Responsive Philanthropy June 2020

Christian Giraldo

Who keeps us safe?

Third Wave Fund is a national feminist and gender justice activist fund that resources the political power, well-being and self-determination of social movements led by young women of color, queer, trans, intersex and gender non-conforming youth. Third Wave Fund upholds that we will achieve deep political, economic and social change if and only if we invest in people directly impacted by systems of power to design solutions and lead the charge toward transformation.

Third Wave Fund has been funding sex worker–led organizing for more than 20 years because we know that resourcing sex worker liberation is central to our goals of gender and reproductive justice. Our grantees taught us that sex workers and people in the sex trade face high rates of violence and discrimination, not because of anything inherent to sex work, but because sex work itself is criminalized, stigmatized and interlocked with other systems of oppression, including gender-based violence, white supremacy, poverty, ableism, queerphobia1 and transphobia.

The SWGC logo, with artistic credit to JB Brager

We see time and again what movement leaders confirm: Sex worker–led groups have the best strategies to confront and transform the oppressive social and economic conditions of their own lives. Given this political and philanthropic insight as well as our investment in fostering leadership from the communities we fund, Third Wave Fund stepped up its commitment to sex worker-led movements with the creation of the Sex Worker Giving Circle (SWGC) in 2018.

The SWGC is a cross-class, multi-racial and intergenerational giving circle made up of people with current or former experience in the sex trade. Our approach to grantmaking is participatory, inclusive and high touch. This means Third Wave Fund is deeply engaged with sex workers living and organizing at the intersections of multiple oppressions and lived experiences. Through SWGC, current and former sex workers participate in a Fellowship program with a popular education-style curriculum that prepares members of the community to mobilize resources, strengthen their relationships, engage directly in grantmaking, and receive support to bring their voices and leadership into philanthropy and social movement organizing. The program is completely by us and for us, and all of the grantmaking decisions are made by sex worker Fellows, guided by the input of sex worker advisers, and supported by the programmatic and fundraising know-how of sex worker staff.

In 2021, the SWGC expanded the Fellowship program to meet the ongoing challenges and uncertainty caused by the pandemic, and we took advantage of our new lives working and organizing from home to launch our 4th overall and 1st fully national cohort of sex worker Fellows. Our first national Fellowship reviewed 35 applications, met with 18 prospective grantees and chose 12 grantees for funding, including 7 new organizations. In total, the SWGC has broken the $1.55 million grantmaking mark, with a total of 36 groups awarded grants since the start of the fund.

How funders can be part of the solution: 4 key lessons

The SWGC has grown tremendously over the last 4 years, and we’ve learned many important lessons from sex workers doing on-the-ground work that we would like to share with the broader field of philanthropy.

First, we have learned to provide unrestricted general operating grantmaking dollars and multi-year commitments whenever possible. This allows groups to cover the real office, salary and overhead costs of existing as well as the tools and physical and virtual spaces to do their work. During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, groups depended on general operating funds to provide life-saving monetary mutual aid and other urgent material resources to the broader community, which kept the movement alive and healthy enough to fight another day. Sex workers found themselves in the impossible reality of needing to stretch every last penny of their shoestring budgets to feed, house and care for their comrades, most of whom had been systemically excluded from government unemployment and economic stimulus packages due to working in informal and street-based economies or lacking eligibility documentation. The never-ending task of organizing sex worker survival cost the movement community members who didn’t have the resources to take in a moment of stillness and recovery and literally worked themselves to death. Sex workers have taught us that when their own economic and material realities are nourished and not under constant interrogation and attack, they are empowered to speak to funders and other resource gatekeepers with less fear and more sex worker power. More sex worker power keeps communities alive.

Second, the movement taught us to center trauma-informed approaches to grantmaking during these chaotic times through coordinating our program with empathy, accountability, flexibility, creativity, humility, generosity, approachability and urgency. The pandemic, economic recession, violent displays of white supremacist police brutality, alliance of ideologically paternalistic anti-sex worker forces and expansion of the for-profit carceral state have worn down sex working communities and deteriorated the physical and mental wellbeing of sex workers. Now more than ever, funders must account for the disparity in power dynamics between philanthropy and the movements we support and how these dynamics are always present, even if we’re actively trying to dismantle them. We must approach conversations by radically self-critiquing our participation as funders in creating power differentials and understanding that our every action creates a world. Funders must always ask ourselves: What kind of world are we creating for sex workers in our grantmaking and interactions with the movement? We must also reflect on how we show up in conversations with the movement and the power that we wield – reluctantly or not – and lean into the necessary discomfort of acknowledging the many power differentials we may unwittingly contribute to and that make up sex workers’ scarce material realities.

