New CEO at Council on Foundations Pledges Greater Accountability

Council on Foundations

Kathleen Enright, the new CEO of the Council on Foundations, discussed the need for transformation and pledged to create a more open and inclusive organization in her speech here at the group’s annual conference, which has drawn roughly 1,000 people.

“We will hold ourselves accountable to a higher standard starting now,” she said to applause. “We will involve members in decisions that affect you.”

She pledged that the organization, a 70-year-old nonprofit association of grant makers, will improve how it interacts with its members, becoming “better at being a member-connected field leadership organization.”

“All of this constitutes my commitment to you today,” Enright said. “In return, will you tell us how we’re doing, and will you hold us accountable?”

Enright assumed leadership of the council in March, taking over from Vikki Spruill who left the organization last June. Enright was previously the president of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. The council has shrunk from 2,000 members in 2009 to about 700 today and has been operating at a loss for the past two years. As a result, it has cut back on conferences and some services.

Enright’s talk largely steered away from specific plans for addressing these issues. Instead she focused broadly on transformation, illustrating the power and possibility of change with the story of her father, who remade himself from a traditional breadwinner to a caregiver for her mother.

Enright also offered a powerful defense of philanthropy, poking fun at the popular-culture stereotype of a philanthropist as a self-serving global capitalist out to bolster his self-image and outdo the next-richest guy. She pushed back on critiques like those from Anand Giridharadas in his book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, that the wealthy have benefitted from and often helped to create the very social and environmental problems they are claiming to address through their foundations.

“A few bad actors that generate such headlines hurt the rest of us by lending credence to our critics, and that, in turn, makes it harder for us to do our jobs and serve our communities,” she said.

In her rebuttal, she cited examples like the Puerto Rico Community Foundation making grants to first responders after Hurricane Maria in 2017 and other foundations providing assistance after the mass shooting in Thousand Oaks, Calif., in November. She also highlighted a $30 million effort to improve mental-health services for veterans.

Enright called for greater self-examination among the council’s members. “We need to start by looking at our own practices and making sure that we are above reproach,” she said. “What is our complicity in the inequities in the system that created us, and how do we balance that against the positive impact that we are clearly having in communities around the country and all over the world?”

Liberal vs. Conservative

Grant makers at the conference talked about the challenges of giving grantees more power in their relationships with funders — and the benefits of taking a more inclusive approach.

Jessamyn Shams-Lau, executive director of the Peery Foundation, identified a key conflict she sees in the foundation world: Board members tend to be more conservative politically, and staff tends to be more liberal.

That can lead to disagreements and challenges in deciding how foundations work in their communities and with grant recipients, she said. “That is something we are really wrestling with and trying to be very honest and open about,” she said. “We have very different ideas of what is most important and the best way to achieve it.”

For example, she said that there have been discussions about whether to make larger grants when nonprofits are led by people of color, an issue that has not been resolved, she said.

Panelists in the discussion, moderated by Tonya Allen, CEO of the Skillman Foundation, agreed that pushing for increased inclusiveness was challenging, but the results were well worth the effort.

Don Chen, president of the Surdna Foundation, has experienced similar tensions. A small number of the nearly 500 relatives of the founder have said they object to the organization’s shift toward funding social-justice organizations. Chen pointed out that his board is about 80 percent white — 10 of 13 board members are family — while his staff is about 75 percent people of color.

Staff members had a deep desire to be on the leading edge of social justice, which led to years of discussion.

“It was really hard and really messy — and it is still messy,” he said. “If you don’t respect each other enough to engage, then you’re not filling the promise of what it means to be a family unit of people working together.”

Brian Hooks, president of the Charles Koch Foundation, discussed the work that his organization is doing on criminal-justice reform. One of the organizations it funds is Hudson Link which provides college education and life-skills training to inmates before they are released. The program was started by Sean Pica, who served 16 years in prison. The foundation has helped it grow. People who go through the program have a recidivism rate of about 2 percent compared with more than 60 percent for most inmates, Hooks said.

To achieve those kinds of results on a large scale, the foundation had to embrace partnerships with people like Pica, Hooks said.

“There’s a richness that comes from approaching the issue from both perspectives,” he said. “If we hadn’t done anything that has made us really uncomfortable — not just a little bit uncomfortable but really uncomfortable — we’re probably not pushing ourselves far enough.”

Correction: A previous version of this article said incorrectly that family members of the Surdna Foundation’s founder had sued the grant maker. We apologize for the error.