‘The battle continues to grow’: Deep-pocketed education group targets contested states

A new organization linked to some of the biggest money movers in Democratic politics is setting out plans to resist the country’s cultural divides in education.

The Campaign for Our Shared Future has a new executive director who says the group has already raised $9 million and holds ambitions to secure millions more. Its strategists have identified 15 states — including the home turf of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — where the organization is preparing to operate during the midterms, fast-approaching school year and 2024 campaign season.

Their goal: Organize parents, educators and students to press against conservative-led legislation and political rhetoric targeting how race, gender and curriculum are addressed at K-12 campuses.

The campaign’s emergence marks the latest form of sophisticated community organizing and fundraising efforts centered on school boards and classrooms, as liberal-leaning education leaders scramble to match political momentum harnessed by conservatives boasting their own initiatives on parents’ rights, school history and sex ed lessons.

“Schools and education have now been caught in the crossfire of a culture war,” Heather Harding, a former education grantmaking director at Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies who began working as the campaign’s executive director in July, said in an interview.

“Much of these attacks have been animated by politics,” said Harding, who has also worked for Teach for America and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “The campaign really wants to be animated by children getting an inclusive, meaningful education that supports their ability to be healthy and thrive in a multiracial democracy.”

Officially a nonpartisan effort, the Campaign for Our Shared Future and its separate advocacy fund are connected to Washington, D.C.-based groups that have supported Democratic politics and spent tens of millions of dollars on left-leaning causes during 2018’s midterm elections.

City corporate records show the campaign’s branches were registered in early May by a nonprofit public charity known as the New Venture Fund and a social welfare organization called the Sixteen Thirty Fund. Those two entities are managed by Arabella Advisors, a firm founded by former Clinton administration appointee Eric Kessler that advises donors and nonprofits about where to give money.

That structure allows the Campaign for Our Shared Future to operate without publicly disclosing its donors.

“We're fully independent,” Harding said. “But at this time, to be honest with you, the way that literal white supremacists are showing up threatening educators and families, we don't want to put a target on the back of any of our donors.”

The group said it will soon unveil more about its specific plans, but its broad list of targeted states includes the battlegrounds of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The campaign has also already launched voter education efforts on school board races in Arizona, Florida, Louisiana and Michigan, and plans to run advertisements that coincide with those campaigns. Harding said the campaign is also working with Our Turn, an organization that organizes student activists, and will also train members of the Florida Student Power Network.

“Any place legislation really gets in the way of students getting what they need to learn and thrive and be successful, we're going to look at,” Harding said.

“It's clear to me that the battle continues to grow,” she said. “We think that presidential politics will continue to keep schools sort of in their crosshairs. We don't find that productive to the actual work of learning, so we do hope that as more donors join us we can be broader, and go deeper so that public schools continue to be a backbone of democracy.”