Third, as a bilingual English/Spanish program, the SWGC learned that funders must embrace and systematize language justice as core to our values. Spanish-speaking grantees taught us that monolingual Spanish-speaking groups face the baseline exclusions confronted by all sex working communities, coupled with systemic injustice around language barriers, racism, colorism and immigrant status. High levels of discrimination and racist policing made many Spanish-speaking and Latinx sex workers afraid of engaging with state bureaucracy on any level and deprived them of an avenue for accessing resources to meet their basic needs. Lack of language accessibility creates challenges for Spanish-speaking groups that make it harder to write grant applications, organize fundraising campaigns, communicate with funders who are not prioritizing their inclusion, and secure legal non-profit status and bank accounts. There are fewer resources and information available in Spanish, and many philanthropic programs do not acknowledge language disparities in their processes. Some programs may provide and accept applications in Spanish, but do not have staff who can speak to grantees in Spanish, provide support, and attest to the disparity in access to resources and opportunities faced by monolingual Spanish-speaking people in the United States.

Finally, we have learned that funders who support sex workers’ rights must stop imposing unnecessary and harmful bureaucratic challenges on groups on the ground. Ideally, funders should grant to groups without requiring fiscal sponsors, who may at times act as gatekeepers, hurt the work of grantees, and further traumatize a community that is already maligned and kept from life-saving resources. If fiscal sponsorship is required, it is crucial to allow grantees to apply for funding before obtaining sponsorship—and then support them in finding a fiscal sponsor who is a good match as a condition of grant receipt, while making funds available to cover any fiscal sponsorship fees so that groups can use the full amount of their grant. Additionally, funders should support groups that have a diversity of tax statuses, ranging from groups with no legal status at all to groups that are fiscally sponsored, as well as groups that have gained their own 501(c)(3) status. In the case of groups working toward securing 501(c)(3) status, funders should do everything in their power to support their petitions and accompany them in their journey jumping through the infinite and spiritually draining hoops of the nonprofit industrial complex.

Accompliceship, not charity

Artistic credit: Grae Rosa

We see amazing potential for participatory programs led by directly impacted communities to shift the discourse away from voyeuristic donor-driven charity and into accompliceship and wealth redistribution. To realize the dream of sex worker liberation and decriminalization, we must build mutual trust with sex workers and transform the power dynamics that paint the realities and material conditions of sex working communities.

As we move into our spring 2022 cycle, we reflect on the fact that sex workers at the intersection of interlocking systems of oppression are finally being funded to organize openly, unapologetically and on their own terms. This is in itself a momentous deal! It means that people who have been organizing from their phones can get a laptop for the first time, create virtual spaces for sex workers to build alliances across the country, and stay connected to members of the community incarcerated for working to survive. It means we are investing in the healing justice of movement leaders who have been tirelessly building support systems while emptying their own sex work-funded pockets to maintain their people’s survival. Directly funding the well-being, bodily autonomy and organizing of sex workers most impacted by oppression is in itself a radical vision and our biggest impact. With a little creativity and a lot of trust in the leadership and experiences of sex workers, it can be a big part of your impact too.

Christian Giraldo is the Program Officer of the Sex Worker Giving Circle at Third Wave Fund. 

This year’s NCRP Impact Awards, held on Wednesday, Oct. 27 at the 2021 Unity Summit, was a joyous celebration of the best that philanthropy has to offer.   (more…)

Fundamentally, NCRP exists to ensure that philanthropy is responsive to those with the least wealth, power and opportunity in American society, and that it serves public purposes rather than the interests of those who control the purse strings.

As I reflect on NCRP’s 45-year history, I think about the amazing contributions of Bob Bothwell and Rick Cohen, NCRP’s first 2 executive leaders, and the incredible work done by the dozens of talented, driven staff who put their hearts and minds into holding philanthropy accountable.

I also think about the many passionate, smart people who have served on NCRP’s board of directors over the years, and especially about those who have served as board chair. Without their vision and courage, NCRP wouldn’t be what it is today, and philanthropy would have less of a positive impact on society.

NCRP’s greatest contributions over the past 45 years can be grouped into 2 related buckets: accountability and social justice. The field has made progress in both areas since 1976, but there is still more to be done.

Holding philanthropy accountable to the public good

NCRP has helped lawmakers and the public realize that private philanthropy shouldn’t be thought of as an entirely private endeavor. Because of the substantial preferential tax treatment donors and foundations receive, private philanthropy should be thought of as a partially public enterprise in which donors and all American taxpayers join forces in pursuit of the common good. Foundations and donors must therefore be accountable to society more broadly.

