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“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” The words of one of history’s greatest advocates, Helen Keller, ring as true today as a century ago.

That same recognition of the power of collective impact is one of the elements that makes the Kansas Health Foundation’s Health Equity Partnership Initiative (HEPI) a model for nonprofit advocacy.

Our two organizations — Children’s Alliance of Kansas and Kansas Appleseed Center for Law and Justice — share many priorities with HEPI’s eight other grantees, including a commitment to maximizing the health of all Kansans.

But we weren’t collaborating, leaving tons of potential progress on the table. We weren’t enemies, but we were advancing our individual policy agendas.

In a world where political capital is as scarce a resource as state funding, advocacy is often seen as a zero-sum game. And policymakers have much to gain from sowing division among advocates.

The Kansas Health Foundation has changed that dynamic for the better.

From the beginning, this initiative emphasized strategy-alignment, recognizing that a health equity movement won’t hold together if competition from within is constantly prying it apart.

We are accountable to each other and to the foundation for identifying strategies that allow each organization to pursue its own goals, within a collaborative framework that minimizes conflict and actively seeks opportunities for collective impact.

Consider the example of our two organizations:

Appleseed led a successful juvenile justice reform effort, beginning in 2012 and culminating with the enactment of sweeping reform legislation in 2016.

The Children’s Alliance consistently supported the aims of reform, several members raised concerns about the potential consequences for the state’s already-overburdened foster care system.

While policy differences never devolved into animus, they did serve as a barrier to collaboration.

The Kansas Health Foundation funding provided a forum for us to find common ground. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t quick.

The foundation committed considerable time and resources to a strategically driven selection process that made true collaboration among grantees possible.

That began with an objective, third-party assessment of each organization’s strengths and capacity-building needs through TCC Group’s Core Capacity Assessment Tool (CCAT).

But from the beginning, it was about much more than strengthening individual organizations; it was about building a movement to advance health equity.

Those efforts paid off, to the benefit of the health of Kansas children and families. Together, we and our allies successfully advocated for the reversal of Medicaid funding cuts that reduced access to health care for children and families.

Individual advocates were able to document the harm resulting from the Medicaid cuts, with the Children’s Alliance spotlighting the health consequences for children affected by abuse or neglect, and Appleseed widening the lens to show the harm to families statewide.

In isolation, neither organization could have solidified support around a specific policy solution. It was collective advocacy; not just ours, and not just the other grantees, but the wider network of concerned advocates that made it clear to policymakers that reversing the cuts was urgent.

And we recently brought together more than 75 advocates, service providers and academics to address another shared concern: the well-being of vulnerable children and families.

That convening resulted in a consensus agenda for effective implementation of new federal child abuse and neglect prevention legislation. If successful, this effort could contribute to health equity gains for some of Kansas’s most economically disadvantaged families.

We and other grantees have actively collaborated on a range of priorities, including:

  • Restoring capacity and stability to the state’s psychiatric residential treatment facilities for children affected by abuse or neglect.
  • Expanding Medicaid to strengthen health access for families throughout the state.
  • Uniting more than a half-dozen advocates in challenging the state’s Child Welfare Task Force to prioritize child abuse and neglect prevention.
  • Supporting directly affected youth and families to speak up in the policy discussions related to foster care and juvenile justice.

We still have differences of perspective and priority on a range of issues. But, due in large part to the collaborative forum provided by the Kansas Health Foundation, we share a commitment to finding common ground to advance policy solutions that improve the health of all Kansas families.

Because what Helen Keller said is true: We can do so much more together.

Christie Appelhanz is executive director of Children’s Alliance of Kansas, and Benet Magnuson is executive director of Kansas Appleseed Center for Law and Justice. Follow @ChristieAppel and @KansasApple on Twitter.

Image by Scott Maxwell. Used under Creative Commons license.

It is dusk in Mariana, a barrio in the coastal resort town of Humacao, which sits at the epicenter of Hurricane Maria’s landfall. The streets are dark but not silent. Mariana still has no power or running water, but there are voices and laughter as people cook dinner together over makeshift outdoor stoves. Mariana’s residents, like many other Puerto Ricans, are making the best of a desperate situation.

The resourcefulness of the Puerto Rican people in the face of Hurricane Maria’s devastating impact is admirable. But it only goes so far. Puerto Rico is far from recovery, and the 2018 hurricane season is already upon us.

