Stacey Abrams group increased anti-police funding shortly after she joined its board, and with her support

The Marguerite Casey Foundation, a far-left grant-making organization that counts Stacey Abrams as a board member, increased its anti-police funding shortly after she joined the group and with her approval, despite her campaign saying she disagrees with the foundation on such issues. 

Abrams’ campaign previously told Fox News Digital that the second-time Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate does not hold the same views as the Marguerite Casey Foundation, which she joined in May 2021. The group has voiced support for defunding and abolishing the police on several occasions. 

Abrams, who has tried to distance herself from the hardline rhetoric of the “defund the police” movement in the past, has received at least $52,500 in income from the foundation, according to her financial disclosures. 

And while Abrams has remained tight-lipped on the defunding issue on the campaign trail, a press release from the foundation issued weeks after she became one of its governors shows that she supported its expanded anti-police efforts. 

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The Marguerite Casey Foundation launched the “Answer the Uprising” initiative in late May 2021, which includes increased financial support to liberal groups working on law enforcement issues. It also established a coalition with other high-dollar grant-making organizations that provide backing to defund the police groups.

The foundation began the campaign on the first anniversary of the “racial justice uprisings,” which the group says challenged “white supremacy and the systems that maintain it as one of the most dominant forces in our lives.”

It received unanimous backing from its board, including Abrams. 

“This latest initiative is fully supported by Marguerite Casey Foundation’s Board of Directors, which recently named seven new changemakers to the Board, including Stacey Abrams and Rashad Robinson, President of Color Of Change,” its press release said. 

The “Answer the Uprising” initiative involved $1.6 million more in pledged cash from the Marguerite Casey Foundation to “fund programs and organizations that directly address racial injustice in policing and the justice system.” 

“What people were marching and crying out about was policing,” the Answer the Uprising page says. “Tens of millions of everyday people took extraordinary risks to say what they wanted in the clearest terms possible — transform, defund, abolish.” 

“They wanted an end to police violence and all forms of racist violence and injustice that are endemic within the criminal justice system,” the page says.

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The Marguerite Casey Foundation recruited other left-wing organizations for the initiative, including Borealis Philanthropy, which has partnered with Black Lives Matter. Borealis Philanthropy acts as an intermediary for donors and provides large sums to numerous liberal activist groups, including those who want to strip police of their budget. 

The Marguerite Casey Foundation has also given grants to left-wing groups that want to defund the police, according to a review of their tax forms. 

In 2020, the foundation awarded $250,000 to the Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of more than 50 groups, including Black Lives Matter, that wants to “divest from excessive, brutal, discriminatory policing and invest in a vision of community safety that works for everyone, not just an elite few,” according to its website. 

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The Movement for Black Lives also sent a text message last summer calling on its supporters to sign clemency petitions for Mutulu Shakur and Sundiata Acoli, a former Black Liberation Army leader who was the mastermind behind several armed robberies in Connecticut and New York. In 1981, the Brinks robbery in New York resulted in the slayings of an armed guard and two police officers. Acoli was convicted of murdering New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster during a 1973 traffic stop. 

In 2020, the Marguerite Casey Foundation also gave $200,000 to the Black Organizing Project, which is part of a 13-group committee pushing to defund the Oakland police. That same year, the foundation sent $200,000 to the Louisville Community Bail Fund, which bailed out a Black Lives Matter activist who attempted to assassinate Jewish Democratic mayoral candidate Craig Greenberg in February.

The Marguerite Casey Foundation’s board also includes one of the most outspoken defund the police activists in the country. Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, the “nation’s largest online racial justice organization,” joined its board at the same time as Abrams. 

Robinson has tweeted his support of defunding the police numerous times, and his group backed a Minneapolis ballot initiative to disband its police department. The unsuccessful effort received $500,000 in backing from a George Soros nonprofit.

The Marguerite Casey Foundation, likewise, has repeatedly voiced support for defunding and abolishing the police, as Fox News Digital previously reported. The group also awarded millions to professors and scholars who advocate anti-capitalist and prison abolitionist views.

Abrams’ campaign and the Marguerite Casey Foundation did not respond to Fox News Digital’s inquiries. 

Fox News’ Jessica Chasmar and Cameron Cawthorne contributed to this report.