POLITICS: The Freedom Together Foundation – USSA News

The Grassroots Global Justice Alliance is a radical-left activist group that fights “for a just transition to a feminist economy” and believes “the liberation of womxn is bound to the liberation of all oppressed people.” Its “worldview and political practice” is “rooted in the realities and interests of women, queer, trans, and non binary people who have been harmed by the intersecting forces of patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism.”

One of its major supporters is the multi-billion dollar Freedom Together Foundation. In its most recent tax filing, Freedom Together reported a $1.1 million grant to Grassroots Global Justice Alliance.

Known until late last year as the JPB Foundation—Freedom Together has become one of the most openly and thoroughly politicized major 501(c)(3) private foundations in the country. Its story illustrates how a fortune that was committed to charity can be deployed by professional activists to fund distinctly political causes—even radical ones aimed at completely upending society.

The Picower fortune

In 1999, one of Picower’s accounts with Madoff reportedly returned an eye-popping 950 percent. It was later revealed, of course, that this money had simply been stolen from Madoff’s other investors.

The progenitors of many of the fortunes behind some of the biggest names in Big Philanthropy are long dead, though the foundations that they endowed live on larger than ever.  Bill Hewlett would be 112 years old today, while John D. MacArthur would be 128. Henry Ford was born just weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg and would be 162 today. Will Keith Kellogg would be 165, and Andrew W. Mellon would be 170. John D. Rockefeller was born just seven years after the death of the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence and would be 186 today.

Jeffry Picower, the billionaire investor whose estate endowed what is now the Freedom Together Foundation, died in 2009.

Picower is best-known as one of Bernie Madoff’s biggest Ponzi scheme investors, and his accounts with the fraudster (of which he had almost three dozen) were said to have repeatedly produced annual returns exceeding 100 percent. In 1999, one of Picower’s accounts with Madoff reportedly returned an eye-popping 950 percent.

It was later revealed, of course, that this money had simply been stolen from Madoff’s other investors. In 2010 Jeffry Picower’s widow Barbara agreed to a $7.2 billion settlement from his estate. The New York Times reported that this reflected all of Picower’s profits from Madoff’s scheme, which Barbara firmly asserted that he had no knowledge of or role in. Prior to the settlement, Picower had made more money from Madoff’s fraud than Madoff himself.

Even so, there was plenty of non-Madoff money remaining in the Picower estate, which Barbara used to establish the JPB Foundation in 2011—“JPB” standing for Jeffry Picower Barbara. It continued under this name until late 2024, when it was rebranded as the Freedom Together Foundation. The new name was chosen to highlight the foundation’s collectivist notion of “freedom,” as “a shared aspiration and endeavor” which must be expressed “in community and solidarity with others,” not “only as something for individuals.” Its overarching goal is to empower those whom it believes will use that power to “change unjust systems and create a more democratic, inclusive, and sustainable society”—what it calls “a truly representative democracy.”

Tax filings reveal that through 2015 the foundation received over $4.1 billion from the estate of Jeffry Picower. Another $91.2 million has trickled in since then. Relatively high levels of annual grantmaking (more than $1.1 billion total from 2021-2023) have left the foundation with $2.75 billion in net assets as of the end of 2023. This places it in roughly the same philanthropic bracket as the Annie E. Casey Foundation (2023 net assets: $2.28 billion), the James Irvine Foundation (2023 net assets: $3.16 billion), or the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation (2023 net assets: $3.63 billion)—though none of these came close to matching the Freedom Together’s grantmaking that year.

As of 2023, Freedom Together held more than $1.6 billion in corporate stock, including almost $227 million in Apple, almost $130 million in UnitedHealth Group, more than $88 million in Eli Lilly, over $56 million in JPMorgan Chase, more than $40 million in Comcast, and more than $25 million in American Express. An additional $1.6 billion was parked in a variety of venture capital, hedge funds, and other sophisticated investment products with names like Soroban Opportunities Cayman Fund Ltd Class A (over $58 million), Taconic Opportunity Offshore Fund Ltd B-NR Series (over $62 million), and Samlyn Offshore Ltd Class A1 Sub Class 3 Series 372 Fund (over $63 million). All told, more than $468 million was invested in funds with either the word “Cayman” or “offshore” in their names.

