Coming to the office in July 2016 was like entering a void for C’Ardiss Gardner Gleser.
Over the course of three days that month, two Black men, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, had been shot dead by the police. Work at the Satterberg Foundation, where Gardner Gleser served as a program officer, hummed along as usual as she grieved in silence.
“I had to leave work because I couldn’t sit there and do nothing and be in this nothingness while people are murdering people who look like me and my son,” recalls Gardner Gleser, who was the first person of color to be employed at Satterberg and who now serves as the Seattle foundation’s director of programs and strategic initiatives.
At the time, Satterberg was a small family grant maker that supported social justice and environmental conservation groups. But Satterberg, which was created from the family’s stake in the Paccar transportation company, was in the process of transforming itself into a muscular philanthropy dedicated to racial justice. While many of the organizations it had given money to in the past had pushed for societal change, the family had not deeply evaluated what racial justice meant and how to design a grant-making strategy that fully embraced the idea.
Satterberg is one of a growing number of family foundations that have started to make the switch. In doing so, it has relied more heavily on staff members and is being guided by a younger generation of trustees determined that their family philanthropy can be part of a broader philanthropic movement. The Seattle foundation’s trustees and staff members are encouraged by the progress they’ve made, but the transformation has not always been easy and is a work in progress.
Satterberg made about $13,000 in grants during 1991, the year of its founding. A bequest in following the 2012 death of family member William Helsell boosted the foundation’s assets to more than $400 million, allowing Satterberg to make a 10-year, $50 million commitment to support Black- and Indigenous-led groups following the killing of George Floyd by police in May.
The commitment marks a significant point in Satterberg’s evolution since Gardner Gleser mourned on her own five years ago. After she shared photos of her middle-school-aged son with trustees and other staff members, Gardner Gleser says board members became more attuned to the trauma many Black people experience on a daily basis because of racism.
After that, Satterberg hired staff members with different backgrounds, underwent training on how racial biases might show up in their work, and increased general operating support for grassroots organizations led by people of color. Board members have loosened their grip on the grant-making decision process, allowing more input from staff members, and showing grantees that they trust them to make decisions about how to best use money they receive.
Sometimes, board members realized, providing a place for people to feel comfortable expressing their pain — something Gardner Gleser needed when she arrived at Satterberg — can seem just as important as a grant.
In Need of a Safe Place
After the killing of George Floyd, Alyssa Macy, chief executive of the Washington Environmental Council, a Satterberg grantee, was in need of just such a safe place. Macy, who is a citizen of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, in Oregon, was visiting graduate-school friends in Minneapolis in May when protests broke out in the city. Shaken and afraid to make the long drive back to the West Coast because she felt targeted as a person of color, Macy spent several weeks in Minneapolis before heading home to the West Coast and participating in a “healing caucus” Satterberg had set up for grantees of color.
Macy says the online meeting was unlike any other foundation gathering she had experienced. She wasn’t asked whether the council was a “fit” for planned Satterberg grants, and she wasn’t quizzed on progress her nonprofit was making hitting certain milestones. Instead the meeting was a forum for leaders of color to talk with each other about the emotional damage they had endured.
Macy credits Satterberg with opening up and getting a “dose of reality” through the meetings, which, at least momentarily, erased the power imbalance between donor and grantee.
“It was a really honest testament to the emotional, spiritual, and physical impact of racism in our communities,” Macy says.
Other family funds have had a similar “enlightenment,” says Nicholas Tedesco, president of the National Center for Family Philanthropy. The increased attention on racial disparities in America and calls for foundations to put money from their endowments to active use have prompted many family philanthropies to increase grants to grassroots organizations, let staff have more sway in grant-making decisions, and listen more deeply to the needs of the groups they support — all things Satterberg has attempted to do.
The idea, Tedesco says, is that family foundations are increasingly seeing themselves as stewards of community assets, rather than as legacy-building machines.
“Family foundations are managing funds that are earmarked for the public good. They are fiduciaries of the public trust,” Tedesco says. “And so what’s being required of them is to be informed, to be effective, to act with urgency. And that’s a mind shift for a lot of families who have historically used these assets as an extension of themselves.”
Generational Split
At times the shift is uncomfortable. Satterberg board members have felt uneasy when grantees have pointed out that the trustees wield power over the foundation’s assets simply because a previous generation built a fortune in trucking, not because they have direct experience in matters relating to Black and Indigenous people in Washington State. They were criticized in the initial days after the George Floyd murder for putting out a staff-written statement on the foundation’s website, rather than speaking out themselves.
The foundation also had to deal with a deep generational divide on its future direction. As a younger generation of trustees eager to make changes joined the board, one original trustee, Michael Pigott disagreed with the new direction and stepped down.
Meagan Gable, one of the next-generation board members, says she respects his decision. Becoming fully accountable as an organization dedicated to ending white supremacy is a bigger effort than simply making grants to the right set of nonprofits, she says. It requires an honest self-examination of how philanthropies wield power.
“If you wholeheartedly believe in your cause, it’s going to take a lot of inner work,” she says. “And some people don’t want to take that journey.”
The power imbalance between grantees and the family foundations that support them can never be fully erased, Gable says. But by listening more deeply to nonprofit leaders and trusting that they have a good sense of how foundation grants can be used to fight the impact of racist policies and attitudes, family foundations can go a long way toward evening out the relationship, she says.
That means letting go of the idea that a grant strategy cooked up in a board room is the best use of resources, she says. When Satterberg board members logged on to a virtual call for donations hosted by the Movement for Black Lives last summer, movement leaders were forceful and direct, Gable says.
The movement, which supports organizations throughout the country, wanted to raise $50 million. Gable says the message to foundations was plain and simple: “You just need to step up and do it.”
In response, Satterberg provided a $2.5 million grant and committed to an additional $2.5 million over 10 years.
A big reason the foundation made the grant is that the movement leaders spoke to them as equals. They laid out exactly what their needs were without any of the deferential posturing that can come in negotiations when one side has all of the money and power.
“They were passionate, and they were unapologetic,” Gable says. “Our job is to not see that as a challenge but to see that as a gift.”
More Power for Staff
The board has also tried to give staffers more sway in where grants are directed. When she first came to the foundation, Gardner Gleser remembers that staff members would give the board about 300 letters of intent from potential grantees. Then the board would disappear into another room and score each document, eventually culling the list down to about 80 nonprofits.
Gardner Gleser was amazed that she and other paid staff were not present.
“The decisions were happening with the folks who have the most amount of power and the least amount of information,” she says.
Now staff members are present when the board sifts through material from potential grantees. The board created a Radical Imagination Fund that gives the staff full discretion over $1 million a year in grant money. And the application process has been streamlined to help applicants focus on their work.
The goal, Gardner Gleser says, is to show the board they can work as partners with grantees, rather than as gatekeepers. If deep relationships are made, Gardner Gleser suggests, there is no need for round after round of site visits, applications, and letters of intent. Those regular foundation activities, she says, are arbitrary and made up.
It’s more important to “write a check” than to do the process work that defines much of philanthropy.
Trustees, she says, are coming around.
Says Gardner Gleser: “They are really getting used to the idea that we can blow all of this up.”
