Editor’s note: The following is a Power Moves toolkit Power in Practice example.

“If we had one wish, it would be for philanthropic funders to set aside more resources to invest in the long-term institutional capacity of organizations and far fewer resources on short-term projects or programs. The issues we all care about will not be ‘solved’ in two or three years, and, even after short-term wins, these issues will reemerge in new and unexpected ways.” – Herb Sandler, Co-founder and President, Sandler Foundation

Whether investing in start-up organizations or established nonprofits, the Sandler Foundation makes a long-term commitment to its grant partners. By investing in their core operations, Sandler helps these change organizations deepen their capacities in communications, outreach, research or whatever area the organizations see a need to strengthen.

This approach has helped key organizations make a significant impact. Sandler’s support enabled Faith in Action (formerly PICO), the faith-based community organizing network, to set up a national office and build out its infrastructure. Faith in Action has been able to provide moral leadership in national health care debates and on other critical equity issues.

Lisa Ranghelli is senior director of assessment and special projects at NCRP and primary author of Power Moves: Your essential philanthropy assessment guide for equity and justice. Follow @NCRP and @lisa_rang on Twitter, and join the conversation using #PowerMovesEquity!

This post is part of a series of case examples on building, sharing and wielding power for NCRP’s Power Moves toolkit. 

Editor’s note: The following is a Power Moves toolkit Power in Practice example.

“I think what’s undervalued and underappreciated is the issue of power and that the root of most social problems that plague our nation – health reform, education reform, fiscal government reform, housing reform – are not fundamentally innovation problems but power and equity problems. As a result of that, we have over the years increasingly been attentive to issues of advocacy, voice and power building in underserved communities and populations, and our grantmaking reflects that.” – Dr. Robert K. Ross, President and CEO, The California Endowment

On the heels of Philamplify’s in-depth study of The California Endowment (TCE), the foundation received NCRP’s Impact Award for a large private foundation. It embraces power as a driver of change and invests in efforts to build community power, particularly of those most affected by health inequities. Also, TCE formally links grassroots power-building with statewide policy change.

This is most explicitly illustrated through TCE’s Building Healthy Communities (BHC) – a 10-year (2010–2019), $1 billion community initiative to improve health outcomes in 14 targeted communities across the state. BHC works to build the organizing capacity of residents and service organizations, connecting advocacy to direct service work.

Using the social determinants of health frame, TCE supports organizing on a range of issues beyond health care access, including school discipline policies. Building on local community initiatives, TCE helped mobilize support to curb school-to-prison pipeline practices by expanding restorative justice policies and ending “willful defiance” as grounds for suspension or expulsion. School districts across the state have adopted favorable policies, thus elevating the public discourse statewide.

TCE also uses the power analysis framework of driving change by serving as a change-maker beyond grantmaking. This includes funding advocacy efforts, directly engaging in advocacy and strategic communications, convening and aligning its investment strategy with grantmaking goals.

While TCE operates at a much larger scale than most philanthropies, smaller funders can employ similar resident-led power building strategies at the community level, as well as a change-maker role.

Lisa Ranghelli is senior director of assessment and special projects at NCRP and primary author of Power Moves: Your essential philanthropy assessment guide for equity and justice. Follow @NCRP and @lisa_rang on Twitter, and join the conversation using #PowerMovesEquity!

This post is part of a series of case examples on building, sharing and wielding power for NCRP’s Power Moves toolkit. 

Editor’s note: The following is a Power Moves toolkit Power in Practice example.

“We invest in grassroots organizing that advances policy and systems change; that cuts across race, class, gender and sexuality; and that uses brave and innovative strategies informed from the ground up by communities directly impacted. This multi-issue, multi-identity solidarity approach has always been critical but is even more so now amidst a political terrain where millions of newly activated people are looking to plug-in to organizations to make a change.” – Vanessa Daniel, Executive Director, Groundswell Fund

In 2017, the Groundswell Fund received an NCRP Impact Award for “smashing silos” because it has focused on building bridges among reproductive justice (RJ) leaders and other social change advocates for multi-issue impact.

