We are at a moment of profound national reckoning. With more than 240,000 Americans now dead from Covid-19, its disproportionate impact on communities of color, and the continued murder of Black people by police and vigilantes (too often without legal consequence or prosecution), these interrelated national crises have laid bare the deep injustices that continue to define this country.
We are seeing how massive structural change is needed urgently and experiencing the limitations of relying on government to bring it about. In these remarkable times, corporate foundations, like all grant makers, cannot remain on the sidelines. Business and social issues are intertwined, and companies have an inescapable role to play in our democracy — an obligation to engage and lead, not follow.
But even as corporate foundations and other grant makers feel an urgent desire to take action on social-justice issues, they may not know where to start. Many are wondering how to meet this moment.
For the Levi Strauss Foundation, the answer has been to intensify our investment in communities of color and strengthen their power to organize by supporting grassroots leaders who are tackling longstanding inequities and fighting for transformative change from the ground up.
Corporate foundations, like all grant makers, cannot remain on the sidelines. Business and social issues are intertwined, and companies have … an obligation to engage and lead, not follow.
In recent years, we’ve seen a surge in conversations about how to build and sustain social movements, yet the funding remains strikingly anemic — and only a sliver comes from corporate foundations.
From 2003 to 2016, the median corporate foundation directed just 3.2 percent of its grant making to social justice (based on a National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy analysis we commissioned). Most of that funding was funneled to national nonprofits with high profiles — not perpetually underfunded local organizations.
As a corporate foundation dedicated to social justice, we’re determined to change that. We think our recent work offers a road map for other grant makers seeking new ways to catalyze social change.
From ‘Grasstops’ to Grassroots
In 2010, we launched Pioneers in Justice, a five-year program to support a group of emerging social-justice leaders as they took the helm of established local nonprofits. These leaders hailed from civil-rights organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area, but many represented affiliates of national groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union. The Pioneers program was so successful, it became the core focus of our hometown work.
In 2015, we were eager to move further into the heart of marginalized communities facing deep injustice, so we selected a very different set of leaders: seven community leaders of color who were tackling inequality in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.
The seasoned organizers and grassroots leaders we chose for this second phase, called Pioneers 2020, were Kris Hayashi of the Transgender Law Center, Pastor Michael McBride of Faith in Action’s Live Free Campaign, Vanessa Moses of Causa Justa :: Just Cause, Zach Norris of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Aparna Shah of Power California, Terry Valen of the Filipino Community Center, and Miya Yoshitani of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network. They each work deep inside their communities, building support and creating movements to drive systemic change on gender equality, climate change, criminal justice, LGBT rights, racial equity, immigrant rights, and gun violence.
We quickly learned that working with grassroots leaders is profoundly different from working with leaders of well-known, established nonprofits. We learned that it requires uncomfortable honesty, radical empathy, and a kind of flexibility not often practiced in philanthropy.
For us, this work was transformative: This new group of leaders reshaped the Pioneers effort, changed our foundation’s operations, and even influenced our parent company’s internal policies and advocacy on social issues.
For corporate foundations and other grant makers considering similar work, here are the key lessons we want to share.
Take a risk. Programs like the Pioneers aren’t about making safe bets and tracking short-term returns on investment. They are longer-term efforts that start with grant makers envisioning the world they want to create and then considering what it will take to move the community, the nation, and ultimately the world to that place.
This approach will not be popular with everyone; it will involve some risks. Corporations and their foundations are particularly prone to view social-justice movements as risky, but these risks diminish when companies broaden the definition of “stakeholders” to go beyond shareholders and customers and include local communities — particularly the most vulnerable people within them.
At the start of Pioneers, our trustees had questions and concerns about how to measure results within five years, but they also agreed that we need to think about our impact on society with every decision made. “These leaders were doing important work that falls well within our mission, and they needed support,” said Jennifer Haas, board president. “So I didn’t see it as risky. I saw it as the right thing to do.”
