This article is one of a series The Chronicle is featuring this month about leaders who are pushing unorthodox ideas to give philanthropy more power to do good.
Susan Taylor Batten’s phone rings almost every time it happens. A police officer shoots an unarmed black man. The story dominates the news and conversation for days, weeks. Anguished officials at foundations around the country call, wondering what grant makers can do in response.
We don’t talk about race, they say. We don’t know how. Come help us.
Soon Ms. Batten, head of the Association of Black Foundation Executives, is on a plane, then in a room full of foundation officials. She’s talking about communities like Ferguson, Mo. About the shootings as a symptom of larger problems tied to America’s history of racism. About how grant making must change to address those problems.
This crisis-response pattern has marked Ms. Batten’s work since the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson. With each shooting, amid the despair, Ms. Batten seizes the chance to promote a new perspective on grant making. “We’re trying to get folks to look at the bigger picture and not miss these moments to change the way they do their work,” she says.
Why should foundations change their work? Many, she says, campaign to revitalize low-income, largely black neighborhoods yet fail to see the role of race in poverty. Their bread-and-butter programs — for housing, for jobs, for youths — don’t address the racial-equity issues underlying the problems they hope to solve.
One answer, Ms. Batten argues, is to focus on strengthening community infrastructure. That means funding the local, black-led organizations that give communities more power to shape their destiny — grass-roots groups that aim to develop African-American leadership and change public policy and debate. With the Hill-Snowdon Foundation, Ms. Batten’s group has created the Black Social Change Funders Network to coordinate such funding and point grant makers to groups nationwide working on these issues, including many organizations born of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Grant makers, she says, also must “hard wire” racial equity into every major decision. For example, Ms. Batten is urging foundations to adopt policies so that big grant decisions include a racial-equity impact analysis, an increasingly common government tool to assess the potential effect of programs on communities of color.
Typically, when a foundation calls Ms. Batten for help after a police shooting, she spends a day and half with the staff. But often the grant maker decides that’s not enough. She says she has long-term contracts to work with 13 foundations and philanthropy associations and is negotiating with six more.
“There’s more will to work on these issues than many people think,” she says. “Folks just need support.”
