Faced with tremendous suffering, society’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has focused on immediate needs. But just as important, we need to start paving the way for a more equitable future. Achieving widespread recovery — true change among large swaths of people, no matter their race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or gender — will require meaningful and deliberate coordination by a wide array of players.
The Bridgespan Group recently studied the successes and struggles of this kind of coordination to understand how such efforts can reach their great potential. Looking at more than 30 social-change efforts, our research revealed that a common pitfall has been inadequate attention to equity. Even efforts considered society’s biggest success stories when it comes to achieving widespread change — curbing teenage smoking, reducing unintended teenage pregnancies, or expanding access to hospice and palliative care — still struggle with significant disparities in outcomes by race.
If there were ever a moment to focus on solutions that benefit the most marginalized, that moment is now. The racial disparities in rates of infection and death tolls from Covid-19 have been devastating and remind us of the ways in which racism continues to be institutionalized within our society. The Black Lives Matter movement has put longstanding demands for racial justice at the forefront of the national conversation, making inequity in any issue philanthropy cares about impossible to ignore.
That’s why the first step is to right the power imbalance between grant makers and organizations doing the work. The risk in crisis mode is that power grows stronger for those who already have it. Countering that gravitational pull will require a mind-set shift by foundation leaders and staff about where answers originate — namely, often not with grant makers.
Beyond work to ensure racial equity is always at the forefront of our solutions and that nonprofits are the ones showing the way, foundations can do several things for these coordinated efforts to be most effective.
Our research shows that it’s vital to:
- Take a holistic view. Grant makers often put their work in silos and limit their success by organizing their efforts too narrowly. The intertwined challenges of Covid-19 could be seen in Detroit, which by April was already the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in Michigan — accounting for more than 80 percent of the state’s cases. Detroit has one of the largest Black populations in the country, and its Black households have been hit hard by the pandemic. They were disproportionately likely to have a family member sick or dying from Covid-19, a family member in a job that prevents working from home or out of work entirely, and children home without access to online learning. Census officials are now worried that the vulnerable communities in which such families often live will be distressed even further from severe undercounting by the 2020 Census, affecting funding and resources for the next decade. With Covid-19 cases now rising in Texas and across the South, communities of color in those regions are also experiencing similar intertwined hardship.
- Balance the urgent need to react with the long-term focus on action. The pandemic has spurred an uptick of quick grants to respond to urgent needs. Achieving equitable results, however, ultimately will also require longer-term investment in vulnerable communities. Aarti Kohli, executive director of Advancing Justice - Asian Law Caucus, a legal and civil-rights organization, expressed the critical need for such balance when speaking about philanthropy’s Covid-19 response during a recent Building Movement Project webinar. “Without the long-term investments in our communities, in our organizations, and in building up a government infrastructure that works for our communities, [disparities] will continue,” she said. “I appreciate the short-term support, but I’m really concerned about the long term.”
- Get a more diverse set of people involved in decision making. A key way grant makers can enable lasting change is by empowering those closest to the problem to take the lead or at least work alongside donors. Tanya Coke, Ford Foundation’s director of Gender, Racial and Ethnic Justice, explains this importance: “It is critical to think about who you need around the table to make the issue move. We as funders can use grants to bring stakeholders into the field who might not otherwise come in.” During this crisis, it is also critical for philanthropy to recognize and support the responses and approaches led by community-based organizations and the people they serve. This includes crowdfunding campaigns, drives by community foundations, efforts by foundations focused on racial equity, and work by other organizations that have close ties to people of color.
- Commit to the long term, given the complex and often systemic nature of social problems. Changes in hospice and palliative care took 20 years. The fight for marriage equality took more than four decades. Supporting efforts over the long term is critical for achieving population-level change and also builds the capacity and resilience of these organizations in uncertain times. The ways philanthropists and nonprofit leaders come together to address the long-term social, economic, and educational impact of Covid-19 will be critical for how we recover. Dana Kawaoka-Chen, executive director of Justice Funders, writes, “For those of us in a position to redistribute resources, this is a moment in which we must urgently act with moral clarity and choose which side of history we want to be on.”
The coronavirus pandemic has challenged our lives in ways that many of us could never have imagined. Today there is an opportunity for grant makers to do things differently than they have traditionally been done before. The hundreds of grant makers that have signed the Council on Foundations’ pledge to embrace flexible and unrestricted grant making in response to the economic and health crises shows that foundations are eager to act differently in the short term. Their commitment to flexible and unrestricted grants will be a key to bringing together organizations to tackle much-needed priorities.
Now that philanthropy has shown it can do this kind of grant making during a crisis, it is time to embrace grant-making practices to encourage transformative, long-term solutions, too. After all, the recovery from the coronavirus pandemic will not be a sprint but a marathon, and we have an opportunity to transform society to be more equitable and just for all.
Lija Farnham are among the co-authors of the new report “Field Building for Population-Level Change: How Funders and Practitioners Can Increase the Odds of Success.”