Choose wisely: Big DAF platforms drop Southern Poverty Law Center

Donor intent be damned. 

Last week, Fidelity Charitable, Vanguard Charitable and DAFgiving360, Schwab’s affiliated donor advised fund, or DAF, one by one announced they would no longer honor donor grant recommendations to the Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC. The move came on the heels of the Justice Department’s indictment of the renowned civil rights organization, claiming that SPLC’s payments to informants observing hate groups like the Klu Klux Klan equated to money-laundering. 

The move to suspend donations came as a surprise to many DAF holders, who thought they had mission-aligned partners, or at the very least, neutral ones. When asset owners choose a financial service provider — whether it’s a donor advised fund, custodian or financial advisor — we do so on the presumption that our money is our money, and that our desires for social impact will be honored even if, structurally, funds change hands. 

This presumption has increasingly become threatened by the preemptive obeyance of service providers to the Trump administration’s attacks on the critical work of equity and inclusion, whether inside financial institutions or by well-established nonprofits at the forefront of social change. Recent examples should cause us to reflect—how can we ensure that we’re not just handing over the control of our money to institutions that not only don’t share our values, but may be actively working against them? 

My interest in this topic is of course entirely self-serving, given that I’ve been co-leader of Candide Group, an investment advisor that for the past twelve years has helped families and foundations who want to put their money to work for social justice. Our objective has always been larger than just what our one small firm can do. It requires a thriving ecosystem of community activists and financial actors with the resources—people, capital, structural—to be able to move money through society in ways that strengthen it.

We sometimes see working with traditional financial infrastructure to fund social impact as a “flight to quality” from our still fledgling sector. But it can actually be a flight toward greater inequality, if these institutions are ultimately more accountable to the Trump administration than they are to their own clients. We have always seen a role for these organizations and partner with them actively. We must collectively encourage a values-based approach—one that does not bend to shifting political winds. 

Frivolous indictment 

The Department of Justice’s indictment was shocking to many, given that the FBI was well-aware of this 40-year old program, and in fact, has benefited from it. SPLC, for instance, predicted the violence at the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville and once helped identify a white supremacist lying about his past on a federal application. Such facts raise the question as to whether the Justice Department is seeking to protect SPLC donors, or simply protect the administration’s apparent agenda of dismantling civil rights in the US. 

This sort of indictment feels similar to lawsuits with a well-trodden playbook, and its own name: SLAPP suits, or Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation. They are generally designed to try to shut people up who are speaking out for peace and justice. While often defamation lawsuits, they can take many forms. They are mostly designed to trap organizations into legal battles that drain time, money and energy from social movements. I am all too familiar, having been subject to one myself, when private prison company CoreCivic sued me personally alongside Candide Group for our activism during the family separation ordeal of 2018. And like the donors still supporting SPLC, we are grateful to the investors who stuck by our side as we were ultimately declared innocent over 4 years later. 

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Innocent until proven guilty is a core tenet of American justice, and one that Fidelity Charitable, DAFgiving360 and Vanguard Charitable should take seriously in the context of what appear to be trumped up charges (no pun intended). A whistleblower report from the DOJ last week noted that the charges were rushed despite internal misgivings about the case. House Democrats have called the indictment a “shocking abuse of prosecutorial power to attack civil society.”  

Fidelity Charitable noted in response to a request for comment that “a grant recommendation might be declined” in instances where “the organization is being investigated for alleged illegal activities or non-charitable activities, such as terrorism, money laundering, hate crimes, or fraud.” Similarly, DAFgiving360 noted, “Per DAFgiving360 policies, granting to Southern Poverty Law Center has currently been suspended. If a governing body of a charity declares an investigation into a charity it oversees, DAFgiving360 may suspend grants to the organization. DAFgiving360 applies its policies consistently across all charitable organizations.” I find it intriguing that both organizations have conditional language–“may” or “might”–and thus appear to be actively making a choice to suspend grants here. (Vanguard did not respond to a request for comment). 

It is completely unfair, and highly problematic, for a DAF to not only put up such a gate, but essentially perpetuate a misinformation campaign that is endangering the lives of the brave people who were working to disrupt violent white supremacist movements. An open letter from donors, foundations and donor networks urged the DAF providers to reverse course, noting, “By acting without adjudicated facts, institutions risk moving away from their role as responsible stewards of charitable funds and toward a form of preemptive institutional compliance that enables the use of state power to silence dissent by targeting civil society organizations.” 

