Commitments from foundations to combat systemic racism have topped $1 billion, according to a Chronicle tally.
The total got a boost Wednesday with announcements by the Packard Foundation and Lilly Endowment that they were each committing $100 million. Packard’s plan includes an initial $20 million grant to the Solidaire Network’s Black Liberation Pooled Fund to support Black-led movement groups. Lilly made a $100 million grant to one organization, the National Urban League, which will be used to create the Indianapolis African American Quality of Life Renewal Initiative, a collaboration between the Indianapolis Urban League and the African American Coalition of Indianapolis.
In a note posted on the Packard Foundation’s website, the foundation’s chairman, David Orr, said that the nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd spurred the grant maker to action.
“Until we focus the resources and energy of the Packard Foundation toward justice and equity for Black people and people of color, we will not live up to the organizational values that guide how we work with one another, with our grantees, and with the communities our grantees serve,” he wrote.
Orr said he didn’t have a good answer for why Packard hadn’t focused on racial injustice before protests erupted this year. “The nationwide protests gave us a stronger sense of urgency and a sense that we could no longer keep discussing but had to take action,” Orr wrote. “I do wish we had acted sooner.”
By mid-July, foundations had committed about one half billion dollars to address systemic racism in America. That amount was anchored by a new $220 million strategy developed at the Open Society Foundations and a $170 million commitment by the Hewlett Foundation, which represented the first time Hewlett had developed a specific response to combat racism. Other grant makers, like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, started new racial-justice programs, and the Mellon Foundation reoriented its entire strategy to push for social justice, including efforts to end systemic racism.
Others followed, including the California Endowment, which committed $225 million.
The announcements came after calls for more foundation support from the Movement for Black Lives and ABFE, a network of foundation leaders that was founded as the Association of Black Foundation Executives. The $1 billion total does not include major contributions from individuals like MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife, who last week announced she had made $1.7 billion in grants in the past six months, including hundreds of millions of dollars to racial-justice groups. Nor does it include grants from corporations, which have devoted hundreds of million to the cause in the past few months.
Clay Robbins, chairman of the Lilly Endowment said in a statement that the coronavirus opened the eyes of many Americans to the realities of racism.
“The pandemic has laid bare how the quality of life for African Americans has been diminished by generations of systemic racism, which has limited their access to educational and economic opportunities that others often take for granted,” he said. “We hope that the efforts funded through this initiative, which will supplement the Endowment’s ongoing support of the efforts of several Indianapolis organizations that strive to improve the quality of life of African Americans, will materially enhance the future prosperity of significant numbers of African Americans in our community.”
Candid, a philanthropy research group, recently reported that foundations, corporations, and major individual donors together have awarded $4.2 billion for racial equity so far this year.
That amount is more than the previous nine years combined, when Candid identified $3.3 billion in funding for racial equity.
