Attendees of a Ku.éex' (Tlingit ceremony) held in Angoon in October 2024, during which the U.S. Navy issued a formal apology for the bombardment of the Angoon community in 1882. Photo: Brian Adams for RWJF.
Throughout this country’s 250-year history, neighbors, teachers, parents, and countless others have shown us how to answer calls to action when our systems fail us. They fought and died working toward making the values of opportunity, justice, and fairness a reality for everyone. They answered the call with selfless valor and moral integrity—defending fundamental rights, expanding economic opportunity, and toppling barriers to health in the face of persistent state-sponsored racism and terror. Their examples point the way for us today.
Movements for justice almost always incur a violent backlash. In the first Reconstruction after the Civil War, racist politicians and citizens responded to the political and economic progress of formerly enslaved Black Americans with deadly intimidation and oppressive policies. During a second Reconstruction—the Civil Rights movement—community activists and leaders overcame aggressive resistance with extraordinary courage and organized action. And when millions mobilized around the country to demand a national reckoning with the deadly legacy of structural racism during the COVID pandemic, marking the first steps toward a third Reconstruction period, the backlash arrived in today’s retrenchment on core American values of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
America was born from the promise that power resides in the people. But we remain far from realizing that noble ideal. And while our democracy has never worked for everyone, its destruction is nevertheless a grave threat—because Americans’ health is deeply tied to the health of our democracy. Without the people having the power to shape policies and decisions that affect their lives and wellbeing, we cannot build a future with affordable healthcare for every family in America; clean air and water in every community; and institutions that follow evidence and science rather than partisan ideology. The Constitution gives individuals the power to vote and requires our federal government to serve all in America. If it only serves some, communities will be sicker and poorer, and we will never reach a day when health is no longer a privilege, but a right.
A call for justice is ringing out across this nation from every neighborhood and community. A call for fairness. A call for those with power, privilege, and resources to put them on the line for the betterment of everyone. Who will answer?
As the nation’s leading health philanthropy during a time of calculated attacks against our democracy, our communities, and our health—we hear the call. And we will answer.
Members of Sac Kids First meet at Youth Forward. Sac Kids First is a grassroots coalition with 36 member organizations to help increase the wellbeing of children and youth in the Sacramento region. Photo: Gabriela Hasbun for RWJF.
In recent years, the Juneteenth holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States has been widely observed. Last year, with the administration elevating attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion, many local governments, corporations, and universities pretended the day never existed. They ignored the call.
But not everyone was silent. An RWJF grantee, the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice (NJISJ), commemorated Juneteenth with a community celebration whose joy and energy were stronger than any attempts to provoke fear and uncertainty. The Institute answered the call for moral courage through its transformational report For Such A Time As This: The Nowness of Reparations for Black People in New Jersey, detailing New Jersey’s often-ignored ties to slavery, and calling for reparations as an essential remedy to enduring harms. The message was clear: we have to continue working for better possibilities—for everyone’s children and grandchildren. As NJISJ leader and RWJF Trustee Ryan Haygood and I co-wrote in a piece published on Independence Day: “This is not the time for small imaginations.”
RWJF President and CEO Richard Besser speaks on a panel with Amber Randolph, RWJF associate vice president, and Ryan Haygood, NJISJ president and CEO and RWJF Trustee, at the New Jersey Reparations Council convening.
"This is not the time for small imaginations."
—Richard Besser, RWJF President and CEO, and Ryan Haygood, NJISJ President and CEO and RWJF Trustee
That inspiring and fortifying moment was one of many highlights during the past year, when, time and time again, RWJF grantees refused to accept the world as it was and is. They are not just dreaming of a better America for everyone—they are acting on those dreams. Across the country, day by day, action by action, our grantees are answering the call.
When the administration broke the law, our grantees answered the call by challenging its lawlessness in court. Their courage made a difference. In its first year, the administration lost more than 70 percent of those court challenges—many of them through the work of our grantees. During the 2025 government shutdown, Democracy Forward Foundation sued to maintain SNAP benefits, ensuring that 42 million people—including families, seniors, and veterans—weren’t forced to go hungry. An RWJF grantee, the National Immigration Law Center, stopped the deportation of hundreds of unaccompanied Guatemalan children over Labor Day weekend. And when the National Institutes of Health revoked so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion grants, the ACLU Foundation filed a lawsuit that helped restore funding for more than 100 projects.
Unfortunately, not all research funding was restored through the courts; so RWJF’s Evidence for Action program answered the call by issuing 44 rapid response grants to help keep some of the important projects moving forward. One of those grants is preparing a new generation of citizen scientists by training youth to gather health data in Paterson, New Jersey. “It’s not just me that’s benefitting from this,” said project leader Dr. Ijeoma Opara. “It’s the teenagers that we’re supporting that are going to be working in my lab, it’s their parents, who are benefitting from raising engaged and curious teens, it’s the community that’s able to see this work move forward and directly impact their cities.”
