This is the fourth in a series of opinion pieces exploring new ways to look at wealth and philanthropy.
Laurene Powell Jobs, founder and president of the Emerson Collective, is among the philanthropy leaders who spoke at a conference in fall 2019 about a new book by Darren Walker, “From Generosity to Justice: a New Gospel of Wealth.” The Chronicle asked her to discuss her response to Walker’s approach in answers to questions posed by the Chronicle. Please add your thoughts about her remarks or your answers to these questions in our comments section.
What does moving from generosity to justice mean to you?
The idea of moving from generosity to justice lies at the heart of so much of our work at Emerson Collective. For many years, we have been on a path toward grant making that is more just by seeking out leaders who embody the communities they serve, advancing models that incorporate community voices and sharing our methods of grant making with others in philanthropy.
And while we strongly believe in the importance of providing general operating support, we have also found that special grant rounds offering project-specific support for existing partners represent a unique opportunity to accelerate social change.
The first time we offered such a grant round was in 2017, and we focused on a theme of “justice and unity,” encouraging partners to propose “initiatives that expand opportunity and inclusivity, value tolerance and human dignity, or promote a sustainable pathway toward long-term peace.”
One grant provided families in Oakland with modest financial incentives to take in someone who was recently released from incarceration — an idea that not only reflects a profound expression of forgiveness, but also promises to produce a profound impact on recidivism. Another offered Baltimore residents modest amounts to start social enterprises, not only lifting up neighborhoods, but also winning over allies for the organization’s mission of advancing equity and justice.
These examples offer compelling evidence of the ways small grants can lead to meaningful and enduring change. But equally powerful has been the impact of bringing together these cohorts of grantees. These gatherings generated new insights, new opportunities for teaching and learning, and new collaborations. For example, justice-reform and healthy-eating nonprofits came together to rethink food in prison; social innovation and civil-rights organizations collaborated on coalition building with members of the LGBTQ community.
What we have learned from these rounds is that establishing grants that are so closely aligned with Emerson’s values has allowed us to do more than advance those values in meaningful ways. It has also brought to the surface some of the highest performing, most values-aligned leaders in our portfolio, opening up new pathways to partner with them to drive change at a greater scale.
You have focused on making sure the social-justice groups you support have all the resources they need, from communications support, to ensuring activists have access to self-care at a time when they risk burnout, to general operating support. Can you talk about how your approach can help accelerate the work of justice organizations and what you hope others can learn from it?
Our approach to social change is holistic — and so is our approach to supporting our grantees. Instead of simply writing a check and moving on, we are focused on harnessing all the tools available to us to help our partners deliver change.
Beyond multiyear general-operating grants, which can liberate nonprofit leaders from the relentless cycle of fundraising and allow them to focus on their work, we also offer a range of capacity-building grants.
Some ask how we justify these grants. Our view is, how do we justify not offering them? At leading private-sector employers, professional development is widely accepted as a necessity for top-tier performance. How can we expect nonprofit leaders to perform at the highest levels without similar support?
That is why we offer our grantees opportunities — supplemental to existing grants — to take classes with the Management Center and Harvard and Stanford Executive Education programs, as well as targeted trainings on fund development, legal support, communications and storytelling, analytics and measurement.
In an attempt to foster another, deeper form of reflection, we gave all our grantees a stipend to bring teams to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. And the experience has been transformational — for individual team members and teams as a whole. One visitor said, “I honestly don’t think that it is an exaggeration to say that it was a pivot point that will etch itself on [our] growth trajectory, demarcating the periods of pre-Montgomery and post-Montgomery.”
Another said, “It is easy for the weight of workloads and the proximity of daily tasks to obscure the greater purpose of the work and to avoid taking hard, deep looks at the sufficiency of what we are offering and accomplishing.” The visit, they said, allowed for those “hard, deep looks.”
Beyond education and reflection, we have also offered opportunities focused on self-care for grantees working in immigration and social justice, where the fights are particularly difficult right now. We’ve found that even relatively modest grants — tickets to a sports event, funds to cover staff yoga classes or regular pizza Fridays — can have a meaningful impact on morale and team-building. Such opportunities not only offer a well-deserved break for recharging and bonding with teams — but they can also create the space all of us need in our lives for our creativity to flourish, and new insights, connections, and synergies to emerge.
Our larger hope is that by supporting grantees so holistically — by viewing them as individuals with different interests, needs, and priorities — we can empower them in ways that will accelerate their organizations’ growth and impact.