When NCRP was founded, most foundations didn’t share any information whatsoever with the public, and there was no sense that foundations should be accountable to anyone outside their organizations. All of NCRP’s work over the last 45 years is based on the idea that it’s legitimate to question and challenge what wealthy people do with tax-advantaged dollars, through foundations or other giving vehicles. Four efforts stand out to me as having most helped advance this argument:

1. Transparency is essential for there to be accountability, and NCRP has pushed for greater transparency since the founding of the organization. In 1980, NCRP introduced its first report on foundation accountability, Foundations and Public Information: Sunshine or Shadow, at the annual conference of the Council on Foundations. In part because of the massive amount of attention that report received, many foundations soon after that began publishing annual reports. Voluntary transparency has continued to improve over the past 4 decades, though the increase in giving through donor-advised funds and LLCs has made a portion of domestic giving far less transparent.

2. NCRP later worked with Sen. Dave Durenberger, R-Minn., to add additional relevant information to the 990-PF tax form that foundations file with the IRS, giving the public more insight into foundation operations and spending. Voluntary transparency only goes so far, and government-mandated transparency plays an important role, too.

3. In 2009, NCRP released Criteria for Philanthropy at Its Best, which included 4 criteria and 10 aspirational benchmarks against which foundations could be assessed. It was an attempt to raise the bar about the standards to which foundations should be held. The field had a strong reaction to the report, and NCRP was called “presumptuous” and “breathtakingly arrogant” by the leader of one large foundation.

4. From 2013 to 2016, NCRP assessed a dozen of the nation’s largest foundations through the organization’s Philamplify initiative. The assessments were made public, and some funders made changes based on those reports. (One of my personal favorite moments from this initiative was the video NCRP produced about the Hess Foundation.)

In 2015, NCRP President and CEO Aaron Dorfman attempted to get access to the secretive Hess Foundation as part of NCRP’s Philamplify initiative. Watch the entire video here.

In recent years, there has been an explosion in public critique of philanthropy. Scholars, journalists and philanthropy serving organizations have sharpened the conversation in helpful ways and have advanced how we all think about philanthropic accountability.

However, philanthropy remains mostly unaccountable. Most donors and foundations aren’t sharing power at the governance level. While we’ve seen a handful of foundations expand their boards, too many still have small, homogeneous boards.

Government oversight is, in many ways, weaker than it has ever been. The exempt organizations division of the IRS has been starved of resources, and they investigate or audit an incredibly small number of foundations each year.

The audit rate for tax returns filed by tax-exempt organizations in fiscal year 2020 was estimated at 0.13% by a recent Treasury Department inspector general report. Individual filers were 3 times as likely to have their return audited, and business were 5 times as likely. Audit rates in the exempt organization division at the IRS, low as they are, appear to be falling still.

Some attorneys general have stepped in to play a more robust role, notably in New York, Minnesota and California. But it’s not enough. In the coming years, I hope to see more donors and foundations voluntarily sharing power, and I also hope to see more robust action from regulators.

Enabling social justice nonprofits to drive societal change

NCRP has helped donors and foundations make a meaningful contribution to building a society that is more fair and just. This is perhaps the most significant way NCRP has influenced philanthropy over the past 45 years.

There is more funding than ever for advocacy, community organizing, civic engagement and other strategies that allow people who have been oppressed to build power, change systems and pursue justice.

The nonprofits funded to do that important work have dramatically improved American society. While still not enjoying full equality or freedom from oppression, there is no doubt that our society is better now than it was in 1976 for LGBTQ people, for people of color, for women, for people with disabilities and for others who have been marginalized.

Nonprofits and their funders helped drive those change. There were 5 things NCRP did that made a difference:

1. In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, NCRP issued reports critical of United Ways and community foundations for their lack of support for people of color and for social justice work. Those critical reports were not always received well at the time, but it’s clear that United Ways and community foundations are now much more responsive to people with the least wealth, power and opportunity than they used to be. They still have room to improve, but it’s undeniable that they have been getting better.

2. From 1979 to 1988, NCRP was part of a coalition of organizations that, through a massive multi-faceted campaign, succeeded in getting the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) – the workplace giving program for employees of the federal government – to open participation to advocacy organizations in addition to nonprofits that provided services. There has been approximately $50 million annually going to advocacy organizations through the CFC every year since then. The total given to advocacy groups through the CFC might be upwards of $1.5 billion at this point. Some of that money has supported conservative advocacy organizations, but much of it has been for progressive causes, too.

