Rumors swirled for months that change was afoot at the NoVo Foundation. Even so, as word spread last week that NoVo was laying off staff and dropping two major grant -making efforts that focus on girls and women, leaders in social-justice philanthropy were dismayed. That the news came through emails that raised as many questions as they answered only heightened concerns.
Funded with more than $1.4 billion by legendary investor Warren Buffett and led by his youngest son, Peter, and Peter’s wife, Jennifer, NoVo is best known for its feminist politics, its commitment to marginalized groups, and its funding of activist groups like Black Lives Matter. Under the leadership of Pamela Shifman, the executive director who left last fall, NoVo built deep relationships with those it funded. Now, as other grant makers step up to support those whose health and livelihoods are threatened by the coronavirus, NoVo appears to be stepping back — and doing a poor job of explaining why.
The reaction has been pointed and swift.
On Twitter, Alicia Sanchez Gill, director of the Emergent Fund, which serves vulnerable people, wrote: “NoVo’s choice to divest instead of invest in the downturn is going to hurt so many communities. #Philanthropy: I hope you’re watching and learning what NOT to do. Honestly, this is reprehensible, and it is survivors, women and girls and gender nonconforming youth of color who’ll pay the price.”
“This is a very big deal and very bad news,” said Ryan Schlegel, director of research at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. NoVo, he noted, has been the largest grant maker supporting women’s rights groups in the United States by a factor of three over the next largest donor, according to data from Candid.
The activist Alicia Garza, who has led three organizations funded by NoVo — Black Lives Matter, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and the Black Futures Lab, which she founded — laments what she sees as, at best, a failure of communications at a foundation she long admired.
“I get emotional about it because I think NoVo was one of the premier foundations working to transform power dynamics in this country by empowering people from the margins to lead that change,” Garza says. Lately, though, she has been unable to get answers out of the foundation about its future direction. “The lack of transparency is not only painful, it’s jarring,” she says.
Increasing Grants This Year
In an extensive interview with the Chronicle, Peter Buffett said the timing of the changes at NoVo is unfortunate, given the pandemic, and that the foundation could have done a better job of communicating. “No question we could have done a better job explaining ourselves,” he said. Buffett said that NoVo will keep its commitments to existing grantees and, contrary to rumor, it will increase its grant making this year. NoVo plans to make about $270 million in grants in 2020, up from $248 million in 2018 and 2019, he said. For context, that’s roughly the amount given away by the Rockefeller Foundation.
NoVo will also continue to support historically marginalized people — indigenous, black and brown people, as well as women and girls, Buffett says. “Girls and women will always be central to our work,” he says. “That and the fact that patriarchy is toxic.”
But Buffett foresees rocky times ahead for NoVo. The foundation is funded not by an endowment but by annual grants of stock from Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate led by Warren Buffett. The elder Buffett has, similarly, made annual contributions to the Sherwood Foundation, which is run by his daughter Susan, and the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, run by his older son, since 2006.
The size of the contributions increased through the 2010s along with Berkshire’s stock price, but Berkshire shares have lost 25 percent of their value in 2020. This year’s stock contribution, which is expected in July, will likely be substantially less than in past years. Meantime, NoVo’s reserves have shrunk because the foundation gave away more than it took in during 2018 and 2019.
“All bets are off in terms of how much more we can do,” Buffett said.
Laid Off Half Its Staff
Because of the financial uncertainties, NoVo will make only one-year grants for now. It has laid off half of its staff of about 36 people, including at least half a dozen women of color. It is eliminating a grant-making program called Ending Violence Against Girls and Women, which funded groups to fight sex trafficking and domestic violence, and it plans to spin off an effort called Advancing Adolescent Girls’ Rights into a freestanding nonprofit in hopes that more grant markers will join that work. “It’s about time other people ponied up,” Buffett says. NoVo will continue to support the organization, which will be operated outside the foundation, perhaps at one of its partners, like the Tides Foundation or Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.
But the changes at NoVo are driven by more than dollars and cents. Underlying them is what Buffett describes as a “philosophical shift” that led to an ongoing reconsideration of NoVo’s work, beginning more than a year ago. “We’re a dynamic organization,” Buffett says. “I’m out there listening all the time, trying to learn and grow.”
What he’s concluded is that while it’s important to fight the evils of the patriarchy, white supremacy, and global market capitalism, it is equally important to promote alternative ways of being — local agriculture, food coops, worker-owned businesses, and the like. NoVo has funded projects in Baltimore, Detroit, and Jackson, Miss., as part of a program to support “vibrant, equitable, and joyful local communities.” But most of this community building work is centered in and around Kingston, N.Y., a town of 23,000 people in the Hudson Valley, where Peter and Jennifer Buffett live.
There, NoVo has bought a 1,255-acre farm, an AM-FM radio station, and a building that once housed a Honda dealership and is now home to a nonprofit food co-op, all of which it hopes will help Kingston and surrounding towns thrive and become a model for community-building elsewhere.
“The key with the building work is that it’s systemic, and it’s complicated, and it takes time, so it’s not as easy to say as ‘We’re fighting for 15’ [referring to efforts to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour]. It’s not a sound bite,” Buffett said. But it’s become increasingly important to NoVo.