After the 2016 election, Groundswell launched a funder- and donor-pooled Liberation Fund to support women of color and trans people of color organizing as well as a rapid response fund so that reproductive justice groups could respond to new attacks on reproductive rights. The Liberation Fund is driven by women and trans advisors of color from the communities being served.

Its Ecosystem Initiative, also launched in 2016, seeks to accelerate RJ policy and systems change in Florida, Georgia, Colorado and other cities and states. It does this by increasing support for existing grantees and their key allies, such as economic justice organizations. Groundswell combines funding, capacity-building and other support to catalyze power building, movement-building and policy change.

Lisa Ranghelli is senior director of assessment and special projects at NCRP and primary author of Power Moves: Your essential philanthropy assessment guide for equity and justice. Follow @NCRP and @lisa_rang on Twitter, and join the conversation using #PowerMovesEquity!

This post is part of a series of case examples on building, sharing and wielding power for NCRP’s Power Moves toolkit. 

Editor’s note: The following is a Power Moves toolkit Power in Practice example.

“Racial disparities in philanthropic giving are fundamentally about whom we trust to lead us to change, whom we think of as strategic, and how we measure the capacity to do great work. Grantmakers must take conscious action to challenge our deepest, and sometimes unconscious, assumptions – assumptions that pose as common sense – if we are ever going to make true progress in significantly shifting funding to transformative work led by people of color.” – Pamela Shifman, Executive Director, NoVo Foundation

The NoVo Foundation, a 2013 NCRP Impact Award Winner, is a large independent foundation founded by Peter and Jennifer Buffet. NoVo invests in systemic change and engages millions of people worldwide in creative efforts to end violence against women and girls. Much of NoVo’s funding is in support of movement building – because the foundation understands that solving the most intractable problems in the world requires mass mobilization. Novo’s successful strategies include:

  • Organizing strategic initiatives that are linked and complementary. The Initiative to Empower Adolescent Girls emphasizes building the capacity of girls to reach their full potential and shifting social and cultural norms so that girls are valued; and the Initiative to End Violence against Girls and Women seeks to achieve long-term policy and cultural change, while building the leadership of the most impacted communities. NoVo’s Initiative for Social and Emotional Learning promotes a teaching approach that helps girls and boys develop skills to work well together for success in academics and life.
  • Contributing to organizations that work to change public policies that affect millions of people. One recent example is the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act by the U.S. Congress. NoVo gives sizable grants to advocacy groups like the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center, the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence and others that help build public will for policies that work to end violence against girls and women.
  • Investing in thriving local economies. NoVo invests in strong local-first movements through its Local Living Economies Initiative (LLE). NoVo’s LLE work connects “consumers with farmers, local investors with local entrepreneurs and business owners with their employees, neighbors and local eco-systems.”

Lisa Ranghelli is senior director of assessment and special projects at NCRP and primary author of Power Moves: Your essential philanthropy assessment guide for equity and justice. Follow @NCRP and @lisa_rang on Twitter, and join the conversation using #PowerMovesEquity!

This post is part of a series of case examples on building, sharing and wielding power for NCRP’s Power Moves toolkit. 

For more than 20 years, survey data has highlighted the persistent lack of diversity on nonprofit and foundation boards in the U.S.

Perhaps in reaction to that, a significant number of nonprofit and foundation chief executives say they are dissatisfied with the current composition of their boards and would like to do better.

As a former BoardSource staff member, co-author of early research on board composition and, since 2012, a member of the BoardSource board of directors, I often get approached by executives and board members who say they are ready to work on diversity and want to know how to get started.

My answer, grounded in experience as a board member and foundation executive, is: Boards that are serious about diversity need to prepare themselves for a conversation and a self-examination that is broader than brainstorming about how to get more people of color, more people with differing abilities or a broader age representation onto the board.

