Mold Young Leaders, Share Power, and Acknowledge Injustice: Advice From Foundation Leaders of Color

At the California Endowment, the focus on racial equity began long before the protests over the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others who died in the hands of police on the job.

A decade ago, the organization tapped nonprofit leaders in 14 struggling communities across California to focus on health equity.

Robert Ross, the endowment’s CEO said he and his colleagues had begun to realize that the philanthropy couldn’t achieve its mission of improving health for all unless it made direct investments in organizations led by people of color who could develop solutions to problems faced by the people they serve — and learn to advocate effectively for policy and systems changes. The approach, he says, was not merely a result of some moral obligation but a strategic approach to achieving the endowment’s mission.

Ross himself had been thinking about issues of race and structural bias for a lot longer. He is an African American of a mixed ethnic background (his mother was of Puerto Rican descent). He grew up in a South Bronx housing project rife with poverty and violence and spent the early part of his career in public health. When he was a pediatrician practicing in Camden, N.J., and north Philadelphia in the 1980s, he watched as Black and brown people were provided little help as the crack cocaine crisis spread and triggered an epidemic of incarceration, infant mortality, sexually transmitted diseases, domestic violence, and so much more.

Ross is just one of many philanthropy leaders of color whose expertise could benefit many white foundation leaders as they seek to deal with matters of race, including the disproportionate impact of police violence, Covid19, climate change, and so many other issues. In recent months, I have talked to him and to two other leaders — Eric Jolly of the Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation and Nicole Taylor of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation — to get their advice about what they’d like their white peers to know.

While many well-intentioned white people work in philanthropy, their experiences limit their understanding of how to find solutions that work for people of color. White saviorism — the tendency to help people of color without asking them what they need — is, unfortunately, alive and well.

This is not to say that leaders of color in philanthropy always get it right. However, they do approach problems from a different perspective and generally have a better understanding of the importance of collaborative problem-solving with members of the communities their organizations serve. Here’s what I learned from my conversations with Jolly, Ross, and Taylor.

Acknowledge injustices in all forms.

White philanthropic leaders are showing up in new and unanticipated ways, often acknowledging the privilege that their whiteness plays in their own leadership. For people of color, identity is likely to play a large role in leadership from the start. Jolly’s own Indigenous identity is intrinsically interwoven with his leadership style.

“I’m a deeply spiritual person and native. So some of that is as an approach and a belief in the power of stories to create an imagined future better than the one we live in, [a belief] in the power of stories to create a recognition of injustice,” Jolly said. “One first step toward justice is the courageous recognition of injustice. It takes more courage to recognize injustice against someone other than yourself. It takes courage to say what happened to that woman was wrong. What happened to that Latinx leader was wrong. It’s easy to talk about who’s stepping on my toes, but I need to recognize who’s stepping on someone else’s toes.”

Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation

Jolly said he adopted the phrase “I’m with you” to indicate to other leaders of color that he sees the injustice being perpetrated against them and that he supports them in their efforts to achieve justice.

“When George Floyd was murdered, it was an act of anti-Blackness,” Jolly said, noting that other groups, including Native Americans, also experience violence at the hands of police. “But for that moment of George Floyd, it was more important for other BIPOC leaders to say, ‘I’m with you,” rather than to say “Me, too.” And that was a powerful act of allyship across the BIPOC community.”

Focus on shifting power to the people affected by critical problems.

When Jolly joined the Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation in 2015, he plainly stated his plan to make racial equity and justice a key component of how the organization awarded money and used its power.

“At the very beginning, we had an agreement: Please don’t hire me if you don’t mean it, if this is not a real commitment to equity,” Jolly said.

Jolly’s staff, board, and community worked together to create a plan to put equity at the center of its work, outlining its strategic goals to advocate for equity, inspire generosity, and invest in community-led solutions.

“The first thing we started with was an understanding that while it’s not always easy to give away money wisely, it’s even harder to give away power,” Jolly said. “And we wanted to stop the habit of philanthropists and donors often investing in solving problems that communities weren’t even aware they had.”

Build on first steps, which takes determination and collaboration with others.

When Taylor joined the Silicon Valley Community Foundation in 2018, the organization already had a foundation of equity work to build from, including work on predatory payday lending, public-policy issues around inequity in education, and Know Your Rights campaigns during U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.

Taylor’s first act was to figure out how to build on that work, not knowing the pandemic would be in full force just as the process was due to wrap up in April 2020.

Silicon Valley Community Foundation

Still, the organization was able to set new goals “focused on reducing systemic disparities and ensuring that our resources are directed to those most in need: low-income, immigrant, and communities of color. “In particular, the organization is focusing on housing for extremely low- and very low-income people, early-childhood development, and financial security and mobility.”

Taylor and her staff also took working from home during Covid-19 as an opportunity to consider new ways to engage their constituents — particularly donors — to show them how they could make the most difference to help those left out by government or business. The fund extended that work by joining with other community foundations to aggregate funds and distribute them throughout the region.

After the murder of George Floyd, Taylor said, “it became clear that we needed to continue to use our voice and our platform — our megaphone, if you will — to highlight racial injustice and equity and to make it easy for people to understand what they could do to help.”

This led the Silicon Valley fund and dozens of other grant makers to launch the California Black Freedom Fund, a $100 million project to focus on Black-led work throughout the state, specifically funding Black leaders focused on social justice and giving them money and other resources they need to do the work.

At both the community foundation and the freedom fund, Taylor spearheaded efforts to create advisory councils led by community leaders, to better inform the work and the needs of the communities they are serving.

“We wanted to get rid of that power imbalance that’s existed since the beginning of time in philanthropy,” Taylor said. “For me, it was really helping to put the line in the sand about who we are and what we stand for, then getting out of the way and letting the team do what I knew they could do.”