3. From 1997 to 2007, NCRP published dozens of reports examining conservative philanthropy. Those reports helped liberal and progressive donors and foundations realize how they were being outspent and out-organized by people who had a very different vision for what kind of society they wanted to create. The reports contributed to the creation of new entities like the Center for American Progress and the Democracy Alliance. The most popular and influential from that series of reports were Moving A Public Policy Agenda and Axis of Ideology.

4. From 2009 to 2012, NCRP documented the incredible benefits for families and communities when foundations and other donors invest in community organizing, advocacy and civic engagement. Through the Grantmaking for Community Impact Project, NCRP studied the work of 110 nonprofits in 7 different parts of the country and found that for every dollar invested in organizing and advocacy, communities reaped $115 in benefits. The summary report from that series, Leveraging Limited Dollars, has been used by hundreds of foundations to protect or expand their funding for these strategies that help people who have been oppressed fight for justice and liberation.

In more recent years, NCRP has helped donors and foundations think about power. Power Moves, the self-assessment toolkit NCRP released in 2018, has been downloaded by thousands of foundation staff and trustees, and many are using the tool to improve how they build, share and wield power in pursuit of justice. Through the Movement Investment Project, NCRP is helping funders get better at supporting movements, a critical ingredient for driving policy change and societal change more broadly.

There is no doubt that progress is being made on increasing funding for social justice. Between 2003 and 2015, support for social justice strategies hovered around 9% of all domestic grantmaking — “spiking” to 11% during the election years of 2008 and 2012. Beginning around 2015, a broad-based increase in social justice funding began, and in 2018 (the most recent year of complete data available), 14% of domestic grantmaking was for social justice work. Preliminary data for 2019 indicate the upward trend continued.

Crucially, it looks like increased funding for social justice is coming from more than just the largest, most identifiably “progressive” foundations. NCRP split Candid’s FC1000 dataset into 2 parts responsible for roughly equal total grantmaking in any given year: the largest 100 foundations and the next-largest 900. The share of funding for social justice from the relatively smaller 900 foundations doubled from 5.5% in 2014 to 11% in 2018.

In spite of that progress, however, there is still much to be done. Foundations and high-net-worth donors still do a terrible job getting resources to groups led by Black people, Indigenous people, Latinx people and other people of color. That must change if we are going to move our society forward and help America live up to its ideals. Social justice funding is still only 14% of the grant dollars given out by the nation’s largest funders. We can and must do better.

American philanthropy has made extraordinary contributions to improve society over the past 45 years, and our nation and its people are better off because of it. In the coming years, NCRP will continue to challenge donors and foundations to operate in ways that benefit those with the least wealth, power and opportunity.

Aaron Dorfman is president and CEO of NCRP.

My experience of anti-Blackness at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and an urgent appeal to our sector

In the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and Tony McDade, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) published an open letter expressing support for the nationwide protests and the call for racial justice.

On June 5, Priscilla Chan, who owns and operates CZI alongside her husband, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, said: “I stand in solidarity with the Black community and all those risking their own health and safety in the fight for justice, equity, and inclusion.”

She went on to punctuate the sentiment by declaring, “Black Lives Matter.”

The statement, which remains prominently displayed on the CZI website, stands in stark contrast to my experience as a Black man working at CZI for the past 2 years.

Public statements versus the internal reality

During my time at CZI, I served in multiple departments and roles, performing a wide range of duties, including grantmaking, grants management and operations. Throughout my experience, I have been consistently alarmed by the racially discriminatory practices displayed in the organization’s treatment of Black employees and its approach to grantmaking, which operates devoid of racial analysis and often with reckless disregard for how internally devised “solutions” will affect Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) communities.

While working at CZI, I made well-documented efforts to highlight these concerns for members of the CZI leadership team, all while contending with numerous incidents of racial discrimination, including pay inequity, threats to my job security from senior leaders and acts of retaliation made against me.

While these incidents made my experience at CZI contentious and oppressive, I was equally disturbed by accounts from Black colleagues who were facing similar issues at the foundation. These are not my stories to tell, but I must note that the most egregious acts of bias and discrimination were those perpetuated against Black women, who were consistently undervalued, underutilized and treated with callous disregard and disrespect.

Noting that my previous efforts to see these issues brought to light had gone unanswered, on Aug. 20, 2019, I met with Priscilla Chan. I told her that incidents of racial discrimination were occurring at CZI and requested that she investigate these issues further.

