To the Editors:
Your recent article “How One Family Foundation Is Evolving to Refocus on Racial Equity” (March 15) focused almost entirely on the decision-making process within a single organization and excluded any reference to racial equity in the larger world.
While the article notes the governing family “had not deeply evaluated what racial justice meant and how to design a grant-making strategy that fully embraced the idea,” the article does not indicate that the family ever did that.
Instead, the article suggests that the Satterberg Foundation’s racial-justice goals are best advanced by increasing funding authority of Black, Indigenous, and people of color on the staff and reducing the board role in validating grant decisions.
The essence of the article turns out to be that “by listening more deeply to nonprofit leaders and trusting that they have a good sense of how foundation grants can be used to fight the impact of racist policies and attitudes, family foundations can go a long way toward evening out the relationship.”
All of this is to the good, but it remains quite a distance from understanding the policies and practices that lead to racial inequities in our country, how these policies and practices can be changed, and what role foundations can — and perhaps should — play in actually building racial equity throughout society.
David Rubenstein
Founding Senior Adviser
Action for Racial Justice