Growing up in Appalachia, my big dreams felt out of place. After becoming high-school valedictorian and being admitted to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, I received a plaque for my achievements from the local Rotary Club. In my acceptance speech, I said I planned to become a Fortune 500 CEO one day.
The local businessmen laughed. I was devastated. I knew many of those chuckling older men from my job as a waitress at the local diner known for its $1-hot-dog deal. It was the first time I realized my dreams seemed preposterous to others.
Nick, the immigrant owner of the diner, viewed me differently. He was impressed by my ambition and left me his coffee-stained copy of the Wall Street Journal every night. As a teenager, I wasn’t all that interested in detailed stock analysis and coverage of the latest mergers and acquisitions, but that crumpled newspaper signified Nick’s faith in me — in contrast with the reaction from the local business leaders. It was one of my earliest lessons in the profound impact of trust.
I went on to become one of the youngest female partners at the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, working closely with CEOs and their top teams. I loved my job, but something was missing. I wanted to have a bigger impact on my community and the world. Poet Mary Oliver’s inquiry “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” tugged at my conscience.
Eventually, I realized that my Appalachian heart and McKinsey-trained brain would be better suited to a life of serving others. My husband, venture-capitalist Jeff Lieberman, and I decided to put our wealth to work by helping struggling families in our adopted city of New York. I worked with others to create Nido de Esperanza, a nonprofit that aims to break the cycle of poverty by changing the first 1,000 days of a baby’s life. I remain the organization’s co-executive director.
But when the pandemic hit, the largely undocumented and vulnerable population served by Nido needed more aid, and faster, than any nonprofit could provide. Jeff and I recognized that we had to get resources out quickly with as little bureaucracy as possible, challenging us to live our values through philanthropy as we never had before. We turned to experts in both childhood development and economic policy to launch the Bridge Project, the first-of-its-kind guaranteed-income program for low-income new mothers in New York.
Our family fund, the Monarch Foundation, is covering the entire $16 million effort, which provides 600 mothers with up to $1,000 a month to spend as they choose. We trust mothers to know what’s best for their babies, whether it’s more diapers, healthy food, a working stove, or a stroller that allows them to navigate the city with a newborn.
We are now applying this same thinking to the foundation’s other work. We’ve replaced grant reports with informal conversations a few times a year. We no longer require letters of inquiry and instead accept unsolicited proposals. And nearly all our grantees — primarily nonprofits led by women and/or people of color — receive unrestricted funds.
Perhaps most important, we have made a conscious effort to listen to what our grantees tell us they need. The foundation recently conducted an anonymous survey of our 48 grantees, asking them to share their general experiences seeking funding and to let us know how we could improve our own process. Their answers show how far philanthropy still must go to provide support to nonprofits in the way they need — not the way we think they should operate. More than 57 percent said they’d had to shift their strategy to appease a donor, and 93 percent said they’d been unable to apply for funding from other foundations because of bans on unsolicited proposals.
All of us in philanthropy need to do better. One respondent offered advice every grant maker should follow: “Ask [yourself], is what I am requiring of the grantee actually necessary? Does it directly facilitate greater success? Consider how the form, amount, and duration of the funding can best support the organization and its people.”
The survey respondents didn’t hold back on letting us know how we could improve our own foundation’s approach. They asked us, for example, to provide more connections to other grant makers and to each other. In response, we are creating a shared workspace that both allows grantees to collaborate with each other and addresses the high cost of Manhattan real estate. Our grantees also emphasized the importance of multiyear funding to help them plan strategically. In response, we began offering and distributing multiyear grants for the first time in 2022.
Listening to and learning from those closest to the issues being addressed sounds like common sense. But matching words to action is profoundly lacking in the philanthropic world. For example, I frequently get suggestions from other philanthropists and foundation leaders that the mothers receiving funds from the Bridge Project should be required to take a financial-literacy class — the assumption being that poverty stems in part from money mismanagement. Trust me, these mothers can stretch $10 further than most people I know.
Changing the way things have always been can be uncomfortable, but the results are well worth the effort. Rather than expecting grantees to prove their value, a foundation’s values should be reflected through the programs and people they support. If donors embrace that view, they will find, as we have, that they can learn far more from a conversation with a nonprofit leader than from a 20-page grant report.
Instead of treating philanthropy as an exercise in red tape and elitism, let’s work together to achieve its true goal: to foster and recognize our shared humanity. You never know who might benefit from a used copy of a Wall Street Journal and a bit of hope.