My appeal was met with the all-too-familiar sophistry of a leader who wishes to avoid responsibility by minimizing the experiences of their employees. Although she initially expressed concern regarding my statements, she quickly veered the conversation toward a broader discussion of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices.

She explained to me that “DEI may look different for each of us” – seeming to imply that claims of discrimination could simply be matters of misinterpretation. I countered this line of reasoning, stating that CZI’s DEI strategy was inadequate and amounted to a tokenizing, quota-based approach to diversity.

I explained that, while CZI had successfully recruited Black talent, it had failed to empower and integrate the perspectives of Black employees into the work – a point supported by multiple engagement surveys that indicated Black employees suffered a significantly lower sense of inclusion and belonging at CZI, and further evidenced by the exponentially higher rate at which Black employees left the organization.

Knowing that I had only been afforded 10 minutes to discuss these issues, I came prepared to offer a course of action, suggesting that Chan prioritize hiring a seasoned DEI professional with a proven record of success working with similarly stunted organizations.

She pushed back on this idea, indicating that she preferred to select a more junior individual for the role, out of a desire to “give them the opportunity to develop in the role and in their understanding of these issues. In the same way we’ve been able to develop you on the Criminal Justice team.”

This patronizing comment told me all I needed to know about my employer and confirmed the old adage: A fish rots from the head.

While on the Criminal Justice Reform team at CZI, I was paid significantly less than non-Black colleagues in the department, less than employees across the organization who held similar responsibilities and less than the originally advertised salary for the position I held.

Days after joining the Criminal Justice Reform department, I was warned by a senior member of the team that I should avoid pushing for grantmaking strategies that centered racial equity, as Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan did not believe race was relevant to the issue of mass incarceration. I was told that previous attempts to educate the couple on this matter had contributed to a former employee being terminated.

Every indication I received while working at CZI told me that this was a place that did not value my professional expertise, identity or lived experience and that if I hoped to keep my job, I would need to suppress my values, beliefs and opinions.

Despite having joined CZI with substantial nonprofit and philanthropic experience, Chan’s comment underscored her perception of me as someone who was enjoying the good fortune of “developing” my talents at the foundation. This stood in stark contrast to the reality of working at CZI, which had revealed itself to be an extractive and exploitative environment for me and numerous Black employees.

I left the conversation unsatisfied with her responses and her lack of leadership, but remained hopeful that she would take appropriate action to address the matters of racial discrimination.

That hope would prove to be naive. Following our discussion, no follow-up meeting was scheduled, no HR representative reached out to me, and no one intervened on behalf of myself or my colleagues. Nothing was done.

CZI’s Black employees send a letter to Priscilla Chan

I cannot speak to why Chan did not take our conversation seriously, but I know that her negligence allowed inexcusable stress and harm to continue against Black employees. Further, I know such negligence is not the mark of someone who truly believes and understands that Black Lives Matter.

As reported by The Washington Post in August, the issues of racial bias and discrimination at CZI came to a head when CZI’s Black employee resource group sent a letter to Priscilla Chan.

In the letter, the collective body of Black employees outlined the systemic racism, discrimination and anti-Blackness present at CZI, citing its treatment of Black employees, its underinvestment in the Black community and the lack of action taken by leadership to address these persistent disparities.

In addition, the letter included a list of recommendations that the group believed would serve as good-faith first steps towards building a more inclusive and just environment for Black employees.

Unfortunately, Chan once again failed to grasp the seriousness of the issues the letter raised, refusing to meet several of the group’s requests, most notably declining to provide transparency into CZI’s pay equity data as it related to Black employees.

Instead of working through the plan of action that was put forth by Black employees, she tasked a recently hired chief operating officer with devising and implementing an alternative course of action. Having witnessed the dynamics of passing the buck and placating employees with half measures play out multiple times at the foundation, I recognized that further efforts would be in vain. On Aug. 31, I left CZI.

Earlier this week, I filed a discrimination claim against CZI with the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of myself and fellow Black employees who have experienced racial bias and discrimination at the foundation.

In addition, I have chosen to publish the claim in its entirety here, detailing the discrimination and systemic racial bias I have faced and witnessed while working at CZI.

After careful deliberation and counsel from colleagues in the field, I felt compelled to take these actions to ensure that CZI and its leaders are held accountable. I believe it is irresponsible and dangerous for an organization of this magnitude and influence to operate without care or consideration for race, while tackling issues related to voting rights, housing, criminal justice, immigration and education – issues steeped in a history of systemic racial bias and inequity.

