Big Philanthropy’s Most Radical Scholars

Last month, the Marguerite Casey Foundation announced the 2024 winners of its annual Freedom Scholar award, highlighting the work of some of the country’s most prominent leftist activist-academics. As in years past, the recipients illustrate the ideological priorities driving what is perhaps Big Philanthropy’s most radical foundation.

Freedom Scholars

The Marguerite Casey Foundation, which had net assets of $800 million in 2022, awards the Freedom Scholar prize to what it calls “exceptional scholar-activists committed to advancing justice and equity.” Winners are said to work in “critical” and “often underfunded” fields such as “feminist prison abolition, global urbanism, alternatives to movement capture, Indigenous erasure and militarized policing.” In practice, a professional emphasis on issues of race or ethnicity appears to be the overriding award criteria. On the foundation’s website, the profiles for every single Freedom Scholar include a reference to race or ethnicity.

Each Freedom Scholar receives a one-time unrestricted $250,000 lump sum grant, which is intended “to support and amplify the work of individuals dedicated to addressing critical social justice issues.” Since 2020, the Marguerite Casey Foundation has given out 38 awards for a total of $9.5 million—a substantial sum that the foundation says has had a “profound impact” on individual recipients. Just four awards were presented in 2024, while the inaugural class in 2020 had 12.

2024 Award Winners

The following individuals received a Freedom Scholar award from the Marguerite Casey Foundation in 2024:

• Natalie Diaz is a professor in the English department at Arizona State University. She directs the department’s Center for Imagination in the Borderlands, which describes itself as an “indigenous space” that seeks to “dismantle the British and European lenses which have excluded so many of our Indigenous and diasporic experiences of language and story.” Diaz’s book Postcolonial Love Poem, which “unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope,” won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She is also a senior fellow at the New School’s Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy, whose founding director is fellow Freedom Scholar award winner Darrick Hamilton.
• Daniel Martinez HoSang is a professor of American studies at Yale University. One of his forthcoming projects is entitled “The Politics of the Multiracial Right,” which aims to “chart the complex and contradictory factors that are drawing growing numbers of people of color into conservative formations and politics.” HoSang has also worked with Kimberlé Crenshaw—a prominent proponent of critical race theory who is credited with having coined the term “intersectionality”—and he previously served on the board of the African American Policy Forum, co-founded and led by Crenshaw. He is also a race and democracy fellow at the left-of-center Roosevelt Institute, and a member of the steering committee at the Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning Collective, which works to advance “anti-racist pedagogy, curriculum and practice within K–12 public schools in Connecticut.”
• Nadine Naber is a professor of gender and women’s studies and global Asian studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, which itself received $1.5 million from the Marguerite Casey Foundation in 2022. Naber is co-founder and research director of Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity (MAMAS), a board member at the Arab American Action Network, an editorial board member of the Journal of Palestine Studies, an advisor to the Feminist Peace Initiative, and a member of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, among other affiliations. She is also founded a company called Liberate Your Research, which offers academic workshops for “transforming systemic violence into writing prosperity, joy, and revolution.”
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  The quote provided for Naber’s Freedom Scholar profile is worth reproducing in full for its remarkable display of Everything Leftism:

My role is to co-produce grounded analyses with activist comrades to expand the possibilities for coalition building and decolonial abolition. From Turtle Island to Palestine, I believe Indigenous studies approaches can especially disrupt the nationalist myths that rising fascist movements have been depending upon to mobilize their base.

• Sabeel Rahman is a professor at Cornell Law School, and—at least from the perspective of those who study the links between funders, nonprofits, and politics—perhaps the most notable of this year’s awardees. Rahman served in the Biden Administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2021 to 2023, including as associate administrator. Before that, he was president of the left-wing activist think tank Demos. During his tenure, the Democracy Alliance recommended Demos for funding, and Rahman participated in at least two of the influential donor collaborative’s secretive conferences. He is on the board of directors of the Roosevelt Institute and was formerly an advisor to the Marguerite Casey Foundation’s Public Dollars for Public Good grant program, which funds groups angling for socialism.

Philanthropic Activism

Those selected to receive a Freedom Scholar award sketch the ideological contours of what the Marguerite Casey Foundation envisions when it declares its desire to “shift the balance of power toward communities historically excluded from shaping societal structures,” through supporting the efforts of those who are “contesting for state power.” The foundation considers the Freedom Scholar program to be key to such efforts, and $9.5 million over five years is certainly a substantial investment.

The Marguerite Casey Foundation is transparent about its efforts to “change the rules of philanthropy.” It stands out even among its peers for how thoroughly it has embraced left-wing sociopolitical activism as its core grantmaking purpose—necessarily at the expense of funding the sorts of causes most Americans would likely think of when they hear the words “philanthropy” or “charity.” This is a deeply regrettable state of affairs, and it will likely further erode public goodwill toward a sector that is supposed to be doing good for people.

For more information about the Marguerite Casey Foundation, including the Freedom Scholars program, see the Capital Research Center’s four-part series here.