Tides Foundation

The Tides Foundation (Tides) is a left-of-center grantmaking organization and pass-through funder for other left-of-center nonprofits. The organization supports nonprofits through grants, fiscal sponsorship, donor-advised funds, and more. ¹ Tides was founded by Drummond Pike, a left-of-center political activist who has since retired from the organization, with the help of seed funding from Jane Lehman, heiress to the fortune generated by the Reynolds tobacco conglomerate and an ex-president of the left-of-center Arca Foundation. ^{2 3}

The Tides Foundation is controlled by the Tides Network, a separate 501(c)(3) nonprofit that acts as a coordinating entity for multiple nonprofits in the Tides Nexus, a catch-all for the numerous organizations operating under the “Tides” umbrella. ⁴

Tides has received millions of dollars from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and was labeled by the National Legal and Policy Center as “George Soros’ Favorite Money Handler” after it was reported that the Open Society Foundations had given at least $17.2 million to the Tides Foundation from 2009 through 2022. ^{5 6}

Background

Creation

The Tides Foundation was founded in 1976 by Drummond Pike, the son of a California investment banker.⁷Pike began his career in political activism in 1970 as associate director for the now-defunct Youth Project in Washington, D.C.⁸⁹ The Youth Project had spun out of the Center for Community Change and was set up to channel money from young wealthy donors to progressive groups fighting for social change.⁷

In 1979, he extended Tides’ operations to include fiscal sponsorship, effectively using Tides’ 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status as an umbrella to incubate new center-left activist nonprofits.¹⁰ Among its funders was Alan S. Davis, the son of the insurance mogul Leonard Davis, who later recruited Pike to run his Shalan Foundation. ⁷

Pike obtained seed funding for Tides from Jane Lehman, heiress to the Reynolds family tobacco fortune and the former president of the North Carolina-based Arca Foundation, a center-left grantmaker. ¹¹ Lehman remained chair of the organization’s board of directors until her death in 1988. ¹²

Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs)

Since its creation, donor-advised funds (DAFs) have formed the basis of the Tides Foundation’s grantmaking services. DAFs act as a kind of “charitable savings account,” enabling donors to gift tax-deductible funds to the Tides Foundation for the organization to invest and grow in individual accounts. Donors may then designate recipients to receive grants from the Tides Foundation with funds from their accounts. This has the added effect of effectively masking (or “washing”) the original donors, since grants from Tides do not reveal which donor directed the funds and the IRS does not require 501(c)(3) nonprofits such as Tides to disclose its donors ¹³

The Tides Foundation has been described as an organization that “washes” away the paper trail between its grants and the original donor.¹⁴ Tides Founder Drummond Pike stated, “Anonymity is very important to most of the people we work with.” ¹⁵

While DAFs are utilized by a large number of 501(c)(3) nonprofits, Tides specializes in directing grants to center-left activist groups, making it one of the largest pass-through funders to left-wing nonprofits.  The right-of-center Washington Examiner has characterized Tides as a “dark money” organization for this practice ¹⁶

Fiscal Sponsorship (Incubation)

In 1979, Tides founder Drummond Pike extended the Tides Foundation’s services to include fiscal sponsorship (or “incubation”), using its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status to shelter the creation of nascent 501(c)(3) activist nonprofits in exchange for management fees. In building out other nonprofits, the Tides entities offer financial services and help with human resources, payroll, risk management, and government compliance. Essentially, the Tides groups (or simply “Tides”) take care of most of the overhead so that the left-of-center nonprofits they help can focus most on their causes. ¹⁷ Tides’ integrated services partnership provides clients a “one-stop shop ” for “full-service grantmaking capabilities bundled with back-office administrative service,” essentially helping the client with every single step of the nonprofit process. ¹⁸ In 1996, the Tides Foundation established the Tides Center, a separate 501(c)(3) nonprofit, to assume its fiscal sponsorship services and form a firewall between its incubation and grantmaking activities. ¹⁹

Tides’ fiscally sponsored groups have been prominent in the anti-war movement, anti-free trade campaigns, gun control, abolition of the death penalty, abortion rights, and LGBT interests. ^{20 21}

