The Brain Trust

Mike Kane

Jeff Raikes is the first to admit he’s not the most likely person to have become one of the nation’s most outspoken and listened-to philanthropists on race matters.

After all, he is a white 61-year-old who grew up on a Nebraska farm. He worked at Microsoft early in his career — at a time when even Melinda Gates has said she nearly left the company because of a bro culture that has marked so many technology startups.

But as he and his wife, Tricia, began to devote more of their dollars and time to run their $109 million Raikes Foundation, they realized they couldn’t tackle the challenges they cared about most — including education and homelessness — unless they also made a significant commitment to reducing racial inequalities.

Raikes Foundation

The Raikes fund makes about $19 million in grants a year, mostly to homelessness and education programs, and has been a leading player in corralling Seattle’s business, government, and nonprofits to expand the availability of affordable housing.

To find their own blind spots, the Raikeses sought to learn everything they could about racism and racial disparities and how they could weave that learning into their philanthropy.

All of that work “starts with a lot of humility,” says Jeff. “We don’t have the lived experience of people who grew up in our country and dealt with the negative narratives about race. We have an opportunity to take advantage of what we’re learning and bring along other philanthropists of significant means who are also white and don’t have that lived experience.”

To further investigate, they’ve formed a brain trust with top leaders from corporate, academic, and nonprofit backgrounds — including Darren Walker, who heads the Ford Foundation, Rashad Robinson, head of Color of Change, Marc Morial, head of the Urban League, and Michele Norris, founder of the Race Card Project. They gather over dinner to grapple with questions about how powerful, wealthy people can do more to heal the nation’s racial divisions and create a world where people of color thrive.

Walker called the dinner he attended with the Raikeses a “profound” gathering.

“I’ve never had an experience like that in someone’s home where there was a deep discussion about not just the diagnosis of racial injustice but how we can unlock solutions that will help our country heal from its racial history,” Walker says.

The Raikeses “have a conviction to improve society that is informed by a high level of empathy for others.”

Jeff has taken the anti-racism message to other leading philanthropists. In his Forbes magazine column, which launched in the spring, he has pushed donors to investigate the part racism plays in the nation’s social problems. He’s expounded on the topic at events held by Center for Effective Philanthropy and the Atlantic, and in July, Priscilla Chan invited him to speak about equity at the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative.

Kevin Dietsch

A Part of Something Bigger

Collaborating with other wealthy donors — and influencing them — has been a big part of the Raikeses’ work, especially after Jeff stepped down as chief executive of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which he led for five years.

In addition to urging other wealthy philanthropists to focus on race, the Raikeses have put nearly $8 million into Giving Compass, a website that collects thousands of stories about the good works supported by philanthropy, along with expert studies on what is most effective.

Learning about the experience of other donors helps new philanthropists understand they don’t have to go it alone — they are part of something bigger. “It’s very important to find the joy in philanthropy,” says Jeff. “We happen to believe you get greater joy if what you are doing has greater impact.”

Giving Compass was incubated in Giving Tech Labs, an effort that the Raikeses have invested in separate from their giving through the Raikes Foundation. At the labs, technology specialists look for ways computer science can serve the public good.

Letting Their Guard Down

As the Raikeses have sought to do more to learn about race, they have also just hired a new leader for their foundation who has a long history of both promoting equity and galvanizing other donors to focus on such issues.

Dennis Quirin, who spent six years as head of Neighborhood Funders Group, a network of grant makers committed to social justice, doubled the number of the group’s institutional members and launched Philanthropy Forward: Leadership for Change Fellowship, a program in which foundation chiefs can freely trade ideas with one another outside of the organizational structures of their institutions — much like the series of dinners that the Raikeses plan to continue to hold to spread more understanding of racial equity among white philanthropists.

Microsoft Fortune Helps Social Good Organization Harness Technology

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

In a loft space in downtown Seattle, Giving Tech Labs allows technologists who cut their teeth at Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo harness technology to better serve charities. Jeff and Tricia Raikes were key early supporters.

The dinners have attracted people like Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson and the philanthropists Steve Ballmer (another Microsoft alum) and his wife, Connie.

Norris, who in addition to founding the Race Card Project is head of the Aspen Institute’s Bridge Program, which focuses on diversity, equity, and inclusion, says the dinners have allowed participants to let their guard down and speak from the heart about their concerns and fears.

“They’re team builders,” she says of the Raikeses. “Camaraderie is part of that. Building circles of trust is a big part of that work.”

