“If you are on the wrong road,” C.S. Lewis wrote, “progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”
In recent weeks, that’s exactly what asset management giant BlackRock has done. In response to shareholder engagement, BlackRock eliminated discrimination in its employee gift-matching policies.
Offered at 65 percent of Fortune 500 companies, gift-match programs enable around 26 million U.S. employees to maximize their support for the charitable work they believe in most. It’s a benefit that allows companies to deliver on their promise that employees can “bring their whole selves” to work.
Unfortunately, while companies tout these programs as a generally available benefit to all employees, conservatives and Christians often find themselves blocked from supporting the groups and causes that drive them.
That was the case with BlackRock. Over the past two years, Alliance Defending Freedom and our clients and allies in the conservative shareholder movement have engaged with the asset manager on several issues, including its employee gift-match program. In our conversations with BlackRock last year, we highlighted issues with its charitable gift-matching policy.
But this year, when we met with BlackRock to encourage BlackRock to stop treating religious organizations worse than other 501(c)(3) organizations, BlackRock delivered. BlackRock removed its prohibition on matching employee gifts to religious organizations and instructed its gift-match facilitator, Benevity, not to require that donations to religious 501(c)(3)s be used for a non-sectarian purpose—signaling that its religious employees are now free to participate fully in the program.
That’s a major success, and it’s not the only one we’ve seen with gift-matching this year. Bank of America, whose policy was among Corporate America’s worst just two years ago, dropped all unnecessary screening mechanisms and now matches employee gifts to any 501(c)(3) nonprofit. That’s a straightforward fix to a self-inflicted problem, and one that every company should adopt.
Not every company has shown the same willingness to self-correct. For instance, Starbucks, which recently announced a new corporate hub in Tennessee, has repeatedly stonewalled ADF and our allies on its policy that similarly discriminates against conservative and religious groups that employees want to support.
Because Starbucks has chosen the path of least engagement, its proxy ballot includes four proposals from conservative filers, two of which highlight its discriminatory gift-matching policy.
Reliance on third parties like Benevity and YourCause is a major source of the discrimination problem in gift-matching policies. Benevity, which partners with over 700 companies, openly impedes Christians and those with similar beliefs from supporting the charitable causes they believe in.
In Benevity’s “self-certification” process for charitable organizations, Benevity asks organizations if they discriminate. Benevity states that if a charitable organization’s policy is to “adhere to a specific set of beliefs” that includes “marriage is between a man and woman only,” the organization should answer “yes” to the question of whether it discriminates.
Benevity’s questionnaire, in effect, bars Christian and other religious organizations from many charitable giving programs.
As one of the Starbucks proposals, filed by The Heritage Foundation, points out, the problem is often made worse by Benevity’s cozy relationship with the thoroughly discredited, blatantly partisan activist outfit known as the Southern Poverty Law Center.
By leaning on the SPLC’s subjective and methodologically disastrous “Hate Map” to screen out conservative non-profits like Turning Point USA, Benevity tilts the scales of charitable giving away from many mainstream religious and conservative organizations, loved and supported by millions of Americans. At the same time, Benevity’s rigged charitable filtration system quietly makes companies like BlackRock, Bank of America, and Starbucks accomplices in religious discrimination.
Perhaps it should not come as a surprise that when Benevity released its top organizations receiving support through Benevity’s programs, both the ACLU and Planned Parenthood were in the top 10 for 2025. That’s the same ACLU that recently declined to provide a distinction between “boy” and “girl” in its oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court, and it’s the same Planned Parenthood that has added irreversible and experimental cross-sex hormone regimens for gender-confused children to its stomach-turning suite of services.
Are these the organizations people love to support the most, or does Benevity’s anti-Christian filtering policy amount to a thumb on the scale?
BlackRock should be commended for the changes it made. But it shouldn’t have to take extra steps to get Benevity’s charitable preferences out of the way of BlackRock’s employees. Benevity’s ugly track record of discrimination needs to stop.
Noah Nash is legal counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom (@ADFLegal).