Rini Chakraborty

Before entering philanthropy, Chakraborty spent more than two decades in other left-wing advocacy roles, primarily in California, with the California Immigrant Welfare Collaborative, the ACLU of Southern California, the anti-sweatshop group Sweatshop Watch, and Amnesty International USA, where she was Western regional director. ³

Background

Chakraborty is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. Early in her career, she worked as a policy associate for the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights and as ballot initiatives coordinator for the ACLU of Northern California. She was later the principal legislative advocate and director of the California Immigrant Welfare Collaborative, then a project of the National Immigration Law Center, where she led campaigns that restored state health and welfare benefits for immigrants and helped pass AB 540, a 2001 California law granting in-state college tuition rates to students regardless of immigration status, including illegal immigrants. ^{1 2}

Chakraborty later worked as a senior policy analyst at the ACLU of Southern California, where she opposed federal counterterrorism policies adopted after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. She was subsequently executive director of Sweatshop Watch, a labor-aligned advocacy group, where she promoted the enforcement of “sweat-free” procurement policies by cities and states. ^{4 2}

Prior to joining the Four Freedoms Fund, Chakraborty was Western regional director for Amnesty International USA, leading the organization’s largest region and directing campaigns for death penalty abolition, migrant rights, and criminal justice policy changes. She has also stated on her LinkedIn page that she worked as a consultant for groups including Asian Americans Advancing Justice, California Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus Institute, California Forward, California Immigrant Policy Center, Ford Foundation, Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees, and Mobilize the Immigrant Vote. ²

Four Freedoms Fund Activities

The Four Freedoms Fund is housed at NEO Philanthropy, a left-of-center pass-through funder, and was created in 2003 by five foundations: the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. ⁵ Later Fund donors have included the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the JPB Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, and the Heising-Simons Foundation. ^{6 7}

After joining FFF in 2012, Chakraborty launched a national grantmaking initiative focused on reducing immigration enforcement, detention, and deportation, and developed the Fund’s Texas Fund, Ending Child Detention and Family Separation initiative, and Black Migrant Power Fund. In a December 2023 interview with Inside Philanthropy, Chakraborty argued that immigration funding intersects with criminal justice, policing, and gender-related causes, calling immigration “the defining issue of our time.” ⁸

In a February 2024 Chronicle of Philanthropy opinion piece, Chakraborty criticized philanthropy for underfunding immigration advocacy amid what she characterized as attacks on immigrants. ⁹

Movement Resilience Fund

In August 2024, ahead of the presidential election, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reported that Chakraborty was leading the Four Freedoms Fund’s creation of the Movement Resilience Fund, a pooled fund with a $5 million fundraising goal to support Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients employed by left-of-center advocacy organizations, in partnership with Cornell Law School’s Path2Papers project, the Justice Action Center, and the UndocuBlack Network. ^{10 11}

Other Affiliations

Chakraborty was named an inaugural fellow of the Rockwood Leadership Institute’s Equity in Philanthropy Fellowship in 2020, a program created to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideology within grantmaking institutions. According to her NEO Philanthropy biography, she has sat on the boards of Health Access, the International Labor Rights Forum, and SweatFree Communities. ¹²

Chakraborty was named to the “Wise Head Panel” of judges for the MacArthur Foundation’s 100&Change competition, which awards a single $100 million grant. She is also listed among team members of Our Family Coalition, a California LGBT advocacy organization. ^{4 12 13}