Struggle for justice receives financial boost

Social justice organisations and movements, such as Equal Education, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and Black Sash, are constantly battling to raise funds. This was acutely brought to public attention by the near closure of the TAC last year.

These and other organisations have feared a further shortage of funds because one of the largest donors to civil society, Atlantic Philanthropies, has closed its local office and is winding down its South African philanthropic work. It has been in the country since 1995. The TAC received tens of millions of rands from Atlantic over the last decade and a half.

The announcement of the new fund will help allay the sector’s concerns. The fund consists of $10 million each from Atlantic and Open Society Foundation (OSF), with the remainder from the Ford Foundation.

Justice Yvonne Mokgoro told GroundUp that the Constitution protects socio-economic rights. “Now is the time to realise its promises. This is an opportunity to find new ways to make the protection of our rights a reality.” Mokgoro, who served as a Constitutional Court judge from 1994 to 2009, will chair a selection panel for the new fund. She will be joined by Aubrey Matshiqi from the Wits Business School and Yasmin Sooka, who heads the Foundation for Human Rights and is a former TRC commissioner.

The logistics of the fund are being worked out, but guidelines for applying for it are expected in the next three months. The fund is intended to run for ten years and it will consist of three rounds of proposals over that period. The first grants will be decided in the third quarter of 2015 and the first payments will be made in early 2016. The first round grantees will only be eligible if they currently receive grants from at least two of the three donors. However, new grantees can apply from the second round.

Christopher Oechsli, the President and CEO of Atlantic, confirmed that the fund has been “shaped” in light of his organisation’s exit from the country, as well as considering “what’s changed since 1994”, and the 20 year anniversary of South Africa’s Constitution.

A frequent complaint by social justice movements is that the administrative burden placed upon them by donors is immense, but both Chris Stone, President of OSF, and Achmat Dangor, the South African representative of the Ford Foundation, emphasised that this fund would be administratively light on recipients. Dangor added that a minimal level of accountability would be expected of grantees.

OSF’s South African director, Fatima Hassan, assured GroundUp that the fund consists of new money and would not affect the usual contributions to South African civil society made by OSF and Ford. “This is an exciting new investment,” she added.

Stone said that he hoped the initiative would “inspire other donors to invest in social justice.”

In this regard, another fund, the Social Justice Initiative, has also been established recently, in part to fill the gap left by Atlantic. Its board is chaired by respected human rights lawyer Geoff Budlender. It is trying to raise substantial funds from wealthy South Africans, which will then be donated to civil society organisations.