Diversity is only one aspect of a larger conversation about equity and power. Lack of diversity is just a presenting symptom – the part of the iceberg that shows above water, signaling much deeper systemic and structural issues that need to be understood and addressed before organizations can tackle board diversity in a meaningful and authentic way.

A growing number of boards and executives seem willing to have those conversations. But many boards still aren’t ready.

Attempting to force the issue because staff recognize the need, or as a response to external pressures and criticisms, may do more harm than good, sparking confusion, division or relapse into inertia.

4 Ways to know if your board is ready for deeper work in pursuit of equity

1. Multiple champions.

Ideally, at least a few board members should:

  • Understand this work.
  • Believe it’s important for the board to engage.
  • Be willing to help bring their peers along.

One champion won’t be enough. Board sentiment can shift depending on who shows up for the meeting, and it’s unfair to ask a single board member to bear a disproportionate share of responsibility to move these conversations forward – particularly if that board member is a person of color.

2. Openness to learning.

Board members may be at very different places in their understanding and personal journeys around equity and structural and institutional racism.

Those who are open to learning can find enormous benefit in processing information with a group they know and trust.

But a few board members who are resistant to learning, or don’t believe conversations about equity are relevant to mission, can easily derail a process and prevent progress.

3. Willingness to commit significant time.

Board members are often volunteers with busy lives, and some may come from professional settings in which they are accustomed to faster timelines and more focused decision-making processes.

Reluctance or unrealistic expectations about the time involved should be a warning signal.

4. Alignment with broader organizational goals.

Boards operate within a larger organizational context. A board’s work on equity, diversity and inclusion should not be undertaken in isolation from the organization’s larger direction and goals.

A board commitment to equity will be of limited value if that commitment doesn’t flow through to an organization’s broader culture and day-to-day work.

Similarly, efforts by staff to move an equity agenda can only go so far if an organization’s governing body is unwilling to approve policy decisions that support that commitment.

What should you do if your board isn’t ready to take on equity?

For boards that aren’t ready, here are some suggestions for executives, board chairs and governance committee chairs:

1. Have strategic, 1-on-1 conversations with board members to lay the groundwork for future conversations.

2. Look for opportunities to bring equity champions into key leadership roles, including chair or vice chair, members of the governance committee or governance committee chair.

3. Encourage board members to attend conferences, workshops or events sponsored by other organizations that are further along.

4. Recruit incoming board members with a demonstrated personal commitment to equity. Be honest about where your board is, how you hope it could shift and what role you think they could play in changing the board.

5. Take the readiness assessment in NCRP’s Power Moves assessment guide, and explore recommended resources from partners such as ABFE and the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity.

Authentic board engagement around equity can’t be forced or faked, and boards can’t do the necessary work unless they’re ready.

But I know from experience that boards can change, and that change doesn’t need to take years of effort.

Accurately reading the signals of readiness and carefully planting the seeds for change can prepare boards to do this work, which should be a required prerequisite for conversations about diversity.

Rick Moyers is a philanthropic consultant, board member of BoardSource, and former vice president of programs and communications with the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation. Follow @Rick_Moyers on Twitter.

Editor’s note: The following is a Power Moves toolkit Power in Practice example.

“Issues of race and racism dominated the media and political landscape over the past 2 years. During that time, I was heartened that racism was again on the table and that so many in the social sector were talking about it.

“I was proud to be among 11 funders contributing to the Washington Regional Association of Grantmakers’ Putting Racism on the Table series.

“As we go deeper into our work, I want to send this note of caution to the sector: This work is not for the faint of heart.

“It requires going against the grain and a commitment to the long haul. We must expect that every victory will send racism scurrying for a new way to carry out its original intent – to privilege whites at the expense of people of color.

“Therefore, this work requires a special kind of clarity and vigilance both personally and professionally.”  – Yanique Redwood, CEO, Consumer Health Foundation

The $23 million Consumer Health Foundation has made a strong commitment to racial equity in its health grantmaking.