Read the entire article in The Washington Post.

If you follow NCRP’s work closely, you’ve probably interacted with two of our newest initiatives: Power Moves and As the South Grows.

What do these works have to do with each other? They are part of the same story – one that’s all about power.

In As the South Grows, a joint initiative with Grantmakers for Southern Progress (GSP), we explored the power of Southern communities and we outlined ways funders can begin questioning the ramifications of their own power and privilege in the process. Power and privilege are also central themes in NCRP’s new toolkit, Power Moves: Your essential philanthropy assessment guide for equity and justice.

Equity and justice have increasingly been at the center of discussions in the philanthropic sector, and this guide offers funders who care about equity and justice a detailed set of tools, plans and resources to address how power and privilege manifest within their institutions and in their grantmaking.

How Funders Can Build, Wield and Share Power with the South

As the South Grows and Power Moves are complementary resources.

Funders using Power Moves will find additional nuance about Southern grantmaking through firsthand testimony and shocking grantmaking disparities in the As the South Grows series. They can explore wielding power in the “organizing philanthropy” tip sheet in the capstone As the South Grows report, So Grows the Nation.

Likewise, a funder motivated by As the South Grows to fund equitably in the South will find a broad orientation to power, an internal planning guide and consultant offerings with Power Moves.

To highlight the connections, below is a sampling of As the South Grows recommendations that fit neatly within the Power Moves assessment’s three dimensions of power: building, wielding and sharing power.

Building Power

  • Embrace the discomfort. Building power to advance equity requires striving to understand the complicated and, at times, painful history of the South by funding Southern-led power-building strategies like advocacy, organizing and civic engagement.
  • Disaggregate your data. The data and research will show realities in Southern communities: Who is disproportionately affected by inequity and injustice, and who benefits from the status quo. Use the data to inform grantmaking strategies.
  • Re-evaluate your institution’s processes and requirements to allow for different definitions of capacity, success and risk. Remember that privilege does not equal capacity. Grantmaking to advance greater equity and justice begins with understanding the different types of assets and measures of success.

Sharing Power

  • Spend time and resources identifying existing infrastructure. Prioritizing building trust and relationships in Southern communities, will lead to the right people and information. Partner and engage the community; don’t just observe and extract information.
  • Change expectations about what signs of nonprofit capacity look like. Signs of capacity may be hard to find by design because of the ways Southern state power has targeted dissent.
  • Trust that the people closest to injustice, inequity and the work required to correct them are best at that work. Actively seek input from disenfranchised Southern communities in grantmaking decisions and hire Southern leaders. Building power begins with having a staff and board with lived experience in the communities they aim to serve.

Wielding Power

  • Assess the stakes of inaction. Funders understandably want to do their research on how and where to invest their resources. But spending too much time prioritizing research over taking action is costly for communities that face far greater risks every day, particularly those on the front lines of power disparities in the South.
  • Understand the privilege that comes with your position and your identity. Funders have an opportunity to leverage their personal and institutional privilege and power to enable higher quality Southern investment. Serve as conveners, advocates and collaborators with grant partners and other grantmakers.
  • Organize philanthropic peers. Learn and co-strategize with peers who are moving their institution towards greater investment in Southern structural change grantmaking.

Steps to take now

Equitable grantmaking is not possible without shifting power back to communities, especially ones that experience inequities and injustice every day.

Whether you fund in the South or not, the region offers valuable lessons for doing this well in the face of deeply entrenched power imbalances.

Here are some steps you can take to start building, sharing and wielding power in your institutions and communities now:

Stephanie Peng is a research and policy associate at NCRP. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

As someone with longtime philanthropic interests in the South, I want to recognize the singular achievement of the As the South Grows series.

Nothing in recent memory has as accurately captured the voices of local southerners – from Appalachia to the Lowcountry – whose work is driven by a commitment to real change for some of the least represented people in the country.

Those of us who support and promote rural philanthropy often ask folks, “Have you read the As the South Grows series? If not, you need to!”

But there is a missing piece of the philanthropic story: Health care conversion foundations, also called health care legacy funders, are often the dominant funders in the South.  

These funders, born of the sale of non-profit healthcare organizations (e.g. hospitals, insurance companies, physician groups) to primarily for-profit health care groups, are often outsized funders obligated to serve rural communities.

