The Next Step in Promoting Equity

Without someone keeping careful watch, people who need help the most could miss out on the federal support Congress sent to nonprofits and local governments in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation in North Carolina is looking for just that kind of sentry: a chief equity officer.

Babcock advertised for the job months ago. Getting someone into the position is even more critical now that the crisis has hit, says Justin Maxson, Babcock’s chief executive.

“Undocumented immigrants across the South are a population it’s likely to totally miss. And rural communities generally struggle to access complicated federal resources,” Maxson says “This is a total redefinition of the federal role in our lives. There’s a lot of potential for upside, but it can miss a lot of people without paying attention to equity.”

Maxson has narrowed the field of applicants to a few people. In April, as most of the country continued to work remotely, Maxson decided to make a final decision once he was able to conduct face-to-face interviews.

At first, Maxson thought an outside organization could help get the foundation properly focus on equity. The grant maker had been working to ensure that everyone on staff, including the receptionist, program officers, and board members, considered the effects of racism each day as they went about their work. But teams of advisers weren’t steeped in the foundation’s workplace culture, says Maxson.

Promoting equity throughout the foundation’s hiring, promotion, grant making, strategy development, and investing was too important a job — and too sensitive — to leave to outsiders alone, he says.

“It just became apparent that we needed someone on staff whose job it was to make equity everyone’s responsibility,” he says. “You’ve got to have somebody getting up every day and going to bed every night thinking about equity,” he says.

Growing Trend

Babcock is the latest in a growing number of grant makers that have created an upper-management position to navigate matters of equity. Carmen Anderson, a longtime program officer at the Heinz Endowment, was named the Pittsburgh grant maker’s chief equity officer in January. Lindsay Hill became director of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the Raikes Foundation in 2018. Aisha Alexander-Young at the Meyer Foundation and Pamela Ross at the Central Indiana Community Foundation have stepped into similar roles in the past few years.

Chief equity officers face considerable obstacles. They must pry old habits from a foundation’s grasp and challenge cultural norms that may drive the way a grant maker chooses the people it hires and how it spends its money, says Jeanné Lewis, vice president and chief engagement officer at National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.

That can mean helping people who are not in the majority feel comfortable about talking with their co-workers about how they are treated because of their race, sexual orientation, or disability. Or it might mean helping employees point out ways the foundation’s grant making unconsciously favors white-led nonprofits. A chief equity officer introduces these topics to the entire staff and board, even if doing so poses a challenge for some staff members who would rather ignore the problem.

“The work is inevitably uncomfortable,” Lewis says. “A senior-level executive needs to be at the helm driving it so the rest of the staff understands that it’s important.”

For the Meyer Foundation’s Alexander-Young, succeeding as an equity leader requires patience. At one of her early interviews at the Washington, D.C., grant maker, she was asked to identify some “low-hanging fruit” to tackle first to make Meyer a more just, equitable foundation. To herself, she thought: The fruit this tree bears is rotten. There are no quick wins.

While Alexander-Young would like to see wholesale changes, she says she realizes that changing a decades-old institution won’t happen right away. Staff members aren’t expected to have everything figured out from the get-go.

“We’re not asking people to come in perfect or be full experts in the history or current realities of systemic racism,” she says. “We’re asking people to have some awareness and willingness to learn.”

Facing the Problem

Pamela Ross, who helped run a statewide foster-care program in Arizona, returned to her native Indianapolis in 2016 to take a job as a program officer at the Central Indiana Community Foundation. Ross felt there weren’t enough people of color in philanthropy, and a job at her hometown community foundation was an opportunity too good to pass up.

The foundation was participating in training developed by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond called “Undoing Racism.” Less than two years later, Central Indiana decided it needed a person on staff to lead a sustained effort, and Ross was named vice president for opportunity, equity, and inclusion.

The foundation couldn’t be a genuine partner to its grantees if it was still “running away” from issues of race and equity, Ross says. So the staff training continued.

“It’s a majority white organization, and people were being challenged in their whiteness, in who they were as a person,” she says. “My job is to make sure that we had a culture of shared power, where people can use their voice and agency to create change in the organization but to also create brave spaces for conversations where people feel they can grow and not be pushed or shoved into it.”

Ross’s work extends well beyond helping co-workers talk about race.

