The Tides Foundation rarely appears prominently in public debate, yet it occupies a critical position in modern American civic life. It is not a political party, a campaign committee, or a government agency. It does not pass laws, issue rulings, or command police forces. And yet, through its structure, it exerts influence over how laws are enforced, how public norms are shaped, and how activism is sustained.
This essay is not an accusation of illegality. It is an examination of architecture, the legal and institutional design that allows power to be exercised without visibility, responsibility, or direct democratic consent.
The name Tides itself was chosen deliberately. It reflects a view of social change not as something achieved through elections, legislation, or singular moments, but as something that advances through cumulative, distributed pressure over time. A tide is slow. It is not dramatic. It does not announce itself as an act of will. It reshapes the shoreline through persistence, not force, and it is difficult to attribute any specific change to a single wave or actor. That metaphor captures the organization’s founding philosophy: Durable change emerges from many aligned actions, operating across institutions, advancing steadily, and appearing natural even when driven by distant causes.
Tides does not promise sudden transformation. It promises inevitability: change that arrives slowly, reshapes everything it touches, and leaves no clear point of responsibility behind. It sounds fairly benign and calm. But if you look back over the last couple of decades, you can see that it is, in fact, closer to a tsunami than a wave.
Why Tides was created
Tides was founded in the 1970s to solve a real problem in philanthropy: how to fund controversial or unpopular causes without exposing donors to retaliation, harassment, or social punishment. Donor anonymity, fiscal sponsorship, and pass-through grantmaking were designed to protect legitimate dissent and encourage giving where social pressure might otherwise suppress it.
At its origin, this was a defensible goal and even a critical need in the era of civil rights reform. American civil society depends on the ability to support causes that are unpopular, misunderstood, or morally urgent before they are widely accepted.
But structures designed for protection of beneficial causes can become instruments of power when scaled, professionalized, and detached from accountability.
How the Tides model works
At its core, Tides functions as a financial and legal intermediary. Pass-through grantmaking allows donors to fund activities indirectly through an intermediary that provides legal cover, anonymity, and administrative infrastructure while distancing donors from the consequences of how the funds are ultimately used.
Donors give money to Tides, often through donor-advised mechanisms that allow for donors, not the organization, to direct where the money goes. Tides then distributes those funds to sponsored projects or downstream organizations. These projects may not have independent nonprofit status. They operate under Tides’ legal umbrella, allowing them to receive tax-deductible donations immediately and to shut down or rebrand easily if needed.
Crucially, Tides retains formal control over the funds while donors retain practical influence through “advice.” This separation — advice without ownership, control without attribution — is what makes the model so effective.
The result is speed, scale, and insulation.
Why it is legal
Under U.S. nonprofit law, 501(c)(3) organizations are permitted to engage in issue advocacy, fund litigation, sponsor projects, and operate donor-advised funds, so long as they do not engage in explicit partisan electioneering or substantial lobbying.
Tides operates aggressively but carefully within these rules. It distinguishes issue advocacy from electoral politics, maintains formal discretion over grantmaking decisions, and documents compliance. The law judges form and intent, not outcomes. Tides has mastered the form.
The 501(c)(4) complement
An additional element completes the structure: the parallel use of 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organizations. While tax-exempt 501(c)(3) entities like the Tides Foundation are restricted from overt electoral activity, affiliated or adjacent (c)(4) organizations, which are not tax-exempt, are permitted to engage directly in political advocacy, lobbying, and campaign-related messaging, so long as such activity is framed as advancing social welfare.
Tides operates within a broader ecosystem that includes Tides Advocacy, a legally distinct but ideologically aligned (c)(4) entity. This separation is not incidental. It allows donor funds to move through parallel channels depending on the activity — charitable, educational, or overtly political — while maintaining formal compliance with IRS rules.
The result is a two-track system: tax-deductible anonymity and moral legitimacy on one side, direct political pressure and enforcement influence on the other. Each entity observes the letter of the law. Taken together, they allow advocacy to flow seamlessly from idea formation to political action without ever requiring donors to stand publicly behind the full chain of consequences. This division of labor is lawful, intentional, and widely replicated across the nonprofit advocacy landscape.
