Reflecting on 2024 and Looking Ahead to the New Year

Dear friends,

As we enter 2025, we are grateful to continue our work alongside many dedicated partners toward a common goal of a more just and hopeful world. We remain deeply committed to the work that lies ahead as we seek to cultivate the conditions for enduring peace and freedom.

We are also mindful that 2024 was a particularly challenging year globally. Over the past year, the fields that Humanity United supports faced severe disruption. The rise of right-wing governments across North America and Europe deeply impacted funding for human rights issues; the strategy shifts and partnership exits by private funders created further uncertainty for many; and we also witnessed a rise in authoritarianism while conflicts in places like Sudan, Gaza, and Ukraine carry on.

Despite these headwinds, Humanity United—along with our sister organizations Humanity United Action and Humanity United Charitable Fund—and our partners were able to make progress on several key priorities, illustrated by examples below:

1) Moving legislation and government action forward on corporate accountability.

The #PayYourWorkers campaign, led by our partner Worker Rights Consortium, supported over 10,000 workers from around the world to secure $23M in back pay across 10 major cases of wage and severance theft. In certain cases, these efforts also resulted in the re-hiring of workers who had been unfairly dismissed due to their activism.

2) Creating forums to support global social movements led by migrant workers and human rights defenders.

The Collective Action Assistance Fund (CAAF), a multi-donor fund hosted by HU and led and advised by frontline activists and human rights defenders in support of nonviolent movements, officially launched at the World Movement for Democracy in Johannesburg in November. CAAF will invest in and catalyze inclusive, rights-based, peaceful movements at critical times in their development and strategic planning and will support enabling environments for movements.

3) Centering the healing and wellbeing of those most impacted by the issues we work on.

In keeping with HU’s commitment to the wellbeing of proximate actors, we collaborated with the UN Development Program (UNDP) to create a multi-sector network of 22 donors that fund mental health and psychosocial support. This network came together to share lessons across sectors and create a larger influencing network. In 2025, the network will be meeting regularly for peer-to-peer support and to collaborate on opportunities as they emerge.

4) Elevating the voices of survivors, workers, local peacebuilders, and local journalists.Through collective advocacy with our partners, we saw an increase in substantive engagement between the U.S. government and those with lived experience, such as Sudanese diaspora leaders meeting directly with senior U.S. government officials or the annual U.S. Trafficking in Persons Report more concretely articulating its engagement of survivors as a necessary strategy.

Our vision for 2025

While we’ve made progress on many fronts, we also recognize that we work on entrenched and chronically underfunded issues that cannot be solved overnight or by HU’s resources alone. Hence, looking ahead we are being intentional about bringing more resources, awareness, attention, and collaboration to the fields we work in to enhance their long-term health and resilience. This week, as we received the news about the executive order to suspend foreign aid and federal grants and are already seeing the detrimental impact the freeze is having on communities around the world, our commitment to build resilience in the fields we work in feels more important than ever.

To this end, our priorities for 2025 include:

• Seeking to understand the impact that executive orders and other policy changes are having on our partners and identifying ways that we can support. This will take time, but we are committed to our partners and will continue communicating with them as the situation evolves.
• Continuing to grow the participatory Collective Action Assistance Fund to include more donors and to share what we learn about how philanthropy can support the ecosystem of nonviolent collective action.
• Bringing together other philanthropies to support advocacy on localization, so that those with lived experience can better lead the way on the decisions that affect their lives.
• Creating new opportunities for leadership for those with lived experience, ensuring their voices and perspectives are present in crucial decision-making spaces.
• Convening international journalism funders to brainstorm ways to bolster regional journalism networks amidst a decline in funding, and to collaborate with them on prioritizing duty of care within media outlets.
• Supporting our Racial Justice and Equity partners as they respond to the backlash and political targeting of racial justice work.

Internally, we are committed to going deeper in our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (DEIJ) journey, including embedding trauma-informed approaches and fluency into our work. We also remain committed to continually improving our grantmaking practices, embracing trust-based and participatory approaches, and ensuring our partners’ voices are heard. As part of this commitment, we will be commissioning another Grantee Perception Report in 2025 to gather feedback from our partners on our performance and our relationship with their organizations.

We know that this work is not easy, and there have already been significant shocks and disruptions in 2025, but we are committed to cultivating the conditions for peace and freedom, both at home and abroad.

With much appreciation,