Hi everyone, I’m thinking of all my friends and colleagues in Canada, who just achieved a resounding election victory against their version of MAGA; this came after the horrific tragedy over the weekend at the Lapu Lapu Day Festival.
Last week, I gave a keynote at a conference of funders who were mostly awesome and fired up to advance DEI and fight to save democracy. During the Q&A, however, a program officer asked, “How do we make change happen when the people with all the power at our foundations are not in the room?”
By that, of course, he meant foundation board members, aka trustees. This is a dynamic we see across the sector: Foundation staff who get it, who want to do things differently and better, and who leave these gatherings inspired only to be quickly demoralized when they go back to their workplaces and must deal with their foundation trustees, who are often the biggest barriers to progress in our field.
Foundation trustees, if you are reading this, thank you; just the fact that these words somehow reached you is a miracle, as we don’t ever see or hear from many of you. Right now, everything is on fire as the right-wing dismantles every institution keeping democracy and society intact. Nonprofits and foundation are trying to work together to fight this authoritarian regime. You play a vital role. But for you to be effective in that role, there are a few things we need you to understand. These are things your program officers want to tell you but usually can’t due to power dynamics:
1. You are not just stewards of an endowment; you are stewards of justice. Some of you see your primary role as protecting your foundation’s financial assets. But what are those assets for? Your role includes advancing equity and justice, and you must assess whether protecting your foundation’s assets will aid in that or hinder it. Be on the right side of history and understand that your main role is not protecting a bunch of meaningless money, but in protecting people, communities, and humanity.
2. Understand that neutrality is not an option. Staying silent or “nonpartisan” in the face of injustice is a political stance—one that maintains inequity and injustice. If you are preventing your foundation from naming white supremacy, anti-trans bigotry, fascism, and other things we’re fighting, you’re part of the problem. If you refuse to stand up for DEI, you’re part of the problem. We need you to lead your foundation to take strong, courageous stances, or at the very least don’t get in the way of those who do.
3. Give out more money. Now. Decades of foundations’ refusal to spend out money to solve problems in the past or prevent them from spreading led us to where we are. Now, we are in a crisis like we’ve never seen before and we need funding to survive, mobilize, and fight. Your endowments will be completely pointless if democracy falls to dictatorship. You need to move beyond 5%, beyond 6%, or 10%, or 15%. Stop thinking about giving the bare minimum you can get away with, and start thinking about what you are willing to do to save our society.
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