Tides Center is an incubator. CO Public Media's lawsuit against Trump is about process, but it can also be political.

Tides Center is an incubator.

Tides Center, according to their own mission page linked first below, believes that (quoting) "... a just and equitable future can exist only when communities who have been historically denied power have the social, political, and economic power they need to create it. To make that a reality, we work in deep partnership with doers and donors to center the leadership of changemakers from these communities, connecting them to services, capacity building, and resources to amplify their impact."

As you might imagine, the Influence Watch page for Tides Center (linked second below) uses less lofty wording. Again quoting (with links intact) "The Tides Center is a left-of-center nonprofit created to manage the fiscal sponsorship services of its “sister” organization, the Tides Foundation. Both groups are part of the Tides Nexus of pass-through and fiscal sponsorship nonprofits based in San Francisco, California."

The Tides Foundation has made some news lately for being not only a dark money behemoth, but also for being connected with unsavory groups like BLM and Palestinian protests on college campuses (as well as taking gobs of Federal grant dollars to spread around various causes). The third and fourth links below give you some context there.

In keeping with my focus on Colorado matters, I want to look in at one specific bit of the overall Tides organization: I want to look at the only part of Tides that I could find that gets Colorado money and that is Tides Center. Less important than their money, however, is what Tides Center is because that will help give you some understanding and vocabulary to better comprehend what you see or read about nonprofits/NGOs.

Tides Center gets a relatively modest amount of state money. The fifth link below is to their TOPS expense report. I have some minor things I'm following up on now from this report. I'll update when I have something to share, but in broad strokes, especially when compared to heavies like Rose Community Foundation, Tides Center is small fry in Colorado money.

Neither do they seem to give a lot of grants to Colorado nonprofits. From their most recent form 990, linked sixth below, I was only able to find two organizations whose mailing address is Colorado. Those are shown in the screenshot labeled "Grants".**

Tides Center's political donations are the same. Curiously, they seem to only have gone big on wolf reintroduction here in Colorado. The screenshot labeled "Wolf" gives their political contributions from the Secretary of State's TRACER database (and, just to avoid confusion, these are the only contributions from Tides Center--I did also see a Tides Foundation donation to Coloradans for Protecting Reproductive Freedom for $180K but didn't include since it's not Tides Center proper).

These are big numbers for someone who earns a teacher's wage, but put in perspective with other nonprofits in Colorado, they aren't that impressive. What makes Tides Center notable and worth sharing with you is as much what Tides Center IS as what it DOES.

Tides Center, is one of the many (MANY) arms of the Tides Foundation and as of 1996 became an "incubator" for the foundation. Quoting from the Influence Watch page (with links intact):

"The Tides Foundation pioneered “fiscal sponsorship” (or “incubation”), a process in which a sponsor organization is paid to act as an umbrella under which new center-left political groups may fundraise and operate prior to achieving recognition of tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), at which point they’re often spun off into standalone nonprofits. In 1996, Tides passed its fiscal sponsorship services to a separate nonprofit, the Tides Center. The Tides Center serves as a 'legal firewall insulating the Tides Foundation from potential lawsuits” filed by those potentially harmed by Tides Foundation-funded projects and assists in the organization and creation of new left-of-center political advocacy organizations. ² The Tides Center offers an array of services to help organizations from their inception onward, including helping organizations to find office space, run a new office, apply for grants, conduct public relations, handle personnel, complete payroll, budget, manage contracts, face legal challenges, and comply with government regulations. ³⁴ "

This is also echoed by a quote from the fourth link below, the Washington Free Beacon article I mentioned earlier as context on Federal money going to the Tides Foundation (copied here with link intact):

"The taxpayer-funded grants were disbursed to groups through the Tides Center, a San Francisco-based nonprofit incubator that wealthy liberal donors use to bankroll progressive causes. A number of radical left-wing groups have fallen under the auspices of the Tides Center, which acts as a "fiscal sponsor" to nonprofits by providing its 501(c)(3) tax and legal status. This arrangement lets the groups under its umbrella avoid registering with the IRS. The grants went to liberal initiatives housed at the Tides Center over a 17-year span between 2001 and 2018 and have steadily increased over time, according to a review of the center's tax data."

From this you can see that there are two ways in which to view an incubator a la Tides Center. One is more in line with what you probably think of when you think incubator: it's a warm, safe place in which to grow. Nonprofit incubators do indeed do that. The process to become a nonprofit is a lengthy and complicated one. It takes at least months of wait and hundreds of hours of labor. I won't say it's definitive, but the site linked seventh below gives some insight.

