The Wallace Global Fund is investing all the profits it made in the stock market last year in their grantees’ social and environmental justice campaigns, and calling on other like-minded foundations to increase their spending. This decision means that Wallace Global Fund is nearly doubling its 2018 grant budget to $10 million.

‘Our democracy and our climate are in crisis,’ said Ellen Dorsey, Executive Director of the Wallace Global Fund. ‘The nation’s activists and organizers are rising to meet this challenge, with inventiveness and courage. It’s time for philanthropy to do the same. And keep in mind, even with the recent corrections taking place in the financial markets, the stock market is up 20 per cent since November 8, 2016.’

‘The alliance between corporate greed and authoritarian state power, which our founder Henry Wallace predicted decades ago in his famous essay on the danger of American Fascism, is a recipe for a precarious economy as well as a move away from democracy’ said Scott Fitzmorris, Chair of the Wallace Global Fund. ‘Most members of the corporate community and conservative establishment who have an elevated platform to critique this administration’s policies went quiet, after their initial appropriate objections to the demagogic and xenophobic rhetoric and policies, when the Trump Administration began to deliver the corporate giveaways. Our mission as a charitable organization does not allow us to celebrate this short-term gain at a long-term loss of economic resilience.’

‘Our resources are needed now more than ever,’ Fitzmorris said. ‘Philanthropy must scale up our giving commensurate with the needs.’

 ‘The Wallace Global Fund is committed to defending the rights of the disenfranchised in the face of corrupt power, alongside protection of our environment,” Dorsey said. “If we just passively channel our investment gains into the health of our own organizational endowment, we are complicit in accepting the benefits of that corrupt power. We are going to live and act by the values that we were established to champion.’