The most important phone call I ever received from a grant maker wasn’t about getting more funding. Quite the opposite, in fact.
It was early spring 2015, and my organization, Interfaith America (then called Interfaith Youth Core), was preparing a proposal for the Einhorn Family Charitable Trust, now known as the Einhorn Collaborative. We were seeking more than $10 million to cover the next five years. It would be our third major grant from Einhorn, and our work was progressing well. I thought we had it in the bag.
What happened next almost made me crash my car.
Jenn Hoos Rothberg, Einhorn’s executive director, called my cellphone as I was driving home from work one March afternoon, and said she had some tough news to share: “The proposal isn’t good enough. In fact, it’s not even close.”
She then proceeded to walk me through the problems: There was too little reflection on what we had learned from the previous grant. The “theory of change” section — our approach to moving the social needle — was thin. The management structure we proposed was even worse. And little thought was given to how we would evaluate our work.
We had until May to submit a new plan. Jenn said she was happy to provide feedback on drafts along the way, but the heavy lifting was up to us.
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I had a sleepless spring, but ultimately we improved the plan, got the funding, and learned a powerful lesson: There are no shortcuts to building an institution. Skipping steps is like constructing a foundation out of sand instead of concrete. If the foundation is weak, it doesn’t matter if the facade sparkles. The whole structure, at some point, will collapse.
I think that Ibram X. Kendi could have benefited from the kind of phone call I received from a trusted funding partner like Jenn.
By now, just about everyone in philanthropy has heard about the implosion at Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. The center, known as CAR, raised a whopping $55 million in philanthropy, much of it right after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020.
But CAR’s output wasn’t nearly as impressive as its fundraising.
The degree programs that CAR was supposed to launch haven’t materialized. The Boston Globe is no longer partnering with the group’s news site, the Emancipator. Much of the research CAR promised never got done.
In other words, an appreciable portion of that $55 million appears to have been squandered.
The depth of the problems became widely known this month when CAR laid off more than half of its 36 person staff. But trouble was brewing for some time.
The Boston University student newspaper, the Daily Free Press, reported that in 2021, associate professor Saida Grundy, who was employed by CAR and left disillusioned, wrote a highly critical letter about the center to the school’s provost, Jean Morrison. Grundy accused the center of having a “pattern of amassing grants without any commitment to producing research obligated to them.” She noted that practice “continues to be the standard operating procedure at CAR” and that there is “no good-faith effort to fulfilling funded research projects.”
Lack of a Sound Plan
So here’s the obvious question: Shouldn’t the sophisticated grant makers whose job was to help build an antiracism institution have ensured that a sound plan and proper benchmarks for meeting goals were in place? It’s possible that some of this did happen with CAR, but it’s also safe to assume that whatever calls were made or meetings held weren’t nearly enough.
In 2020, philanthropy had a moment of reckoning around racial justice. That reckoning led to a huge amount of cash directed toward institutions such as CAR.
I think it’s time for reflection in the philanthropic world about the grants made to antiracist institutions in the summer and fall of 2020.
Perhaps the poor management at the Center for Antiracist Research is the exception. But at least one other high-profile anitracist organization seems to have faced similar problems. Last year, New York magazine reported that the Black Lives Matter Foundation raised more than $90 million with little to show for it except a $6 million “influencer house” in Southern California.
Foundations have a straightforward task: to make grants that help organizations run their programs. Once that’s understood, the reflection process is simple: Were the right grants made to the right institutions in the right way? Would the impact have been greater if the grant had been structured differently or if the money had gone to a different institution?
Conservative media, such as Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and the National Review, are having a field day with the news about Kendi’s center. But those outlets seem more interested in lampooning the movement of antiracism than addressing the problem of racism.
That’s why it’s so important that the philanthropy professionals who want to make a difference on racial inequality exercise real accountability, transparency, and responsibility and that proper reviews are conducted of the grants made to antiracist institutions in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
Need for Due Diligence
Maybe the grants produced what they expected. If so, great. If not, they should ask themselves some hard questions. Was the due-diligence process diligent enough? Did they believe that the organization’s proposed programs would achieve their goals? Did they have confidence in the leadership team to execute the programs? Were there benchmarks in place to check progress?
I know from personal experience that these types of questions from grant makers were essential to building my own nonprofit during the past 20 years.
If philanthropy didn’t do its basic job — to be a partner in planning and an investor in real social change — then grant makers should look in the mirror and admit it. That includes sharing some version of what they learned with the public.
It also means considering the most unflattering possibility, which may go something like this: Due diligence was short-circuited because too many professionals were swept up in a cultural moment, blinded by ideological fervor, and mesmerized by celebrities. Grant makers need to recognize that events such as the mass layoffs at CAR weaken the movement for racial justice and that conducting rigorous reviews will help strengthen it.
They also need to remember that when a choice is made to invest in a particular institution, a donor by default is choosing not to support other institutions.
I’ll close with a personal story. A friend of mine who raises money for Black-led startup organizations on the south side of Chicago was gobsmacked by the amount of philanthropic funding CAR received — and squandered. Many of the executive directors he works with don’t take salaries so they can pay their staff and funnel money into their programs.
“The leaders I know can’t afford to make a mistake with even one-tenth of 1 percent of the money that CAR raised,” he told me.
The real tragedy here is not what didn’t get done by the organizations that received money but what could have been accomplished by those that didn’t.
