The $4.7 billion California Endowment Friday named Brenda Solórzano, an early architect of “trust-based philanthropy” and a veteran of health-care grant making in the Golden State, as its next president.
Solórzano, who is currently the chief executive of the Headwaters Foundation, a $116 million foundation in Missoula, Mont., will replace Robert Ross, who has led the California Endowment since 2000. Ross announced in 2022 that he planned to retire this year.
At Headwaters, Solórzano built a philanthropy from scratch. The grant maker was created by the 2017 sale of a nonprofit hospital to a private health system.
With a clean slate, Solórzano developed Headwaters according to the precepts of trust-based philanthropy, a less top-down approach to grant making. During the pandemic, more foundations began adopting the approach, offering more multiyear grants without restrictions and allowing nonprofits greater flexibility in how they spend. Foundation leaders also tried to cut down on time-consuming applications and onerous progress reports to allow nonprofits to focus on their work rather than on chasing grant money.
Solórzano believes trust-based philanthropy forces foundation staff and boards to become more aware of the power imbalance between philanthropies with large endowments and nonprofits scraping to get by.
The approach, she says, is “built on creating authentic, transparent relationships and being able to see power in those relationships so that the people doing the hard work have an opportunity to have a say in where funds go and how they’re utilized.”
Over the past several years under Ross, the California Endowment has taken steps to solidify its place as a longstanding social-justice grant maker and “democratize” its philanthropy by relying more on suggestions from grantees, says Kurt Chilcott, who chairs the endowment’s Board of Directors.
Chilcott believes Solórzano will help take the endowment to the “next level” as it attempts to build partnerships with its grantees. He points to a decade-long attempt begun in 2010 to achieve health equity in California that laid bare the limits of the foundation’s ability to foresee problems and address residents’ health needs.
“We didn’t have the answers,” he says. “Our communities have the answer.”
The grant maker has attempted to respond to its grantees’ needs in other ways. In 2021, the California Endowment raised $300 million in a social bond offering. The proceeds were used to strengthen racial- and social-justice organizations throughout the state. The grants were made with few limitations and were guided by a trust-based approach, according to the endowment. And in November, after previously divesting from for-profit prisons and tobacco companies, the endowment said it would place the entirety of its assets in investments it believes will help Californians.
In 2022, the most recent year for which figures are available, 43 percent of the California Endowment’s grants were for general support, up from 22 percent the previous year — reflecting a deepening integration of a trust-based approach.
Solórzano plans to bring her ideas about power and grant making to the California Endowment, but she didn’t provide specifics beyond wanting to push the foundation to deploy more of its assets into grants to nonprofits.
Her approach will be similar to what she did upon her arrival in Missoula, she says, when she had “600 cups of coffee” with people throughout western Montana to listen to their ideas and concerns before taking action.
From Immigrant Law to Health-Care Philanthropy
For Solórzano, the job is a return home. After obtaining her law degree from Whittier Law School in Los Angeles, she worked as a policy analyst at the California Medical Association and as a program officer at the Blue Shield of California Foundation, the California Health Care Foundation, and the California Endowment.
Unlike many big-foundation presidents, who tend to come from academe or politics, Solórzano began her career providing legal services to immigrants. She became frustrated and decided to go into policy making and philanthropy because she was swamped with a large caseload and felt like she wasn’t making a big enough difference.
The change I want to see has to happen at a systems level.
— Brenda Solórzano, incoming president of California Endowment
“The change I want to see has to happen at a systems level,” she says.
A big part of generating that kind of change, she says, is to give nonprofits more leeway in how they use foundation support. At the Blue Shield of California Foundation, Solórzano oversaw the distribution of general operating support grants to each of the state’s community health clinics and every domestic-violence shelter in the state.
Crystal Hayling, outgoing president of the Libra Foundation, was the chief executive of the Blue Shield of California Foundation at the time. The grant making that Solórzano spearheaded, she says, helped build long-term relationships with groups that were “foundational” to assisting the sick and victims of abuse.
“We didn’t have the term ‘trust-based philanthropy’ back then, but I think that’s what we were developing and experimenting with,” she says.
Catalyzing Personal Experiences
Solórzano was born in Guatemala and came to the United States as an infant with her mother and older brother on Christmas Day to join her father, who preceded them. Her family, she says, was taken advantage of and sought help from a nonprofit legal-services agency serving immigrants.
The experience instilled in her a desire to help other immigrant families, and she started her career in the mid-1990s as a coordinator at the Latino Coalition for a Healthy California. There she saw firsthand the benefits of wielding power. She would sit in elected officials’ offices for long stretches of time waiting to make her case in a matter of few minutes. As she waited, “suits” representing corporations and business interests were ushered right in.
She decided she needed to learn more about being a power broker from the inside. But after two years as a senior policy analyst at the California Medical Association, a health crisis led her back to the nonprofit sector.
When she was 29, Solórzano’s life hit a “pause moment” when she was diagnosed with a very advanced case of breast cancer. Her prognosis was not good, but she recovered. Upon trying to re-enter the job market, she turned down a chance to lead an organization because it did not provide health insurance that would cover her doctors.
The experience helped her decide that she would “do whatever I could do with whatever time I had to advocate on behalf of people that don’t have access and don’t have power in California.”
Trusting and Spending Down
At Headwaters, Solórzano experienced some resistance from board members when she introduced the trust-based approach. One of her early innovations were “Go” grants, which sought to make getting funding as fast and easy as applying for a credit card. Eventually, her board came to appreciate the expertise that grantees brought to solving problems.
One reason might be Solórzano’s ability to help people with different views understand and respect each other, says Jill Nishi, chief executive of Philanthropy Northwest, a membership group of grant makers and donors in the Pacific Northwest.
Solórzano led several seminars introducing the trust-based approach to Nishi’s members, and many of them have taken up aspects of the practice.
“She’s brilliant at bringing along people who initially might have a divergent set of perspectives and finding a path forward,” she says.
That talent helped her streamline Headwaters’ process for grant applicants and persuaded her board to nearly double the payout rate at Headwaters to more than 9 percent of its assets, nearly twice the amount required by federal regulations.
In 2021 and 2022, the California Endowment’s payout rates were 5.1 and 6.8 percent, respectively.
Solórzano would like to see more money flow out to grantees. She recognizes that board members may feel a tension between growing the endowment in perpetuity or spending now on the organization’s mission. Part of her job, Solórzano says, will be to remind board members that they are privileged to feel that tension because they are in positions of power.
Says Solórzano: “We can’t achieve mission unless we spend.”
