The Piper Fund is a multi-year collaboration of individual donors and foundations helping to build the movement for campaign finance reform through strategic grantmaking. This collaborative helps individual funders and foundations make grants to dozens of state-based organizations without having to expand their own grantmaking capacity. Making grants to promote campaign finance reform makes sense because it takes advantage of the prominence of the issue in the public eye. Even though the influence of big money on our democratic political process has always been overwhelming, until recently there hasn't been much hope of building a movement for lasting reform. Today philanthropic dollars can have an impact that would have been unimaginable five or ten years ago.
State legislatures are more important than they used to be.
As state legislation becomes more important, large political contributors are focusing more of their campaign giving on state legislative and gubernatorial campaigns. People want reform at the state level, and because they remember when it was different, they believe change is possible. Extensive polling in various parts of the country shows strong support for reform of state-level campaign financing. Campaign finance reform initiatives at the state level are more likely to pass than comparable reforms at the federal level. Because states are smaller and politically more accessible than Congress, reforms are actually passing state legislatures and winning at state ballot boxes.