What foundation grants to Indivisible (Open Society, Tides, etc.) are publicly documented in IRS filings for 2020–2024?
Executive summary
Publicly available IRS filings and nonprofit databases show that Indivisible’s tax returns (Form 990s) are accessible through ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer and related services, and secondary trackers report some foundation payments, but the record in the provided reporting is incomplete for a clean, year-by-year ledger of foundation grants from Open Society Foundations, Tides, and similar donors for 2020–2024 [1] [2] [3]. InfluenceWatch notes specific past payments — including a $150,000 figure from Tides Advocacy in 2020 — but the assembled sources do not contain a comprehensive, fully sourced list of all foundation grants to Indivisible across 2020–2024 [4].
1. What the public IRS filings repositories contain and why that matters
The IRS’s extracted Form 990 data is published and searchable via ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer, which provides the underlying 990 filings (including schedules) for organizations like Indivisible Project and its related entities; those filings are the primary public record for grants received and grants made [1] [2] [3]. Data aggregators such as GuideStar/CauseIQ and FoundationSearch rely on those 990s to build profiles and lists of awards, and Instrumentl also compiles award counts and dollar ranges from digitized Form 990s [5] [6] [7]. If a grant appears on a Form 990 (Schedule A, Schedule B, or the grants schedule), it becomes public via those feeds; but the availability of line-item donor names and amounts can vary by form type and by whether the donor is a foundation, a fiscal sponsor, or a donor-advised fund [1] [3].
2. What the reporting explicitly documents about Tides and other foundation grants
InfluenceWatch’s summary cites that Indivisible “received … $150,000 in 2020 from Tides Advocacy,” and it also recounts historical support figures such as a 2018 transfer of $2.24 million, but InfluenceWatch frames these as part of its own compilation rather than reproducing an IRS image of each grant line item [4]. Instrumentl’s 990-derived profile lists counts of awards by year (for example, one award in 2024 and 2023, two in 2022, five in 2021, two in 2020) and reports typical award sizes, but it does not in the provided snippets show named donor-by-year tables that tie Open Society or Tides to specific line items on Form 990 in 2020–2024 [7]. SceneInAmerica notes popular claims about large Soros/Open Society totals but cautions these “lack hard confirmation in public financial records,” and explicitly says the specific multi-million figures circulating online are not corroborated by the public filings cited [8].
3. Limits and gaps in the available reporting (and how that shapes conclusions)
None of the provided sources presents a consolidated, cited table of Open Society Foundations grants to Indivisible for each year 2020–2024; ProPublica and FoundationSearch host the raw 990s where such entries would appear, but the provided snippets do not extract or display those specific donor entries for 2020–2024 in full [2] [6]. That means definitive statements — e.g., “Open Society gave $X in 2021 and $Y in 2023” — cannot be reliably made from the current reporting without opening those specific Form 990 PDFs or machine-readable XMLs and citing the exact schedule lines [1] [3]. InfluenceWatch’s assertion about a $150,000 Tides Advocacy payment in 2020 is the clearest single grant-level claim in the reporting supplied, but it is one data point rather than a comprehensive ledger [4].
4. Competing narratives, incentives, and why precision matters
Political critics and social posts have circulated large round-number claims about “millions from Soros” to Indivisible, but the SceneInAmerica excerpt and ProPublica’s emphasis on raw filings underscore that such claims require line-item verification against 990 schedules; the absence of that verification in public reporting is precisely the gap that fuels both skepticism and misinformation [8] [1]. InfluenceWatch and other watchdog-style outlets may emphasize donor relationships to build narratives about influence, while ProPublica and Instrumentl emphasize primary-source transparency; readers should weigh each outlet’s mission and incentives when interpreting summaries of 990 data [4] [7] [1].
5. Bottom line — what can be stated now, and what requires further document review
Based on the supplied reporting, one documented foundation payment cited is a $150,000 transfer from Tides Advocacy to Indivisible in 2020 as reported by InfluenceWatch, and broader award counts and typical grant-size ranges for Indivisible appear in Instrumentl and FoundationSearch profiles derived from Form 990 data [4] [7] [6]. However, the reporting as provided does not supply a complete, line-by-line extraction from Indivisible’s 2020–2024 Form 990s identifying every Open Society, Tides, or other foundation grant; producing that definitive list would require downloading the specific 990 PDFs or XMLs via ProPublica/IRS data and citing the exact schedules [2] [1] [3].