SAVING LIVES, SUPPORTING COMMUNITIES, AND STRENGTHENING DEMOCRACY

During the Great Recession, Open Society saw early on that many Americans were going to greatly suffer, so we stepped in to provide immediate relief to the hardest hit communities and families, launching a substantial Special Fund for Poverty Alleviation. 

• We put $35 million into a joint New York State and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services program—Back To School New York—to provide $200 per child to families receiving public assistance or food stamps in New York State. The program helped families buy back to school supplies or clothing so that children could stay in school while their families experienced economic hardship.
• Open Society provided funding for youth development organizations working with the most at-risk young people—those at risk of dropping out of school or who are involved with the criminal justice system or in foster care.
• We supported Accelerating Opportunity which provided training programs—including basic skills development along with opportunities to earn postsecondary credentials—for workers in Kansas, Kentucky, Illinois, and North Carolina enabling them to pursue careers in different industries that paid wages that can support their families.

When communities across the U.S., and in New York City in particular, were hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, Open Society responded with an emergency funding package that covered 30 jurisdictions in the US at the city, county, and state level. This included $65 million funding for: 

• New York City Fund for Public Schools, for emergency remote learning programs and child care centers for the children of essential workers.  
• The National Domestic Worker Alliance’s Coronavirus Care Fund which provided emergency assistance to home care workers, nannies, and house cleaners, also left out of federal programs.  
• Cash and other forms of direct relief to people in desperate need, especially essential workers, and others who had been excluded from federal emergency support.
  

After Hurricane Katrina, the Open Society Foundations quickly stood up a program to support nonprofits working to rebuild their communities and to ensure that local recovery efforts included displaced and low-income residents. Grants included:

• Students at the Center to provide educational programs for displaced youth from New Orleans’ most under-resourced public high-schools 
• The Catholic Legal Immigration Network for legal representation of immigrants affected by the storm 
• The New Orleans Community Network to provide critical information to displaced residents and helped them have a voice in rebuilding their communities

For nearly a decade, Open Society supported a program called the Project on Death in America, which helped develop the field of expertise of palliative care and see it implemented in hospitals around the country. 

• The program included the Faculty Scholars Program, which supported 87 faculty scholars, as well as dozens of leaders in social work and nursing.  
• Faculty scholars established palliative care education programs, improved textbooks, and provided training to hospital residency programs.  
• The goal was to improve end of life care in the U.S. and then globally.
  

As part of our decades-long work on drug policy, for many years now, Open Society has funded efforts to reduce overdose deaths and stem the overdose crisis. We supported and continue to support initiatives to hold the pharmaceutical industry accountable, and to increase access to proven overdose prevention medicines and strategies. 

• Grantees include Remedy Alliance/For the People, which is working to decrease drug overdoses and save lives by increasing access to naloxone. 
• We support a number of grantees that are advocating for state and local governments to use the billions of dollars won in lawsuits with opioid manufacturers and distributors for impactful public health programs that benefit impacted communities. These include VOCAL Kentucky, Salvation and Social Justice in New Jersey, and the Maine Recovery Access Project.
  

For 25 years, Open Society ran a local program in Baltimore, Maryland to support a range of initiatives to improve civic engagement, police accountability and criminal justice reform, overdose response, and help those suffering from poverty and discrimination. This program included:

• Expanding access to buprenorphine and naloxone, building support for overdose prevention sites, and contributing to a drop in overdose deaths in the city, countering statewide and national trends
• Supporting advocates advancing major reforms to the criminal justice system, including the elimination of the flawed Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights, advocating for and supporting implementation of the Department of Justice’s consent decree, and fostering a movement to reform a pretrial system that penalizes residents for their economic status
• Facilitating a robust response to the pandemic, including providing cash assistance to 15,000 residents, anchoring the Baltimore Equitable Vaccination Initiative
• Launching a non-partisan civic engagement campaign for the 2020 election that led to Baltimore City having the highest turnout of any jurisdiction in the state and its highest since 1987

Learn more about our work to save lives, support communities, and strengthen democracy in the United States.