Why the structure is prone to abuse
The Tides model depends on high trust internally and low accountability externally.
Within the network, shared ideology, professional norms, and informal discipline allow coordination without explicit instruction. Outside the network, donor anonymity and institutional layering obscure who is acting, who is funding whom, and who bears responsibility for downstream effects.
Failures do not accumulate. Projects dissolve. New ones appear. Institutions survive. Donors remain insulated.
This does not require bad actors or any kind of conspiracy. It requires incentives that reward distance from consequence.
This is a model, not an outlier
The Tides Foundation is not unique. It is one of several large pass-through and fiscal-sponsorship organizations built to convert donor capital into activist infrastructure while diffusing accountability across legal layers.
The most significant parallel network is Arabella Advisors, which operates a constellation of nonprofit funds including the New Venture Fund, Sixteen Thirty Fund, and Hopewell Fund. These entities specialize in fiscal sponsorship, rapid campaign incubation, and large-scale pass-through grantmaking, often supporting organizations that appear grassroots while relying on centralized professional infrastructure.
Upstream of both sit the major donor-advised fund platforms — Fidelity Charitable, Vanguard Charitable, and Schwab Charitable — which normalize donor anonymity at massive scale. These platforms are not inherently ideological, but they provide the plumbing that allows anonymity, pass-through funding, and discretion to become standard practice rather than exception.
Finally, large philanthropic networks such as Open Society Foundations (George Soros's pet project) and the Ford Foundation regularly fund policy advocacy, legal reform, and “systems change” through intermediaries rather than directly, further separating donors from downstream effects.
The point is not coordination, conspiracy, or illegality. It is architecture. This ecosystem did not emerge by accident, and it does not depend on any single actor. It functions because the model itself — donor anonymity, fiscal sponsorship, and pass-through funding — reliably produces influence without consequence to the donors and without responsibility or accountability to the people affected by its outcomes.
A necessary distinction: charity, power, and secrecy
It is obvious at this point that reform of some sort is necessary. Any honest discussion of reform must begin by acknowledging that secrecy itself is not inherently wrong.
The Bible explicitly commends giving in secret. Christ’s admonition in Matthew 6 warns against turning charity into performance, coercion, or self-exaltation. Quiet mercy is morally superior to public display. Churches, shelters, and aid organizations are right to protect donors who give for love rather than influence.
But this moral protection of secrecy applies to mercy, not power.
Organizations like Tides do not alleviate suffering. They reshape enforcement priorities, legal norms, public policy, and cultural boundaries. These effects fall on people who did not consent, vote, or even know the influence was being applied.
Secrecy that protects humility is good. Secrecy that protects power is corrosive.
The same legal mechanisms that shield a church donor from pride can also shield a funder from accountability while he exercises enormous civic influence. When that happens, secrecy ceases to be virtuous. It becomes insulation.
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Transparency as the only viable reform
Restrictions on speech, association, or giving empower regulators and threaten legitimate dissent. Bans and caps drive money underground. Selective disclosure becomes politicized. Half-measures create new shadows.
Sunlight is the only remedy that does not require censorship.
But it must be the right sunlight.
The solution is not to abolish donor privacy wholesale. It is to distinguish clearly between two kinds of giving:
- Charitable giving, aimed at direct relief and mercy, where anonymity may rightly remain protected.
- Governance-shaping giving, aimed at influencing law, enforcement, litigation, or public policy, where anonymity must give way to visibility.
If a donation is intended to affect how laws are enforced or how public power is exercised, it is no longer merely expressive. It is governing others. And power, in a democratic society, must be visible to the people it governs.
The principle is simple:
Christ commands secrecy in mercy — not secrecy in power. Those seeking to serve Caesar, not God, should be made public, not allowed to give in secret.
Any system that cannot survive that distinction has already confused charity with control.
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