Start with trust. This is critical when those involved hail from groups or industries that don’t typically engage with each other. We learned this lesson in hindsight. As grassroots leaders working on social-justice issues like structural racism and income inequality, the new Pioneers came with a healthy critique of capitalism, philanthropy, and anything that seemed “top-down.”
Just as we were learning to work with grassroots leaders, they were learning to work with us — and early on, there were many moments when our frames of reference and our perspectives clashed.
Several months into the program, we began creating opportunities to build relationships and community between the Pioneers and our foundation as well as among the Pioneers. Only after creating space for everyone to listen and understand one another’s perspectives did trust kick in. For trust to grow, grantees and the foundation staff must be willing to be open and vulnerable.
It’s obvious only in retrospect, but you need time and trust to even begin to understand each other. Without these, any effort to bridge the corporate-philanthropic and the social-justice worlds can’t find its footing.
Be flexible. Our 2020 effort began as a replication project, following a buoyant first phase. But we learned quickly that predesigned road maps and theories of change don’t apply to this deep, emergent, and sometimes messy work.
Trying to replicate our original model felt overly prescribed; the approach didn’t match the moment. So we shifted tactics. After the first year, we set aside our original design and started asking the Pioneers: What do you need to advance social change? How can we best help you?
Our strategy shifted, and so did the focus of our grants. So many grant makers have a rigid theory of change, and they exercise tight control over the program. But such approaches are counterproductive to advancing social justice because grant makers often don’t know what communities need.
By going back to the drawing board one year into the program, we had to embrace uncertainty and accept a level of vulnerability. Instead of trying to fit leaders into a predesigned program, we asked the leaders what they needed and then invested in those areas. We changed the formula.
Make the most of your networks. Working with grassroots leaders requires more than administering grants and running a program. Mentorship is not enough; we must elevate underrepresented groups and offer opportunities for visibility and leadership.
Our foundation worked to unlock new resources and networking opportunities for the Pioneers to show other grant makers and influencers how critical, timely, and effective these seven leaders and their movements are. One of the unusual features of the program was also among its most valuable: creating opportunities for the Pioneers and our board members to form authentic relationships.
Welcoming social-justice leaders to interact regularly with board members — and introducing them more widely around the foundation and company — created a new dynamic among us, one built on common values and commitments. The bonds and connections formed between Pioneers and board members enabled honesty, insights, and mutual empathy that is one of the program’s most important outcomes.
Be open to transformation. Partnering with grassroots leaders is not top-down but side-by-side work, with advice, influence, and learning flowing both ways. We benefited from the leaders’ wisdom and frontline perspectives. One of biggest surprises was how deeply the Pioneers influenced our foundation and our company. For example, Mike McBride’s experience and insights helped inform Levi Strauss & Co.’s groundbreaking anti-gun-violence platform and bring communities of color to the center of that discussion. Kris Hayashi and his staff helped inspire and shape our company’s first policy that bans discrimination against employees who are transgender. In one way or another, all the Pioneers inspired us to take on the issues of our time with greater vigor and authenticity.
Grant makers must step up. These nonprofit leaders have inspired us to change how and who we fund and to take new moral stands. They have changed the way we bring our voice, influence, and values to bear to fuel social justice.
This is only the beginning. We need more corporate foundations supporting leaders at the grassroots level to ensure that these movements succeed. We need all grant makers to find organizations not on their radar and to listen to what they need. We must redefine “corporate responsibility.”
I fiercely believe that every institution in society must align toward social justice — no matter how uncomfortable at the outset. In this “movement moment,” it is time for all of us, as grant makers and as human beings, to ask ourselves hard questions such as: Who are we willing to stick our necks out for? Who we are willing to support financially? Who are we are willing to be changed by?
What we stand for matters — but who we stand alongside matters even more.
To learn more about lessons and outcomes of this project, visit Pioneers 2020: Funding the Frontlines of Social Justice.