Further, CEO Yanique Redwood has used her bully pulpit to exhort and educate other funders about what it truly means to lead with equity.

While it is promising that so many health foundations have embraced “health equity” as a concept, Redwood notes that jumping on this “bandwagon” requires deep, tough and thoughtful work.

As outlined in the foundation’s racial equity impact assessment tool, first, a grantmaker needs to ask the right questions about a proposed policy solution and then fund the groups best equipped to advance an equity agenda related to that policy.

The foundation keeps building on its equity commitment. It has been holding workshops on racial equity for nonprofit organizations to build their capacity; in 2018, it launched a year-long learning exchange so that nonprofits that have participated in training and begun integrating a racial equity lens into their operations and work can meet with a cohort of peers to deepen and institutionalize those efforts.

Lisa Ranghelli is senior director of assessment and special projects at NCRP and primary author of Power Moves: Your essential philanthropy assessment guide for equity and justice. Follow @NCRP and @lisa_rang on Twitter, and join the conversation using #PowerMovesEquity!

This post is part of a series of case examples on building, sharing and wielding power for NCRP’s Power Moves toolkit. 

“Do you want to be powerful?” asked Jeanné Isler, NCRP’s vice president and chief engagement officer, as she opened the first deep-dive webinar in a series from The Funders’ Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities (TFN).

Whether we want power or not, we all exercise it in some form. Be it personal, positional or institutional, it’s essential to examine our power to understand how to utilize it for social change.

Jeanné’s question yielded a thoughtful, honest conversation between Joseph Gutierrez, program associate at the Maddox Charitable Fund and Jehan Benton-Clark, portfolio director at the Colorado Health Foundation.

The conversation drew from and built on NCRP’s publication, Power Moves: Your essential philanthropy assessment guide for equity and justice. Joseph reviewed the draft guide, and Jehan participates in the Power Moves learning group for funders.

Link to watch Power Forward webinar.

Framing the conversation on building, sharing and wielding power

Having a shared definition of power is an important first step. Jeanné gave an overview of the Power Moves framework, whose glossary highlights key terms, informed by sector leaders such as OpenSource Leadership Strategies, CHANGE Philanthropy and the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity:

  • Equity: Achieved when you can no longer predict an advantage or disadvantage based on race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation or ability.
  • Power: Control, influence or authority. Rashad Robinson of Color of Change said, “Power is the ability to change the rules.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Power is the ability to achieve a purpose. Whether or not it is good or bad depends upon the purpose.”

In a social change and equity context, distinctions are made between “power over” and “power with.”

  • White privilege: The concrete benefits of access to resources and social rewards and the power to shape the norms and values of society that whites receive, unconsciously or consciously, by virtue of their skin color in a racist society.

Power at the Colorado Health Foundation

The Colorado Health Foundation (CHF) advances health equity to bring health within reach for all Coloradans.

Power Moves supports the foundation’s equity and inclusion initiatives, to fully operationalize equity and help program officers across the state be more responsive to the communities they serve.

Jehan emphasized that authentic dialogue is required for deeper dives into how power plays out internally and externally in foundations.

CHF staff began their journey with Power Moves by using the glossary to help define power. In line with their existing body of work, Jehan’s team has focused on building power through grantmaking and wielding power by funding advocacy.

Some of the hardest feedback that CHF received was that foundation staff were unapproachable, stemming from program officers not wanting to lead people on about grant opportunities.

The feedback led to conversations about how to build genuine relationships with grantees. To avoid a transactional approach, the foundation will review the roles of program officers to make them more transformational and field-based.

Power at the Maddox Charitable Fund

Maddox Charitable Fund is based in Nashville, Tennessee, and serves a 41-county mid-state region. A few years ago, the fund started asking grantees about the issues they are facing in the community.

In response, they encouraged the fund to focus on sharing and wielding power.

After listening to their partners, Maddox took a stronger stance on issues like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and water conservation.

They re-envisioned their website to be more transparent, added a database with 5 years of grant history, and changed their technology to include in-person and on-line workshops.

