DeAngela Burns-Wallace
President and CEO, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation (Kansas City)
Start Date: August 2023
Age: 50
Previous experience: Chief technology officer and secretary for administration, State of Kansas; vice provost for undergraduate education, University of Kansas; assistant dean of undergraduate admissions, Stanford University; diplomatic tours in China and South Africa for the U.S. Department of State.
When DeAngela Burns-Wallace took the top job at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation last year, one of her first tasks was to get staff members to talk to one another.
Since 2020, the Kansas City grant maker’s employees had dwindled from 115 to 84. Morale, the board informed her, was dragging. Staff members across program areas didn’t have a clue what their colleagues were working on, and a lack of trust in leadership permeated the building.
Burns-Wallace came to the foundation with a résumé packed with diplomatic and administrative experience — at the State Department, in Kansas state government, and at the University of Kansas and Stanford. New to philanthropy, she felt she had a chance to use private grant dollars to help her hometown give children a better education, help prepare them for the work force, and support budding entrepreneurs.
But without attending to the organization’s internal malaise, those efforts would “die on the vine,” she says.
Burns-Wallace’s first move was to hire a chief people officer to lead weekly all-staff meetings, where employees were asked to pitch priorities for the foundation’s refresh. Conversations with nonprofit leaders in the Kansas City region followed. And this fall, for the first time, Kauffman’s staff is participating in a job-satisfaction survey.
To bridge the foundation’s siloed programs, Burns-Wallace has restructured her staff, combining them into one “impact team.”
“They’re not program officers anymore,” she says. “They are impact officers.”
Kauffman now asks staffers to take a holistic view of the foundation’s efforts and assess how its grants to nonprofits and collaborations can improve life in the city.
Another change has been to improve communications with grant makers, nonprofits, and city leaders.
A big complaint Burns-Wallace heard during her first year was that local Kansas City organizations didn’t know what funding opportunities Kauffman provided or how much of the organization’s grant making went to nonprofits in the city. Burns-Wallace has made that information transparent through its website.
During her first year at Kauffman, Burns-Wallace shifted its grant making to focus on achieving greater, and more equitable, economic mobility in Kansas City and tightened its former program areas of education and entrepreneurship to focus on college readiness and completion, work-force readiness, and entrepreneurship.
As the foundation moves to a focus on impact in those areas, many of Kauffman’s current grantees might not be a good fit, Burns-Wallace says. The foundation has instituted office hours where grantees can talk with program staff about how to measure their impact and whether their work can buttress Kauffman’s broader mission. Organizations that don’t do so can apply for sunset grants of $100,000 and will be unable to receive Kauffman funding until 2027.
Says Burns-Wallace: “We’re having those tough conversations right now.”
