“In 2024, I’m out.” That’s how Robert Ross, CEO of the California Endowment, bluntly started a 2022 blog post announcing his departure from the health-care grant-making giant that he’s headed since 2000.
Ross, 69, a pediatrician and former public health official, spent more than two decades leading work to connect marginalized communities to medical, mental health, and housing resources. And now it was time to hand the reins over to new leadership. The two-year window between declaring his retirement and his departure time would allow the board ample opportunity to find his replacement, he said. The board selected that successor, Brenda Solórzano, who was an early adopter of the trust-based philanthropy approach in her previous post as chief executive of Headwaters Foundation, earlier this year.
Two years later, Ross has become part of a wave of leaders bowing out and making way for new faces at the top of some major foundations, the latest being Darren Walker, who announced in late July that he would step down as president of the Ford Foundation in 2025 after a 12-year tenure.
“Darren and I, we’ve been good friends over the years and we’ve kept one another abreast of our respective retirement thinking,” he said.
Ross will officially step down at the end of August. Like Walker, he is considered an important advocate that 21st-century philanthropy focus more on race, class, and geography. Notably, he was involved in an effort to diversify the leadership of foundations.
Among the grant-making efforts he is proudest of are the $1 billion, 10-year Building Health Communities project launched in 2010 to curb health inequities in 14 California communities, including East Oakland and South Los Angeles. The program spearheaded statewide efforts focused on “social determinants of health,” the idea that environmental factors, such as access to health care, education, and housing stability, can significantly affect people’s health and thus their livelihoods.
In 2021, the California Endowment, which has assets of $4.3 billion, raised $300 million for a social bond to fund nonprofits promoting racial justice and health equity in the wake of the pandemic and the police murder of George Floyd that led to several awards, including an $85 million grant to support community organizing among marginalized neighborhoods throughout California. The California Endowment was among several foundations to take this step, following Walker’s lead at the Ford Foundation. Ford issued a $1 billion social bond in 2020.
More recently, Ross has spearheaded the task of transitioning the organization’s entire endowment to an investment portfolio that more closely aligns with its mission, meaning greater investment in companies that promote equity and support women and communities of color and divestment from companies linked to mass incarceration and gun and tobacco sales, among others. California Endowment is the largest foundation to make such a commitment, according to Mission Investors Exchange, an association of foundations doing impact investing. Ross hopes others will follow the example.
“Imagine if every single foundation committed the entirety of their endowment to mission and impact investment,” he said. “That’s an economic machine.”
Yet putting philanthropic might behind that kind of equity-focused work has become a riskier proposition since the Supreme Court barred colleges and universities from factoring race into their admissions decisions, opening the door for further legal challenges to philanthropy aimed at supporting African Americans and other groups that have historically faced discrimination. A lawsuit against a grant program for Black women entrepreneurs run by the Atlanta-based Fearless Fund could make it illegal to limit grants to members of a specific race.
Contending with the current polarization in the country is a continuation of a battle that many Americans have been fighting for generations and requires greater investment in sustaining equity-focused nonprofits rather than less, Ross said.
The Chronicle spoke with Ross about his career as a public health advocate and the role philanthropy can play in promoting equity. This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
You’re wearing a T-shirt that reads #SchoolsNotPrisons. What’s the significance of that?
I’ve been on a farewell tour across the state this last year, thanking grantees and partners in the various regions where we’ve worked and getting gifts that are wonderful. The best one was a blanket with a tapestry of T-shirts from campaigns we’ve supported — all knitted together into a single blanket. It was “Health for All,” it was “Schools Not Prisons,” and it was the vote campaigns. It was tearfully moving because of all the community work. Each T-shirt represented a movement of residents and young people of color who are working in support of health justice.
How did you know it was the right time to retire?
I really began to examine it more closely when my wife passed away. She died of breast cancer four years ago. It was in the middle of Covid. So it was one of those moments where my life partner had passed away and my youngest daughter was struggling with mental health issues as a result of my wife’s passing. It was just one of those very reflective, introspective moments. I’m into my fourth generation of board members, and the energy that they were bringing, the frustration after the George Floyd murder, Covid, my wife’s passing, I just went into kind of a deep, reflective, prayerful moment, and concluded: It’s time. It’s time for me to think about another chapter after more than two decades. It’s time for this board to bring on their own new leader.
You’re leaving amid major shifts in the philanthropy world. In addition to leaders like yourself stepping down, the kind of diversity, equity, and inclusion work that you have championed is being challenged, most notably in the case against the Fearless Fund. How are you looking at this moment?