When the administration began purging public health data from government websites, our grantees answered the call. They took swift action, with the support of emergency grants from RWJF, to monitor and track data erasures and coordinate responses. Local groups like the Louisiana Public Health Institute worked quickly with public health organizations to preserve data and help local organizations identify alternate data sources to continue serving their communities.
Our grantees have also answered the call to stand against the administration’s abuses of society’s most vulnerable. With immigrants living under looming threats of family separation, deportation, and discrimination, RWJF grantee, the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota, formed an Immigrant Rapid Response fund to provide resources for daily needs. Their work has ensured that families could continue to pay rent, feed their families, find reliable transportation, and get the healthcare they need.
When the administration’s rollbacks and attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion closed off pathways to opportunity for women of color, our grantees answered the call. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, an RWJF grantee, worked with Chicago Women in Trades to challenge the Trump administration’s anti-equity executive orders and secured a win that protected continued funding to a diverse group of women as they enter the skilled trades.
The administration’s racist attempts to dehumanize people of color, undermine institutions, propagate misinformation, and much more, have not been able to obscure the power and resilience in American communities. With every cruel, hostile, and demeaning act, people continue to rise up, pull together, and answer the call to protect and care for one another.
Expanding the Call
RWJF grantees have always faced risks. A glaring recent example is the politically motivated arrest and trial of Nick Tilsen, founder and CEO of NDN Collective, which works to build power for Indigenous communities. More than a year after peacefully observing a law enforcement action involving a relative, police charged Tilsen with offenses that have a potential maximum sentence of 26 years in prison. The weaponization of local law enforcement in Tilsen’s case, or the federal government in many other instances, is a common tactic to silence people working against injustice.
But Tilsen’s community answered the call. NDN Collective gained the support of 22,000 community members and more than 500 organizational leaders to support Tilsen and his leadership. In the end, the charges were dropped. Tilsen said, "My freedom wasn’t granted by a judge, a jury, or the settler colonial court system. My freedom was won by the people, the movement, and the ancestors."
RWJF is committed to speaking out against these abuses and threats, understanding that we are in a privileged position where we face far fewer risks than our grantees. With that privilege comes a responsibility to use our voice to speak truth to power everywhere we can.
We were among the first to denounce lies enshrined in early executive orders targeting diversity, equity and inclusion—fundamental American values that we continue to support. We did not hesitate to sound the alarm about Secretary Kennedy’s appointment to lead HHS and have continued to challenge his efforts to cause confusion and chaos instead of shaping a public health system that could better serve all in America.
Wherever we can, we continue to call on more of our philanthropic peers to speak out and to match the courage of their grantees by refusing to stay silent. Philanthropy can provide leadership by channeling our voices into a chorus and help pave the way for other sectors as well. As our grantees answer the call on the frontlines, it is on us to expand the call to help shoulder the heaviest burdens of this moment.
Answering the call for each other
Our past lives in our systems and the decisions we make today. RWJF is undergoing a Truth, Repair, and Transformation process to confront our role in both creating and upholding harmful systems in our country. We are taking a hard look at whose interests we have prioritized, who benefited from our work, and who has been harmed. And we are asking: When were we willing to speak up, and when did we remain silent? Learning how those patterns of decisions continue to affect our work today is essential for moving forward in a better direction. This process is ongoing, and we have more work to do, but we’re committed to transforming how we work so we can hold ourselves accountable to the communities—particularly those that were historically excluded—with the greatest barriers to health. We continue to evaluate how we engage with grantees, and how we can make our grantmaking processes less cumbersome so we can be better partners to the communities we serve.
This administration’s reign of division, domination, and violence cannot prevail if we continue to come together in community with solidarity. Sulma Arias, executive director of People’s Action Institute, an RWJF grantee, noted that Minneapolis organizers ushered in community power-building at the height of the federal occupation. There was a consistent invitation for neighbors to get to know one another. “I think the most radical thing we are learning in this moment,” she said, “is that no matter how dark it seems, community is hope.”
I feel that hope. We are in a “planting time,” as Sherrilyn Ifill, founding director of Howard University’s 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy, calls it. We are sowing seeds for justice that we may not get to see in our lifetimes. This act of optimism and faith is work. Ifill says, “Planting is work. That work must be aimed at building ideas, theories, paradigms, institutions, skills, practices, and alliances that we can seed now for a future harvest—a fulsome and lush democracy that will reflect the very best of us.”
The last 250 years of history show us, again and again, how powerful we can be when we come together to work for a better future. And each day, our grantees reconfirm that fact as they work to transform communities into places of opportunity and joy. They have not backed down in the face of racism, discrimination, and systems designed to leave them behind. They are not backing down now. They have answered the call. They continue to answer the call. RWJF remains committed to answering the call with them.
With gratitude,
Richard Besser, MD
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About the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
RWJF is a leading national philanthropy dedicated to taking bold leaps to transform health in our lifetime. Through funding, convening, advocacy, and evidence-building, we work side-by-side with communities, practitioners, and institutions to get to health equity faster and pave the way together to a future where health is no longer a privilege, but a right.