The foundation is still examining how power shows up internally, and building consensus among their 2 staff members and board of community leaders.

Individual and positional power

Power shows up on a personal level. In his closing remarks, Joseph shared that, as a young person of color, he sometimes can’t wrap his head around the idea that he has power in his position as a program associate. As an Asian-American, his life is “lived in the hyphen.”

As he thinks about his power in the roles he occupies, and how to bring his whole self, he notes that fostering collective power, not exercising power as an individual, is his ultimate goal.

For Jehan, a southerner in Colorado, working for a grantmaker is a combination of understanding the context of the foundation and the history of marginalized communities in the state.

She constantly questions how to use her power to support communities who have been stripped of their power.

What power can you wield from your seat?

Continue the conversation with The Funders’ Network! Join TFN for their 20th annual conference from March 18-20 in Miami to explore how philanthropy can leverage its collective power to create communities and regions that are truly sustainable and just.

Stay engaged with Power Moves! Download the guide and catch up on NCRP’s own webinars, including a toolkit overview and deeper dives into building, sharing and wielding power.

Connect with us at powermoves@ncrp.org, and stay tuned for other Power Moves programs in 2019!

Until this week, Reed Young was events and webinars intern at NCRP. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

Thank you to The Funders’ Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities for their partnership with NCRP and the Power Moves project.

Two recent philanthropic sector news items have attracted the attention of philanthro-folks on social media. Both channel current debates about whose voices are heard in public discourse, and both hint at opportunities for foundations to embrace sharing their power with the communities they serve.

On Jan. 9, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported that a group of extended Andrus family members who object to the Surdna Foundation’s current racial equity grantmaking strategy had sent letters to the Surdna board of directors expressing their displeasure.

Now their objections have been aired in a prominent industry publication.

The next day, Hewlett Foundation CEO Larry Kramer published an open letter in which he announced that, in order to “hear our opponents and make them feel heard,” the foundation’s staff would, over several months, spend time listening to the foundation’s opponents and deliberate the merits of their opinions. 

The implied identity of “opponents” in the letter seems to be those who would, like the Andrus family members, take issue with the Hewlett Foundation’s systems-change approach to their grantmaking.

What connects these stories is what is conspicuously missing: The voices of grantees and the often-marginalized communities they serve.

Both assert that foundation staff have a responsibility to engage meaningfully with those who would question their grantmaking strategies, but appear to presuppose that that category includes other philanthropists or ideological opponents.

In other words: People with similar levels of power and privilege as the foundation leadership and staff themselves.  

Neither speaks to the value of grantee community voices in that conversation, and that’s a missed opportunity that, luckily, can be easily remedied.

It’s no surprise that foundations, like the rest of us, have begun to wrestle publicly with hot-button issues in the past few years: Whose voice is worth listening to? Who has power and privilege in a changing country and world? Who should?

Whose voice is worth listening to?

“Foundations depend on their boards for wisdom, perspective, and sense-making. Board members who bring authentic relationships, experiences, and an understanding of the communities the foundation aims to serve are more likely to help shape strategies that are responsive to real needs.” – Jim Canales and Barbara Hostetter, Barr Foundation

Our capacity to listen empathetically should expand in light of the deep divisions recently exposed in our civic life. But we shouldn’t listen as if power and privilege do not exist.

The descendants of a mega-wealthy donor whose ideological viewpoint is echoed in the halls of the Senate, the White House and on the country’s most-watched TV network are not under-represented in the public discourse.

Those who would deny facts to defend the status quo – people who deny the facts of our changing climate, for example – are not those whose perspective is sorely missing from philanthropy.

It may feel broad-minded to give hearing to voices of dissent when they come from other people with power. But inviting conversation with other wealthy, privileged and, often, white people about what good grantmaking looks like is not a shift in the status quo. It’s what most foundations do by default every day.

In 2014, the D5 Coalition’s research showed that 92% of foundation CEOs and 87% of their board members were white. Just 38% of foundation board members were women, 2% identified as LGBTQ and just 1% identified as disabled.

