Foundations and Wealthy Donors Urged to Advance Racial Justice by Giving to Grant-Making Charities

A wide array of grant makers have signed an open letter calling for foundations and wealthy donors who do not already have relationships with grassroots groups to direct more of their racial-justice giving to funds with close ties to communities of color rather than only trying to support grassroots racial-justice groups themselves.

The past year has brought vast attention to organizations led by people from marginalized groups, and there has been an outpouring of billions of dollars in pledges to help groups fight for racial justice. The Groundswell Fund, which supports reproductive and social-justice groups led by women of color and transgender people, and other funds like it have spent years developing close relationships with grassroots groups that are part of the communities most affected by systemic racism. Yet these funds and the groups they support have not received the bulk of funding, says Vanessa Daniel, Groundswell’s executive director.

Daniel is one of 31 CEOs of color leading funds who published the letter. She and Gloria Walton of the Solutions Project organized the effort together. It has been signed by 385 foundation executives and individuals, including officials from large and well-known grant makers such as the Ford Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the California Endowment.

“I am surprised by the response. It would not have looked the same before the uprising. It was a great moment of awakening in the country and the sector,” Daniel says. “There is momentum to really make positive change, and that is heartening.”

Groundswell Fund

She says that in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, there is an opportunity to address systemic racism in society and how it manifests in philanthropy.

Many funds that focus on racial and social justice are structured differently than most large foundations. Some have board members who have been homeless or incarcerated. They typically don’t have endowments and usually raise the money they distribute. They also have longstanding relationships with community-based nonprofits that are led by people from marginalized backgrounds and are often closest to the problems the organizations are trying to solve. The letter argues that the most effective way to fight racial inequity is to give to these smaller grant-making groups.

“We need more money going towards movement, more money going towards racial, gender, and economic justice,” says Kiyomi Fujikawa, co-director of the Third Wave Fund, which supports youth-led gender-justice groups, who was also one of the letter’s co-authors. “The way that that happens really matters. We’re piloting a way of doing that that could be a different way for philanthropy to operate.”

These funds sometimes work with very small groups that would not meet the criteria required by larger grant makers. Liberated Capital, a fund focused on groups that serve people of color including Indigenous communities, is often the first grant maker to make grants to some of the groups it funds. That would be hard for a large foundation to do, says Edgar Villanueva, the fund’s principal, who is a coauthor of the letter.

“We’re able to get funding to folks who are doing fantastic work, but they may not check all the boxes for institutional philanthropy,” Villanueva says.

This past year, the group was able to get money from large foundations to 100 Native-led groups to help address the pandemic. “There is no way that any foundation could have quickly gotten that money out or even known who those folks are,” he says. “We’re providing a way to build up that muscle and respond quickly in a beautiful way.”

Longer Time Horizons

Large foundations have a lot to gain from working with these funds, says Hilary Pennington, executive vice president of programs at the Ford Foundation. Large foundations often have short time horizons on the work they do and can be fickle about where they spend their money. These funds tend to understand that some issues require patient support. For example, one of Third Wave’s funds gives out six-year grants — much longer than is common at large private foundations.

Ford works with many of these funds, Pennington says, in part because it believes foundations working together can accomplish more. But she also says that a huge institution like Ford could not engage in the kind of participatory grant making — in which community members help decide how to allocate funds — for all of its grants. But these small grant makers often use that process.. Instead, Ford can support these funds and learn from their processes and accomplishments.

“I’m really passionate about the need for these kinds of intermediaries,” Pennington says. “It’s a really important part of the portfolio for any large national funder.”

Some of those who signed the letter also hope that if more donors work with these funds, there is more of a chance that commitments to racial justice will not fade when urgent new issues surface. Pennington hopes that foundations will see the effort to address racial equity as a permanent part of the way they give.

While these funds, for the most part, have not been overwhelmed with financial pledges, there is interest in understanding how they work. Over the past year, Daniel and other foundation executives have fielded call after call from grant makers who want to learn how her group works — how it is structured, how it identifies and funds organizations. She has spent countless hours talking with people who, in a well-meaning way, could end up co-opting her group’s work.

“That is not authentic sharing of power and control with people of color,” she says. Instead, she argues, large private foundations and donors should just support these funds rather than trying to replicate their work.

“On the issue of racial justice, it would be a terrible mistake for big, mostly white-led foundations to only go it alone,” Pennington says. “They can have so much more impact by working with and learning from the people of color-led movement and accountable public foundations. There’s no better way to do this work than that.”

Daniel hopes that the letter and the broad support it has gained will lead more foundations and wealthy donors to rethink how they donate to advance racial justice.

“We are not calling anyone out,” Daniel says. “It’s a matter for raising consciousness in the entire sector so people are called in to move together in a more respectful and constructive way.”