Which specific grants from Open Society Foundations list Indivisible or Sunrise as recipients and what were the grant purposes?
Executive summary
Reported public records and media reporting indicate that the Open Society network has made multi‑million dollar grants to Indivisible and to the Sunrise Movement in recent years; those grants are described in secondary reporting as general operating or social‑welfare support and as climate‑justice funding and legal‑defense support, but precise line‑item grant descriptions and full archival entries are best verified in OSF’s own grants database (Open Society Foundations) [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. Indivisible: documented headline grants and stated purposes
Multiple outlets report that an Open Society entity—the Open Society Action Fund or affiliated Open Society units—gave Indivisible a $3.0 million grant in 2023 described as two‑year support “to support the grantee’s social welfare activities,” language repeated in reporting by Fox‑linked outlets and The National Desk and summarized by InfluenceWatch as part of Indivisible’s recent OSF funding history [3] [5] [1] [6]. InfluenceWatch further itemizes earlier OSF funding rounds, citing an $875,000 award in 2021 and $1.135 million in 2022, and places Indivisible’s cumulative receipts from OSF and sister organizations at several million dollars (over $8 million as reported there), but those figures come from a watchdog aggregation rather than a direct OSF release in the provided materials [1]. OSF spokesperson language quoted in contemporary reporting emphasizes that grantees “make their own decisions” and that grants were not targeted at specific protests—an important caveat about how OSF frames its grants [3].
2. Sunrise Movement: amounts reported and program framing
Coverage in The Guardian states that Sunrise received roughly $2.1 million from Open Society between 2019 and 2023 and links at least some of that support to climate‑justice programming and to backing for legal defense funds tied to decentralized opposition to the Atlanta “Cop City” project; that reporting notes the Capital Research Center’s critique of such funding as evidence of support for controversial activism but also records Sunrise’s denials and the group’s emphasis on nonviolent organizing [2]. The Capital Research Center’s report amplifies claims that OSF funding flowed to groups the CRC labels “pro‑terror” or tied to militant tactics and explicitly names Sunrise in that narrative, but CRC is an advocacy research outlet with an ideological perspective and its characterizations and conclusions are contested [7] [2].
3. What the Open Society Foundations’ public resources say (and don’t show in these snippets)
Open Society maintains an online searchable grants database and a general grants page describing that it awards grants “ranging from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of dollars” across many program areas and that most grants are to organizations working on democracy, human rights, climate justice and related fields—the site is presented as the authoritative source for past grant awards [4] [8] [9]. The materials provided here do not include direct screenshots or OSF grant‑record pages showing each Indivisible or Sunrise entry, so the granular OSF language for individual awards (exact grant title, grant number, legal recipient name, start/end dates and program code) is not reproduced in this packet of sources [4] [8].
4. Disputes, context and limitations in the reporting
Conservative watchdogs and outlets (Capital Research Center, ZeroHedge, some news aggregators) have used OSF grant tallies to allege that funding supported violent or extremist activity; mainstream outlets and OSF itself push back, saying grants support civic engagement, social‑welfare activities, climate advocacy and legal defense rather than specific illegal acts—this dispute underscores both the political stakes in narrating philanthropy and the gap between aggregate grant totals and legally specified grant purposes [7] [5] [2] [3]. Secondary sources cited here (InfluenceWatch, The Guardian, Capital Research Center, national news summaries) provide overlapping but not identical dollar figures and purpose descriptions; the OSF grants database is the primary source to resolve discrepancies, and the provided snippets do not include the raw OSF grant records themselves [1] [2] [7] [4].
5. Bottom line and recommended verification step
Available reporting identifies a high‑profile $3 million OSF (Open Society Action Fund) grant to Indivisible in 2023 described as social‑welfare support and reports OSF support to Sunrise—about $2.1 million across 2019–2023 in one account—framed as climate justice and support for legal defense funds; secondary watchdogs assert larger or more controversial links but those claims rest on interpretive frames rather than verbatim OSF grant text in the materials provided here [3] [1] [2] [7]. For definitive, line‑by‑line grant names, recipient legal entity names and official purpose language, the OSF online grants search and the foundation’s published pages are the documentary source cited by OSF itself [4] [8].