A Final Archewell Update (Probably)
Timeline of events, observations and broader context
When you’re knee-deep in a developing story, it’s easy to forget that inaction is—in itself—an action.
This past weekend I gave myself permission to step out of social media discourse around Archewell and back into reality.
Today, with the benefit of time and space, I am going to wrap up the Archewell donation story—some of which you may already know. I acknowledge that I’ve spread myself too thin. I’m on a lot of platforms and it’s difficult to keep track what I posted where, plus factoring in when people are joining the story. Last year I made a commitment to focus on Substack as my main content platform and I’d like to get back to that.
Archwell: Where the Story Is Now
There have been a few notable developments in the Archewell donation story.
Before we dive in, let’s lay out a timeline of events:
April 9th 2025: Letter notifying MWC of Archewell’s decision to cut ties is sent.
April 10th 2025: An Archewell source tells NewsNation that they sent a letter to Janan Najeeb yesterday (April 9th). Knowing this story was coming, Archewell appears to have acted quickly. Someone made sure the reporter knew the situation was resolved so she could include it in her piece.
April 11th 2025: NewsNation piece comes out.
April 17th 2025: MWC publicly replies to the Archewell Foundation.
April 18th 2025: Archewell Foundation releases a public statement in response.
Notable Developments Since My Last Post
-Independent verification from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel confirmed the letter sent by Archewell to Najeeb at the Muslim Women’s Coalition ending their grant was legit.
I compared the letter from Archewell to the NewsNation quotes and it is 99% the same.
Archewell’s initial letter to Janan Najeeb:
From the NewsNation piece:
One of my questions last week was, is the letter made up (seemed unlikely), is this a leak, or was someone given the ok to speak with NewsNation and pass on the letter? Based on the timeline and Archewell’s second response, my educated guess is they wanted to get their response into a story they knew was coming out.
Archewell acknowledged the op. ed. NewsNation presented them, cut ties with MWC and managed to get the letter they sent to NewsNation in time for the article to drop. All of that and still a grossly misleading headline. The framing of Prince Harry and Meghan remains. Why is why I can’t stop thinking about this. Why did Archewell executives react like this to a year old op. ed. presented by a right-wing news outlet?
I don’t expect an answer, but I can’t stop puzzling over it.
-Najeeb told the MJS that Archewell didn’t mention the Feb. 2024 op. ed. when they called her.
Before she was notified Archewell cut the funding, a foundation staffer called to ask about her opinion piece, Najeeb said. The staff member only ever mentioned the piece in the Journal Sentinel — not the Muslim Journal piece, Najeeb said.
The NewsNation piece states that they brought a Feb. 2024 op. ed. from the Muslim Journal by Najeeb that contained the highly charged and contested phrase, “From the river to the sea”. The AP has a great explainer on the phrase writing: “Like so much of the Mideast conflict, what the phrase means depends on who is telling the story — and which audience is hearing it.” This is simply to provide context.
Najeeb posits that the piece in the Journal Sentinel from May 2024 about student protestors is why the funding was cut off. According to Najeeb, the staffer never mentioned the phrase used in the Feb. 2024 piece.
That’s what we have from Najeeb. Archewell provided their own expanded reasoning for cutting ties in their second statement.
-Archewell replied to MWC’s public Instagram statements with a new letter, publicly posted on Friday.
The second response from Archewell is a departure in some ways from the original one. Again, it’s well within Archewell’s right to end a grant for whatever reason. I wonder how much social media chatter influenced what they selected to focus on as additional explanation for why they cut funds. It feels like a statement crafted for people completely plugged into this story.
My personal opinion is that, if this was handled differently from the start, Archewell wouldn’t need to release a second statement.
Archewell’s PR decisions, though I don’t personally agree with it, makes a little more sense in the context of what happened last week in the Trump Administration.
What Else Happened Last Week?
The crackdown of free speech by the Trump Administration continued. I spoke with some people in the non-profit space and they shared with me that there was a lot of rumbling over Trump’s statements in the Oval Office on Thursday and a bill passed by the House in Jan. 2025.
I’m Just a Terrible Bill
In early January the GOP-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill that would give the President the power to take away tax-exempt status from a nonprofit organization. Here’s a brief description:
Give the attacks on higher education—as I was writing this news broke that Harvard is suing the Trump Administration. From
:Harvard filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in federal court, claiming that the government was unfairly slashing research funding as a way to retaliate against the university for standing up for its constitutional rights.
It’s unsurprising that the next target are non-profits. This was never about curbing “government spending”. We’re dealing with a government uninterested in democracy. It’s about scaring people from exercising their rights, specifically the 1st Amendment. We are in a dark place right now and I’m not confident that we call this “slipping into authoritarianism” anymore.
Besides fears of this bill making it’s way to the Senate, there are Executive Orders to worry about.
Trump’s Oval Office Presser On 4/17/25
Among the several topics Trump discussed in the Oval last week was this:
Given that context, I understand the pressure on Archewell to take a hard line, expanding their definition of no-tolerance to include: “additionally, language that calls for the destruction of others, whether explicitly or implicitly, crosses a line.”
But what exactly does this mean? How is destruction defined? Who decides whether an op. ed. or a tweet or a photo at an event is calling for the implicit destruction of others?
Archewell has every right to define their boundaries and pull funding. I think there was a better way to craft a message that accomplished that without playing into a right-wing narrative about pro-Palestinian activists and considered the impact on MWC—beyond the loss of funding.
Archewell has the power because they hold the purse strings. That’s not to say that their fears about this administration are unfounded. But so do smaller, regional organizations like the MWC.
I do not believe in picking and choosing when to question or critique power. Attempts to silence that with pile ons or conflating it with hate or disloyalty is a reflection of our current moment.
It certainly doesn’t improve the causes we champion.
-Meredith
"My personal opinion is that, if this was handled differently from the start, Archewell wouldn’t need to release a second statement."
Completely agree. It seems like Archewell felt they needed to get ahead of this impending article (for a number of valid reasons - the polarity of the current moment, the administration's threats, the heavy scrutiny Harry and Meghan are always under, the actual content that the MWC founder shared, etc.), but that rush resulted in their notice letter lacking the substance of their public statement (they didn't even specify which op-ed was problematic in the letter). Archewell is more than justified in determining whether an organization should continue to receive their funding, but this scenario just seems like they reacted too quickly to the potential NewsNation piece and then felt they had to further justify their argument when they got backlash after MWC responded. And it also feels a little bit like they let the online discourse craft their defense for them.
Perhaps it boils down to being a matter of conscience. Each person’s conscience is shaped by their acquisition of knowledge, life experience, the trials they’ve endured and learned from. (Harry certainly has some experience with swastika symbols which might be a trigger) My conscience might prohibit me from an action or association yours might allow. That doesn’t necessarily make either of us “right”. It celebrates autonomy and choice. It’s my life endeavor to respect each person or entity’s choice and to really try not to make a rush to judgment. After all, in my experience, one can never know all the facts of any case unless personally involved. I can only lend support based on my conscience. All of that being said, given what I personally know and have researched, I am willing to think the best of two people, and their endeavors, who seem to be striving to show up and do good.