How philanthropy can recover right from COVID-19

We at NCRP sit with heavy hearts over the continued anti-Asian violence that has been going on across the nation during the last year, including this week’s shootings of Tan Xiajie, Julie Park, Feng Daoyou, Park Hyeon Jeong, Delaina Ashley Yaun and Paul Andre Michaels in Atlanta. We acknowledge the grief and fear from these continued assaults and the longstanding racist lies and tropes that have fueled them even before the recent pandemic. Pain that directly results from the general failure of society to deal with gender violence that sees an overwhelming majority of these recent assaults directed at women.

We stand with our Asian American staff, friends and partners in not just in denouncing these acts of violence, but also in calling for our sector to use the power of its voice and its grant dollars. That specifically includes supporting a new normal that makes Asian American and Pacific Islander organizations part of their regular grantmaking and advancing a more holistic racial-equity strategy that tackles gender-based and anti-immigrant violence.

Another hard look in the American mirror

The truth is that the shooting of 8 people, including 6 Asian women, is yet another tragic reminder of the life-threatening consequences that communities — and Black, Indigenous, People of Color women and trans people specifically — face when we fail to actively address this nation’s destructive foundation of misogyny, anti-Blackness and white supremacy. It’s a story that includes not just a centuries-long history of sexual violence against Asian women that is rooted in imperialism and colonialism, but one that is ever present. One just has to look at what’s on television and in the movies to see the dehumanizing, sexualized stereotypes that seem only in the service of white, cisgender men.

Red Canary Song, a grassroots collective of Asian and migrant sex workers, organizing transnationally, explains it best: “The women who were killed faced specific racialized gendered violence for being Asian women and massage workers. Whether or not they were actually sex workers or self-identified under that label, we know that as massage workers, they were subjected to sexualized violence stemming from the hatred of sex workers, Asian women, working class people, and immigrants.”

Where we go from here

If January’s attempted insurrection didn’t provide a clue, it should be clear by now that we will all have to directly confront the dangerous repercussions of how the last 4 years have emboldened white supremacy in a way few thought possible.

That’s why, more than ever, philanthropy has to commit to practical rapid response and investment in safeguarding communities and the organizers who serve them. In the immediate aftermath, it means listening to local groups like Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Atlanta, which said community members need “robust and responsive crisis intervention resources,” including mental health, legal and immigration services. It also means challenging click-bait driven media narratives that spend more time focusing on Black-Asian hostility than on exploring the unjust, exclusionary policies and systems that are at the root of those racial tensions.

Long term, philanthropy cannot allow a fight against anti-Asian racism distract from its efforts to rooting out anti-Black racism. It would also do well to adopt a grantmaking framework, advocated by groups like the Ella Baker Center, that reimagines safety as security that isn’t based on the use of force, militarized law enforcement and criminalization of communities of color, but on addressing the root causes of violence and providing community care. And on ensuring that we have local infrastructures that provide individuals and families with the economic, educational, language and health-related resources to heal from systematic trauma and reach their potential.

That will certainly mean continued moments of discomfort and well-intentioned missteps from institutions. It will also mean that some friends, more than others, will have to play catch up as they do their own important work in addressing these issues internally and personally.

But it can also mean bold imagination, healing joy and new expressions of love.

Our commitment to justice, liberation — and each other — demands nothing less.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published on NCRP’s Medium page and on Candid’s blog.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted every aspect of life around the globe and exacerbated perennial challenges such as entrenched poverty, hunger, lack of access to health care and racial inequality. 

In spite of the challenge presented by social distancing requirements, the U.S.’s civil society has mobilized to begin meeting historic levels of need for direct services. 

And as a reinvigorated movement for Black civil and human rights swelled again last spring and summer, organizations working at the intersection of advocacy, community organizing and systems change have stepped up, too. U.S. foundations, corporations and individual donors have responded, and according to Candid, more than $10.7 billion in U.S. grantmaking has been dedicated to meeting the COVID-19 challenge so far.

There is no doubt that philanthropy has responded to COVID-19 on a scale not seen before. Nearly 800 philanthropic organizations signed on to the Council on Foundations pledge calling on foundations to commit significant resources in response to COVID-19 and reduce grant restrictions and reporting requirements for their grantees. 

