Foundations have committed nearly half a billion dollars in recent weeks to racial justice efforts, including a nearly $170 million commitment announced Wednesday by the Hewlett Foundation.
Hewlett will move swiftly to give $18 million to anti-racism activities in the coming months. The rest will be part of a program area that is still being developed. , Hewlett plans to hire a chief equity and culture officer who will report directly to Larry Kramer, Hewlett’s president, and integrate racial justice into all of its programming areas.
In a statement provided to the Chronicle, Kramer acknowledged that as a foundation that has not traditionally focused on racial justice, Hewlett has much to learn. The recent killings of Amhaud Aubrey, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, he says, triggered an “awakening” to the long history of racism in America.
“Our new grant making will allow us to specifically focus on and support groups working on racial justice,” he wrote in the statement. “But the pernicious effects of systemic racism are found in every field in which we work — education, performing arts, environment, global development and reproductive health, and U.S. democracy. We will undertake a broader effort to integrate racial justice more fully into our grant making and our internal culture and operations.”
(The Hewlett Foundation is a financial supporter of the Chronicle.)
Hewlett is the second major grant maker to commit more than $100 million to racial justice in the span of one week following the Open Society Foundations’ $220 million plan to support Black-led organizations. Just six months ago, such a huge commitment to racial justice would have seemed like a radical departure for Open Society, says Alvin Starks, director of the equality team at Open Society-U.S. While the grant maker has long focused on human rights and racial equity, it did not have a program area specifically focusing on combating anti-Black racism.
That was before Minneapolis a police officer killed George Floyd and hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in protest.
In response, Open Society created a new approach that would directly address anti-Black racism rather than racism across the board, and it doubled the length of its normal grant cycle to five years, giving Black movement leaders the latitude to try new approaches and take political stands as they see fit.
Taking Action
Open Society is hardly alone. The protests that surged in June and calls to action from groups including ABFE, a membership organization of Black foundation leaders, and the Movement for Black Lives has resulted in a geyser of support from philanthropy to Black-led social-justice groups.
“We saw a significant shift in the American zeitgeist,” Starks says. “If anything, we’re stepping into the mainstream. The movement changed the sense of what is possible.”
Open Society was preceded by the Mellon Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which announced new commitments to support racial justice in the past month. Mellon will make $500 million in grants this year, an increase of $200 million over its previous plan. Rockefeller Brothers will devote $10 million over five years to racial justice. They were joined this week by the Meyer Memorial Trust, which plans to make $25 million in grants over the next five years, and the Lumina Foundation, which announced a $15 million plan.
Other recent announcements:
- The Irvine Foundation will spend $20 million over the next 18 months to support efforts to end anti-Black racism and advance racial equity in California.
- The Robin Hood Foundation created the Power Fund to make $10 million in grants to Black-led nonprofits.
- The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation made a $4.5 million grant to Borealis Philanthropy’s Black-Led Movement Fund.
- In Minneapolis the Philanthropic Collective to Combat Anti-Blackness & Realize Racial Justice aims to raise $25 million for the MN Holistic Black-Led Movement Fund. The effort is being led by Chanda Smith Baker, senior vice president for community impact at the Minneapolis Foundation, and Repa Mekha, CEO at Nexus Community Partners.
- The California Endowment and the Inland Empire Community Foundation created the Inland Black Equity Fund with a goal of raising $5 million over two years.
- The Raikes Foundation has created a new $1 million fund to support leadership development and grassroots racial-justice organizations.
- The Denver Foundation, Colorado Health Foundation, Mile High United Way, and a men’s giving circle called Denver African American Philanthropists created the Black Resilience in Colorado Fund, which has a goal of making $1 million in grants during its first year
In addition, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation says it is working with the Akonadi Foundation and other California grant makers and donors to respond to the calls for racial justice.
“Philanthropy must commit to funding Black-led organizing and infrastructure and demonstrate a commitment not just to the moment but to the long-term movement that is needed to bring real change to our communities,” Chau Vuong, a Silicon Valley Community Foundation spokeswoman wrote in an email.
More to Come
Open Society’s Starks thinks more pledges will follow. Since the George Soros-backed philanthropy put its money on the table, other grant makers have come calling with questions.
“They’re curious about how one even starts to have the conversation internally about what their added value would be” in the fight against white supremacy, Starks says.
One way to start the conversation is by making sure Black people are well-represented in foundations, says Michelle DePass, chief executive of the Meyer Memorial Trust. . A shift in personnel, she says, can more easily bring about a shift in how grants are made.
“How does this happen? As the first black CEO of Meyer Memorial Trust, I decided that I was going to take this to my board and we were going to grapple with a moment of surge, a moment of risk,” DePass says. “One of the sparks for opening up the coffers and bringing change in philanthropy is through a change in the leadership.”
Although the Meyer Memorial Trust has a history of supporting racial equity broadly, its new effort, Justice Oregon for Black Lives, is more explicitly focused on systemic racism against Black people. In addition to putting money behind efforts to end police brutality and rethinking the role of the police, another new effort for Meyer, DePass says, is to hire people with “lived experience” dealing with racist systems and look to grassroots organizations to help decide how to design the strategy..
The Lumina Foundation’s new three-year, $15 million Fund for Racial Justice and Equity follows a $1 million fund the foundation started after white supremacists held a rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. That fund supported cross-racial dialogues on college campuses.
The details of the new fund are still being developed. But Danette Howard, Lumina’s chief strategy officer, says it will focus on ending societal systems that oppress Black people and limit their ability to succeed.
“We are a foundation that is focused on learning after high school and making sure that people earn high-quality post-secondary credentials,” she says. " However, we can’t do our work successfully without also having a focus on racial justice and equity. And justice is about dismantling the systemic oppression.”
Local Work
Both Patrick Gaspard, Open Society’s president, and Meyer’s DePass signed a letter along with 62 other foundation executives that outlined steps grant makers could take to support racial justice.
Susan Taylor Batten, chief executive of ABFE, which coordinated the letter, said in an interview before Hewlett’s announcement that smaller foundations were responding with more support than large, national foundations.
“The promise in philanthropy right now is with regional funders and community foundations because this work is hyper-local,” she says.
Over the next few months, Taylor Batten is gathering foundation executives in regional discussion groups to talk about how to encourage more action. And in September she will convene meetings that will include trustees of foundations that she hopes will result in grant-making changes.
“I know there are more regional announcements coming, and I think that will influence the larger philanthropies,” she says. “When we start to see names pop up that have not been in the racial-justice funding arena, it will mean something different.”
Some foundations are focusing all of their efforts in response to Covid-19 and will take a pass on new racial-justice strategies, predicted Marybeth Gasman, executive director of the Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions. Others, she says, will take note of the large commitments made recently and say, “‘Someone else is handling that so let’s stick to where our capacity is.’”
“There are also foundations where it’s just not in their nature to get involved” in efforts to end systemic racism, she says. “Various foundations have various strengths.”
Meyer’s DePass says that’s not an option.
“We all have to get involved,” she says. " There is no pass for any of us. There is no pass for a Black leader of a foundation. There is no pass for a white leader of a foundation. There is no pass for a place-based funder or a national fund. This is the national issue of our time.”