Long Journey

Teamwork also describes how the Raikeses work together on their philanthropy.

Jeff Raikes likes to say that he hit the Microsoft lottery twice “because there was Microsoft stock, and there was Tricia.”

The couple met and forged their careers at Microsoft — Jeff was an Apple Computers transplant who rose to a top leadership job before leaving to lead the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for five years. After a stint in New York, Tricia had returned to her hometown of Seattle in 1981 to help lead the startup’s marketing department.

The boom in Microsoft’s stock price made the couple enormously wealthy, and they decided it was important to give much of it to good causes. Deciding exactly how to do that fell to Tricia. She wasn’t a neophyte. At Microsoft, Mary Gates, Bill’s mother, took her under her wing and connected her to philanthropic opportunities in the area, including her first board seat at the Boys and Girls Club of King County, in Washington.

Still, the responsibility of running a foundation seemed like a huge weight.

Says Tricia: “I felt ill-prepared.”

The couple began by supporting issues close to home. One of their children was harassed in school, so they began giving to anti-bullying efforts.

Shifting from anti-bullying grants to curbing systemic racism more than 15 years later didn’t happen because of some “aha” moment. Rather, it was an “organic” process, Jeff says, that resulted from their curiosity and willingness to thoroughly investigate social problems.

Their anti-bullying work fostered a deep interest in adolescent brain development and the concept of fixed versus growth mind-sets among children. A child with a growth mind-set realizes she is smart and will put in extra effort to learn so she can contribute to the world around her. A student with a fixed mind-set has come to believe she will not succeed so she avoids challenges and makes little effort.

A child of any race or income level can have a fixed mind-set. But the more the Raikeses investigated, through discussions with Stanford University psychology professor and Raikes grantee Carol Dweck and others, the more they became convinced that racism was a key factor.

Chris Wojdak/Equal Opportunity Schools

Testing and Feedback

Those insights shaped the Raikeses’ $14 million annual education grant-making budget. Rather that emphasizing teacher training and standardized test scores, the couple’s education grants are dedicated to creating school environments where all students, regardless of income and race, can thrive.

Instead of simply making a grant to a nonprofit, they also initiate the group into a network of experts and other grantees that meet regularly to exchange ideas and offer advice. The supportive environment of peers allows grantees to take risks and open up about their shortcomings, especially when it comes to race, equity, and inclusion.

Educators may not be aware of their own hidden biases, the Raikeses worry. Joining the group, called the Building Equitable Learning Environment Network, allows grantees to test many approaches and get feedback.

The network’s home base is the University of Chicago Consortium, and other research members include the Billions Institute, the National Equity Project, and the Project for Education Research That Scales.

The Raikes fund didn’t issue a request for proposals to enlist members. Instead it sent out a “request for learning” to identify nonprofits that were pioneering new approaches to students of color and low-income students to get them to tell the foundation what kinds of information would be most helpful to their work.

“A traditional RFP would be: ‘Tell us how great you are and some smoke and mirrors game about your results.’ " says Zoë Stemm-Calderon, director of the foundation’s education program. In a request for learning, she says, potential grantees are asked to describe the students they know least about and areas where they have not yet been effective.

The approach emboldened Sasha Rabkin, chief program officer at Equal Opportunity Schools. Over the past seven years, the Seattle nonprofit has identified and enrolled nearly 40,000 students of color and students from low-income families in Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate classes in 183 school districts across the country. Getting a $1.3 million grant from Raikes and joining the equity education network gave Rabkin the freedom to test new approaches to steer students of color to advanced learning courses.

Rabkin knew that the nonprofit’s current approach, which analyzes data to identify students to help, wouldn’t have a lasting impact without deeper change. To succeed, an entire system of behaviors, attitudes, policies, and practices, both in school and out, would have to shift.

To identify where those changes need to be made, Equal Opportunity Schools developed Equity Leader Labs. The labs act as an in-house research-and-development unit for the educators the nonprofit works with to help them develop as leaders, collect data, and share ideas on how to boost enrollment.

In 2017, 50 schools participated. Since then, the Gates Foundation has chipped in $300,000, and Equal Opportunity Schools has more than doubled the number of participating institutions.

The way the foundation approached the grant, Rabkin said, demonstrated patience on the Raikeses’ part. It also reflects the humility Jeff Raikes says is necessary as a white donor interested in supporting racial equity, where self-awareness is necessary and success isn’t guaranteed.