Tides Initiatives

As of June 2025, the Tides Center had eight “Tides Initiatives.” These included the Healthy Democracy Fund, Just Health Fund, Womens Environmental Leadership Fund, Advancing Girls Fund, Frontline Justice Fund, Immigrants Belong Fund, Stronger Together Fund, and the Crisis Response Fund. Each fund supports left-of-center organizations to promote public advocacy, advance left-of-center policies, or generate activism. ¹

Tides is committed to the left-of-center principles of social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion. ²²

Other Services to the Left

The Tides Foundation has expanded to include a network of nonprofits in the decades since its creation. This network is collectively called the Tides Nexus. In 2016, the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit group which oversees online encyclopedia website Wikipedia and similarly-linked organizations ²³, created an endowment that would be held and managed by the Tides Foundation. ²⁴ Titled the Wikimedia Endowment, this collective action fund was created to raise over $100 million through donations within a 10-year period to help continued funding for Wikimedia-linked projects. ²⁵ However, it managed to surpass that goal in half the time, raising over $162 million by 2021. ^{25 26}

According to the Washington Free Beacon, in 2023 California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) raised roughly $350,000 from the Tides Foundation for the “Edible Schoolyard Project,” an initiative part of his school lunch program for the state of California. This was done through the state’s “‘behested payments’ system” which allows for public officials to raise money for select philanthropies or causes from their donors. Since 2015, Gov. Newsom has raised roughly $1.4 million from the Tides Foundation for various nonprofits and causes ²⁷ In addition, since 2020 Gov. Newsom raised over $11 million for the Tides Foundation, $10 million of which came from grantmaking organization Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies. ²⁷ In 2025, it was reported that from when he took office in 2019 to April of 2024, Newsom sent nearly $187 million in taxpayer funding to the Tides Center. California state agencies also awarded no-bid contracts to Tides Advocacy under Newsom’s tenure while another state department paid the Tides Center $3.4 million in part to conduct “public health planning for climate change impacts.” ²⁸

Controversies

Influencing Canadian Environmental Policies

The Tides Foundation has been implicated in a scheme of funneling millions of dollars into Canada from American donors to block joint U.S.-Canadian energy projects. During debate over the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline that would transport Canadian oil to U.S. refineries along the Gulf Coast, it was discovered that much of the Canadian anti-Keystone advocacy was being funded by American environmental donors. Vivian Krause, a blogger from British Columbia, estimated that from 2000 through 2012 American donors poured roughly $300 million into controversial Canadian environmental groups that engaged in domestic Canadian political disputes.  ²⁹

When her journalism uncovered the depth of U.S. donor involvement in Canada, the Canadian government withdrew an $8.3 million funding agreement with the Makeway Foundation, then titled Tides Canada Foundation, a Tides affiliate based in Canada which acted as a key conduit for U.S. donors to influence Canadian policies. ³⁰

Alar Apple Pesticide Scare

The Tides Foundation was influential in promoting the so-called Alar-on-Apples scare in 1989, a short-lived fear that the plant-growth regulator Alar was causing cancer in children who consumed apples treated with the pesticide. The conspiracy theory was later debunked by the American Council on Science and Health, which wrote in 1999 that Alar, which prevents the fruit from rotting prematurely, posed no danger to consumers. ³¹

The scare campaign was largely led by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and environmentalists such as actress Meryl Streep, resulting in major damages to the apple industry as parents and schools temporarily stopped buying apples. ³² The NRDC used the Tides Foundation as a go-between to pay the fees for Fenton Communications, a for-profit communications firm which helped the NRDC run a public relations campaign against Alar. ^{33 34}

In May 1989, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) acting administrator denied reports that Alar posed a health risk, announcing that “We believe that the NRDC report presents a misleading picture of the risk of pesticides in the diet.” ³¹

