The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF) filed a lawsuit against the Tides Foundation, its one-time partner, on Monday, accusing the progressive nonprofit group of committing fraud and withholding more than $33 million in donations earmarked for the BLM organization.
First reported by The New York Post, BLMNGF’s 285-page lawsuit filed in the California Superior Court of Los Angeles County claims that the Tides Foundation has “refused to honor its promises and continues to commandeer BLMGNF’s donations.” The suit further claims that Tides has taken an undisclosed amount of money intended for the network and redirected it to radical BLM breakaway group “Black Lives Matter Grassroots.”
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Founded in 1976 by left-leaning activist investor Drummond Pike, the Tides Foundation functions as a nonprofit umbrella group that collects money for activist organizations that do not have 501(c)(3) tax exemptions. Tides manages over $1.4 billion in assets on behalf of various organizations, essentially acting as a banking institution without any of the licensure required for an actual bank. At the same time, the group’s 501(c)(4) status allows the groups underneath it to avoid taxes and IRS scrutiny.
The Tides Foundation, in turn, is heavily funded by some of the largest left-leaning dark money groups in the world. Billionaire globalist George Soros has funneled more than $20 billion into Tides via his Open Society Foundation. Other major Tides Foundation donors include:
- The Carnegie Corporation of New York
- The Ford Foundation
- The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Rockefeller Family Fund, and the Rockefeller Foundation
- The W.K. Kellogg Foundation
- The David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
With the money it receives from these high-profile donors, the Tides Foundation supports dozens of activist organizations, including BLM and, more recently, multiple pro-Palestine and anti-Israel groups that are carrying out mass protests on college campuses across the country.
Related Video: The Soros Connection – Who Owns & Controls American Universities?
“Tides has engaged in deceptive business practices and has operated in a quasi-banking capacity without appropriate regulatory oversight of licenses,” the BLMGNF lawsuit says. “Tides operates with a level of autonomy and minimal regulatory scrutiny that is starkly at odds with the regulatory framework imposed on traditional financial institutions.”
Following the death of George Floyd and the ensuing BLM riots in 2020, the network took in tens of millions of dollars in donations—but at the time, it did not qualify for tax-exempt status. In order to avoid the hefty tax rate on the donations, BLMGNF approached Tides to manage its money. Tides allegedly entered into a verbal agreement to return the money once the group became tax-exempt, managing the donations in a “collective action fund” in the intervening time.
The lawsuit alleges that, after BLMGNF ended its partnership with Tides in 2022, the foundation refused to return $33 million and has instead been sending portions of that money to BLM groups not affiliated with the network—all the while collecting a fee of between 3 and 9 percent for every processed donation.
In June of that year, $4.75 million from the $7.4 million collective action fund was sent to a BLM chapter in Oklahoma City, which is not affiliated with the global network foundation. “It is unclear why such a large amount would have been granted to a single city’s BLM chapter,” the suit states.
“Resources in the Black Lives Matter [collective action fund] were never intended to be granted to large, well-funded national organizations like Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, and were always intended to be granted to local Black Lives Matter chapters,” the Tides Foundation response in a statement to the Post. “BLMGNF’s lawsuit seeks to circumvent the intent of the Fund’s donors and deprive grassroots Black Lives Matter chapters of critical resources, for its own benefit.”
As the Post points out, BLMGNF has had its own problems with questionable financial activities, beginning with a $90 million donation windfall in 2020. Shortly after this, BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors bought three multi-million-dollar homes for herself in Atlanta and Los Angeles and also signed off on two other properties to be used as office spaces for BLM chapters in Los Angeles and Toronto. She denied using donations to pay for these expenses, but she resigned from her role at BLMGNF less than a month later.
For more on the connection between Soros-backed groups and the campus protests, watch this latest episode of “Drink Tank: an Unusual Suspects Production.”
Connor Walcott is a staff writer for Valuetainment.com. Follow Connor on X and look for him on VT’s “The Unusual Suspects.”
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