In 2023, the foundation paid its chief investment officer Gerald McNamara more than $1.4 million in personal compensation.

Despite its heft, as recently as 2019 Inside Philanthropy was writing that the then-JPB Foundation was “largely unknown in nonprofit circles.” Barbara Picower, as president and board chair, was said to exercise complete control over its operations, to such a degree that grantees simply used the name “Barbara” as a metonym for the foundation itself. That level of hands-on involvement, combined with the foundation’s sheer size, would have rightly secured for Barbara Picower a place among the most powerful figures in American philanthropy. Darren Walker, the outgoing president of the Ford Foundation, was effusive in his praise of Picower’s impact on the American left-progressive funding ecosystem.

A Who’s Who of the activist left

Another prominent senior staffer is Alicia Garza [. . .] Garza’s politics are notoriously radical—fellow Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors described the two of them as “trained Marxists.”

In addition to the name change in 2024, Freedom Together underwent a major leadership overhaul. Barbara Picower (who had announced her intention to do so the year before) stepped down as president. A series of new hires have ensured that the Freedom Together Foundation’s senior leadership is now made up of those who have made their careers out of attempting to remake American society along left-wing lines.

Picower’s hand-picked successor was Deepak Bhargava, a professional activist with the perfect resume for left-wing philanthropy. His first job after college was with ACORN, and he later went on to become the longtime head of the activist group Community Change. At various points he has served as board chair of the climate activist group 350.org; board secretary of the Congressional Progressive Caucus Center; and has been a board member of the Leadership Conference Education Fund, the Democracy Fund, and the Bauman Family Foundation. He was a U.S. advisory board member at the Open Society Foundations (to which he co-authored a leaked memo on “voter engagement” funding for the 2012 election cycle), an editorial board member at The Nation, and a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

After leaving Community Change in 2018, Bhargava became a lecturer at the City University of New York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies. His book Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World, co-authored with Stephanie Luce, was published in 2023. Born out of Bhargava’s frustration with “the state of strategy on the Left,” Practical Radicals was intended as a guide for activists who “hold big visions for transforming society and are willing to do what it takes to win in the real world.” Longtime socialist activist-academic Frances Fox Piven praised the book, while former Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) called it “a vital resource for progressives who want to win” and noted that “our movements must seek and win governing power to achieve our visions for a more just society.”

Another prominent senior staffer is Alicia Garza, Freedom Together’s senior vice president of movement infrastructure and explorations. She is best known as one of the three co-founders of what ultimately became the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. Garza’s career also includes notable roles as founder of the activist group Black Futures Lab, co-founder of the political organization Supermajority, and special projects director at the labor union-aligned National Domestic Workers Alliance, all of which (or their affiliates) are current Freedom Together grantees.

Garza’s politics are notoriously radical—fellow Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors described the two of them as “trained Marxists.” In her forward to the 2018 edition of Max Elbaum’s Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che, Garza wrote that when she had first read the book as a young activist, she “hadn’t yet studied much of the origins of the Marxist-Leninist tradition that I was loosely trained in.”

Marxism-Leninism, of course, aims to produce a one-party totalitarian communist dictatorship through the forcible seizure of power and the ruthless suppression of political dissent.

Garza was one of six new senior staff members who joined the foundation around the same time Bhargava took over as president in early 2024. They all have strong ties to left-wing activism or philanthropy.

Two—Deborah Axt and David Altschuler—formerly held leadership roles at Make the Road New York. Altschuler was also the former co-executive director of the group’s 501(c)(4) political affiliate Make the Road Action. Axt was hired to be Freedom Together’s senior vice president of community and worker power, while Altschuler became chief of staff.

Jason Garrett, who joined Freedom Together as senior vice president of faith, bridging, and belonging, was formerly a program officer at both the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundations.

Arianna Jimenez, Freedom Together’s senior vice president of democracy, gender, and racial justice, spent years working for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in California, including as political director for the powerful SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West.

Deepak Pateriya, now Freedom Together’s senior vice president of program strategy and management, was previously chief of staff and managing director at Community Change, where he worked alongside Bhargava. Pateriya also has a union organizing background at both the SEIU and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW).

Freedom Together also brought on new high-profile board members, whom it said collectively had “decades of experience and expertise fighting for social, racial, and economic justice.” The most prominent of these was Mary Kay Henry, then-president of the SEIU—which was to soon pledge $200 million to back Joe Biden and other Democrats in the 2024 elections.