And all of that is just the certification. You'd still have to find a physical location, find funding, etc. In analogy to a small business suffering under government regulations because one business owner can only stretch so thin among all of his or her chores, startup nonprofits suffer from the difficulty of adding government regulation on top of all they must do to get out there and help the people.

Imagine you ran a nonprofit and what you really wanted to do was to help people, not fill in paperwork, or talk to office building owners. Wouldn't you jump at the chance to have someone do that so you can start your work? Tides can help with that so you can get out there and remold the world in your progressive image.

Incubator also carries that second meaning, hinted at by the second quote. It acts as a shelter in that it prevents outsiders from getting a look at what's going on inside. It lets donors put money in, nonprofit stuff comes out, and blocks scrutiny of the details.

I tried and tried to see if I could find any Colorado-related groups that Tides Center incubated, but couldn't (yes, this includes Green Latinos). Doesn't mean there are, doesn't mean there aren't, it just means this isn't something readily available to the public. Perhaps that's the point. The second meaning of "incubator" above would suggest so at any rate.

As more and more people dig farther into the web of nonprofit and NGO funding both here at the state level and also at the Federal level, you as a reader are likely to find terms like incubator tossed at you. Sometimes with explanation and context, sometimes not.

Take a minute to dig in on some of the resources below so you'll have a better understanding of just what that term means so you can be a more active participant in the conversation. Gotta know the vocab to comprehend the language.

**Greenlatinos was quite familiar to me. Every. single. time. I've been waiting to testify at a board meeting involving emissions, a bill on same, etc. someone from there is invariably testifying too. They're on the list to dig into, but it may be a bit: it seems that the list to look into grows faster than my time does.

https://www.tides.org/about/mission/

https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/tides-center/

https://www.yahoo.com/news/dark-money-group-backing-anti-155407416.html

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/tides-center-funnels-170-million-in-taxpayer-money-to-left-wing-groups/

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nKoqSbC5Y1LOdN6QZBkWANBn6TMWPw44/edit?usp=drive_link&ouid=113451218632854191614&rtpof=true&sd=true

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943213100

https://www.501c3.org/how-to-start-a-501c3-nonprofit/

Related:

Dark money giants Arabella Advisors started an incubator of their own: the Hopewell Fund.

Related to the above, the Hopewell Fund was an incubator for States Newsroom which is the financial sponsor of Colorado's own progressive news site Colorado Newsline.

Incubation in action in our media not just our politics.

More on Newsline in one of my earlier pieces below.

https://completecolorado.com/2024/12/14/gaines-colorado-newsline-progressive-bias/

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Colorado public media's lawsuit against Trump is about process, but it can also be political.

I wrote recently about divorcing local government from paying newspapers for public notices, and in that newsletter (see the first link below) I also included a Complete Colorado op ed by Ari Armstrong about how government funding of public media is inherently corruptive.

Mr. Armstrong mentions the lawsuit against the Trump administration by a group of public media outfits in Colorado. That lawsuit is being pursued by Mr. Zansberg, a noted media and First Amendment lawyer here in Colorado. Not too long after Mr. Armstrong's piece, I noted a response by Mr. Zansberg in Complete. It's linked second below.

I wanted to share it not only in the spirit of reading widely, but also because I felt something needed to be written in response to Mr. Zansberg's piece, something that rubbed me the wrong way.

Mr. Zansberg spends a good deal of time talking about legal process. Perhaps at the risk of oversimplifying -- you should be reading the op ed yourself and not entirely taking my word for it--it strikes me that, in summary, Mr. Zansberg's feels that what Trump is doing is an Executive Branch overreach.

Quoting the op ed:

"Boiled down, the lawsuit poses two basic questions: (1) Does any president have the authority, under the law, to command CPB how it is to disperse its funds, or the recipients of CPB grants how they can (and cannot) spend those monies? And (2) assuming, for argument’s sake only, that the president does have such authority, does it infringe on the First Amendment rights of those private entities if the government imposes restrictions on what programming they may broadcast based exclusively on the express (stated) grounds that the president disapproves of their speech?"

With a couple quibbles, I think I agree with Mr. Zansberg. I think, given what I've read on the topic, Trump reached beyond what the Executive is allowed to do. I think this is true despite my own personal support for not paying government money to public media; I'd love to see this happen, but legally (and morally) I think it needs to be done through Congress.