I would say I’m concerned but not worried. I really do take the long view. In 2026, the nation will be 250 years old, and we’re still trying to get this thing called democracy right. The injustice journey of my people has been 400 years in the making. So I really do have a 50-year view on this work. Right now, political events seem to be working against us — those of us who believe in a multiracial democracy, who believe in belonging and inclusion, who believe in Martin Luther King’s description of the beloved community. But we’re very much on the right side of history.
I go back to the struggles of our ancestors, be they Black folks in chains, be they Japanese Americans who were interned, be they women who’ve been so politically marginalized and ostracized for so many years, the LGBTQ and trans communities, farmworkers, migrant workers. You just stay in the fight, and you adapt. And if there’s a need for a new strategy or new tactics, you resort to that.
What has been your approach to social justice over the past two decades?
I think the biggest single lesson for me and our board starts with deciding that you’re in the work of social justice and equity and a multiracial democracy — which at our foundation is through a health framework. Once you decide that that is your reason for being a philanthropic institution, then the next thing that follows is righting the wrongs of injustice, which is systemically and structurally mediated and navigated in this nation, largely through structural racism. Once you accept that as a premise, then what follows is there are no shortcuts in this world. You cannot make a clever, innovative three-year grant and solve the problem.
For me, the biggest lesson has been the importance and the value of investing in the infrastructure of those who are movement builders for social justice and health justice in this nation, and particularly in California as a California foundation. And when you have an infrastructure orientation, it leads you to making different kinds of grants. We’re big disciples of trust-based philanthropy. And so the last few things we’ve done as a board have really been about infrastructure.
Impact investing is another approach that you’ve supported. Can you talk about why you made that decision to shift assets in that direction and what the process has been like?
We decided as a board to go all in on mission investing. With our $4 billion corpus, we decided over time we want to go to 100 percent mission-aligned and impact investing. We’d be optimizing our impact because it’s not just the 5 percent or the 6 percent [of the endowment] — it’s the entirety of the $4 billion corpus that would be directed toward communities that are struggling.
We did a one-year intensive learning process with the board, where we identified those on the leading edge of mission investing and impact investing. We learned from them. We brought them into our conversation. We did our own research. We agreed as a board that if it took us 10 years to get there, it would take us 10 years to get there.
One of your landmark programs was the Building Healthy Communities initiative. What did you learn from its implementation?
Building Healthy Communities was extremely pivotal in our history as a foundation. The reason we wanted to embark on it was the social determinants of health. It was very much a public health-oriented, strategic investment because the social determinants of health had been stymied in public health for decades. Outside the four walls of the health care system, we were asking: What are the things that negatively impact and adversely reduce health status in this country? That’s what Building Healthy Communities was intended to address.
We made a lot of mistakes in the early rolling out of Building Healthy Communities, but I asked the board for 10 years. That was the smartest thing I’ve ever done in my philanthropic career, because we really needed 10 years to understand the impact and to realize the impact of what these communities are doing. If it had been a three -year project, it would have failed.
The initial biggest mistake was “overcooking the meal.” When we engaged the communities, we walked in with well-researched health objectives to measure progress. It was well-meaning, but it was arrogant. It really was top-down philanthropy. We got told by community leaders: “You said you want this to be an effort where we’re real, meaningful partners with you. California Endowment, you can’t just walk in here and tell us what our goals are and what our objectives are, nor can you just tell us how we’re going to do the work.”
We had to pull the plug on the planning process and start all over again with a more humbled listening orientation, and we did that. We got much better, and we learned a lot from that lesson about the advantage of humility and listening when we trusted those grantee leaders and those young people in those communities. The results were the Schools Not Prisons campaign. The results were transforming school discipline practices in schools. The results were Health for All for undocumented young people. The results were mental health services for young people in schools. We learned a lot by trusting the experiential wisdom of those close to injustice in the communities. Even though Building Healthy Communities was a 10-year campaign, it will impact the next 20 to 30 years of how the California Endowment operates.
What’s next for you?
I’m big on passion. Life is so short, right? The time on this planet is just so finite. For me, the one passionate interest that I want to continue to pursue, but unclear as to how to proceed on, is the matter of belonging in this nation. I’m a patriot. I believe in the American ideal. I believe in the American spirit of justice for all. The nation is having an epic struggle between the narrative of how to define “for all” and the narrative of exclusion and the narrative of full inclusion. I have been, and the California Endowment has been, on the side of full, unapologetic inclusion. In some manner, way, shape, or form, I want to still be in that fight and that narrative battle. Does it mean writing a book? Does it mean teaching? Does it mean consulting? I don’t know. I’m going to let that percolate and not rush.
