Eric Ward, who is African American, is an expert on white nationalism. He worked in foundations for seven years, including a three-year stint as a program officer at the Ford Foundation. When he became executive director of the Western States Center, a nonprofit that helps build grassroots economic, gender, and racial-justice organizations, he wanted to believe that what he calls progressive philanthropy would be eager to support his work.
But that has not been the case. Less than half of his budget comes from those grant makers. The result, he says, is that one of the few black leaders with a deep understanding of white nationalism is receiving the least money to address it.
“I entered the job with that as part of my calculation,” he says. “Some of that is race. Some of that has to do with, perhaps, class. Some of it has to do with geography or not being based on the East Coast, but certainly implicit biases are part of that equation. It doesn’t make people bad. That is just the society we live in.”
While there isn’t hard data, experts agree that very few grant dollars go to groups led by people of color.
What is tracked are the grants designed to help communities of color — and the numbers are discouraging. Although members of racial- and ethnic-minority groups account for about 40 percent of the U.S. population, only 10 percent of grants are explicitly designed to help people of color, according to the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity, also known as PRE. To be sure, many people of color benefit from other types of grants not specifically made with them in mind, but gaps remain.
Foundations are trying hard to change their ways. In recent years, many more grant makers have named “racial equity” as a goal. In part, it’s a response to the growth of widespread racial- justice movements sparked by high-profile accounts of overt racism and police violence, including the deaths of Freddie Gray and Trayvon Martin. Foundations are intensifying work to make their grant making and staffs more reflective of the racial and ethnic makeup of the country and more supportive of groups led by people of color.
They hope to overcome their own histories of racial insensitivity — or outright exclusion — and move beyond an era when many believed that making grants without considering race would result in the most effective use of their money.
Change is slow and incremental. But it is happening.
“The popular thing among us progressives is to say that things aren’t much better,” says Lori Villarosa, executive director of PRE. “While the numbers overall are still abysmal, there has been some improvement.”
When PRE was founded in 2003, it invited fewer than 60 foundations to its meeting on racial equity. Now, most mainstream philanthropic gatherings include an “equity track,” and as many as 800 grant makers attend national conferences focused on the issue.
Since 2005, markedly more foundations are using what PRE calls “racial-justice language” in their grant making, according to research it conducted using data gathered by the Foundation Center/Candid. From 2006 to 2016, funding for grassroots racial-justice organizations increased more than fourfold, to a total of $37 million.
“We’ve gone from literally a handful of foundations that were concerned with racism in their practices and grants to a strong number of folks who, as they consider what and who to fund, want to tackle aspects of structural racism,” Villarosa says. “It’s encouraging that the racial-justice field has grown enormously.”
The question of how to promote racial equity in philanthropy is gaining mainstream attention. In November, the New York Times published an opinion piece by Vanessa Daniel about the critical role women of color play in social change and why it’s important to support the nonprofits they lead.
But Daniel and other proponents say foundations need to move from talking about the issue to action. She argues that grant makers need to set clear guidelines for what they’re trying to achieve.
“Philanthropy sets the bar too low and then wonders why the overall percentage of giving to people of color barely moves,” says Daniel, executive director of the Groundswell Fund, which supports organizing by women of color and by transgender people of color. “No foundation can authentically say it is doing racial-equity grant making unless the majority of its giving is going to organizations led by people of color, and the white-led organizations it funds have a demonstrated commitment to dismantling white supremacy and standing in solidarity with people of color.”
A New Direction
Some foundation leaders believe focusing on racial-equity standards — and not just efforts to increase diversity or become more inclusive — is a way to take philanthropy in a new direction.
“Even as foundations talk about diversity and inclusion, their grants don’t always get to the racial groups that need them,” says Maya Thornell-Sandifor, director of racial-equity initiatives at Borealis Philanthropy. She says that by creating a new approach to giving that emphasizes getting money to groups that represent and work for people of color where they live, foundations can better fulfill their missions. “When you use the term ‘racial equity,’ which has a more narrow definition, it makes it more likely that minority groups will get more resources.”
Borealis, which receives support from the Ford, W.K. Kellogg, and Rockefeller Brothers foundations to distribute to other nonprofits, looks at the racial and ethnic demographics of all organizations that apply for its grants — their board members, leadership, staff, and the people they serve. Then the grant maker analyzes how each group’s work affects people of color and whether it has been effective. Borealis has made more than $15 million in grants to foundations and organizations that focus on racial equity since 2017.
It’s too early to measure the performance of those grants. But leaders believe that by ensuring that organizations serving people of color get needed support, Borealis can do more to help them solve intractable social and economic problems, such as homelessness, poverty, and racially skewed mass incarceration.