Further, I know that my experience of discrimination at CZI is indicative of a larger problem concerning the treatment of Black people in philanthropy, and I believe my silence would only serve to reinforce the acceptability of similar practices.

***

CZI is not the first philanthropy that has sought to portray a commitment to racial justice, while privately operating in a discriminatory and racially biased manner.

Too often philanthropy devolves into a grotesque performance, where funders court a public image as “progressive,” “trust-based,” “anti-racist” and “responsive to community needs,” all while failing to do the work required to earn those accolades.

Inevitably, Black employees become enrolled in this performance and are resigned to serve as window dressing for institutions that we ourselves recognize as deeply flawed.

Against our better judgment, we are expected to publicly uphold, defend and promote philanthropies that we are rarely positioned to shape or influence. Worst still, if we attempt to affect change from within these institutions, we are reprimanded, our voices are suppressed, or we are quietly asked to leave.

This is an unprecedented moment in our country’s long and grisly history of racial and economic inequity. We find ourselves contending with a global pandemic that has disproportionately ravaged the Black community, a renewed social movement to end the violence and brutality perpetuated against Black bodies, and a presidential election that has seen the topic of white supremacy become a central matter of discussion and debate.

Now, perhaps more than ever, philanthropy should be rushing to center Black voices and expertise and to build authentic partnerships with the broader Black community.

Yet, as I speak to colleagues, friends and associates in the field, I am disheartened by accounts of Black professionals who, like myself, have been disempowered and displaced in this moment.

Programs are being cut, positions are being eliminated and the established trend of Black professionals leaving the industry at an alarming rate seems likely to only continue, in the face of the growing need for our presence and “lived experience.”

Even now, BIPOC professionals who have spent the last decade calling for foundations to embrace racial equity as a priority across their grantmaking, organizational culture and operations, are finding that their appeals continue to go largely ignored as institutions remain resistant to change.

All the while, many of these same institutions have been the quickest to capitalize on opportunities to publicize and self-applaud the marginal efforts they have undertaken to “respond to the moment.”

I think I speak for many of my colleagues in the field when I say I did not enter this industry to settle for the appearance of doing good. I am a Black man who grew up across the low-income neighborhoods of Queens, N.Y., and have experienced firsthand the effects of urban poverty and the intricacies of generational disenfranchisement.

I have faced many of the same barriers and challenges affecting the communities our sector purports to serve. My commitment to Black liberation and my deeply held desire to empower BIPOC and historically marginalized communities is not a matter of academic curiosity or charitable sentiment – it is core to who I am.

I believe philanthropy, much like our country, has arrived at a critical juncture and the choice before us is clear:

We can accept, as many of our harshest critics have indicated, that this industry is irredeemable and beyond self-reform.

We can accept that justice cannot serve as a guiding principle for a sector that emerged as a byproduct of this country’s history of racial and economic inequity.

We can resign ourselves to “performative philanthropy” and accept that our work will remain inextricably tied to generating publicity for individuals who have often amassed their fortunes through extractive and unethical means.

We can accept the status quo and allow this moment to pass, just as it always has.

Or alternatively, we can commit ourselves to doing the hard work of reimagining all that this industry is and can be.

We – industry executives, practitioners and professionals who came to this work seeking to center the needs of the communities we cherish, only to find ourselves enrolled in shadow theater – can commit ourselves to holding institutions accountable even when that means prioritizing our duty over our jobs.

We can commit ourselves to serving as true partners and co-conspirators for movements and communities entrenched in the fight for liberation.

We can commit ourselves to denouncing acts of performative philanthropy, recognizing that when institutions fail to align their private actions with their publicized values, when they choose media attention over community empowerment and power hoarding over trust, and become bastions for bias and extensions of white supremacy – We can commit ourselves to calling these institutions to task and exposing them for what they really are.

This is the choice before us, and the stakes have never felt higher.

Ray Holgado is a grantmaking, finance and operations professional based in San Francisco. He currently serves on the board of directors of the Andrus Family Fund and worked at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative from September 2018 through August 2020.

For Washington state’s Group Health Foundation, the current coronavirus pandemic has only reaffirmed the importance of community leadership to advance equity.  

Editor’s note: This article was written before the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis and the subsequent uprisings in more than 400 cities. Please see the dear colleague letter that accompanies this issue of Responsive Philanthropy for more context.

An early and unsettling headline from this pandemic came on a Friday in March from The New York Times: “‘Chilling’ Plans: Who Gets Care as Washington State Hospitals Fill Up?”  