A 2015 report from Grantmakers in Health (GIH) showed at least 75 conversion foundations in the South with assets of more than $8 billion. These numbers continue to grow, with another 20 foundations likely to come online in the South since the GIH report data was collected.

The recently announced pending sale of the nonprofit Mission Healthcare in Asheville, North Carolina, to private healthcare company Hospital Corporation of America will create a new foundation serving 18 rural and very rural North Carolina counties with assets predicted to be upwards of $1.5 billion.

With a service area that contains less than a million people, this healthcare conversion will create perhaps the largest foundation in the country on a per capita basis – and one that will serve some very poor Appalachian counties.

So, with all the financial mass and promise of healthcare conversion foundations, why are they not more prominently featured in As the South Grows? How do their investments reflect the focus on grassroots advocacy, poverty and structural change that As the South Grows describes and promotes?

The answer is: They don’t. At least, not as a whole.

There are notable exceptions in the region, including Danville Regional Foundation (Danville, Virginia), the Mary Black Foundation (Spartanburg, South Carolina), Allegany Franciscan Ministries (Palm Harbor, Florida), The Greater Clark Foundation (Winchester, Kentucky) and others.

However, the bulk of conversion foundations in the South are punching well below their weight class when it comes to funding structural change.

Like too many of their peers across the philanthropic spectrum, they hesitate to invest deeply in the kind of on-the-ground advocacy, difficult conversations and paradigm shifts that are necessary to dismantle systems and structures that perpetuate inequity and poverty in the region.

The reasons for their hesitancy aren’t mysterious. Some are still dedicated exclusively to supporting health care services for the poor, per their origins and regulatory environments.

Many have moved to a social determinants of health frame, which looks upstream from health care to the causes of poor health outcomes, such as poverty, education quality, poor nutrition, homelessness and many other social factors. These funders invest in early childhood, food access, built environments and more to improve social conditions.

Support for local advocacy and grassroots system-led change is a natural extension of social determinants work. Unfortunately, too many health conversion funders are content to bide by only the old tried-and-true mechanisms of philanthropy, making passive grants to traditional nonprofits that only respond to the effects of social determinants rather than addressing the causes.

The other barriers that hold Southern conversion foundations back from making a positive dent in the South’s current systems and structures are the same as for philanthropy in general: lack of experience; no peer group to lean on; an aversion to risk taking; and the inability to readily measure the value of investments in advocacy.

(The cynical might add that many of Southern conversion foundations are led by board and staff who represent the same traditional leadership that has nurtured and reinforced historic power structures. While that may be true in some cases, I don’t believe that’s representative of the majority.)

What will create a change? Conversation. I encourage other Southern-based funders that have successfully moved beyond these roadblocks to intentionally pursue conversations with conversion foundations.

Show them your good work; engage in board-member-to-board-member conversation; train them on how to measure advocacy success and vet grassroots grantees.

Staff at successful foundations should go to conferences and meetings, and share the tactical ways that conversions funders can dip their toes in the grassroots advocacy funding pool.

And every grantmaker association in the region should provide at least one annual training on the mechanics of making good grassroots advocacy grants.

Most importantly, philanthropic work on social determinants of health and underlying systems change in our region must be based in the Southern experience and the unique history of conversion foundations.

While NCRP and others have rightly decried the lack of investment in the South by national funders, this is a battle that is only going to be won by leadership from within our own ranks.

The world of Southern conversion foundations is only just hitting its stride. Support for advocacy and grassroots systems change is the obvious next step.

Allen Smart spent more than two decades in leadership roles with rural funders in the Southeastern U.S. before launching RuralwoRx, a national consultancy aimed at increasing and improving rural philanthropy across the country. Follow @NCRP and #AstheSouthGrows on Twitter.

Editor’s note: The following is a Power Moves toolkit Power in Practice example.

“The foundation has invested in civic engagement; that’s been really powerful. You’d be amazed how even the low-income community neighborhoods in Little Rock are a lot more empowered than some of the rural places where we’re working. In almost every community, they have never held a candidate forum in their lives.

“Now, in Monticello, we had 150 people show up to the last candidate forum for the mayor’s race, and they’ve become an enshrined part of the community now. In just five or six years, we’ve made that shift. Every mayoral candidate is asking the group for their endorsement, participating in a public forum about it.