Abrupt Change
If there was a single project that embodied the values of NoVo during the 2010s, it was a bold and high-profile real-estate venture known as the Women’s Building. The foundation, then led Pamela Shifman, planned to transform what had been a women’s prison on Manhattan’s west side into a building to house nonprofits focused on women’s issues, community services such as a female adolescent wellness clinic, and a ground-floor women’s art gallery, restaurant, and event space.1
The project was unveiled in 2015 by the Buffetts, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and the feminist icon Gloria Steinem. “The Women’s Building will show what’s possible when the potential of women and girls is nurtured rather than locked away,” Shifman declared. During an interview on WNYC public radio, Steinem said: “Ten years from now, instead of a beautiful old building that was chopped up into terrible cells, there will be a place where women can work, meet each other, and have child care.”
It didn’t turn out that way. Last October — five years and more than $25 million later — NoVo abruptly dropped its plans for the Women’s Building, citing “timelines and budgets that far exceeded original estimates.”2 The news disappointed an “advisory circle” made up almost entirely of women of color.
Less than a month later, Shifman left NoVo. It wasn’t clear why. On its website, NoVo said Shifman had “decided to step down” and described her as a “visionary, dedicated and deeply compassionate leader.” Outsiders were certain she had been pushed out. Buffett says it wasn’t personal. Pamela’s incredible,” he says. “She built an incredible body of work.”
But Buffett and Shifman could not agree on the future direction of NoVo, he says. “What started to happen was a divergence in the philosophy of how to get to the world we were hoping to see,” he said. “We have different approaches, worldviews.” Shifman declined to offer her thoughts.
Shifman left quite an imprint on NoVo. She led the Move to End Violence, a 10-year, $80 million dollar effort to end violence against girls and women in the United States that backed Girls for Gender Equity and the #SayHerName campaign; launched a $90 million commitment to support girls of color across the United States, supporting organizations like the Young Women’s Freedom Center and the S.O.U.L Sisters Leadership Collective; supported groups led by indigenous women and women of color, including the formerly incarcerated; and deepened NoVo’s work in poor countries by making grants to organizations like Grassroots International, Thousand Currents, and the Urgent Action Fund that support movements.
“They have supported some of the most amazing, radical feminist organizations, the very groups who are doing the necessary work now to lead us out of this global pandemic and beyond,” says the executive director of a nonprofit supported by NoVo. Like other grant recipients, she requested anonymity because she hopes to continue to get funding from NoVo.
Helping Its Neighbors
While projects like the Women’s Building and an effort to invite young women of color to help shape its grant making attracted national attention to NoVo, the foundation was quietly building an extensive portfolio of projects closer to home — specifically, the 19th-century farmhouse that Peter and Jennifer Buffett (and not NoVo) bought for $1.2 million when they moved from New York City to Kingston in 2010.
A faded industrial town on the west bank of the Hudson River, Kingston has begun to attract tourists and second-home buyers from New York, which is two hours away by car. But it remains distressed: nearly one in five residents is poor, and the median household income of $45,000 is well below average for New York State. About four in 10 residents are black or Hispanic.3
NoVo has made grants to traditional human-service organizations, including the local United Way and the YMCA, as well as to activist organizations such as Rise Up Kingston, a grassroots group “dedicated to dismantling the structures of racism and oppression.” The foundation made $55 million in grants in the Hudson Valley in 2018, the most recent year for which its tax return is available.
By far its biggest investment created the Hudson Valley Farm Hub, which seeks to foster “an equitable and ecologically resilient food system in the Hudson Valley.” NoVo paid $13 million for the 1,255-acre corn farm that became the farm hub and committed another $27 million to pay for capital improvements and hire staff. The farm hub trains farmers, conducts agricultural research, and provides full-time jobs for migrant farmers who once got only seasonal work.
“It’s really the cornerstone of the work here,” Buffett says. “We’re trying to knit back together the community and the land that feeds them.” A variety of crops grown for local consumption are sold at the food coop, and if all goes well, the farm hub will supply nearby schools and hospitals. A portion of a separate $4 million grant to Ulster County will connect the farm to downtown Kingston via a rail trail.
NoVo has also made more than $7 million in grants to Radio Kingston, a public radio station that provides informational programming in English and Spanish, as well as music. “I see the radio station as a social-justice organization,” Buffett says. “It’s lifting up all these voices that don’t have a chance to be heard.” A composer and performer who has won an Oscar and an Emmy award for his music, Buffett sits on the radio station’s board.
Don’t ‘Just Play in Your Backyard’
All of this — the warnings of tough times ahead, the apparent shift from advocacy toward community building, and the departure of trusted staff — has unnerved groups that NoVo supports. The fact that they’ve heard so little from the foundation has caused anxiety during already anxious times.
Rajasvini Bhansali, executive director of Solidaire, a network of progressive donors, said of Buffett: “It’s his money, and he can do what he wants — but there’s a leadership burden. You have to be accountable to others and not just play in your backyard.”
“NoVo for a long time positioned itself as a messenger for good philanthropy — and got a lot of accolades for it,” she added. “I am worried that this is now going to set a terrible standard for philanthropy at an extraordinary time of great need, when so many people are fighting for their lives.”
Going forward, NoVo will be led by Peter and Jennifer Buffett and three current staff members — Sangeeta Budhiraja and Gary Schwartz, who worked out of the Kingston office, and Matthew Tye, who worked from New York. All work remotely now, of course. The Buffets are unpaid.
Peter Buffett says he will honor his obligations to those funded by NoVo. “Anything that’s coming to an end will be wound down responsibly,” he says. “We will have these conversations.”