But in reading Mr. Zansberg's piece, you might easily walk away with the impression that this lawsuit is entirely about God, defending Freedom, Mom, Apple Pie, Bald Eagles, the Constitution, and any other "Good Words" that might come to mind.

Bolstering this impression is the following quote from the op ed:

"To make the obvious unconstitutionality of Trump’s executive order clear, consider this hypothetical: a future Democratic president signs an executive order commanding the IRS to withdraw tax-exempt status from any religious or non-profit organization that publicly opposes a Democratic party priority. No problem, right? After all, the argument is that no non-profit organization (e.g. the Catholic Church or the NRA) is entitled to a federal tax exemption, a form of public subsidy. If so, the government would be free to withhold that completely discretionary benefit — one that increases the burden on all non-exempt taxpayers — exclusively because it disagrees with those organizations’ speech, right? No, of course not."

Two things can be true at once. This lawsuit can be about both politics and process.

Mr. Zansberg could be pursuing this lawsuit (and you can say the same for the public media orgs he represents) out of a concern over process, out of a desire to defend the normal Constitutional workings of government.

But I believe that he (and again I include those he represents) chose this particular item as his hill to die on specifically because it involves Trump (who I believe he holds a particular animus for) and policy he disagrees with. He is defending public media getting public money as much as he is standing up for God and country.

I don't read minds, and I have not directly asked Mr. Zansberg (we've not seen eye to eye in the past, so I didn't ask), but I say the above because what Mr. Zansberg says and implies in his op ed is shouted down by his actions. Well, his lack of actions.

The first example comes from Mr. Zansberg's own quote above. The government removing tax-exempt status from a church due to not liking it?

It's not quite exactly the same, but anyone with a functioning memory that lived through Obama's presidency might remember when his IRS did specifically go after churches and groups that didn't have the right ideology. See the third link below. The government doing similar to what Mr. Zansberg mentions isn't so hypothetical after all. You remember him mentioning it and calling it out right? You remember his lawsuit?


Let's come closer to the future.

You remember Mr. Zansberg speaking out when Polis threatened to withhold transportation funds to local governments who wouldn't toe the line on what the state wants? Me neither.

Then there's the fond memories we all share of when Mr. Zansberg made his principled stand against Biden's excesses, such as his repeated searching for any and all tricks that would allow him to skirt the Supreme Court ruling on student loan forgiveness (see the fourth link below). Never has there been such a defender of reining in the Executive as we have in Mr. Zansberg.

I know I wish Mr. Zansberg's lent his mighty strength of conviction when I sued CPW for cutting my mic and booting me from a public meeting. His unflinching defense of my right to say things the CPW Board didn't like would have been welcome. Mr. Zansberg didn't reach out to me, utter a peep about it, or offer to represent me as he has multiple media outlets (including public media here), however.

Then there is the following from the op ed. Mr. Zansberg writes in response to Armstrong's contention that public media being funded by the government diminishes their credibility and ability to be a watchdog:

"Personally, I believe it makes sense to have news outlets not beholden to corporate owners like Jeff Bezos, Patrick Soon-Shiong, Comcast, Paramount, Disney, etc., so that reporters and editors are not worried about angering the folks who sign their corporate paycheck, and to ensure all Americans are served even when it’s not commercially profitable."

So it's right to be concerned about corporate media ownership exerting influence, but not so for government sponsorship? The seeming inconsistency here is puzzling and telling.

It's fair to note that none of these cases overlap exactly with the fact pattern of Mr. Zansberg's lawsuit. Take them together for what they are though. They illustrate what matters and what doesn't by his own words and actions. It's a Constitutional problem if Trump does it, not so much for others.

While we agree on the process Trump is using to pursue his political ends, Mr. Zansberg's words and his principled stand here would be more forceful if they matched his actions, past and present. His convictions and thoughts would be easier to respect.


https://open.substack.com/pub/coloradoaccountabilityproject/p/the-government-should-get-out-of?r=15ij6n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

https://completecolorado.com/2025/06/22/zansberg-public-media-lawsuit-against-trump-explained/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/22/politics/biden-student-loan-forgiveness-supreme-court

Related:

If you would like to see some more of Mr. Zansberg’s politics, another bit of evidence to bolster my claim above, I have an older op-ed of his to share.

Linked below.

https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.aol.com%2Fm-proud-woke-too-opinion-222814604.html&sa=D&source=calendar&usd=2&usg=AOvVaw2E6XrBXfQPRk4bAoPIWFeS