A July and August survey by the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) found that 72% of surveyed foundations said they had increased their 2020 payout above what they had planned for the year. “Almost all” surveyed foundations reported a new strategic focus on supporting Black communities and other marginalized people during the ongoing COVID crisis, and 80% of surveyed funders said they were prioritizing systems change funding.

A survey of 500 of the largest U.S. foundations by scholars at the University of Washington Evans School of Public Policy (fielded between May and August) found that 75% reported they had relaxed restrictions on grants, making it easier for recipients to use the funds to meet emergency needs. Most (70%) said they’d started a COVID-specific response fund. But less than one-third reported they had increased their payout percentage. 

The dissonance between this final statistic and that gathered by CEP’s survey demonstrates the limitations of reporting percentages from limited sample sizes.

The debate will continue whether foundations and other donors have done enough to fulfill their obligations during the ongoing crises gripping the country. Candid will not have a full picture of 2020 grantmaking until more giving data becomes available — ideally from funders submitting their grants directly to Candid. (Find out more about submitting grants data.)

There are, however, already some major takeaways from Candid’s COVID-19 grantmaking data as well as some major unanswered questions.

What we know

● As of Jan. 13, Candid has tracked $10.7 billion across 24,349 grants by foundations, corporations, and large individual donors to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S.

● Candid identified an additional $8.2 billion representing 290 pledges. Candid distinguishes between grants, contributions for a specified amount to a recipient, and pledges, which generally reflect the announced intention to provide funding, typically in response to a crisis or emergency. In some cases, there may be double-counting between grants and pledges in Candid’s database.

● Of U.S. grants funding to address COVID-19, 7% ($727 million, 551 grants) also addresses issues of racial equity. These grants are also captured in Candid’s racial equity map for 2020.

Tracking the philanthropic response to the COVID-19 pandemic provided Candid with an opportunity to scale up its collection of data on giving by individuals and corporations. Together, these 2 types of funders are responsible for 75% of U.S. COVID grants funding and 67% of pledged funding that Candid has collected so far.

How is COVID giving different?

Based on available U.S. grants data, grantmaking in response to the pandemic appears to have been designated for social justice and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color)-serving initiatives at higher rates than we’ve typically seen.¹

● Some 28% of U.S. COVID giving so far has been for social justice strategies.² Between 2003 and 2016, just 9–12% of U.S. giving by the Foundation 1000 was for comparable strategies.

● One-tenth of U.S. grant dollars and 5% of U.S. pledged dollars for COVID have been designated explicitly to benefit Black communities. Only 2% of Foundation 1000 giving has been designated this way in previous years.

● Some 0.9% of total COVID-19 grant dollars (and zero pledged dollars) were designated explicitly to benefit Indigenous and American Indian communities, compared to just 0.1% of the total in previous years.

What Candid’s data can’t tell us

Candid has tracked but has found little detail on 2 types of COVID-19 funding. Together, they comprise significant chunks of all private giving in response to COVID-19 tracked to date:

● Pledges. As noted earlier, these are intentions to give specified amounts at some point in the future (290 pledges, $8 billion). They account for 43% of all U.S. COVID funding tracked by Candid so far.

● Grants to multiple or unknown recipients. These are specific gifts that have been announced but that, aside from the grant amount, contain little to no information about the organizations receiving the funds (1,200 grants, $5.5 billion). More than half (51%) of U.S. COVID grants tracked by Candid so far can only be attributed to multiple or unknown recipients.

This breakdown between verifiable, detailed grants data and gifts with an expression of intent and little else plays out in different ways across different kinds of giving:

More specifically, Candid’s detailed grants data suggests that funders are explicitly focusing on communities of color to vastly different degrees — 20% of grants to named recipients were expressly focused on Black communities, but less than 5% each for Latinx people, Asian American Pacific Islander people and Indigenous people. 

And while a substantial portion of grant dollars to multiple or unnamed recipients (41% in either case) reportedly serve BIPOC communities and support social justice strategies, the lack of detail about this funding prevents more in-depth analysis. Without more information, it is impossible to confirm who is receiving this funding and in what amounts.

More research is also required to determine whether funders are making good on their commitments. At this time, Candid has only been able to find associated grants information for roughly 24% of COVID-19 pledges.

