, and we rely on established external monitors, including the SPLC's own Hate Watch, along with Change the Terms, Color of Change, GLAAD, and others, to help us make those determinations. The SPLC has not been flagged by any of them. When we look at the full picture, the evidence does not support pausing grants to an organization that has been a cornerstone of civil rights work in this country for more than half a century.

We signed the Hate Is Not Charitable Pledge in 2021 alongside more than 90 other philanthropies because we believe that how we give matters as much as how much we give. Honoring that commitment sometimes means making calls that aren't easy. This one, I'll be honest, feels pretty clear to me.

To every donor and advisor who reached out: thank you. This is the conversation we should be having. Please keep reaching out. And please know that TBF will continue to be a place where your charitable intents are met with the same seriousness of purpose you bring to them.