Change or charity: what Liberty Hill Foundation becomes at 50

A PODCAST LAUNCH is not the story. The story is what a 50-year-old progressive foundation looks like when it has outgrown its original mission and begun to build an institution in its own image.

Liberty Hill Foundation, the Los Angeles public charity that describes itself as the "home for progressive Los Angeles", is celebrating half a century. Founded in 1976 by four people of inherited wealth - among them Sarah Pillsbury, heir to the Minnesota flour fortune - Liberty Hill was originally conceived as a rebellion against conventional philanthropy. Its early motto, "Change, Not Charity," was a promise to fund grassroots organising rather than social services, to seed movements rather than treat symptoms. That was genuinely radical at the time. Funding community activists was not a mainstream concept, as the foundation's own history page notes. Even today, it remains distinctive.

Season 5 of "Conversations from the Frontlines," Liberty Hill's award-winning podcast, is the visible marker of this anniversary. It is also a window into a deeper institutional transformation. The real story is not the podcast. It is what Liberty Hill has become: an organisation whose budget has grown, under the stewardship of its president and CEO, Shane Murphy Goldsmith, from $8m to more than $30m since she took the helm in 2013. To mark the occasion, the foundation has appointed three new chief officers, including a chief strategy officer, Corey Matthews, drawn from JPMorganChase's global philanthropy unit. The anniversary is being framed as "Seeds of the Future," a campaign projecting from 1976 to 2076.

The surface question is whether a foundation's podcast matters. The deeper one is about who controls progressive influence in Los Angeles, how wealth flows through institutions that claim to channel it to the grassroots, and whether Liberty Hill's expansion represents movement-building or institutional consolidation.

To be sure, Liberty Hill's track record is not imaginary. Under Ms Goldsmith, the foundation's Agenda for a Just Future has supported campaigns that reduced youth incarceration by more than 50%, pushed through local and statewide bans on neighbourhood oil drilling, and won rent caps and tenant protections. In a recent grantmaking cycle, it distributed more than $3.34m in two-year general operating grants to 65 grassroots groups. Its Fund for Change programme, which uses a "Community Funding Board" on which donors and organisers sit together to decide where money goes, pioneered a model of participatory grantmaking.

The mechanism is clever. Influence Watch, a watchdog organisation, has noted that liberal private foundations sometimes give to Liberty Hill precisely because it insulates them: rather than fund politically sensitive advocacy directly, which risks IRS scrutiny, they donate to Liberty Hill, which then channels money to the causes the larger foundations want to support. Liberty Hill thus functions as both a grassroots funder and a political intermediary. That arrangement benefits everyone, except perhaps transparency.

The incentive structure of progressive philanthropy is worth examining. Liberty Hill was founded by people who inherited money. Today, it draws institutional funding from the Irvine Foundation, the California Endowment, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Obama Foundation, as well as individual donors including Hollywood figures and union members. It is a 501(c)(3) public charity, not a private foundation, which means it depends on a steady stream of contributions. Dependence on funders creates its own constraints. A foundation that needs to keep large donors satisfied will tend to professionalise, diversify, and scale - all of which are legitimate organisational goals but also ones that distance it from the radical edge that made it distinctive.

Ms Goldsmith's own background illustrates the tensions. She grew up poor in Santa Monica, lost both parents to lack of healthcare, and became a community organiser. She joined Liberty Hill in 2009 and has been its president since 2013. She serves on the Los Angeles Police Department commission, the city's most powerful police oversight body, and previously advised Mayor Eric Garcetti when he was on the city council. Her close ties to the Garcetti administration - his wife, Amy Wakeland, served on Liberty Hill's board - have occasionally drawn scrutiny, as Influence Watch has documented. The foundation has never been a secret about its political ambitions, but the convergence of grassroots funding, policy advocacy, and proximity to elected officials raises questions about whose interests it ultimately advances.

The podcast, hosted by Ms Goldsmith, fits into this picture as a form of institutional storytelling. It interviews movement leaders, but the framing, the platform and the audience selection are determined by the foundation. The question is not whether the conversations are valuable - they probably are - but whether the podcast amplifies grassroots voices or showcases the foundation's role as the connective tissue between donors and organisers. In practice, it does both. The distinction matters less in principle than in effect: every institution that curates a movement also shapes it.

The deeper problem is not hypocrisy. It is scale. A foundation that has grown its budget fourfold in a decade, appointed C-suite officers drawn from corporate philanthropy and major environmental NGOs, and launched a 100-year vision campaign is no longer a small radical laboratory. It is an established player in the LA political ecosystem. That is not a criticism, but it is a change worth noting. The movement for social justice in Los Angeles does not need more institutions that look like the establishment. It needs institutions that can still surprise.

The strongest argument in Liberty Hill's favour is that scale buys durability. Grassroots organising is perpetually underfunded and often dependent on short-term project grants. General operating support, even in modest amounts - the Fund for Change provides grants of up to $50,000 - gives groups the breathing room to plan, hire, and sustain campaigns. Liberty Hill's willingness to dip into its endowment during the pandemic, defying conventional foundation rules, was an instance of institutional flexibility that larger, more bureaucratic funders would not have managed.

Yet institutional maturity also brings a familiar risk: the institution begins to optimise for its own survival rather than the movement it claims to serve. New leadership roles, longer time horizons, anniversary campaigns - these are all signs of an organisation thinking about itself, not just about the campaigns it funds. The danger is not immediate capture. It is slower: a gradual drift toward respectability, toward partnerships that feel good but do not challenge power, toward a definition of "justice" that fits comfortably inside a $30m annual budget.

The better answer is not to diminish Liberty Hill. It is to hold it to its own standard. The "Change, Not Charity" motto was once a provocation. Now it should be a test. Does the foundation's expanding infrastructure actually increase the power of the grassroots groups it claims to serve? Do the conversations on its podcast translate into resources, political cover, or policy influence for the organisers featured on it? Or is the podcast, like many institutional media projects, a way to broadcast the foundation's importance without materially shifting the balance of power?

Liberty Hill's 50th anniversary offers a moment of accounting. Five decades of grantmaking, campaign support and leadership development have produced real gains for Los Angeles's progressive movement. The challenge for the next half century is whether the foundation can resist becoming what it once claimed to oppose: a charitable institution that treats the symptoms of injustice while leaving its root causes intact. Movements do not need more infrastructure. They need infrastructure that stays restless.