She has pushed the foundation’s human-resources department to widen its pool of applicants for open jobs. With her input, the foundation removed its $25,000 minimum for new donor-advised-fund accounts to attract a broader profile of donors. And it created a fund to support grassroots organizations that are much smaller than its typical grantees, which tend to have budgets of more than $250,000.

“The problem is, organizations at that level are typically white-led, aren’t close to the problems on the ground, and don’t have authentic relationships” with members of the community they is trying to serve, Ross says.

Seeding Transformation

Having a point person on equity can be a sign that the organization is making a real effort to transform itself, says Kerrien Suarez, executive director of Equity in the Center, a foundation-supported effort to promote equity in philanthropy. A stand-alone position, particularly if it reports directly to the foundation president, acknowledges the significance and breadth of that work, she says.

“A chief equity officer position creates formal institutional accountability in the same manner that a chief financial officer ensures everyone stays in compliance with the Internal Revenue Service code and stays out of jail,” says Suarez. “The difference is that finance is transactional. Equity is not compliance work. It’s transformational, not transactional.”

But just because a foundation has created the position doesn’t mean that it will follow through and make meaningful improvements.

“The word equity, to an extent, is becoming trendy,” she says. Often organizations, whether they are nonprofits or businesses, use the terms “equity” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion” interchangeably, Suarez says. Diversity and inclusion efforts focus on hiring staff or making grants to people from different backgrounds with a goal of broad representation. Foundations that place a value on equity look to ensure people have the same access to resources, career advancement, and power regardless of their background.

When a foundation creates a chief diversity officer, or a “DEI” officer position, Suarez says, it could mean that an organization is “checking the box” rather than really trying to transform itself. For a foundation to demonstrate its commitment to equity, its work must go beyond attracting more professionals who are people of color or directing a portion of its grants to community-based organizations led by people of color, Suarez says.

A single person beating the drum for equity can have a profound effect throughout a foundation if the person in that position controls a budget and wields decision-making power. If not, staff members may not feel that equity is one of their core responsibilities, argues Michele Kumi Baer, philanthropy project director at Race Forward.

Baer, who worked as the diversity and inclusion coordinator at a different nonprofit, said, “There were some moments when the position felt a bit tokenized.”

One way to avoid that is to augment a chief equity officer’s work, she says. At the Seattle Foundation, which has contracted with Baer as a consultant, Alice Ito, serves as senior adviser on equity and reports to the grant maker’s president. She also leads a committee composed of staff members across the foundation’s departments that develops policies and practices to promote equity.

In addition to mobilizing staff throughout the entire organization, it is essential that the person assigned the duty of leading on equity be an expert, says the Meyer Foundation’s Alexander-Young. Too often, she says, foundations hire people without proper experience or assume that people of color will take up the task.

“Black people and other people of color don’t come out of the womb with a full education in the understanding of race and systems,” she says. “You need someone or a team of people who have that knowledge and understanding to be able to dismantle something that was built very strategically, with very strong support beams.”

Making the Commitment

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Babcock’s new equity officer won’t likely use a strict equity litmus test on where to send grants. A black-led community-organizing group in Mississippi might answer questions on a grant application about equity differently than an immigrant-led organization in Alabama or a white-led economic-development organization in South Carolina, Maxson says. Some grantees, he says, are more well-versed in equity issues and practices than others, and there is room to learn.

Carmen Anderson, who became the Heinz Endowment’s first chief equity officer in January, is also working to educate staff at the foundation and grantees it supports. For instance, it became apparent that the foundation had not made disability a part of its equity focus. With its Pittsburgh neighbor the FISA Foundation, Heinz hosted local disability leaders, Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, and Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, president of RespectAbility, a group that has pushed foundations to make people with disabilities more of a priority, for a one-day educational session.

Anderson says Heinz serves a lot of people with disabilities through its grant making but hasn’t done a particularly good job specifically recognizing both the needs and contributions of disabled people.

“Owning that and being transparent about it was one important step for us because it demonstrates where we are vulnerable,” she says. “If we can own it, it is our hope that our grantees can own it as well.”

But, Anderson says, learning about equity is a prelude to changes in the way the foundation will award grants.

“At this point, it’s primarily education. But over time we want to get to the point where we can say, ‘You know, we’ve been down this road a way, and we’ve had opportunities to learn and understand. And if you’re going to be an ongoing partner, it does matter if you’re committed or not.”