Edward W. Hazen Foundation Announces Plans to Spend Down
The Edward W. Hazen Foundation in New York City has announced that it plans to spend down its assets over the next five years in support of education and youth organizing, with a focus on racial justice.
Established in 1925, the foundation was an early supporter of the emerging field of youth organizing and in the 1990s and early 2000s began to provide support for groups that were adopting the tools of organizing and applying them to education and other issues on which young people were taking a leadership role. In 2009, the foundation articulated a shift in its mission to focus more explicitly on racial justice and created a four-year funding initiative to help build the capacity of grantees. With the United States in the midst of "a 'movement moment' in which...issues central to structural racism — discriminatory policing, mass incarceration, punitive school discipline, immigrant detention and deportation, [and the] privatization of education and other public systems — have been brought into the national consciousness," the foundation states in its announcement, "Hazen believes that our fundamental support of organizing for racial justice is needed now, perhaps more than ever."
To that end, the foundation plans to support the development of a new generation of young leaders with the skills and capacity to transform their communities and control the conditions of their lives; support grassroots organizations and help them effect change now, sustain their work over time, and continue to innovate, grow, and build power into the future; and assist in the development of a more robust ecosystem of formal and informal organizations that seek to expand networks focused on advancing racial justice. While the foundation will focus on grassroots youth organizing across a range of issues, it will continue its longstanding support for organizing by students, parents, and community-based groups...