When events as horrific as what happened in Charlottesville erupt, many of us in philanthropy are struck with sadness, outrage, disgust, depression, shock, and terror.
While we take in all the information we can — especially the insights of trustworthy analysts and commentators — we ourselves start doing the usual punditry. We issue calls for action. We offer to provide more money and new programs to educate Americans and ourselves about hate groups, racism, and diversity. We make pledges to operate in new ways.
But let’s face it: If we really expect to make a difference, each of us needs to change how we act, and to better understand how our own biases too often get in the way of nonprofit and philanthropic leadership.
For me, this means looking in the mirror and recognizing and confronting my own weaknesses. It has taken me time to learn that my work as a grant maker almost always requires corrective lenses. It requires constant work and self-reflection to recognize my blind spots and humbly look to, listen to, and learn from the people I am trying to serve. It also means admitting that until we do that, we are making mistakes that keep our grant making from doing as much good as it can.
Opening Eyes, Ears, and Minds
Owning up to the ways our backgrounds get in the way is a strong first step. Although not part of the 1 percent, I grew up and developed values in what I now appreciate was a privileged household. I was raised in suburban Boston with two loving parents in a stable home. My parents were college-educated professionals, a librarian and a lawyer. My brothers and I went through a public-school system that, at the time, was among the country’s best.
Our home had books on the shelves. There was never a question that there’d be a good breakfast before school, dinner on the table after, heat in the winter, and enrichment programs during the summer. I could ride my bike safely up the street and lay it in front of a friend’s house, knowing it would be there when I came out. My parents were there to take me to good doctors, and the water from the tap was safe to drink.
These experiences are part of who I am, as is the fact that I’m a straight white male. All of this permeates my DNA.
So when I became a foundation trustee in 2003, I naturally and unwittingly used my own experiences as a filter in making decisions about programs for children in Spanish Harlem and South Bronx communities that were totally foreign to my background, and where I was the minority.
It took me years to recognize the damage I was doing. Sometimes I was nearsighted, missing the obvious, and at other times farsighted, unconsciously looking past the real issues and their roots.
Different lenses help us recognize the diversity in our society and allow us to see the inequity it often begets.
To be clear, I mean diversity in every sense of the word: racial, economic, educational, gender, sexual, religious, political. Within equity, I include the basic human rights to which we are all entitled, such as access to clean water, healthful food, and good, affordable health care, and the ability to live, work, and freely move about within our communities.
Today, I am still haunted by the first time I met a family that had no books in their home. Not a one. To me, that was incomprehensible. It was far away from the world I knew and where I felt comfortable. Yet, as striking as that moment was to my psyche, it apparently was not enough to fully open my eyes, my ears, and my mind.
At the time I was one of several donors deciding what reading programs should receive grant money. One of the programs we declined to fund was fundamentally solid, but my colleagues and I looked at it through our own privileged lenses.
One of the big factors in our decision was the charity’s choice of literature. The program was using works by Malcolm X and James Baldwin to engage youngsters. With our totally different backgrounds and inability (or was it an unwillingness?) to be open, we felt the program should be offering Mark Twain or Louisa May Alcott.
What was I thinking?
As a young grant maker I proudly professed to friends that I was helping kids learn to read. Yet in retrospect, I can’t imagine being any ruder — any more patronizing, inappropriate, or frankly, racist. What makes it worse is how incredibly detached I was from the very people I was trying to help.
Are You Stepping Up?
Hindsight often, but not always, being perfect, it is now clear to me that I needed to make understanding those I was trying to serve the priority.
So instead of pontificating about the role of philanthropy and how it can do better after Charlottesville, after Ferguson, and after too many other tragic events, let’s all vow to better understand the people whose lives we hope to improve and the history that shaped their current state.
That means listening to the voices of everyone affected by a philanthropic effort and making every attempt to better understand all the perspectives that influence their world, not ours.
As a supporter of early-childhood programs, that means listening to children, parents, and caretakers. It means listening to classroom teachers, educational administrators, and the social-services agencies serving the community. It means seeking opinions from diverse voices. Not only diversity of roles or titles or positions — these are not just boxes to check off on a list — but diversity of ideas and approaches, including all generations, backgrounds, and perspectives, especially those with which I am unfamiliar and therefore the least comfortable.
Discomfort brings challenges we have to face as individuals. So I pose the question to each of you: Are you stepping up to meet the challenges? Are you willing to recognize and acknowledge your own biases, seek a diversity of opinions and perspectives, and persevere with the belief that a better, truly inclusive world is possible?
For what each of us individually and all of us collectively cannot be is silent in our words and, more importantly, our actions. We cannot hide behind our inability to face our own blind spots and pretend we are addressing issues that ultimately affect us all.
As individuals and as key players in the nonprofit world, we should be proud that we are having conversations about diversity and inclusion as steps to true equity. But we should not be satisfied. Inequity in what we do and how we act is not an option. Nor is avoiding issues that make us uncomfortable. There is much to do and time is fleeting.
If you believe, as I do, that charitable giving helps hold our society together, then we must be willing to meet people on the ground; to look, listen, and learn with them and from them; and to do so with the humility necessary to understand our shortcomings. This is not easy. But nobody ever promised me that being an effective grant maker would be.
Henry Berman is the chief executive officer of Exponent Philanthropy. This column is based on a plenary talk he gave at the organization’s 2016 annual conference.