Julia Stasch, who narrowed the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s grant-making strategy to focus on several “big bets,” said Tuesday that she will step down as president of the Chicago grant maker next year.
Stasch joined the foundation in 2001 and served as vice president for U.S. programs before being picked for the top job in 2014. Previously, she served as chief of staff to former Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and as chief executive of a Chicago community-development bank.
Dan Huttenlocher, MacArthur’s board chairman, praised Stash for bringing a sense of “rigor, urgency, and boldness” to the foundation.
“Her vision helped define ‘big bet’ philanthropy and reinforce in powerful ways the foundation’s core commitment to justice,” he said in a statement.
Under Stasch, the foundation, which has about $7 billion in assets, wound down some longstanding programs, such as its support for housing and maternal health, and committed larger sums of money to criminal justice, climate change and the environment, nuclear disarmament, and civil-society efforts in a single country, Nigeria.
“We will work in programs that are larger in scale, time-limited in nature, or designed to reach specific objectives,” she wrote in her first annual report as president. “We will place less emphasis on program areas with an indefinite life span.”
‘Sense of Urgency’
Stasch pushed for a sunset date on each big bet, believing it would make grants more effective.
She told the Chronicle in 2015 that putting a “bookend” on a program’s life cycle would create pressure for the grant maker to change course quickly, if necessary.
“Having a sense of urgency and relevance requires that you create structures that force you to constantly examine” the foundation’s impact, she says. “Being time-limited does that. If we don’t get traction in the first few years, there may be better ways to use our money.”
Stasch also altered the way the foundation evaluates potential new program areas. Rather than construct a fully baked plan before committing money, Stasch has advocated for what some call a “design-build” approach that gets money out the door quickly and entrusts foundation leaders, grantees, and others to make changes in funding priorities on the fly.
Under Stasch, MacArthur continued to place an emphasis on program-related investments that attempt to generate both a social and a financial return. It also sought to develop a platform for uninitiated impact investors to get involved. For instance, in 2016 MacArthur teamed up with the Calvert Foundation and the Chicago Community Trust to create “Benefit Chicago,” an attempt to steer donor-advised-fund holders to make impact investments in the city.
With Stasch at the helm, MacArthur also inaugurated 100&Change, a $100 million grant given after a yearlong selection process. The award was designed to lift the veil on the grant-making process and provide applicants with public and expert feedback. In December, MacArthur announced the winners: the International Rescue Committee and the Sesame Street Workshop, for a program to educate refugee children in the Middle East.
The MacArthur board will immediately launch a broad search for Stasch’s replacement, Huttenlocher said.