“Racial equity provides us with a kind of narrow targeting that will make it more likely that groups led by people of color will get more resources,” Thornell-Sandifor says. “It allows us to move the needle via philanthropy in a way that we haven’t been able to for centuries.”
Many Flavors
Racial-equity grant making comes in many flavors. Some foundations, such as the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and grant-making groups, such as Living Cities, have placed strong emphasis on training their boards and staffs about what racial-equity grant-making practices should be.
The San Francisco Foundation and a handful of others have focused on making every grant rise to stringent race-based standards. Others, such as Borealis and Tipping Point, an antipoverty grant maker in San Francisco, have created entire grant-making programs and priorities to reach organizations led by people of color.
“As we have adopted racial equity as the way we do things, we’ve found that we work with the same groups we’ve long worked with, but those groups now get more general-operating support and multiyear grants,” says Fred Blackwell, president of the San Francisco Foundation, which makes more than half of its grants — around $100 million per year — to grassroots organizations run by people of color. “It’s a way for us to do more for them. We’re partners for longer.”
Other grant makers, such as the McKnight Foundation, have recently augmented efforts to make their operations more equitable by collecting demographic data from organizations that apply for grants. Meanwhile, others are going global in the quest to do more to promote racial equity. Kellogg recently announced a total of $9.5 million in grants to support organizations led by people of color in Haiti, Mexico, and the United States, as part of what it calls “identity-based philanthropy.”
“The ‘right thing’ looks different from group to group,” says Marcus Walton, chief executive at Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, an organization that helps its member foundations improve their practices. “Racial equity represents a journey. It’s not just about frameworks and tools. This is a change-management strategy. Foundations need to facilitate change in partnership with people in communities and find their own ways to do that.”
Such a bold change isn’t exactly synonymous with the foundation world or its history, Walton says. “It was taboo in the past to support some advocacy groups that try to make the changes their communities need,” he says. “Racial equity is showing us a way to help those groups.”
Navigating a White Industry
There are still barriers to overcome. Too often, foundation executives and program officers create racial-equity systems that are then scotched by board members who feel threatened by them once such grants have been made. Trustees often serve as a drag anchor on racial progress. And too many grant makers hire from within the industry, making their own staff and leadership disproportionately white, which can affect grant making.
“Philanthropy hasn’t ever been ready to go to a place where it changes systems,” says Sam Cobbs, president at Tipping Point. “There aren’t as many rebels in this sector as people like to think. We say we want to be more diverse ourselves, but we tend to recruit our own, which means things don’t really change.”
Grant making is still driven largely by relationships and personal interactions, says Al Richmond, executive director of Community-Campus Partnerships for Health. Because foundation officials are still overwhelmingly white, nonprofit leaders of color are at a disadvantage. “This work is a contact sport,” he says. “It’s taken me time to develop those relationships.”
To make those connections, Richmond has to navigate race and class differences. “I have to work through that all the time because oftentimes I am the only African American male present,” he says. “That’s my own internal work. But also, I think it’s work that foundations have to do to try to create a warm and opening environment.”
Richmond thinks foundations should track their grant making carefully so they know what share of the money they give goes to nonprofits led and staffed by people of color. One way foundations can increase their connections to those groups is by increasing the racial and ethnic diversity of their boards of directors.
Grant makers that care about racial equity should also examine their policies to see if they lock out certain groups from applying. Richmond says that many nonprofits led by people of color are very small. New groups in immigrant communities might have only one or two employees.
“If we continue to fund those that have the greatest capacity, we will never fund those that need support in helping them to grow their capacity,” he says.
Despite the Grind, There’s Hope
The stakes are high for foundations to figure out how to be more equitable in their grant making.
Organizations that are led by people of color are often closest to the problems they’re trying to solve, and they find innovative approaches to solve them, says Ward, the executive director of the Western States Center. But because those leaders have to spend so much more time than their white counterparts to raise smaller sums of money, their groups are chronically underfunded and can never take their ideas to scale. Often, he says, more prosperous white-led groups co-opt their approaches and hire away talented young leaders.
The grind takes its toll.
“We are taking these amazing, bright, innovative, energetic leaders, and we are drowning them in philanthropic bureaucracy,” he says. “They’re burning out.”
Despite grant makers’ fits and starts on racial equity, many people are hopeful.
“It feels like we’re riding a wave on this right now,” says Michele Kumi Baer, philanthropy project director at Race Forward, an organization that works to sharpen the advocacy of racial- justice groups. “Philanthropy can get caught up in trends that it often drops in midstream. But what’s encouraging to me is that a lot of high-powered grant makers are discussing best practices in racial equity.”
It’s great to see grant makers dive into racial issues they’ve long been afraid to tackle head-on, she says. “We’ll know within the next three to five years whether this is a trend that will truly be transformative.”
Jim Rendon contributed to this article.
