Can community foundations be racial justice organizations?

By Terry Mazany, senior vice president, philanthropy

Many community foundations have been compelled to make strong statements of solidarity with the Black Lives Matters movement. But can a community foundation be a racial justice organization?

I think not.

A community foundation must, however, be anti-racist and use data and evidence to understand and address structures and systems that perpetuate racism. It must use its power of convening to bring together the community it serves in dialogue of truth telling, healing and transformation.

The mission of a community foundation is community, the well-being and shared prosperity of all the residents and places we serve. While most community foundations have been negligent, if not complicit, in the racism woven into our communities, our mission is to reflect and represent the diversity of the communities we serve. 

That we have not done so is cause for truth telling and reconciliation with those underserved (and dare I say, reparations?). 

Because most community foundations have been instruments of the dominant white society for the vast majority of their years, be it over 100, 75, 50 years or younger, to presume that a community foundation can transform overnight into a racial justice organization is not credible, and perhaps not even warranted. 

Before we can walk the talk of the solidarity commitments displayed on website mastheads, each of us has to conduct considerable internal reflection (truth telling), reckon with the communities not well-served (reconciliation) and build trust (reparations).

We cannot be naïve about what it means to take on systems of oppression and dehumanization that have persisted for more than 400 years. We must own the fact that most community foundations have little legitimacy or standing on issues of racial equity and justice, and are, in fact, offspring of the very instruments of racism that have segregated our communities. We have been complicit in the perpetuation of structural and systemic racism in our patterns of grant making to entitled white-led organizations serving predominantly white interests, while ignoring persons of color led organizations because they don’t meet our criteria, or even worse, because we have never met those leaders or know they exist.

Until we acknowledge this reality with our own truth telling we can never get to reconciliation – this is the definition of our reckoning.  It is likely that each community foundation must face its own reckoning with those underserved, and we should consider what reparations mean in this context to help our communities heal and become a better version of themselves.

Community foundations have a role to play in creating more just and equitable communities, helping our communities to identify and dismantle systems of structural racism and build back more equitable systems. 

We have many tools to leverage the full range of foundation assets for this purpose, including:

• the diversity of our board and staff.
• the placement and investment of our financial assets.
• the use our business spend (marketing, audits, IT, consultants, etc.).
• which organizations we choose to spotlight in donor communications.
• the studies we commission to document racial disparities in health outcomes, education, housing, neighborhood investments, etc.
• how we report on the diversity of our grant recipients and intentionally rebalance grant making portfolios.
• the tables we convene and the voices we privilege.

A number of community foundations are already leading the way – with efforts that pre-date our nation’s current calls for racial equity and justice.

The San Francisco Foundation offers a shining example. Since the day it hired Fred Blackwell as its chief executive in 2014, the foundation has not only established equity as its North Star, it has made itself publicly accountable for its staffing and board, grantmaking and investment strategy.

Today, 70 percent of its staff are people of color – up from 56 percent in 2016.

Equally impressive, in 2019, 24 percent of SFF’s investment management firms were majority owned by women, and 11 percent were majority owned by people of color. Industry-wide, just 1.3 percent of assets under management globally are overseen by firms that are majority owned by women or people of color, according to the Knight Foundation’s 2019 report, Diversifying Investments: A Study of Ownership Diversity and Performance in the Asset Management Industry.

The foundation has also deepened its already impressive grantmaking commitments with its 2016 decision to focus its entire program strategy on racial equity and economic inclusion.

In the Midwest, Central Indiana Community Foundation in 2018 made a bold commitment, pledging to no longer be a White-power organization and committing to become a shared power, anti-Racist and multicultural organization. Dismantling racism is now foundational to its community leadership efforts – and in October it will lay out a plan of action for achieving its bold goal.

In the South, the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, together with the Kendeda Fund and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, relaunched the Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative to change the current reality that “if a person is born into poverty in Atlanta, there is just a 4% chance of escaping poverty in their lifetime.”  The Chicago Community Trust has similarly focused on racial income and wealth building.

And just recently, Ronn Richards, CEO of the Cleveland Foundation, announced an initial $2.5 million in funding for the creation of the Cleveland Black Futures Fund, designed to invest in and strengthen Black-led and Black-serving social change organizations.  Similarly, the Seattle Foundation and King County just announced a grant of $725,000 from the Communities of Opportunity initiative to support proposals for system- and policy-change projects led by and for Black communities in King County.

Change, however, will not come easily. Most of us depend on and serve white donors, some of whom may not believe that racism is even a problem, or who are uncomfortable talking about race in raw and honest terms (even as the movement for racial justice compels us to move way beyond “we have to be careful how we talk about this with our donors”). 

In this time of politicization and polarization, we find ourselves walking a tightrope between the interests of residents who have done well in our society and those who have been oppressed by our society. Even my assertion that there are “those who have been oppressed by our society” will be contested by those who hold deeply that ours is a land of opportunity where individual effort and merit determine success.

And the reality is that this tension is not easily resolved – because we are community foundations serving all of the above. Our communities need those who have been successful in commerce or fortunate in inheritance to transform those dollars into public good. We need to celebrate acts of generosity to inspire others to follow suit.

What then is the role of a community foundation whose mission is the serve the residents of the place we call home – all of the residents? 

At this time of great social division, community foundations are called to step up and help our communities find common ground, engage in constructive dialogue, share our individual truths and listen to the truths of others who are different than us; and yes, forge a way of healing and growing stronger together.  Community foundations have been called the backbone of civil society, the weavers of our social fabric and the glue of our community.  We have no self-interest separate or above the interests of our community.  We can do this!

We were born to build community and though, like our country, we may not have been perfect, we embody the truths of community and the stewardship of our community’s philanthropic endowment in perpetuity. We must strive to become a more perfect expression of our community.

At a time when our country and its 330 million residents are reeling from a series of devastating assaults on health and well-being, opportunity and prosperity – shining a spotlight on the realities of centuries of racism and decades of growing inequity;  at a time when these challenges are compounded by the collapse of trust of government, business and civic institutions that traditionally take the lead on solutions; at a time when the impacts of climate change are taking center stage and wiping entire communities off the map; at this moment when the very soul of our nation seems at risk, when armed factions are forming and killing fellow citizens, and when many are promoting their own opinions as facts that endanger our collective well-being; community foundations offer a most hopeful place to start to repair and rebuild our communities from the ground up. There is no place for bystanders in this moment of reckoning.  To tackle such deeply rooted and insidious realities either we all must change, or nothing changes. We were built for exactly this moment, rising to the challenges of this historic moment.