Other new board members included National LGBTQ Task Force president Kierra Johnson, Obama Administration domestic policy council director Cecilia Munoz, and SNF Agora Institute inaugural director Hahrie Han. Also joining the board was Alan Jenkins, a Harvard law professor who (among other things) was formerly president of The Opportunity Agenda, director of human rights at the Ford Foundation, and a board member at Community Change.

This is an executive roster that appears to have been constructed with meticulous ideological—indeed, in some cases outright political—intent. It is far from common notions of philanthropy and charity.

Programs, power, and politics

Bhargava wrote that it was crucial for civil society to combat Trump through the twin formulas of “Sue. Protest. Vote.” and “Disrupt. De-legitimize. And draw defectors.” He spun such resistance as a “pro-democracy” movement, despite its target having been democratically elected barely seven months earlier.

A charity-to-politics metamorphosis is regrettably common in Big Philanthropy, but it happened relatively quickly with Freedom Together. When first established, the foundation’s mission was to support medical research, poverty reduction, and environmental protection. From 2012 to 2023, it made approximately $250 million worth of grants under its medical research program, and $1 billion each under its poverty and environmental programs. But while the foundation’s early grantmaking tried to help “people make choices that would improve their lives,” it soon decided that “systemic changes were necessary to advance economic justice.”

The poverty program initially focused on “creating opportunities for people to move and stay out of poverty,” but was subsequently reengineered to “transform the systems that perpetuate social and economic inequities.” In the foundation’s words, it began making “a much more explicit link between poverty and democracy,” which it claimed is “inextricably linked with racial justice.” Freedom Together also claims to have been one of the early philanthropic adopters of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices, noting that over the years it has “sharpened its focus on race, racism, and injustice.”

Today, Freedom Together operates five grantmaking programs. Through its Democracy, Gender, and Racial Justice program it seeks to “expand multiracial democracy” and combat what it calls “looming authoritarianism.” The foundation’s Community and Worker Power program supports union organizing and similar efforts aimed at “uniting the working class” to “achieve a true democracy.” The Movement Infrastructure and Explorations program’s goal is to help groups “build and wield power” through (among other things) “narrative and culture change strategies.” The Faith, Bridging, and Belonging program is aimed at “advancing the will of the people from a place of love.”

Finally, there is the Reproductive Health, Medical Research, and Community Grants program, which houses the foundation’s longtime funding for the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Alongside its support for the Harlem Children’s Zone, this is among the foundation’s most traditionally charitable major grantmaking.

Today, more than anything else, the concept of societal “power” (and who wields it) is central to the Freedom Together Foundation’s work.

Upon taking charge in 2024, Bhargava told The Chronicle of Philanthropy that “an imbalance in power” among various racial, class, and gender categories was “the underlying issue underneath all the problems we face, from housing to health care to climate injustice.” In Bhargava’s view, philanthropy has a critical role to play in building “the power of people who have been denied it,” funding narrative change to “move the frame of how people understand key issues in society,” and supporting associated voter registration and election administration work.

Noting that foundations cannot support direct lobbying, Bhargava advocates for indirect methods of “shaping the issue environment” and “educating the public on key issues,” all with an eye towards shifting the “power” dynamics in American society. All of this is couched in terms of funding so-called “democracy” efforts—a word that along with “democratic” appears a remarkable 13 separate times on the Freedom Together homepage.

In our system of government, such efforts are functionally inseparable from electoral politics. All of it necessarily comes down to questions of who occupies what office, and what they do while they’re in that office. Capital Research Center senior fellow Michael Hartmann observed that “when people hear progressive foundations say they want to help ‘small-d’ democracy, there’s a justified concern that they’re really going to just be boosting the prospects of ‘big-D’ Democrats.”

Certainly, Bhargava’s past public statements as an outspoken Democratic Party partisan would seem to validate such fears. During the 2020 election cycle (while a lecturer at the City University of New York) he cautioned fellow Democrats that while “most of us are rightly focused now on winning,” he had “thought long and hard about how we might approach governance and movement-building in a next Democratic administration” and believed that “moving from resistance to governing—should we be fortunate enough to have that problem—is going to be very hard.” In the immediate aftermath of Joe Biden’s victory later that year, Bhargava wrote that Donald Trump was “a mirror for the deep racism, misogyny and cruelty bred in the bone of American society and culture.” He called on readers to celebrate what he called Trump’s consignment “to the dustbin of history,” and urged the Democratic Party to take steps to ensure Congressional majorities through the 2022 midterms.