It is true that once funds are contributed or transferred to a DAF, they are legally owned by the DAF provider. In other words, they are no longer your assets, which is important to keep in mind. Once funds are contributed to a DAF, their use is governed by the sponsoring organization’s policies and applicable law. While donors may make nonbinding grant recommendations, the sponsoring organization retains final authority over grant approvals. This effectively positions the sponsor as a gatekeeper in the grantmaking process, a structure that may raise concerns depending on how that discretion is applied. 

In short, power can always be dangerous in the wrong hands.

Gatekeepers in legacy finance

We similarly see such gatekeeping across the financial industry, often in much more subtle ways. As asset owners and stewards, we must be deliberate in choosing our partners wisely. 

While a non-discretionary investment advisory may only recommend investments to you, such that you seemingly retain decision-making power, they still control the pipeline of investments you’ll see. And in many instances, they may choose not to diligence managers who have less than a certain amount of capital under management or funds under their belt. This can be a great way of enacting systemic inequity—policies that masquerade as neutral or colorblind, but have the impact of systematically eliminating capital access for women and people of color. 

This practice is as old as finance itself. More recently, we’ve seen a rapid retreat from Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives, in alignment with the Trump administration’s agenda. In February of 2025, Institutional Shareholder Services, or ISS, announced it would no longer support equity and inclusion on corporate boards as part of its standard ESG offering. 

Surprise! That means if your “impact fund” uses ISS ESG guidelines, and hasn’t created a custom exception to the general policy, they likely are not voting for DEI proposals, either.

Sure enough, as investor support of diverse boards has waned and anti-diversity shareholder activists have grown more vocal, companies in turn are getting bolder in dropping DEI. The same month as ISS’s DEI retreat, Goldman Sachs said it would abandon diversity requirements for companies it helped go public; a year later, the firm announced it would no longer consider race, gender or sexual orientation when evaluating new Goldman Sachs  board members. BlackRock has abandoned its diversity targets for both interviewees and hires. JP Morgan Chase declared it would cut back on DEI programs. 

Actions like this do not negate the great work that some individuals within these institutions have done over the years, but they certainly reflect a broader, disconcerting trend of firms moving away from equity practices. 

At a firm like Candide Group, we haven’t had, or needed, specific DEI targets, we’ve just always sought to find the best talent and investments that are led by people closest to their communities. This has led to our building a team that is 85% women, gender non-confirming and people of color, and in turn supporting 169 companies and funds, of which 90% are similarly diverse-led. 

We know this is similar for our peers at Adasina, Nia and Zevin, to name a few. We know that this work can be done differently, and that it will require a different web of intermediaries to get us there, or greater accountability for those we partner with. 

Resistance over obeyance 

So what do we do when our service providers are abandoning our values? The good news is that we indeed have options, and the ability to move our money. We can weigh questions of who owns and governs a platform, what are their motivations, values and actions, and how well we align with those.  

In stark contrast to Vanguard Charitable, DAFgiving360 and Fidelity Charitable, last week the San Francisco Foundation, a DAF provider under the leadership of Fred Blackwell, announced they would continue to fund donations to SPLC. 

Blackwell noted that “giving platforms are not acting neutrally when they cut off access to charitable resources based solely on a charge, before any court has weighed the facts. They are imposing a penalty in advance of due process, reinforcing the very deterrent effect such prosecutions are intended to produce, and weakening civil society in the process.”  

Impact Charitable and Possibility Labs, also DAF providers, have equally reaffirmed their support for SPLC in response to requests for comment.

And in large part as a response to our outrage over Institutional Shareholder Services backing off from equity and inclusion recommendations for proxy voting, Candide Group launched Bought and Bossed this year, a public equity index strategy where we have individually checked over 1,000 shareholder ballots over the past year to ensure that our shared values of social justice, climate action and DEI are respected.  It’s named after the autobiography of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black Congresswoman whose campaign slogan, Unbought and Unbossed, makes us think how governments shouldn’t be bought and bossed—but corporations absolutely should be. Ours is just one of many public equity initiatives that haven’t backed down on DEI, alongside efforts from our peers at Trillium and Boston Common. 

We also recognize that we need everyone and every dollar working together for social change. That means creating on-ramps for larger institutions to do better. This will require actual accountability to their customers—their donors and investors—who hopefully are equally engaged in accountability practices with the communities they, in turn, serve. 

It means that investors and donors must advocate for our own money, making sure it’s actually serving its intended purpose.

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Morgan Simon is a founding partner at Candide Group, an investment advisor that works with families and foundations who want their money working for justice. You can learn more about the 169 companies and funds they’ve supported here: www.candidegroup.com/portfolio.