Tides at 50: The Next 50 Starts Now

Fifty years ago today, during a moment that rhymes hard with this one, Tides was founded. Watergate had hollowed out public trust in institutions. Stagflation was grinding working families down. The civil rights and anti-war movements had crested, and the backlash was already mounting. The Voting Rights Act was barely a decade old. Philanthropy had long played a vital role in supporting the institutions and infrastructure of civic life, but the sector wasn’t designed to rapidly channel resources to the grassroots organizers and emerging movements responding to local issues in real time. That gap needed filling.

Tides’ founder, Drummond Pike, saw a problem that was at once simple and stubborn: donors wanted to move resources to organizations doing urgent and proximate work — but doing so was complicated, slow, and often out of reach for smaller groups. The infrastructure to do it well didn’t exist. The need was concrete: community leaders in New Mexico needed resources, and there was not an efficient, compliant way to get them there. So he built it. Tides was designed from the start to be that inclusive, progressive backbone: enabling resources to move efficiently and responsibly.

Fifty years later, that need has not gone away. It has intensified in ways Pike could not have anticipated, and in ways that should sober anyone paying attention.

The communities Tides serves have never been more organized, more connected, or more clear-eyed about what justice requires. That strength is exactly why this moment is so contested. The coordinated investment in conservative infrastructure, the political attacks on progressive philanthropy, the legal pressure on nonprofits: none of this happens unless the work is working. The attacks on DEI, on nonprofit infrastructure, on the freedom to fund transformative work are not signs of a movement in retreat — they are a measure of how much ground has been gained, and how much more there is to win.

We want to be direct about what this anniversary means to us, and what it doesn’t.

This is not a victory lap. There is no appetite for galas and branded swag while the communities Tides serves are navigating active threats to their funding, their legal standing, and their civil rights. A fiftieth anniversary that reads as self-congratulation in a moment like this would be a failure of nerve, and worse, a failure of purpose.

What the fiftieth is — if we do it right — is a demonstration. A proof of concept. Evidence that the infrastructure Pike built more than half a century ago is not just surviving this stress test, but built precisely for it. The architecture he created is now being tested by the very forces it was designed to resist. That is not a crisis. That is the mission, reactivated.

What Tides set out to do fifty years ago has grown into something clearer and more pointed: to shift resources and power to communities historically denied both, so they can create a just and equitable future. The mission has matured. So has the urgency behind it.  

So here is how we are marking this moment. Through our Tides Next 50 campaign, we are engaging our sector in the work of future-proofing the next half-century, and we’ll be unveiling more in the weeks and months ahead. 

Our work ahead centers on three areas that we believe are foundational to what movement philanthropy must become. The next generation of change leaders. Impact investing oriented toward justice. And a better understanding of how to strengthen philanthropy to help movements thrive. Who needs to be at the table, what needs to be built, and how we get there together — that’s the conversation we’re committed to having. Expect us to have more to share soon. 

These are not anniversary activations. They are commitments. 

The communities we serve are counting on us not to flinch. And we won’t. 

This is what we were made for. This moment proves it, and we’d love you to be a part of it. Donate today and help us build the next fifty years.