Acton Family Giving

History

Acton Family Giving was founded in 2014 by billionaire philanthropists Brian and Tegan Acton. ¹

Brian Acton is a computer scientist who previously worked for Yahoo! before co-founding the messaging application WhatsApp with Jan Koun. ² In 2014, Facebook (now Meta) purchased WhatsApp for $22 billion. ²

In addition to Acton Family Giving, Brian and Tegan Acton have founded two additional grant making organizations, Sunlight Giving and Solidarity Giving. ²

Sunlight Giving focuses on grant making in California’s Bay Area, while Solidarity Giving focuses on social issues, including support for abortion, organizations that support race-based preferences, organizations that seek to weaken voting integrity laws, and organizations that seek to expand asylum-based immigration to the United States. ¹

All three organizations were created with assistance from the left-of-center Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF), a grantmaking foundation, after the Actons made a $290 million contribution to SVCF. ³

In addition to having founded three grantmaking organizations, Brian Acton is the founder of the Signal Foundation, a nonprofit organization that seeks to advance technologies that promote free expression and secure global communication. ²

Grant Making

In 2022, Acton Family Giving contributed to organizations that support social policies based on racial preferences, activism incubation, organizations that support abortion, animal liberation organizations, environmentalist organizations, and educational/cultural organizations. ⁴

Race Focused and Activism Incubation Grants

In 2022, Acton Family Giving contributed to organizations that seek to advance social policies along racial lines and organizations that incubate left-of-center activism. This included contributions to Youth Speaks, a “youth development program” that seeks to train young individuals to produce various forms of media focused on issues such as environmentalism, support for censoring speech on the Internet, and support for racial preferences in social programs. ⁵

In 2022, Acton Family Giving contributed to ITVS ($500,000), POLIS Project ($250,000), Youth Speaks ($125,000), Voice of Witness ($125,000), StoryCorps ($500,000), Capital Public Radio ($50,000), City Lore ($75,000), Center for Cultural Power ($125,000), Define America ($75,000), Games For Change ($100,000), Houses on the Moon ($25,000), Latino Public Broadcasting ($175,000), Magnum Foundation ($75,000), PEN America ($125,000), American Documentary ($75,000), Visionmaker Media ($100,000), Center for Asian American Media ($100,000), Black Public Media ($100,000), Pacific Islanders in Communications ($100,000), Marshall Project ($50,000), We Need Diverse Books ($195,000), Equal Justice Initiative ($50,000), Living Room Conversations ($25,000), Facing History and Ourselves ($25,000), Narrative 4 ($50,000), Economic Hardship Reporting Project ($25,000), and the San Francisco Foundation ($10,000). ⁴

Animal Liberation and Environmentalist Grants

In 2022, Acton Family Giving contributed to a number of left-of-center animal liberation and environmentalist organizations, including the World Wildlife Fund, which has been accused of supporting park rangers that commit human rights abuses in Central Africa and South Asia ⁶ as well as organizations that seek to advance left-of-center positions in rural America such as the Center for Rural Strategies. ⁷

Acton Family Giving contributed to World Wildlife Fund ($100,000), RedRover ($100,000), The Jane Goodall Institute ($100,000), Chimp Haven ($100,000), WildAid ($100,000), United States Friends of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust ($75,000), Urban Bush Women ($50,000), Institute for Human-Animal Connection ($50,000), Center for Rural Strategies ($50,000), The Redford Center ($50,000), Humane Society of Silicon Valley ($25,000), Big Life ($50,000), Snow Leopard Trust ($50,000), Farm Sanctuary ($45,000), Mongabay ($45,000), HEART (Humane Education Advocates Reaching Teachers) ($40,000), Whale and Dolphin Conservation ($25,000), and  Wildmind ($25,000). ⁴

LGBT and Abortion Grants

In 2022 Acton Family Giving contributed to two LGBT organizations, Collaborative for Gender + Reproductive Equity ($500,000) and History UnErased ($50,000). ⁴

Education

In 2022, Acton Family Giving contributed to museums, universities, and educational organizations. While many of these organizations do scientific research or provide grants for the arts and writing, some of the organizations on the list have been noted to have a left-leaning bias, including the Wikimedia Foundation ⁸ and American Library Association. ⁹

Acton Family Giving contributed to Sundance Institute ($500,000), Monterey Bay Aquarium ($250,000), American Library Association ($200,000), Fred Rogers Productions ($200,000), Tech4Dev ($200,000), The Moth ($150,000), 826 National ($100,000), Smithsonian Institution ($100,000), International Storytelling Center ($75,000), Greater Good Science Center ($75,000), Tenement Museum ($50,000), National Civil Rights Museum ($50,000), Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center ($50,000), Book Trust ($50,000), Center for the Science of Moral Understanding ($50,000), Wikimedia Foundation ($50,000), Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory ($50,000), Inevitable Foundation ($35,000), Double Shift Podcast ($25,000), The War Horse ($25,000), and Stanford University ($25,000). ⁴

Freedom of Information

In 2022, the Acton Family contributed to organizations that seek to advance freedom of communication and privacy in the digital sphere, including Freedom of the Press Foundation ($50,000), Internet Archive ($100,000), Mozilla Foundation ($50,000), Let’s Encrypt ($300,000), OpenStreetMap US ($5,000), and the Scratch Foundation ($5,000).

Leadership

Brian and Tegan Acton manage Acton Family Giving. ¹⁰ While the Acton family determines which entities the organization contributes to, the day to day handling of the assets and distribution of contributions is managed by Fidelity Charitable. ¹⁰

Finances

Acton Family Giving, as a donor-advised fund, is not required to provide independent financial disclosures. The organization claims that it holds $397 million under management and strives to disburse 5 percent of all its assets annually. ¹¹

In addition to lower levels of financial transparency, DAFs have been criticized for not requiring annual distributions of funds, allowing the contributor to take an immediate tax deduction with no requirement for the allocated funds to be spent in the same year. ¹²

The Acton family has stated that using a DAF provides them with “flexibility in our work,” ¹¹ and is less expensive than managing a grantmaking foundation. ¹¹