Uphold the dignity of those who are struggling.

When Jolly thinks about what he wants to impart to white leaders, he shares a tale from his childhood about a community doctor who made a nighttime house visit to treat Jolly’s sick sister and to give preventative shots to Jolly and his brother. Jolly’s father pulled an envelope of emergency cash from behind the refrigerator and nervously asked the doctor how much he owed.

“The doctor looked at me and looked at my father, and he said, ‘Well, Mr. Jolly’ — a doctor called my dad ‘Mr. in front of his kids, and that was remarkable and uncommon in the Native community,” Jolly recalled. “The doctor said, ‘Well, Mr. Jolly, I gave three doses of medicine and did some examinations. I’m going to have to charge you more than usual. Would $5 be too much?’

“Now, even back then, $5 wasn’t much, but that doctor could have said to my father, ‘Well, Clarence, I know you don’t have much. I’ll just take five bucks.’ But he didn’t. Instead, he said, ‘I’m going to charge you extra, Mr. Jolly.’ And he gave my father dignity in front of his family and his community.”

Jolly concluded, “That’s how giving has to happen. It can be an action that gives dignity or takes it away.”

Listen to young leaders — and prepare them to make “good trouble.”

Ross says it’s important for foundations to invest time, money and resources on young leaders who play a pivotal role today and tomorrow.

He has a president’s youth council of activists of color ages 16 to 22 from across California that he meets with four times each year.

“What I do with that time is mostly switch to listening mode,” he said. “What are these young people of color dealing with in their communities, in their neighborhoods? I want to be mindful that I am in direct communication with them so that their words, their experiences, are not filtered out by a glossy report or presentation.”

Ross said he hopes to see philanthropy embrace “what civil rights icon John Lewis termed as ‘the good troublemakers among us.’” He continued, “The last 10 years have shown me that when we entrust and invest in organizing activism and advocacy that engages or is led by young people, they never disappoint.”

Taylor also places great emphasis on the importance of building future leaders because she sees them as playing an important role both now and then. She came to philanthropy from higher education and has seen the power and passion of young adults of color throughout her career. She envisions a future when they will lead from the front lines. She said they have a clear picture of their own role and the role of others in the fight for equity, justice, and a better world.

“Young people are always on fire when something is wrong and unjust,” she said. “They see it so clearly. And they would want me to be on the front lines with them, marching and protesting and demanding change.

“I told them that I’ve learned lessons from the civil-rights era. There are different roles that need to be played when social change takes place. When we’re trying to get long-term embedded wrongs righted, there needs to be a place for people on the front lines, and there needs to be a place for people working in the back who are resourcing the people on the front lines. And there’s a role for people who can negotiate and work directly with the people who have the power to make the rules and policies. They can be the voice for the people on the front lines and the bridge to the people in the community.”

Invest generously for the long haul.

Beyond learning to recognize who those frontline leaders are, Ross said philanthropy must consider that long-term answers take long-term investment and effort while recognizing that vulnerable groups have their own specific needs that should be met in different ways. Forcing those groups to fight each other for their own piece of the pie is not the solution.

“Once our grant-making strategies are reduced to identity slice-of-the-pie politics, then we fail to achieve the bigger prize, and that bigger prize is what Dr. Martin Luther King offered 50 years ago,” Ross said. “The beloved community, a community of full inclusion, full belonging, devoid of hate, devoid of racism, devoid of poverty. And that is a prize that we need to collectively try to achieve across racial differences.”

Remember that identity matters.

The past year-plus has held plenty of challenges for philanthropy and, perhaps most of all, for its leaders of color. “I am personally exhausted,” Taylor said, “because as a Black woman, a leader, and a mother of a 21-year-old Black son in America right now, the fear is real.”

Taylor brings up a point that is vital. At the end of the day, leaders of color may be able to hang up their foundation president hat. They cannot, however, take off their own identity — either on the job or off. And their identities can be a great asset for philanthropy and its ability to make a difference where it matters most.

“Some people say that they can compartmentalize their lives,” Taylor said. “Sometimes I can do that, but in the past year, it’s been near impossible. I would like to say that people have seen me be genuine with them and that, in the appropriate way, they see the pain that I carry and that I can relate to their pain and to the need for change.”

“It has led me to a sense of urgency,” she concluded, “and I carry that sense of urgency in my leadership with the organization.”

Likewise, Ross seeks to stay close to people who grew up facing challenges like he did.

Having experienced some of the same injustices that continue to be perpetuated against those communities today puts leaders of color like him in a position to develop effective strategies and solutions.

“As a person of color, you can’t help but feel obligated to remain proximate to that pain, to the pain of what folks are dealing with in North Philadelphia or the South Bronx or South Central Los Angeles,” he says.

“It’s important that when we show up in board meetings and meetings with other foundation leaders, in meetings with the mayor or a governor or an elected official, that you carry with you the proximity to pain and injustice.

“If you lose that sense,” Ross says, “then you become unmoored and unhitched to your roots.

Foundation presidents like Ross lead by example to show his peers what they can do. So, too, do Jolly, Taylor, and many more, like Carmen Rojas of the Marguerite Casey Foundation, who works tirelessly for workers’ rights and dignity and Judy Belk of the California Wellness Foundation, who regularly speaks out in opinion articles and elsewhere to hold up a mirror to help philanthropy see its own blind spots.

These leaders know what needs to be done and have demonstrated the courage it takes to make the hard choices to do it. White-led philanthropy must follow their lead.

Keecha Harris is chief executive of a consulting firm that bears her name. She directs the Presidents’ Forum on Racial Equity in Philanthropy and is a member of the Democracy Frontlines Fund’s Brain Trust.