There are various possible explanations for this discrepancy: 

1. Grants associated with the pledge haven’t been awarded yet. 

2. Grants were awarded, but not publicly announced. 

3. Grants were publicly announced, but Candid hasn’t yet come across the announcement or processed the data.

Finally, and perhaps most important, Candid can only track what they find (i.e., what is made publicly available or shared directly). While foundation funding will eventually become available via foundations’ 990s (though not necessarily at a very descriptive level) Candid can only track funding from high-net-worth individuals, corporate direct giving programs and LLCs if it’s publicly announced. No mandated mechanism for transparency exists.

To what extent has philanthropy’s COVID response has been sufficient, effective and just? Here are the questions NCRP and Candid will be looking for answers to in 2021.

4 Big questions raised by the data

1. Will donors and foundations make good on their pledges to communities of color? 
Spring and summer of 2020 — and more specifically, the community organizing led by Black grassroots activists — inspired a wave of announcements of new racial justice philanthropy initiatives. How and when will those announcements of intent be realized? Will the philanthropic momentum built by BIPOC leaders continue into 2021?

2. How much funding for COVID work in communities of color will go to work by and for those communities?
We know — both because BIPOC in philanthropy have said so for decades and because the quantitative data shows us — that BIPOC-led organizations are systematically underfunded due to implicit and explicit biases in our grantmaking practices. Will philanthropy’s COVID-driven investments in BIPOC communities reach work by and for those communities?

3. Will the philanthropic response to COVID change how grantmaking is done, or just how much?
Hundreds of the country’s largest foundations have pledged to change their grantmaking practices to embrace more flexible MYGOD (multi-year general operating dollars) funding practices. Candid’s data doesn’t capture instances where funding has been pre-paid, project support has been converted to general operating support or reporting requirements have been relaxed. But it does seem to point to a new focus on social justice strategies and general support funding in the COVID pandemic response. Will changes like these be durable? Will more foundations adopt them?

4. To what extent will donors share the details of their grantmaking — either publicly, or better yet, directly with Candid — as long as mandatory reporting does not exist? 
The law requires foundations to disclose sparingly little information about their grantmaking, and it requires next to no disclosure from individual donors or corporate giving. Despite this lack of requirement, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey has shown a high degree of transparency through a publicly available spreadsheet where his LLC, Start Small, is sharing details about how it’s disseminating the $1 billion he’s committed in response to the pandemic. We encourage other donors and foundations to follow this example and share grants-level information about their giving, including through Candid’s eReporting program.

Over the past year, we’ve seen funders take drastic actions to support their grantees and their communities. The scale and newness of philanthropy’s COVID-19 response demands extensive analysis by many researchers using a variety of methods. We hope this preliminary analysis will inspire others to dive deeper into Candid’s data on COVID-19 philanthropy and look forward to working together to better understand a most unprecedented year in giving.

1. The Foundation 1000 is Candid’s annual data set capturing all grants of $10,000 or more awarded by 1,000 of the largest U.S. foundations each year. The set is used to identify trends in U.S. foundation giving and, here, represents “typical” grantmaking. 

2. Candid uses a definition for social justice grantmaking it developed in collaboration with NCRP that includes subject and strategy codes like community organizing, democracy, human rights, environmental justice, health care access, and others. Read more here.

Ryan Schlegel is NCRP’s research director. Follow @r_j_schlegel on Twitter. 

Anna Koob is Candid’s director of research standards.

If the past few months have shown us anything, it is that there is no going back to normal. Beyond the unimaginable thought of full subway trains and crowded restaurants and bars, our “normal” was horribly flawed.

Our “normal” meant accepting the hostility and racism against the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community as COVID-19 spread, a disease that is disproportionately affecting Black communities, who are also the targets of state-sponsored violence.

It’s time for a new normal. A new normal that must address anti-Asian hostility and anti-Black racism head on, especially as organizations seek to diversify and deepen their work around racial equity.

To do that, we must acknowledge the historical roots of anti-Asian racism in this country and how it has served the myth of white supremacy.

Anti-Asian racism as a tool of white supremacy

The demonization of Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic is part of a long history of discrimination and social shaming in the U.S.

The Chinese Exclusionary Act of 1882, internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and labeling of Southeast Asians as terrorists post 9/11, are just a few reminders that anti-Asian hostility is long ingrained in America’s history.