At the time, we were the American epicenter for the outbreak as hospital and state leaders were planning for what was believed to be inevitable: Washington would soon see more patients than it could care for. Leaders were drawing up criteria to help hospitals decide who would get life-saving treatment and who wouldn’t.  

There were frightening implications: People of color, people with disabilities and older people would be denied life-saving care at staggering rates if criteria such as age and underlying health conditions were to move forward.  

At Group Health Foundation, we were worried about what would eventually become true: Black, brown and Indigenous people are overly represented in infections, fueled by longstanding systemic inequities. Our team thought if we didn’t speak up in that moment, we would regret it for years to come. As our board chair said: “It’s always the right time to do the right thing.”  

Over the weekend, we talked about what the right thing meant for us. We weighed countless options and struggled to find our voices. We are grantmakers, not health care providers; what would we know about making such painful and unimaginable choices?  

While we struggled with our next steps, Disability Rights Washington (DRW) already knew what to do. In reaction to the same news report and within the same weekend, DRW connected internally, organized with partners in and out of state, and filed a complaint the following Monday with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights. Seven other states also sent in complaints modeled after DRW’s.   

Five days later, the agency issued a statement affirming that “our civil rights laws protect the equal dignity of every human life from ruthless utilitarianism.” In the 3 days it took for us to figure out our best role, DRW assumed theirs to reaffirm the rights of people across the country. 

Equity is a leading value at Group Health Foundation. We aspire to seek community wisdom for funding decisions and prioritize lived experiences when hiring staff and recruiting board members. We are committed to making mostly general operating grants and minimizing unnecessary hoop-jumping for grantees.  

Yet, despite our aspirations and commitments, the rapidly changing, quick pace of this public emergency even got us momentarily distracted from a core belief: trust and follow community leadership on matters that impact them most.

We struggled, but what we did do right in this case was something we have always done: fund nonprofits that are culture- and identity-specific, multiracial and whose leadership and board are reflective of the communities they serve. We are grateful to have supported Disability Rights Washington in 2019 and 2020.  

I share this story because it was humbling for us. And I believe in this moment humility is something philanthropy could use more of, including examining our role in creating the inequities we see today and how we can work to undo them in the future.  

Philanthropy is complicit in perpetuating harm 

We find ourselves in a pivotal moment, living through a pandemic that has claimed more than 114,000 lives in the U.S. and nearly 4 times as much worldwide. At the end of it, many of us will likely have lost someone — a family member, a friend, a colleague. We will know even more people who have lost a job, closed a business or missed a mortgage payment. 

As a result, we are all grieving concrete losses, even grieving dreams and ideas about how we thought 2020 would turn out. There is certainly a lot of pain, and one of the most painful reckonings as we do this work is admitting how philanthropy is complicit in the inequities we see now.  

Modern philanthropy’s promise was to make the world a better place. Billions of dollars later, philanthropy has done a lot of good and perpetuated the disparities we see in health, education, employment and other areas of well-being.  

Our sector was founded by dynasties of white families who believed wealth equaled expertise. Our professional inheritance is tied to this world view and how it lives on in the way we operate today.  

What we now have is the legacy of our decisions: decisions on who gets funding (overwhelmingly white-led institutions), what issues are worth funding (without naming racism as a root cause), which prescriptive strategies to fund (instead of trusting community-designed solutions) and how to measure success (usually through a Eurocentric framework).

In recent years, we have taken best-selling critiques about philanthropy in stride — nodding in agreement as we launched book clubs, joined panel discussions, appeared on podcasts and drafted op-eds. The word “equity” has become ubiquitous, flowing freely from our speeches, annual reports, mission statements and funding strategies, signaling that we have a deeper understanding of the world around us.  

The dollars have not flowed to match our words. Numerous reports show funding for specific racial and ethnic communities have either stagnated or decreased; and the 1,000 largest foundations in the U.S. gave only 10% to communities of color.  

The subtext? Philanthropy knows better than community; that people who talk about equity know how to advance it — not communities experiencing inequities every day.  

When the coronavirus crisis hit, too many of us put down our newly acquired equity lenses and defaulted to business as usual. Some of us resumed the practice of spreading resources evenly across grantees all the while knowing that this pandemic did not evenly impact communities. 

Yet, the best responses came from foundations that understood how racism, classism, ableism, ageism, heterosexism — and other -isms — work, and how they interact to compound inequities.  

These funders understood from their grantees for whom social isolation would be most damaging. They understood which communities are overrepresented in jobs that put them at higher risk of exposure: cleaners and janitorial staff, food-processing plant employees, grocery store clerks, delivery drivers and warehouse workers. They understood who could not access public assistance based on immigration status. They understood whose humanity would be denied because of their race or ethnicity. They understood that racism plus classism is a public health crisis. 