“We’ve trained a corps of people to develop their own platform about what they want – before they talk to anybody else. Now they’re thinking, ‘Well, okay, we need to start developing our own people to run for office.’ It’s all part of this development process of building, and I think the foundation has really enabled us to have the patient presence in those communities to build the leaders’ analysis to do that strategy.” – Stakeholder of Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation

WRF has thoughtfully embraced a number of successful strategies to make a difference for Arkansans over the last decade, including coalition-building, research, advocacy, convening, mission investing and systems change grantmaking. Embedded in these mutually supporting activities is the through line of community empowerment and agency.

In addition to Monticello and Little Rock is the story of the Gould Citizens Advisory Council. Over several years, with training and coaching from the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, the frustrated residents in this small town of 2,500 learned how to overcome apathy, organize their neighbors, demand accountability from local elected officials and develop their own leadership, eventually unseating five incumbents and bringing the town out of bankruptcy.

WRF’s president and CEO Sherece West-Scantlebury and staff approach their relationships with stakeholders by first asking one important question: “How can we help people come together, build consensus and take action?” What is unique and not easily done is to know when to lead, when to work side by side and when to follow, along with when to speak up, when to listen and when to lift up the voices of those most often ignored. WRF is adept at walking this fine line.

Lisa Ranghelli is senior director of assessment and special projects at NCRP and primary author of Power Moves. Follow @NCRP and @lisa_rang on Twitter, and join the conversation using #PowerMovesEquity! Read more case examples here.

Editor’s note: The following is a Power Moves toolkit Power in Practice example.

“Over the last three months, we’ve made more than $6 million in grants to organizations working to both advance and defend wellness in California. For us, this has been an extraordinary experience of collective action. Our staff quickly organized to assess and respond to needs in the community; our board worked with us to accelerate our grantmaking process to address the most urgent needs; and our grantees across the state have swiftly engaged, providing critical services and advocating for change. I’m truly proud of the Cal Wellness team, but it’s our grantees who are the true heroes in the work we do together.” – Judy Belk, CEO, California Wellness Foundation (April 2017)

Tina Eshaghpour, director of organizational learning and evaluation at The California Wellness Foundation, noted that the foundation decided to revamp its internal procedures to enable it to disburse grants more quickly after the 2016 election. “We took cues from our grantees and implemented some new processes to expedite making core operating support grants to advance and defend wellness,” said Eshaghpour in an interview. “These times demand responsiveness and creativity, so our board approved new tools to enable us to move funding out the door more quickly.”  

She also observed that, previously, the foundation had developed a shared understanding of equity internally, which created the conditions for the foundation to be bold in both its grantmaking and leadership stance in response to the new political environment, such as issuing public statements challenging some of the president’s executive orders.

Lisa Ranghelli is senior director of assessment and special projects at NCRP and primary author of Power Moves. Follow @NCRP and @lisa_rang on Twitter, and join the conversation using #PowerMovesEquity! Read more case examples here.

Any Southern organizer knows the feeling of being assessed by funding criteria developed in the sterile conditions of a foundation boardroom.

It’s not unlike the feeling of being in the cramped quarters of a doctor’s office, assessing what you can and can’t disclose as a provider runs through a list of questions that have little to do with who you truly are and what’s going on with your body.

This clinical diagnostic process manages to be invasive and alienating; so too does grantmaking that misses the mark.

But I’ve also experienced the opposite. My family gets care from a family practice doctor who breaks script enough to create a human connection, addresses the additional stresses that a queer Southern family shoulders and treats each of us as whole people.

I’ve seen the same with some funders who, in both word and deed, approach the South – and the lives of Southerners – with care, commitment and grantmaking practices that speak to the distinct features of our region.

The difference isn’t just a palpable shift in how interactions feel; it actually makes for better outcomes.

As the South Grows: So Grows the Nation, a new report from National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and Grantmakers for Southern Progress, interrogates an idea I’ve heard countless Southern organizers and strategists obsess over: Imagine what would be possible if funding was done differently in the South.

Above all, what I hear in this report is an invitation for funders to become new kinds of practitioners: More vessel, less gatekeeper; more situational, less linear; more relational, less transactional.

And with this, to let go of the power that comes with money and trust that the world will be better for it.

In the South, there is nothing abstract about the times we are living through. The forces of white supremacy and Christian nationalism are exerting themselves at every level of Southern politics. Our state legislatures are labs to test draconian policies (like Mississippi’s HB 1523, the nation’s most extreme anti-LGBTQ law) that are then introduced at the federal level.

