2024 Reflections | Looking Ahead to 2025

Thursday, December 19, 2024

As we approach 2025, we at GCIR know that working together will be our greatest asset as we face impending challenges for immigrants and the immigrant justice movement. As we continue to mobilize funders into action, philanthropy must utilize its enormous power and privilege to stand with immigrant and refugee communities, one of the primary targets of the incoming administration. 

In 2017, funders responded to the relentless attacks on immigrants by ramping up investments and converting existing project support grants to flexible, general support dollars, a trend that accelerated after the advent of the COVID pandemic in 2020. This time around, philanthropy must again act boldly. There is much to be done to prepare for and defend against assaults on marginalized communities. And – as we know – an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us.

Immigrant justice movement groups have been planning over the course of the past year, if not longer, for all possible electoral outcomes and their potential impacts on our communities. In an effort to support the movement and uplift the strategies being deployed by frontline groups, GCIR hosted a series of scenario planning webinars this past summer. To help fortify pro-democracy work in the face of a heightened threat of authoritarianism, we organized sessions on redefining democracy at our biennial national convening in Detroit the week before the election. 

Over the past months, the GCIR team has been putting our post-election plans into action, issuing a day-after response statement, hosting “The 2024 Election and the Path Ahead,” joining movement-led post-election programs, and meeting with movement partners to listen to their analyses, preparations, and needs. Many common themes have emerged from these conversations, including the importance of centering the safety, security, and well-being of the movement and migrant populations. In the coming weeks, GCIR will share funder recommendations in preparation for January 2025 and beyond. 

In early 2025, GCIR will continue to coordinate and strategize through our new communities of practice with funders who are interested in transnational migration, the intersection of economic justice and immigrant justice, and fostering immigrant belonging in rural communities. 

In the first quarter of the new year, we will convene funders in Texas, Michigan, and California to strengthen state and local networks, and we will bring together the grantees of our State and Local Democracy Project, which invests in democracy-focused organizations in Texas, Michigan, Louisiana, and Nevada.

This February, GCIR will bring its third delegation of funders to Foundations on the Hill (FOTH) in DC, bringing the most urgent migration issues to those in power and amplifying the policy priorities of the immigrant justice movement. We are also exploring how we can further strengthen public-private partnerships, especially at the state and local levels.  

Immigrant and refugee populations are resilient, having transitioned to life in the United States to start anew, raise their families, and contribute to their local communities. Movement organizations stand ready to protect and defend them, and GCIR will be standing by to amplify the needs of movement groups to advance those protections. Philanthropy can join us by standing unflinchingly in support of the frontline work safeguarding our immigrant communities and – by extension – the multiracial democracy we strive to be.