Closing the 2020-2025 Blueprint

A Five-Year Investment in Freedom, Justice, and Movement Power

From 2020–2025, Groundswell’s Blueprint unfolded during one of the most turbulent periods in recent U.S. history—years marked by a global pandemic, mass unemployment, the 2020 uprisings for Black lives, escalating attacks on abortion and trans rights, the intensifying climate crisis, the 2020 and 2024 presidential election and its aftermath, and pointed assaults on voting rights.

The uprisings sparked a historic surge in donations to racial, reproductive, and gender justice movements, only to be followed a few years later by a steep contraction in philanthropic support as national attention shifted and political polarization deepened.

These forces reshaped daily life while sharpening the stakes for bodily autonomy, democracy, and community survival. It was in this volatile landscape that Groundswell and our grantee partners responded with clarity, creativity, and resolve—mobilizing resources at scale to meet immediate needs while fortifying long-term movement infrastructure.

During this same period, the Blueprint strengthened the nation’s most urgent fights for reproductive justice, bodily autonomy, climate survival, economic justice, and multiracial democracy.

Across our c3 and c4 entities, Groundswell moved more than $100 million to grassroots organizations addressing the issues that determine whether people can live free, healthy, and self-determined lives.

Throughout these past five years, we have partnered with and elevated grassroots movements while holding philanthropy accountable to prioritize sustainability for those on the frontlines. This included advancing abortion access, reducing maternal health disparities, expanding community-rooted birth work, confronting climate and environmental harms, supporting worker justice campaigns, protecting voting rights, and building durable civic participation – while also providing grantees the space to strategize and execute without putting daily operations at risk.

The Blueprint invested deeply in movement infrastructure by rebuilding organizational systems, strengthening data and digital capacity, supporting leadership transitions, resourcing healing justice, and creating stronger c4 vehicles for long-term democratic participation.

These investments enabled grantee partners to secure significant policy wins, mobilize hundreds of thousands of voters around issue-based campaigns, and grow the power required to defend and expand freedom for years to come.

The Blueprint was never meant to be an endpoint. It was a commitment to ensuring that movements had what they needed not only to survive crisis, but to build power beyond it. As we close this chapter, the work ahead remains urgent. Attacks on bodily autonomy, civic engagement, and community safety are accelerating, even as the resources available to frontline organizers continue to shrink.

Groundswell’s role is to stand with movements for the long haul—moving resources where they are most needed, strengthening the infrastructure that makes organizing sustainable, and ensuring that those closest to the harm have the capacity to lead what comes next.