As always in the South, many things are true at once: Resistance is also alive and well here. Across the region, you see incredible examples of creative, innovative programming and intersectional rapid response organizing.

The report takes a deep dive on models of funding that work in the South, including engaging history, race, gender and class in grantmaking practices.

In this spirit, I want to lift up four practices I’ve experienced from funding practitioners that have been gamechangers in our work with them:

1. Stay curious. Ask questions like:

  • What does your community need?
  • What does your community dream of?
  • Why did you approach this issue that way?

Questions like these invite people to speak more authentically about their communities and work rather than responding in the dialect of grantspeak. When we speak authentically about what matters to us, it’s a lot easier to get clear on what matters and to be honest about what’s working and not.   

2. Figure out how to move money quickly.

In 2018, we are working on sending people to Mars and can isolate strands of the human genome, things we once thought impossible.

It is entirely possible to move money quickly. And it’s necessary if we are to respond adequately to the chaos and danger of this political moment.

Recently, a funder told me that they had money sitting in an account and the greenlight to disburse it, but couldn’t figure out how.

It became clear that the real issue was that this foundation wasn’t ready to trust organizers with rapid response funding.

3. Have faith. And if you don’t, be willing to ask why.

Listening to people on the ground, trusting their leadership and moving money so they can do the work: That’s trust-based grantmaking, but it’s also a spiritual practice rooted in relationship, a faith in the unseen and a readiness to move mountains to create the beloved community.

If you’re not there yet, what would it take for you to trust like this? Are there war stories about grant funds being misused? Of course, but there also are war stories about funders exploiting the work of grantees.

We either get stuck in these old patterns and stories or create new ones.

4. Build space for revision into grantmaking and reporting practices.

Will some of our projects fail in their initial inception? Definitely. Every work of significance – innovations in medical treatment, breakthroughs in impact litigation – emerged from a long trail of iterations, failed attempts and revisions.

Be a thought partner as we learn, offer specific feedback, share other models with us and build reporting documents that ask us to learn and revise rather than spin stories of unbridled success.

Consider multi-year funding that includes time and space for reflection and revision, rather than one-year project specific grants that operate on a binary model of success and failure.

The recommendations in So Grows the Nation echo what I hear from the most interesting voices in other sectors these days. At the border, attorneys are practicing “community lawyering” to represent parents and children who have been separated. Clergy stepped down from the pulpit to act as “movement chaplains” in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year.

Perhaps this is part of how we will build the world anew: By casting aside the old vocational habits that entrench us in broken systems of power and control and instead honing the skills that 21st century America requires of us.

Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara is a minister in the United Church of Christ and the executive director of the Campaign for Southern Equality, a non-profit that works for full LGBTQ equality – both legal and lived – across the South. Follow @jbeachferrara and @SouthernEqual on Twitter.

Editor’s note: This blog post is the fifth in a series of guest features on NCRP’s exciting new resource, Power Moves: Your essential philanthropy assessment guide for equity and justice.

Listen, read, take in the news, look around every day and you will hear and see what it means to live in this country as a Black or Brown person. You will read about systemic oppressions, differential treatments, impacts of racism, being “othered” and lives lost too soon. Every day.

It was by looking and learning that The Colorado Trust changed its focus to achieving health equity, which, as we have since learned, can’t be accomplished without addressing root causes with solutions that directly benefit the people experiencing the most inequities in a community or place.

We launched three initiatives: the Health Equity Learning Series, Health Equity Advocacy and Community Partnerships.

The learning series is as much for us as it is for relating narrative and research about impacts of inequity, unequal power and race.

The advocacy work is driven by a cohort of 18 diverse organizations that are working together to change policies and laws that maintain inequitable and oppressive systems.

Community Partnerships builds power to achieve health equity using a place-based and resident-driven approach. Teams of residents in communities across Colorado research and name the root causes and solutions they need funded.

Long-term funding goes directly to the resident team through a fiscal sponsor that we partner them with and also cover the fees.

In several of the communities, residents have uncovered lack of social cohesion, social disintegration and loss of culture as core root causes of inequities.

They are also focused on systemic inequities where unequal practices and policies are generational: the local economy, housing, education and environment, to name a few.