“The usual philanthropic cycle is to fund things that did well last year and then double down on them the next year,” Rabkin says. “Raikes has funded what we want to do well but haven’t been able to pull off.”

United Way of King County

Data on Homelessness

Education was a natural priority for the Raikeses. They felt powerless as parents of a child facing problems at school. Others who weren’t as wealthy or who didn’t receive as much support from educators, the couple realized, faced even more pressure trying to protect and encourage their children experiencing similar difficulties. They didn’t have to look too far to figure out what their other key priority would be.

In their hometown of Seattle, civic leaders have struggled for years over how to solve the city’s homelessness crisis.

When the couple began tackling ways to end homelessness in their region nearly a decade ago, they discovered that King County, Wash., devoted a lot of care to homeless children and families but didn’t track homelessness rates among young adults or people in their late teens.

“They were not being viewed as a discrete population. They weren’t being held in any of the system’s responses,” says Tricia Raikes. “We realized it was a hidden problem.”

Young adults who are homeless are disproportionately LGBTQ, black, or Hispanic. Often they are trying to escape danger at home, and remaining hidden is a survival tactic.

The Raikes Foundation began by taking stock of all of the resources available to homeless youths in the county and bankrolling data-collection efforts by the local government to get a better picture of how many students were homeless and for how long and the immediate causes.

Doing so gave the Raikeses a clear sense of the need.

“If we’re going to really invest our time and do something meaningful, early on we agreed to identify where there were gaps, where there were needs that weren’t being addressed,” Tricia Raikes says. “If we can figure out how to solve those kinds of problems, we’re really going to make a difference and not just add to something that’s already well-funded.”

Help From Pearl Jam

As the problem became better understood, the Raikeses invited others to join the effort by creating the Youth Funders Group of donors. They pooled more than $5 million, which went to improve data collection, support a dedicated county employee to coordinate efforts, and provide a forum for young homeless adults to tell their stories and contribute to the policy response.

The effort resulted in a coordinated plan, developed with support from United Way of King County, to prevent youth homelessness. Having a fleshed-out plan helped government and nonprofit leaders who worked with the county’s jails, court system, schools, and social-service agencies get a sense that the group was fully committed.

The work gained momentum throughout the state, leading to the creation of the Office of Homeless Youth in Washington. In 2016, the Raikes, Gates, Paul G. Allen, and Campion foundations gave a total of nearly $2 million to start Schoolhouse Washington, a program to end homelessness among students. More than $10 million in federal Housing and Urban Development Grants followed.

And in 2017, the Raikeses helped start A Way Home Washington, a statewide campaign to call attention to the problem of youth homelessness. With the support of a long roster of businesses and nonprofits, the campaign held 100-day challenges in which the City of Spokane and King and Pierce counties competed to help the most homeless people in their jurisdictions. The campaign caught the attention of local heroes Pearl Jam. Last year, the rock group and its members donated $10.8 million after a series of benefit concerts in Seattle.

Fighting a Failing System

The Raikeses’ coalition building became especially important after Seattle’s City Council passed a tax on large companies to create a housing fund.

After the levy was signed into law, some of the region’s big businesses, led by Amazon, balked, and the tax was repealed.

In response, this winter, the Raikeses helped form a team of business and nonprofit leaders, including Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, Mark Okerstrom, president of the Expedia Group, and Connie Ballmer to help Seattle and the rest of King County plan a regionwide approach to fighting homelessness.

It remains to be seen what solutions the group will come up with. But any approach will surely involve investigating how and why the current system is failing and organizing a collaboration among government, business, and nonprofit officials.

It’s clear that the Raikeses want to be part of any such collaboration for a long time. They declined to say what their net worth is, but Jeff Raikes says the foundation’s endowment is a “small percentage” of what their giving will be.

The couple keeps much of their wealth outside of the foundation. Doing so, they say, allows them to give when the need arises, rather than having to struggle to make grants simply to meet a federal requirement that private foundations direct 5 percent of their assets a year toward charitable purposes.

“It can lead to ineffective philanthropy when there’s financial pressure to meet a percentage payout,” Tricia Raikes says. “We want the work to flow as an effective practice.”

Alex Daniels covers foundations, donor-advised funds, fundraising research, and tax issues for the Chronicle. He recently conducted an interview with the MacArthur Foundation’s Julia Stasch, who is stepping down after five years as president. Email Alex or follow him on Twitter.

Correction: A previous version of this article referred to Forward Fellows rather than Philanthropy Forward: Leadership for Change Fellowship.