Levi Strauss Foundation Has Focused on Racial Justice for a Decade

Many corporations and foundations have started new lines of grant making recently in response to the racial-justice movement. For the Levi Strauss Foundation, social justice has been a core area of focus for a decade.

The foundation launched its Pioneers in Justice program in 2010 with investments in five San Francisco Bay area social-justice nonprofits that were transitioning to a younger generation of leaders. With five-year funding commitments, the foundation helped the organizations boost their capacity to use social media and other new technologies, experiment with new forms of collaboration, and strengthen the public voices of the leaders of those organizations.

Five years later, the foundation convened a second class of Pioneers working on issues like mass incarceration, worker rights, and immigrant voting rights. It has given a total of $1 million per year through the Pioneers program, says Daniel Lee, executive director of the foundation. For the current year, it decided to double that amount to $2 million because of the challenges of the pandemic coupled with opportunities coming out of the country’s reckoning with racism and police violence.

“This has been a year of breakneck adaptation,” says Lee.

The goal of the multiyear commitment is to give the organizations a reliable source of funding over an extended period, Lee says. “Many of these organizations have been systematically starved for decades,” he says. “This is a moment that demands sustained investment in movements.”

Kris Hayashi, executive director of the Transgender Law Center and one of the current “Pioneers,” says the longtime support for the transgender community from an iconic brand like Levi Strauss has been important in ways that go beyond cash. It’s also helped boost public support for the trans community.

But money is important, too, he says. “Trans organizations and movements for a very long time — and it continues today — have been drastically underresourced.”