Health and race equity are inseparable. Living Cities notes that if we aim to address racial inequity, we must understand it in terms of power.

Racism, at its core, is a tool to establish and maintain power structures that are centered on whiteness.

When we don’t talk about power and power dynamics at all levels – individual, interpersonal, institutional and systemic – we perpetuate all kinds of inequity, including health inequity.

NCRP’s Power Moves provides a timely assessment tool to understand how we are doing in building, sharing and wielding power in our work and as an organization that holds much power. Upon initial reflection on the guidelines, I found them helpful to take a pulse on where we are related to moving power:

  • Building power is described as “supporting systemic change by funding civic engagement, advocacy and community organizing among marginalized communities.” We are funding under-resourced communities to build power to achieve health equity and be their own agents of change. We are funding cross-cutting approaches. We are funding for the long term. We also are building engagement, leadership, organizing and advocacy capacity across all the work to support moving power. We could be more explicit about advancing systemic equity for specific marginalized communities in our goals and strategies. We are working internally to be more responsive, trustworthy and respectful of all of our external stakeholders.
  • Sharing power is described as “nurturing transparent, trusting relationships and co-creating strategies with stakeholders.” We strive to be fully responsive, inclusive and transparent in all communication. Sometimes, we miss the mark. We do invest in the success of the communities and grantees by granting long-term support. We strongly engage with and trust communities to make funding decisions. We also center narratives and stories to deeply understand lived experiences and real fears.
  • Wielding power is described as “exercising public leadership beyond grant making to create equitable, catalytic change.” We convene grantees and community stakeholders, while also playing a role as supportive participant at other convening tables. We can do more with organizing and collaborating with philanthropic peers that share common concerns and with other sectors, such as government. We can do more to inform, raise awareness and advocate by using our reputation and expertise to bring visibility to critical issues and amplify the voices of the most marginalized. We can also do more to deploy non-grant financial assets creatively to advance foundation and grantee goals, and shift resources and power to underinvested communities.

Taking this pulse helps to see where we are making progress and where we must grow. My team is excited to dig in more.

Clearly, the work of power building gets more challenging as you go deeper in building, sharing and wielding power. Yet philanthropists have a unique opportunity and obligation to do so. The work may not be easy, but it is most certainly urgent.

Gwyn Barley, PhD is vice president of Community Partnerships & Grants at The Colorado Trust. Follow @NCRP and @ColoradoTrust on Twitter, and join the conversation using #PowerMovesEquity.

Download your free copy of Power Moves: My essential philanthropy assessment guide for equity and justice now.

Editor’s note: This blog post is the fourth in a series of guest features on NCRP’s exciting new resource, Power Moves: Your essential philanthropy assessment guide for equity and justice.

The toolkit builds on NCRP’s research from its innovative Philamplify initiative, which assessed a dozen foundations, including the William Penn Foundation in 2013-2014. NCRP’s history with the foundation dates back over 20 years.

In 1995-1996, at the request of the William Penn Foundation, NCRP conducted an evaluation of its responsiveness to low-income and other disenfranchised groups in the greater Philadelphia region.

To “lead by example” is a fundamental principle within philanthropy. However, the power dynamic inherent to the funder-grantee relationship can sometimes lead to a lack of self-reflection or self-discipline among funders. A funder wishing to advance a best practice may require the practice from its grantees but forgo the difficult work of implementing the practice for itself.

This can be especially true when it comes to practices that are designed to tackle issues of race, including both the racial composition of staff and leadership and also the unique barriers communities of color face in accessing the benefits of certain grant-funded programs.

Notable responses have come from across philanthropy, with headlines trumpeting restructured paradigms and transformative approaches to philanthropic giving. These efforts are inspiring, but for institutions where incremental change is the more feasible option, a different model is needed.

At the William Penn Foundation, we have leveraged existing business processes to implement incremental change.

Our approach starts with internal practices and opens up the possibilities for new dialogue with grantees and other key stakeholders, reflecting our desire to model best practices before pursuing external changes on the part of the grantee community.

Additionally, our leadership works on a consensus basis, making decisions thoughtfully and deliberately after significant consideration, which is why an incremental approach often works well for us.

The William Penn Foundation is a 73-year-old private family foundation located in Philadelphia, a city with a richness of racial diversity, but also a legacy of racial conflict and structural inequity. Our institution can proudly lay claim to a longstanding commitment to racial justice.