Lawsuit with Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation

In May 2024, the BLM Global Network Foundation (BLM GNF) filed a lawsuit against the Tides Foundation, accusing it of withholding at least $33 million in donations that it claims were earmarked for the group. According to the New York Post, the BLM Global Network Foundation alleged in the lawsuit that Tides “refused to honor its promises and continues to commandeer BLMGNF’s donations,” and that it had sent funds to other unaffiliated Black Lives Matter groups, including Black Lives Matter Grassroots. The BLM Global Network Foundation claimed that this money had been earmarked for it, and that Tides had no authority to give it to other Black Lives Matter groups. ^{35 36} In a statement, Tides said that the allegations were “completely false” and that the money was “never intended to be granted to large, well-funded national organizations like Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.” Tides said that the lawsuit “seeks to circumvent the intent of the Fund’s donors and deprive grassroots Black Lives Matter chapters [of] critical resources, for its own benefit.” ³⁵

According to the Washington Free Beacon, from between 2020 and 2022, a seven-member committee of BLM activists, which included BLM Grassroots co-director Melina Abdullah, reportedly convinced the Tides Foundation to move $8.7 million to BLM Grassroots during that period of time. According to internal Tides emails, the $8.7 million was donated through the group’s then-fiscal sponsor One Love Global, and intended to support local BLM chapters. However, One Love Global claims that it only received $2.2 million in all outside contributions between 2020 and 2022. One Love Global reported “deferred revenue” that ranged from $1.9 million in 2020 to $5.6 million in 2022. A nonprofit tax expert consulted by the Free Beacon said that it was “highly unusual” for a nonprofit to report deferred revenue, and explained that it typically occurs only in the rare situation where an organization receives a conditional grant. ³⁶

In March 2026, BLM Global Network Foundation voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit and formally retracted all allegations. In its dismissal statement, BLM GNF acknowledged that the Tides Foundation did not engage in wrongdoing related to the claims raised in the litigation. ³⁷

Funding

Financial Overview

According to tax filings, in 2023, the Tides Foundation reported over $350 million in revenue, over $711 million in expenses, and over $646 million in assets. ³⁸

In 2018, the Tides Foundation reported $419 in total revenues ($406 million of which came from grants), $304 million in total expenditures, and $361 million in net assets. It paid $291 million in grants to other organizations in 2018. ³⁹

In 2017, the Tides Foundation reported $298 in total revenues ($290 million of which came from grants), $253 million in total expenditures, and $257 million in net assets. It paid $236 million in grants to other organizations in 2017. ⁴⁰

Donors to the Tides Foundation

Many of the Tides Foundation’s largest donors are center-left grantmaking foundations. From 2022 to 2023, the Tides Foundation received $17.8 million from the Open Society Foundations. ⁵ The Tides Foundation also receives regular grants from a number of “commercial” donor-advised fund providers (nonprofits associated with for-profit investment companies), including Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program, Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, and Schwab Charitable Fund. Funds from these DAF providers originate with individual donors or foundations, though they can rarely be traced from the DAF provider to the ultimate grant recipient. Notable grantors between 1998 and 2018 include:

• Annie E. Casey Foundation: $946,500
• Arca Foundation: $542,000
• Bauman Family Foundation: $2,773,787
• California Endowment: $4,265,828
• Carnegie Corporation of New York: $823,486
• David and Lucile Packard Foundation: $492,000
• Ford Foundation: $26,410,759
• George Soros’ Foundation to Promote Open Society: $10,259,289
• George Soros’ Open Society Foundations: $12,130,241
• Gill Foundation: $3,292,700
• John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation: $340,986
• Nick and Leslie Hanauer Foundation: $640,384
• Oak Foundation USA: $392,754
• Omidyar Network Fund: $818,000
• Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: $2,236,350
• Rockefeller Brothers Fund: $5,373,108
• Rockefeller Family Fund: $460,914
• Rockefeller Foundation: $1,661,055
• Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors: $3,525,000
• W.K. Kellogg Foundation: $3,131,201
• Wallace Global Fund II: $8,621,001
• William and Flora Hewlett Foundation: $8,317,690

The following are known grants (primarily from foundations) to the Tides Foundation between 1998 and 2018: ⁴¹