Staying the course when race-based grants are targeted

Last month the Grand Victoria Foundation, a $180 million dollar grant maker in Illinois, did something unusual in this era of attacks on race-based grant making: It has doubled down on building Black-led movements.

The foundation is becoming more vocal about its role in supporting racial justice organizations at a time when many others are downplaying those commitments and softening the language they use to describe their work. 

The most obvious change is the foundation’s new name: AMARA. It means “grace” in Igbo, a language used in parts of Nigeria and stands for A Movement Activating Repair and Abundance in Illinois, where its grant making is centered.

The name change signals the foundation’s deeper commitment to racial justice in recent years and reflects “an opportunity to be more full-throated and forward-leaning in our work,” said Sharon Bush, AMARA’s president.

Many philanthropies have fled in the opposite direction. After President Trump issued a January 2025 executive order against diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts that targeted foundations with assets north of $500 million, many grant makers scrubbed language from their websites detailing support for Black-led or Black-serving nonprofits, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and others, according to a 2025 study by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. Many groups also fear the growth in lawsuits over this issue that can result in huge legal bills regardless of the outcome. 

AMARA is one of several grant makers that is clearly declaring its support for racial justice. Its decision to be more explicit about its mission shows unity with its grantees, Bush said.

The foundation, which was created from profits generated by the Grand Victoria Casino in Elgin, Ill., has supported Black-led organizations in Illinois since its inception in 1996, making about $9 million in grants each year. But its focus on racial justice became sharper in recent years, Bush said, after many grantees told her, “‘if you guys are race-explicit, then it helps us to do our work more openly.’”

‘Courage is contagious’

By sticking to their racial-equity missions, some foundations are showing that “courage is contagious,” said Lulete Mola, co-founder of the  Black Collective Foundation MN, another grant maker that hasn’t budged from its support of racial justice.

Foundations and other organizations are in a period Mola called the “great revision,” when using certain words and phrases come with greater risk given the Trump administration’s attacks on DEI and the more than two dozen court cases that are in litigation against nonprofits for supporting race-based programs.

Some organizations may consider it too great a risk to promote the fact that they work to support Black communities, and that is understandable, Mola said, especially if they rely on federal grants to survive.

However, getting crosswise with the White House is less risky than doing nothing in the face of the rollback of civil rights attempted under Trump, Mola said.

“You can have all the right language and do all the right things, and you might still experience the wrath of this administration,” she said. “So you might as well be focused on your mission, and you might as well be serving your demographic.”

Race-based work carries real risk

The risks faced by leaders like Mola and Bush are real.

One of the more prominent lawsuits targeting race-based grant making was filed in April by the American Alliance for Equal Rights, a conservative legal nonprofit, against the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. The suit alleges that college scholarships provided by the foundation were meant for Black students and discriminated against white applicants.

The foundation’s lawyers argued that the requirement that scholarship recipients be Black was dropped before this year’s application process started.

But Ed Blum, the Alliance’s president, is confident he will prevail in the case anyway. Even if foundations alter their websites and how they describe their work, they can still be discriminatory, he said.

“Courts examine how a program operates, not its label or description,” he wrote in an email.

Blum, who as the leader of litigation nonprofit Students for Fair Admissions successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that race-based college admissions policies are unconstitutional, said he is making progress. But he sees much work to be done in his quest to eliminate policies that benefit people based on their race, which makes grant makers like AMARA and the Black Collective Foundation MN vulnerable.

Since that Supreme Court decision in 2023, he says courts are increasingly striking down race-based programming. But there are hundreds of race-based programs that Blum sees as ripe for a challenge. “This is a long legal campaign with much work left to be done,” he wrote. 

The lawsuit is a case “in search of an injury,” said Alphonso David, a lawyer who represents the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, explaining that no scholarships have been awarded yet, giving Blum’s group no basis for taking the foundation to court.

David, who also represents other nonprofits in similar cases, called philanthropy’s response to what he believes is an attack on grant makers’ first amendment rights a “mixed bag.”

“Foundations have to move beyond solidarity and towards bold leadership,” he said.

A clear vision and path

That sort of leadership is what AMARA is trying to demonstrate through its name change, said Amanda Hwu, executive director of the Illinois Community Power Fund. The fund, which is  supported by AMARA and other grant makers, provides grants to social justice groups.

“The change isn’t aesthetic,” she said. “It’s a mandate for all foundations to show that we have to be explicit in who we are supporting. The foundation is moving with a clear vision and a path for all of us.”

When feeling under threat, leaders like her and AMARA’s Bush shouldn’t shrink from the risk and instead need to develop strategies to counter legal and political attacks, Hwu said.

But for AMARA, the stakes may not be that high. After conferring with her attorneys, Bush determined that AMARA was too small to be ensnared in the Trump administration’s maneuvers against race-based programming. She and other civil rights leaders maintain that there is nothing illegal about providing grants to build Black-led movements despite the many lawsuits arguing otherwise.

If anything, the attacks have given her a distinct sense of purpose.

Said Bush: “The anti-DEI focus just brings greater clarity about why the work is important.”