Bhargava became president of Freedom Together in 2024, and after Trump’s election victory the foundation quickly emerged as a central pillar of the philanthropic sector’s resistance to his administration. The “crisis” of the Trump administration’s early weeks, according to Bhargava, “demands an extraordinary response from philanthropy,” and Freedom Together  announced that it would increase grantmaking to a full 10 percent of its endowment—double the required rate.

In a remarkable June 2025 essay for The Guardian, Bhargava wrote that it was crucial for civil society to combat Trump through the twin formulas of “Sue. Protest. Vote.” and “Disrupt. De-legitimize. And draw defectors.” He spun such resistance as a “pro-democracy” movement, despite its target having been democratically elected barely seven months earlier.

Most recently, the New York Times reported that Bhargava sits at the center of a secret $250 million coalition of “political philanthropy” (a term that should be an oxymoron) designed to fight the Trump administration through litigation, media, support for activists, and more. All of the money involved would be in the form of 501(c)(3) ostensibly “charitable” dollars, and the Times reported that some Democratic Party officials were privately arguing that such funding would be better used in “work that could at least indirectly aid progressive organizing and elections, like voter registration in battleground states.”

2023 grantmaking

Community Change works to “bridge the worlds of grassroots organizing and progressive politics to change the systems that impact our communities,” aiming for “long-term political shifts” toward “an immigrant-inclusive multiracial democracy.”

The most recent available financials for the Freedom Together Foundation are from 2023, a year in which it paid out $424 million in grants, including the aforementioned $1.1 million for the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance.

Freedom Together’s single largest 2023 grantee was Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (RPA): $16 million to fund projects designed to advance left-of-center perspectives on public policy issues ranging from abortion, to immigration, to climate change.

Another $5 million granted to RPA by Freedom Together supported the Collaborative for Gender + Reproductive Equity, a pro-abortion philanthropic coalition originally created in 2018 by Barbara Picower and then-Packard Foundation president Carol Larson. It is a fiscally-sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors that through 2024 has raised more than $310 million.

Freedom Together gave at least $10.9 million to Amalgamated Charitable Foundation in 2023 to fund a similarly wide range of left-leaning initiatives, such as the Families and Workers Fund and Organizing Resilience.

Together, the Tides Center and the Tides Foundation—two constituent members of the major left-of-center Tides funding network—received more than $7 million from Freedom Together in 2023. $1.75 million of this was earmarked for the Green New Deal Network, which organizes in support of the eponymous eco-socialist public policy agenda. A 2019 legislative manifestation of the Green New Deal was defeated 0-57 in the Senate, with the 43 Democrats voting “present.”

In 2023, the Freedom Together Foundation gave a combined $27.8 million to the New Venture Fund, the Windward Fund, and the Hopewell Fund—all part of the gigantic left-of-center activist nonprofit network managed by Arabella Advisors.  More than $6 million of this was earmarked for the Fund to Build Grassroots Power, a grantmaking intermediary established by the then-JPB Foundation in 2018 to “advance the environmental and climate justice movements” and “help accelerate a just transition from an extractive to a regenerative economy.” Another $1.15 million was designated for New Venture’s Collective Action Fund for Accountability, Resilience, and Adaptation, which underwrites the ongoing lawfare campaign by state and local governments against major energy companies, seeking to hold them civilly liable for the massive costs that those governments claim to be incurring due to climate change.

Freedom Together gave almost $10.4 million to the Movement Strategy Center, whose radical worldview is illustrated through a remarkable glossary it maintains of far-left terminology. It defines “abolition” as “a political vision and broad strategy [that] eliminates imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creates lasting alternatives to punishment and incarceration.” The phrase “extractive economy” is defined as “a capitalist system of exploitation and oppression that values consumerism, colonialism, and money over people and the planet.” The Movement Strategy Center asserts that “white supremacy is ever present in our institutional and cultural assumptions,” and claims that characteristics of “white supremacy culture” include “perfectionism, sense of urgency, defensiveness, quantity over quality, worship of the written word, paternalism, either/or thinking, power hoarding, fear of open conflict, individualism, objectivity, right to comfort, and progress.”

