The Carnegie Corporation named the 2022 winners of the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in an August 3 Chronicle forum. Among the awardees was Stacy Schusterman, who joined Chronicle editor Stacy Palmer for a wide-ranging discussion that included Regan Pritzker, co-founder of the Kataly Foundation, and Anne Earhart, a previous Carnegie medal winner and founder of the Marisla Foundation. During the forum, entitled Women Philanthropists: Charting a Course for Change, the panelists shared lessons they learned leading their family foundations. They explained whether recent global crises changed their giving and talked about the power of philanthropy to improve people’s lives. Read on for highlights of the conversation, or watch the full session below.
During the pandemic, says Schusterman, chairwomen of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, the group pursued some new approaches, such as giving more to individuals, but many of her foundation’s core areas stayed the same. Founded by her parents in 1987, the foundation primarily supports criminal-justice reform, education, gender and reproductive equity, Jewish causes and Israel, efforts to strengthen voting rights, and charities in the family’s hometown of Tulsa, Okla. Schusterman is a businesswoman who spent a decade leading her family’s oil and gas exploration company and later co-founded a real-estate investment company and clean-energy business.
The pandemic and other recent events, Schusterman says, demonstrate how quickly societal systems that are vital to people and a well-functioning democracy can be weakened or threatened. For example, Schusterman says, the pandemic showed the importance of access to paid leave and help with child care because so many women had to leave the work force to care for sick or vulnerable loved ones. Plus, the overturning of Roe v. Wade this summer, highlighted the link between women having control over decisions to bear children and their ability to participate fully in the economy. In addition, the racial reckoning after prominent police killings of people of color in 2020 revealed flaws in the criminal-justice system, and efforts to reduce people’s access to voting could imperil democracy.
“We are really doubling down on all of those things by joining collaboratives and listening to communities and getting their input on how we can more collaboratively work with them to help solve the problems that these communities are most impacted by,” says Schusterman.
“We’re taking a long-term approach by making multi-year general operating grants to our grantees so they can be more nimble in addressing these problems.”
Anne Earhart says her giving has not changed much since 2020 because she and her small team of employees believed it was important to continue supporting current grantees in tough times — even groups that had to change focus or found it impossible to carry out their missions.Sometimes when charities change what they are doing the foundations that support them will stop supporting them because of that change. She didn’t want to to do that.
Marisla paid for special retreats for the leaders of the nonprofits it supports so they could learn from one another how to respond to unprecedented challenges, Earhart says. “The emphasis was on self-care and how to deal with the enormous stresses they were undergoing in trying to keep their organizations going and their staffing together.”
An heiress to the Getty oil fortune, Earhart supports marine conservation, energy and climate programs, efforts to reduce toxic chemicals in the environment, and health and human-service groups through Marisla. The foundation has supported the Nature Conservancy, Oceana, and the Resources Legacy Fund, among others.
Regan Pritzker, an heiress to the Hyatt Hotels fortune, said advocacy is a particularly important aspect of a lot of the grant making she helps to direct through her family’s Libra Foundation and her own Kataly Foundation. Much of the grant making from both goes toward social-justice nonprofits that are primarily led by people of color, and many of those groups have started 501(c)(4) offshoots, which can be more actively involved in politics than can a traditional 501(c)(3) charity. As far as her own political giving, Pritzker said she has shied away from it for a long time.
“I resisted being a political funder for many years because of the unsavory feeling of being a wealthy person influencing politics in a disproportionate way,” Pritzker said. “But I’ve learned [from working with advisers] that you can be a political donor in ways that reinforce grassroots organizing and shift that power to the organizations you’re supporting.”
Schusterman says wealthy donors should give as much as they can now instead of waiting until their later years, and they should give multiyear general operating grants. Earhart agreed that giving general and long-term support is the best way donors can make a difference.
“I want the organizations to be doing what they do best and not spending their time fundraising,” said Earhart. “I consider keeping the lights on and the rent paid the best way to support those organizations. It may not be very sexy, but it’s important to let them to do their jobs.”
