Peace funding advocate urges more giving for Ukraine, other conflicts

About $400 million — or barely 1% — of philanthropic funding worldwide goes toward supporting peace and ending conflict, according to Alexandra Toma, the executive director of the Peace and Security Funders Group, as she urged donors to give much more.

That money is aimed at “preventing atrocities, preventing nuclear war, preventing war in general, peace building,” she said Wednesday during a Skoll World Forum session on the response to the crisis in Ukraine amid the Russian invasion.

But it isn’t enough to meet the needs in Ukraine or places such as Afghanistan, Somalia, and Myanmar, according to Toma, who said that more philanthropic dollars should be flowing to conflict-torn countries around the world to support democracy and maintain peace.

PSFG, a network of foundations and individual philanthropists, focuses on those issues. Its membership includes the Skoll Foundation, Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, among other large foundations.

Toma said she wants philanthropists to at least double the amount of funding they dedicate to issues such as addressing the root causes of conflict, including inequity.

One way to help accomplish that would be if philanthropic funders stopped limiting themselves to specific areas, such as girls’ education or climate change, and instead looked to a broader array of causes, she said.

Toma, whose 99-year-old grandmother is from Ukraine, recently wrote an op-ed for The Chronicle of Philanthropy that appealed to funders to provide more humanitarian assistance in Ukraine. Specifically, she called for more rapid response funding, support for independent journalism, and “investment in peace and security broadly.”

During Wednesday’s session, she urged philanthropists to seek out opportunities to support the work of foundations “that are already on the ground” in Ukraine. Urgent Action Fund for Women’s Human Rights, for example, has been providing rapid response grants to organizations supporting women in the country, as well as members of its LGBTQ and intersex community. Urgent Action Fund is a PSFG member.

Toma said funders can also give to donor pools like the Ukraine Democracy Fund, which was launched by the Open Society Foundations last month. OSF is a PSFG member as well.

Another way to increase philanthropic funding for global peace and security efforts would be for U.S.-based foundations to spend more than the 5% that they are legally required to pay out of their endowments annually, she said.

“Fund a little bit more. Give a little bit more — a little bit more than 5%, 10% maybe. Double the funding,” Toma said.

Heather Grady, a vice president at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, responded to that idea.

“This conversation begs the question of why foundations need to preserve their endowments for perpetuity in the face of clear and present dangers,” she said during the virtual session.

Six years ago, Grady started working with “time-limited foundations,” which have sunset provisions requiring that their endowments be fully spent by a deadline, she told Devex by email afterward. While she initially thought that time limits were “a niche, not terribly helpful idea,” Grady said she now sees the benefit of funders spending down while they are alive, especially in the context of “sudden crises and slow-onset existential threats.”

Currently, nearly $670 million in grants and over $650 million in philanthropic pledges have been announced in response to the invasion of Ukraine, according to data provided by Candid, a philanthropy research group.