No data exist on the socio-economic status of foundation CEOs and board members, but it’s not going out on a limb to conclude the overwhelming majority are people with high incomes, high wealth or both.

This begs the question: In a sector that is still overwhelmingly staffed by well-heeled white people, what would a shift in empathetic listening look like? Grantee organizations and the communities they serve hold part of the answer.  

Who has power?

“Public officials, grantmakers, and others in power may tap constituents for their ‘input’ at a neighborhood charrette or community meeting, but they often ultimately ignore community ideas and insights. As a result, many communities have plenty of experience with people in power telling them what is really good for them, rather than being able to speak for themselves and act on their own behalf.” – Linda S. Campbell, Detroit People’s Platform and Building Movement Project

Listening with empathy is necessary, but insufficient. The most effective foundations go beyond listening to actively sharing power in order to co-determine the best interventions with their grantees and the communities they are part of, which are closest to the sticky problems foundations are working to address.

These ideas are being put into practice by innovative institutions in the sector. In 2014, the Brooklyn Community Foundation launched a community engagement initiative that brought foundation staff and leadership into conversation with nearly 1,000 Brooklyn residents through 30 neighborhood roundtables.

The results: The foundation created a 17-member community advisory council, invested $100,000 in community-identified priorities and decided to implement the resident-driven process every year.

A wealth of knowledge, experience and innovation are left out of the grantmaking process when foundations make decisions in a vacuum without grantee and community input.

There are paths for institutions to take to begin listening with empathy to the unheard voices of philanthropy and sharing power through accountability.

NCRP’s Power Moves guide provides a host of different options for foundations interested in embarking on that journey.

And NCRP’s staff is ready to be a thought partner to those who decide they’re ready to take the leap toward accountability.  

It’s for each foundation to chart its course through this era when questions of power and privilege are inescapable, especially for a sector that is largely built on both.

Philanthropic leaders have incredible opportunities in this challenging time. Foundations that embrace sharing their power with their grantees and the communities they serve can unlock innovative new solutions to our pressing problems and begin to transform their grantmaking practices to become more effective, more authentic and more mission-aligned. 

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

“At the heart of our work have been these central questions: Is racial equity in philanthropy even possible? Can the fallacy of philanthropic expertise fall away to create room for the nonprofit visionary to lead? In a city of such exquisite design – from bold architecture to systemic racism – can we ask more of ourselves in philanthropy, listen more, talk less, focus on areas that have been disinvested in and lift the powerful organizations that have grown in spite of… that disinvestment?”

 — Angelique Power, President, The Field Foundation of Illinois, 2017-18 Biennial Report

When Angelique Power became CEO of The Field Foundation of Illinois more than 2 years ago, she helped the institution embark on a new path, to change “how we fund, who we fund, how we measure our work and our worth.” The foundation pledged to direct:

  • At least 50% of funding to organizations on the South and West sides of Chicago.
  • At least 60% of funding to organizations led by African, Latinx, Asian, Arab and Native American (ALAANA) constituencies.

Through its Justice and Leadership Investment portfolios, the foundation funds community organizing and advocacy among these constituencies, helping historically under-resourced neighborhoods exert power to reshape the systems that perpetuate inequity.

Field’s biennial report captures some of the stories of impact emerging from these investments, affording a birds-eye view of power-building grantmaking in practice:

  • Arise Chicago has helped exploited low-wage workers become leaders and successfully fight for better workplace conditions and benefits.
  • The Chicago Community Bond Fund has made progress toward reducing and eliminating money bonds, which force individuals without wealth – who are presumed innocent – to spend long periods in jail while awaiting trial.
  • The Crusher’s Club and Youth Organizing Project have each engaged youth of color and helped cultivate their leadership skills, enabling them to have access to better opportunities and outcomes in the future.

Lisa Ranghelli (@lisa_rang) is NCRP’s senior director of assessment and special projects.