Over the decades our grants have included support for the early workforce development efforts of civil rights leaders Grace and Rev. Leon Sullivan, community outreach led by Black Power advocate Father Paul Washington, implementation of a $10 million Minorities in Higher Education grantmaking program, and even support for NCRP’s groundbreaking survey of racial and ethnic disparity in corporate giving.

Over the decades, our grant strategies and guidelines evolved to address the symptoms of Philadelphia’s declining population and urban decay.

Solutions for the root causes of racial phenomena like white flight felt beyond the capabilities of our grantmaking and fell outside our core strategies.

We moved away from racially explicit language toward a broader focus on “low-income,” “disinvested” and “underserved” populations.

As a consequence, a number of our stakeholders perceived a change in institutional priorities, as documented in NCRP’s Philamplify assessment of our foundation in 2014. Specifically, stakeholders shared their concerns with the de-emphasis of racial equity. As one participant observed:

“I haven’t heard [equity] be a part of the William Penn Foundation conversation. In terms of promoting equity, I don’t see it as a priority for giving. Some of the projects they fund do have equity goals. I don’t think they challenge themselves to forge new partnerships to bring in new populations, new perspectives, to embrace diversity in all its meanings.”

In the context of a national conversation on racial injustice, these observations made it clear that we faced an important opportunity to reinvigorate our strategies and clarify our decades-long commitment to racial equity.

And with the renaissance of Philadelphia’s downtown now largely accomplished, we are able to shift our focus toward more equitable, community-based reinvestment.

These changes are part of the essential and ongoing work of strategy refinement, and involve everything from a renewed focus on inclusive community engagement processes in our funding for public spaces, to the prioritization of under-represented communities of color in our funding for outdoor access.

The Philamplify assessment also raised the importance of minimizing disruption and projecting stability in both internal operations and external grantmaking. With this in mind, staff and leadership leveraged existing, internal business practices to introduce important changes in how we address racial equity.

For example, facing a number of open positions, a few motivated staff engaged with human resources and foundation leadership to develop a hiring statement that explicitly values racial diversity and shares our aspirations for an inclusive workplace and our goals for racial equity.

Integrating this statement into our website and position descriptions helps ensure that applicants see and reflect these same values.

In a parallel process, the foundation board’s Governance Committee also made diversity one of its priorities in the recruitment of new public board members to ensure the board’s public membership better reflects the racial diversity of the communities we serve. 

The foundation also now has an internal Racial Equity Working Group, which started organically as a self-organized group of staff working on racial equity-related projects, meeting regularly on an informal basis to share learning and leverage one another’s efforts.

Already the group has used this forum to source ideas for everything from staff training needs to new grantmaking opportunities.

In recognition of its importance as an on-going resource to the foundation, the activities and responsibilities of the working group have been memorialized in a charter using a process modeled on our board committees.

The process of developing a formal working group charter helped to codify institutional values and expectations around racial equity and raise the visibility of this important work across the organization.

Under the auspices of the Racial Equity Working Group, we also collected and published our diversity data as part of a larger, voluntary data transparency initiative implemented through GuideStar.  

GuideStar has long been essential to our core business processes. Staff responsible for maintaining our profile were able to add the collection of our diversity data to the regular update process.

This new component required additional conversations at the leadership level, but associating the effort with familiar practices helped smooth the way. With our data published, we are in position to share our experience and encourage others to follow suit.

With these incremental changes to our own recruitment, hiring and data sharing, we are better equipped to work with our grantees to undertake similar practices.

Considering that William Penn Foundation funding underwrites almost 100 local nonprofit hiring decisions every year, our aspirations fall nothing short of partnering with grantees to help shape the future of an entire sector.

Dramatic gestures can be inspiring, but empty gestures help no one. At the William Penn Foundation, we found our sweet spot by building momentum from the ground up and by introducing new practices from the inside out.

Crafting a diversity statement, pulling together a working group and publishing your demographic data are three great first steps.

We have learned that our strongest strategies come from our greatest experience. It is our expectation that the learning we gain from these incremental and pilot efforts will be harvested to inform the future refinement of our grantmaking goals and strategies, and the improvement of our own business practices.

For our family foundation and others like us, these incremental approaches can result in practices that are more internally sustainable and position our institutions to impact the field in meaningful and lasting ways.

