Funding New Paths Toward Open Society—an Update

Promoting open societies is an inherently political endeavor. The Open Society Foundations have never shied away from working in repressive contexts and we have supported human rights causes that no one else would.

We are a philanthropy that traces its origins to major political struggles that once looked insurmountable—be it the struggle against apartheid in South Africa or consolidating the transition to democracy in Eastern and Central Europe. In over four decades of promoting rights, equity, and justice, we have consistently supported systemic change to build more inclusive societies the world over.

Open societies continue to be shaped by the primacy of politics, but the world itself is changing fast. As the global landscape shifts, our shared future hangs in the balance.

Climate change and extreme concentrations of wealth are producing new threats; inclusive democracies are being eroded from within by elected autocrats and the forces of majoritarianism; double standards undermine international norms.

But there are also hopeful possibilities, including the rise of new powers and new manifestations of citizens organizing against these trends. There are growing calls to remake international institutions that are no longer fit for purpose in today’s world. 

Can we harness this emerging energy to create a more just and equitable world?

Many authoritarians the world over know exactly what they want to achieve. Our role, together with our partners, is to foster better alternatives—nationally, regionally, and ultimately globally. Political contests at the national level, informed by local insights, can feed into conversations in international arenas.

We saw examples of this most recently in Rio de Janeiro at the G20 summit, which broke new ground on addressing economic inequality with a Brazilian proposal for a global tax on billionaires, reflecting how a country from the Global South can use these multilateral spaces to introduce agendas that serve the global majority. Earlier this year at the United Nations, the Africa Group led the General Assembly in passing a landmark tax convention that cracks down on tax avoidance and aims to ensure that tax dollars are used for the public good. These efforts began as civil society initiatives on the ground.

Another example is the Escazú Agreement—a regionally-led action plan where countries in Latin America and the Caribbean came together to strengthen protection for environmental human rights defenders. We are supporting a civil society push to develop a similar inter-governmental agreement in Africa to ensure that the global conversation on the protection of environmental defenders is shaped by those from the Global South.

To meet this moment, Open Society is also rethinking how we do our work and where we place our attention. Moving forward, we will be a smaller but still mighty organization that will be more focused and integrated in its efforts.

Our roots remain the same, but we are adapting how we work. We will continue to be risk-taking and proximate to local challenges with a globally distributed staff drawn from and based in the regions where they work. We will continue to grapple with heterodox thinking and critical perspectives as a healthy feature of open societies through our Ideas Workshop to challenge our ways of seeing the world. We will continue to respond to crises and other unforeseen situations through our rapid reserve fund.

Rather than maintaining standing programs, we are building much of our work around new time-bound goals that will address a breadth of issues and geographic focuses, from promoting new state-led economic models of green economic transformation to promoting inclusive political participation. This will allow us to responsibly exit work and open new areas over time. We will continue to support strategic litigation efforts, both directly and through grant support, as well as to employ impact investment as a tool for change.

To ensure that work in each region is coordinated and cognizant of the differing contexts and political spaces in which we work, internally we have appointed geographic leads to play an integrative role bringing together all the efforts to be more than the sum of their parts. Our advocacy efforts have also been restructured to focus on local priorities, which our advocates will help bring to global debates, as again we believe that struggles for rights, equity, and justice start at the local level and with movements trying to engage with power.

In addition to our work on our new time-bound goals, Open Society will also be giving multiyear grants to a diverse and intersectional network of organizations that are catalysts of transformative change. Organizations across the world will be considered for this type of support as we aim to balance our global ambitions with local insights, ensuring that they inform and strengthen each other as we work to help bring new voices into the corridors of power.

With our transformation, we remain as committed as ever to local knowledge and to having a global presence, while our new model optimizes our resources and centers us around the impact we seek to achieve. We are also deeply appreciative of all the support we have received from our partners and allies who have shared their insights and wisdom with us throughout this process.

Our willingness to rethink our ways of working and to embrace new approaches ensures we will be better placed to confront a changing and uncertain world, one whose emerging challenges are still not completely clear but where support for those struggling for open society values remains as essential as ever.