We see the continuation of that rhetoric not just in the policies of the current presidential administration, but also with the model minority myth.

For many years, AAPI people, and East Asians in particular, have benefited from the model minority myth, created to further divide Asian Americans and Black people to benefit white people.

Asian Americans were considered hardworking and obedient, a stereotype that embraced anti-Black rhetoric and granted many AAPI people access to something almost like white privilege. This dynamic exists in philanthropy, too.

This myth has been harmful for the AAPI community, masking the complexity and unique identities of each community, while further worsening the perceptions towards Black people.

But it has also permitted and even encouraged more violence against Black people – by white people and people who aren’t white.

A hard reset is needed

As conversations about racial equity have gained renewed traction, the reality is that anti-Blackness is still ingrained in the sector.

Philanthropic institutions have made bold statements and committed to action to condemn anti-Asian racism and anti-Blackness.

But we know from the data available that AAPI communities receive just 0.2% of all U.S. grantmaking, and Black communities received just 1% in 2017.

In Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy’s open letter to philanthropy to cure “viral racism,” one of the calls to action is to “think of this moment as a ‘reset’ button to imagine a more holistic approach to philanthropy that gains new traction toward racial and gender equity.”

If we are serious about creating a new normal, we must imagine and create a more holistic philanthropic approach that includes AAPI voices that aren’t at the expense of Black ones. One place to start is by increasing AAPI representation, especially at the leadership level.

According to recent data from the Diversity Among Philanthropic Professionals (DAPP) survey, AAPI people make up 9% of the sector, and 14% of the millennials in philanthropy.

This statistic bodes well for the future, especially as it relates to the overall size of the applicant pool over the next decade. AAPI are the fastest growing minority population, and are younger than white people, reflecting the trend that young people are more diverse and more progressive.

Young, progressive and in primed position for leadership 

Millennial AAPI representation in philanthropy that reflects more progressive perspectives is critical to responding to and meeting the unique needs of the population, which includes people from over 20 countries and many more cultures, religions and languages.

And as millennials become the next philanthropic leaders – and as Gen Zers enter the work force – it is also critical to ensure that there is a leadership development pipeline to positions with decision-making power over foundation strategies.

Currently, within the already white-dominated sector, AAPI people are especially underrepresented at the board level, making up only 4% of boards, compared to 60% of white board representation.

If this continues, even with increased AAPI representation in other positions, funding inequities will still exist without AAPI voices leading on funding strategies that meet the needs of the community.

Diversity at the board level is a key driver to setting strategies and funding priorities that meet the needs of the communities the sector seeks to serve.

Representation from the AAPI community is even more important to make sure the complex needs and challenges of the community are not lost or misunderstood as a monolithic community.

But increasing AAPI representation must also come with increasing Black representation in the sector. While AAPI people make up 9% of philanthropy, Black people make up only 11% of the sector. DAPP data suggests that even with increased representation of people of color, they are not becoming more Black or even more inclusive of Black voices at decision-making tables. Even though people of color make up 38% of the sector, white people are still the majority in philanthropy, making up 60% of the sector.

That’s why it’s so important for Asian Americans to play an active role in confronting anti-Blackness in philanthropy’s equity work. Doing so helps our communities break free from the “wedge” narrative and helps erode another tool of white supremacy

A new world is within our grasp

As a sector whose foundations are rooted in the profits born from racial inequality and exploitation, philanthropy has a responsibility to lead as the world looks to create new, more equitable normal.

This effort must be co-powered by AAPI voices and experiences without reinforcing harmful narratives that further divide AAPI and Black communities. Additional steps to confront racism and establish a new normal in philanthropy:

• Use an anti-racist lens in grantmaking and fund strategies that address racism while meeting more urgent community needs.
• Increase AAPI representation in decision-making positions, especially at the board level.
• Examine how anti-Blackness exists in your organization: Are AAPI staff filling token diversity roles that perpetuate the model minority myth? Are you increasing Black representation as you increase diversity? How are AAPI voices represented in conversations about race and equity?

We must imagine change that does more than just look different. Our communities deserve — and our collective future depends on — an equitable world that is no longer powered by white supremacy but instead on solidarity and justice.

Stephanie Peng is NCRP’s senior associate for movement research. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.