The left-wing activist group Community Change—once led by Freedom Together president Deepak Bhargava—received $7.5 million from the foundation in 2023. Community Change works to “bridge the worlds of grassroots organizing and progressive politics to change the systems that impact our communities,” aiming for “long-term political shifts” toward “an immigrant-inclusive multiracial democracy.” Its ultimate objective is to “abolish poverty,” which it views as “essential to undoing the violence of systemic racism, misogyny, and white supremacy in our country.” A joint press release from November 2020 published on Community Change’s website congratulated Joe Biden on his “decisive victory against Donald Trump,” describing it as a “win” and “a solid rejection of Trump’s vile xenophobia.”

The Center for American Progress (CAP) received $5 million from Freedom Together. CAP is an all-round left-of-center public policy think tank founded by John Podesta and closely associated with the Democratic Party establishment. A 2021 report from Business Insider counted at least 66 CAP alumni with positions in the Biden Administration, including high-level roles. Most notably, CAP president and CEO Neera Tanden was nominated for director of the Office of Management and Budget, but was forced to withdraw after it became clear that she would not be confirmed. Tanden went on to serve in other roles in the Biden Administration, including as director of the Domestic Policy Council.

Another $1.25 million from Freedom Together went to the Chinese Progressive Association to support its Black Futures Lab project, which works to build “Black political power” and to “use our political strength to stop corporate influences from creeping into public policies.”

The Alliance for Youth Organizing, whose mission is to grow “progressive people power across America,” got $2.5 million from Freedom Together. So did the Center for Popular Democracy, which works to “upend politics as usual” and “demand transformational change for Black, brown and low-income communities.”

The Planned Parenthood Federation of America received $6 million from Freedom Together in 2023 (including $1.5 million for its public policy litigation and law program). The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities received $4.5 million. Prolific environmental litigant Earthjustice got $3.5 million to leverage “the power of the law to build healthy & equitable communities.” And Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice got $5 million for “youth organizing for climate action and racial equity.”

The People’s Action Institute was given $3.5 million for Green New Deal advocacy and $250,000 for tornado relief in Alabama—a perfect illustration of the foundation’s relative priorities.

Freedom Together granted $5 million to support the Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice program at the City College of New York, which aims to “build power with people of color, women, LGBTQ+ people, people from low-income and working-class backgrounds and those most affected by injustice to effect social change.”

Out of at least $5.7 million the foundation gave to Harvard University, $1.5 million was earmarked for the school’s Structural Racism Initiative for Diversity with Equity (STRIDE) program. Among other things, this program studies “race-based medicine” and “the potential public health impact of monetary reparations for African enslavement.”

Some of Freedom Together’s grants were made for ostensibly nonpartisan voter engagement efforts. The Voter Registration Project—the partisan bias of which was exposed in a major Capital Research Center report—received $6 million. Of the $8.5 million the foundation granted to NEO Philanthropy, $4 million was earmarked for the State Infrastructure Fund, which aims to increase voter turnout among what it calls “historically underrepresented communities” so that they will “elect those into office who share their values.”

Another $1.25 million was designated for the Youth Engagement Fund, whose mission is “helping young people of color flex their voting power,” while fighting both the “legacies of racism, colonialism, oppression” and the influence of “capitalist forces.” A 2024 foundation report described the Youth Engagement Fund as “the only donor collaborative dedicated to increasing the civic participation and electoral power of young people.”

Final thoughts

While the word “philanthropy” derives from the Greek for “love of humanity,” the Freedom Together Foundation is purposefully driving wedges into the country’s most raw and divisive political fault lines, all with the aim of shifting the fundamental balance of “power” in society. The handful of professional activists shepherding Freedom Together’s vast endowment believe that the United States must be fundamentally reengineered along their own left-wing ideological lines, and they are deploying the foundation’s philanthropic resources in pursuit of this objective.

This is far afield from what ordinary Americans —the ones incentivizing its grantmaking—would consider “charitable.” The nature of Big Philanthropy’s influence is rightly coming under increasing scrutiny, and politicized grantmakers such as the Freedom Together Foundation are no small reason why.