
February 2020
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The Weissberg Foundation is a small, family foundation based in Arlington, Virginia. It was started in 1988 by real estate developer and engaged citizen Marvin Weissberg.
We have always operated with a broad vision for social justice. In the past several years, we have worked to better articulate our mission, to advance organizations and efforts building power of those most negatively impacted by racism through funding, amplification, capacity building and collaboration. In 2018 the foundation made grants totaling $1.4 million.
In January 2016 our trustee Nina Weissberg began participating in a 6-month learning series organized by the Washington Regional Association of Grantmakers (WRAG) called “Putting Racism on the Table.”
This experience provided her and, through her, the foundation (including me when I came on board in May of that year) stronger foundational knowledge about structural racism, implicit bias and white privilege, and an urgency for philanthropy – including the Weissberg Foundation – to play a role in advancing racial equity.
In August 2016, we kicked off a strategic planning process. The first thing the board and staff did as part of this process was to articulate our core values, which included equity.
Over the next year, and with that lens, we did a lot of talking to each other; getting feedback from our grantee partners, declined grant applicants and peers; and looking at our grantmaking history.
Soon after we started our strategic planning process, Donald Trump won the presidential election; this was a real kick in the tail for us.
We convened a board and staff call in the week following the election to process the “what, so what and now what” of that, and our biggest “now what” was that we needed to be bolder in developing, naming and implementing our strategy to advance equity.
Throughout the remainder of our strategic planning process, it became clear that so much of what our work was addressing was caused by inequity, in particular racial inequity.
In August 2017, we released our new strategic framework and our new Reframing <Washington> program area, both centered on advancing racial equity by supporting building power in communities of color.
Since that time, we have continued to build our knowledge, sharpen our analysis and examine our own complicity in structural racism. In late 2019, we revised the language in our strategic framework to be even bolder and more explicitly anti-racist.
Weissberg Foundation’s Disrupt, Move, Voice Power program is one example of the foundation’s “reparative” grantmaking prioritizing the funding of people of color-led organizations.
Power Moves as a resource
In 2018 we started using Power Moves as a tool to help us more effectively operationalize racial equity internally and externally.
I participated in an NCRP learning cohort of other foundations exploring how to implement Power Moves, and our foundation dedicated significant time through 3 consecutive board meetings from November 2018 through June 2019 to examine how we build, share and wield power.
Throughout this process, we found that Power Moves provided:
We devoted each board meeting to a different dimension of power (building, sharing, wielding). In advance of each meeting, using a survey tool co-created with NCRP as part of the Power Moves Peer Learning Group, we anonymously surveyed board and staff on how well they thought we were doing on that aspect of power.
At the actual board meetings, we then shared and discussed results of the assessment. To bring the concepts to life, we explored how other foundations and our grantee partners move power by reading case studies about their work, or inviting them to the board meeting to share firsthand.
Outcomes of this self-assessment and learning process included a greater shared understanding among the foundation board and staff of where we were, where we wanted to be and how we could move toward engaging power more effectively for equity.
Moving power in governance and operational practice
Before we started using Power Moves, but certainly more so since, we have been making some changes to advance racial equity internally:
Moving power in grantmaking practice and programs
In terms of ensuring our programmatic activities, including our grantmaking practices, are more racially equitable, we engage in the following:
Lessons learned in moving power
Everything we do is an opportunity to learn and to inform our next steps, so we seek out lessons that will develop us individually and institutionally at the foundation, and that will help make the philanthropic sector more equitable. Some stand out as particularly important:
What’s next for the foundation?
When we did the Power Moves assessments, we found that we are moving in the right direction across all 3 dimensions of power. That said, it was clear we have the furthest to go in terms of wielding our power.
So, building the muscle – of both our board and staff – to push philanthropy, academia, government and business to operate and engage more equitably is a particular priority for us in the coming year.
Because racial equity is both a process and an outcome, our work needs constant, vigilant tending and nurturing – it is ongoing.
And because people’s lives, our communities, our country and our humanity are on the line, we will keep at it.
Hanh Le is executive director of the Weissberg Foundation. She participated in NCRP’s Power Moves Peer Learning and Advisory Group.
A Q&A with Noelle Dorward of The Colorado Trust
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