Nathan Boon is program officer with the William Penn Foundation. Follow @WilliamPennFdn and @NCRP on Twitter, and join the conversation using #PowerMovesEquity.

Download your free copy of Power Moves: My essential philanthropy assessment guide for equity and justice now. To request a copy of The William Penn Foundation and the Disenfranchised, 1992-1994 evaluation cited in the editor’s note, please email Caitlin Duffy at cduffy@ncrp.org.

Image by Pedro Ribeiro Simões. Used under Creative Commons license.

Editor’s note: This post is part of an ongoing series of posts featuring NCRP nonprofit members.

Grantmaking in this new era calls for funders who trust their grantees with general operating support and who acknowledge and support leaders of color.

The Center for Popular Democracy (CPD)’s successes and structure present a testament to these two needs.  

Founded in 2012, CPD has skyrocketed into a leading voice for equity, opportunity and a dynamic democracy with 50 affiliates whose work impacts people in 126 cities, 34 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. Two-thirds of their affiliates are Black- or Latinx-led.

The organization builds power among communities of color, immigrants, working families and LGBTQ individuals to tear down the structural barriers that restrict their full inclusion into American society.

CPD trains and supports an organization’s leaders, staff and members to be the owners and drivers of their organizations, while pursuing a broader collective movement for a just, healthy and joyful world.

Since the 2016 election, affiliates of the CPD network have helped organize more than 860 resistance events that were attended by more than half a million people. The network also hosted 15 major civil disobedience actions on issues ranging from immigration to taxation to health care. 

These are the results:

  • Twelve million workers now enjoy a higher minimum wage in Arizona, Colorado, Washington, California, New York, Vermont, Oregon, Minneapolis and Washington, D.C., thanks in part to CPD’s tireless work.
  • Their Fair Workweek Initiative has moved policy wins for another one million workers across the country.
  • Their network registered 40,000 re-entering citizens in Maryland and moved 25,000 formerly incarcerated Virginians to the polls in 2017.
  • CPD and its affiliates expanded, defended or won new local- and state-level sanctuary policies everywhere from Denver to Illinois to Bridgeport, Connecticut.
  • Their Hurricane Maria Community Recovery Fund in raised in two months more than $4 million to support immediate relief, recovery and equitable rebuilding in the territory. A Puerto Rican advisory team ensured the funds went to the grassroots organizations and individuals guiding the recovery and rebuild.

Despite how it may look on the outside, the organization sees its fair share of hurdles. One is the lack of flexible funding that’s available.

As new problems arise faster than ever before, CPD and its affiliates, like many organizations operating in our time, need the flexibility to change course at any given moment.

The organization’s minimum wage win in Minneapolis was a moment of celebration. It felt to the CPD network like the most important thing going on in the state of Minnesota at the time – until a police officer shot and killed Philando Castille.

Suddenly, in order to be responsive to the needs of that community, they had to pivot from the campaign to a crisis response. In perfect conditions that’s hard to do – a lack of general operating support made it even harder.

General operating support allows nonprofits to nimbly move from one issue to another. This is a critical step toward building power in disadvantaged communities.

If they were freed from project-specific grants, CPD and its affiliates could use their expertise to address issues when they arise instead of having to wait for the next fiscal year.

As the list of wins above shows, these are organizations worth trusting with this responsibility.

Another issue is the discrepancy between funding for white-led versus people of color-led organizations. The sector’s underinvestment in leadership for nonprofits of color has been well documented.

According to Network President and Co-Executive Director Jennifer Epps-Addison, CPD’s Black and Latinx-led affiliates rarely have asset reserves, forcing them to live paycheck to paycheck on grants.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation reported that 60 percent of people served by nonprofits hail from communities of color; CPD and its affiliates are no exception.

If philanthropy wants to sufficiently move the entire country together in the direction towards equity, justice and progress, it has to support leaders of color in the same way the sector has supported the sector’s white leadership.

A survey of the sector done by the Building Movement Project found a “lack of difference” in qualifications and backgrounds for white respondents and respondents of color. That leaders of color have a harder time fundraising reflects not any failure of their own, but instead the racial bias of people at foundations.

In this new era, bringing about an equitable world requires both general operating support and a specific dedication to adequately resourcing leaders of color. Anything less is no longer acceptable.

Troy Price is NCRP’s membership and fundraising intern. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

Image by Fibonacci Blue. Used under Creative Commons license.