Our Giving Fund: Defending Democracy in Q1/2024

In February 2024, in response to the CORRECTIV-Research “Geheimplan gegen Deutschland (Secret plan against Germany)” as well as numerous inquiries from donors, the cause area of Defending Democracy was launched.

The associated Giving Fund: Defending Democracy (Beta) was launched at the same time. By the end of the 1st quarter, we had received donations of around 165,000 euros from almost 150 donors.

While our other Giving Funds disburse funds on a semi-annual basis, we have chosen to disburse funds on a quarterly basis because of the unique urgency of the Giving Fund: Defending Democracy.

This makes it realistic, for example, that the funds forwarded in the second week of April will also have a short-term effect in strengthening democratic principles in the context of the first important elections of this year: The elections to the European Parliament and the local elections taking place simultaneously in many places in Germany at the beginning of June.

When distributing the funds, we decided to allocate one-third of the received funds (approximately 55,000 Euros per organization) to the recommendations presented in my blog post Donate effectively to defend our democracy. These are:

1. Independent, investigative journalism: CORRECTIV – Recherchen für die Gesellschaft gGmbH
2. Democratic shaping of progress: Demokratie-Stiftung (democracy foundation) campact
3. Democratic participation in the digital world: HateAid gGmbH

The funds received in the second quarter will be distributed around mid-July and thus in time to be able to work against extremism and for the strengthening of democracy as early as the state elections in fall 2024. We are planning to review and possibly expand the list of target organizations and will report on this in due course.

About the author

Stephan Schwahlen.

Senior Advisor Donor Advisory

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I have been advising major donors on their grant decisions since 2018, and since 2023 as part of the Effektiv Spenden team. I am also a co-founder of Power for Democracies gGmbH. Feel free to reach out if you have any thoughts on our recommendations or would like to donate a larger sum. We can suggest projects that can only be implemented with larger donations. I look forward to hearing from you via e-mail.