The Ben & Jerry’s Foundation announced it will suspend operations as of 31 December 2026, unless it obtains a favourable ruling in its legal challenge to its loss of funding. The foundation is actively pursuing that challenge, which is expected to extend into next year and is fully committed to seeing it through, it says. This year-end suspension of operations follows the April 2025 decision by Unilever’s spinoff, The Magnum Ice Cream Company (TMICC), to cut the foundation’s funding and its more recent mandate for the foundation to have vacated its corporate office by 15 July 2026. Without these essential resources, the foundation cannot continue its work, it notes.

“After 40 years of investing in grassroots organisations working to make the world a more just and better place, TMICC is causing us to shut down at exactly the moment that work is most urgently needed,” said Liz Bankowski, president of the board of trustees. “While we’ve lost funding and been removed from our office, we stand firm in the belief that the law and the facts are on our side.”

Since its founding, the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation has been unwavering in its mission: to support progressive social change at the grassroots level and to engage Ben & Jerry’s employees in that work. Last October, the foundation celebrated its 40th anniversary, a milestone honouring thousands of small grassroots organisations whose work to advance justice, human dignity, and environmental protection was bolstered by the foundation’s early and often catalytic support. Beyond the national grants programme, the withdrawal of funds also affects roughly US$600,000 (€524,380) contributed annually across Vermont through an employee match programme and employee-directed local Community Action Team and Vermont Equity & Justice grants.

For more than 25 years, following Unilever’s acquisition of Ben & Jerry’s in 2000, the foundation operated without corporate interference, a true testament to the integrity of the original merger agreement, the foundation says. That agreement established an independent board to oversee the company’s product integrity and historic social mission and provided for foundation funding under an annual formula. The foundation’s independence was never questioned, even when it funded Migrant Justice during a period when that organisation was considering a boycott of Ben & Jerry’s. Rather than interfering, Ben and Jerry’s, led by the independent board, responded by becoming the first dairy company to establish a human rights programme, designed and built by farm workers themselves.

“The Ben & Jerry’s Foundation was a key early funder for our work; they helped us get to where we are today,” said Will Lambek, of Migrant Justice. “They believed in the human rights vision of Vermont farmworkers, even when it brought us into direct conflict with the company itself. The decision to fund Migrant Justice while we were campaigning against Ben & Jerry’s was a testament to its independence, courage and integrity.”

Everything changed in early 2025, when Unilever restructured its ice cream businesses under a new corporate entity, TMICC. Using a pretextual governance review and a promised but never-disclosed audit, TMICC moved to remove a foundation trustee and members of Ben and Jerry’s independent board and to cut off funding to the foundation. This resulted in a legal challenge under the merger contract, the case that is currently pending in federal court in New York.

“We are a $6 million (€5.24m) foundation,” said Bankowski. “TMICC is a multi-billion-dollar multinational corporation. This is exactly the kind of David and Goliath fight our grantees face every day, and like them we are not backing down. It breaks our hearts that we are being forced to step back at such an urgent time, when community organisations across the country who rely on funders like us are facing growing resistance in their fights for justice, human dignity and environmental protection. We urge other funders to step forward and support grassroots activism. Local organising has never been more critical.”