Here in Washington, we were able to quickly bend our infection rates thanks to our culture- and identity-specific nonprofits. They proactively addressed these challenges and their success was because they had earned the trust of their communities.  

These groups responded to immediate needs: child care when schools were closed, food and supplies during shelter-in-place orders, technology for mental health counseling and culturally specific and non-English communication to prevent spread. Our nonprofits also stood up to systems by stopping evictions and foreclosures, pushing for better unemployment insurance and work conditions and, in the case of DRW, ensuring federal protections are in place for treatment. The work was going to happen with or without philanthropy, but our dollars helped defray costs, allowing them to serve more of the community.  

“Center those most impacted,” is not new insight. Yet we in philanthropy have largely ignored this advice, even when presented with a plethora of data, reports and stories that prove it is the fastest path to change. We come up with sophisticated reasons for our inaction, but they all boil down to a lack of willpower.  

Many of us in philanthropy are afraid to lose what this world offers us: job security, access to power and the chance to influence and shape the work of others. Afraid of damaging our reputation and dismantling the cozy places we’ve found ourselves in, we have made choices that protect our role and hedge against “risks.” 

However, the real risk is allowing our privilege to become our expertise.  

Remember who is doing the work

Let’s Stop COVID-19 sign in downtown Bellevue, Washington, during the pandemic.

We at Group Health Foundation are fortunate because we are new and get to build our organization from the ground up. Our team has benefitted from all the insight our peers in philanthropy have shared with us and we will forever be grateful for the lessons learned. If there is a common sentiment I can share, something I have heard time and again from both nonprofit leaders and retiring foundation presidents it is this:

Be more courageous, take more risks and remember who is doing the work.

Let’s remember who is doing the work and recognize that anything we want to accomplish is entirely dependent upon the community organizations we fund, not us. Let’s commit significant resources to organizations that are for and led by Black, Indigenous and people of color, immigrants and refugees, people with disabilities, members of the LGBTQIA+ community and people who have experienced poverty.

And when we do, let’s resist the urge to position ourselves as the expert, leader or savior of their work.

Let’s also stop normalizing and promoting the notion that certain communities are destined to suffer. This narrative upholds a society where it is acceptable to undervalue whole groups of people. We recently saw this play out nationally when too many people were quicker to decry broken windows over stolen Black lives.

Let’s take more risks by shouldering the burden that comes with challenging the status quo. Let’s apply pressure on those with whom we share institutional power to echo what generations have been asking for: comprehensive unemployment insurance for all workers, humane immigration policies, abolition of the prison industrial complex and health care as a human right.

Let’s demand a government that is accountable to the people it serves and ensure that future leaders reflect their communities. There is no shortage of brilliant leaders all around us. They are running nonprofits and organizing in their communities, and they can tell you off the top of their head — without a request for proposal process or a slide deck — what equity looks like for their people.

Let’s build a society where those who design policies are the people who experience inequities rather than those people who just talk about equity.

Let’s be courageous and acknowledge the generational harm that chattel slavery and attempted genocide has had on Black and Native communities. Let’s work to truly understand how its legacy has created a blueprint for racism and fascism that has hurt everyone in this country and apply that understanding to how we approach our work. Let’s always call racism for what it is.

We can create a better society if we put our full support behind the nonprofits doing the work. These organizations and leaders show they can do a lot with a little; imagine what we can build together if we develop the courage to trust and follow community leadership.

In philanthropy, we hold the trifecta of power: economic, political and social. Now is the time to wield it so that communities can lead us through recovery and what comes after.

The last time I wrote an NCRP article was 15 years ago. I was a young executive director of a Native American organization. Ironically, the piece was called “The New Same Old Story.” I was deeply frustrated with philanthropy and wanted change. I was not naïve; I understood I was just one more person in a long line of leaders who had been asking philanthropists to believe in community-driven solutions, trust community leaders and get real resources to those who carry our society’s burden of inequity.

I never imagined that one day I would be part of philanthropy, let alone a foundation CEO. I closed that article with a principle gifted to me by a friend and lifelong mentor from the Quinault Indian Nation:

“The people are beautiful, already.”

I believe this more today than ever before. We will all be fine if we remember this when we make grants.

Nichole June Maher is president and CEO of Group Health Foundation. She previously served as the CEO of Northwest Health Foundation and executive director of Native American Youth and Family Center. Nichole is also co-founder of the Coalition of Communities of Color.