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.
4. Reframe your thinking around risk. You, like board members everywhere, have been some of the most risk-averse people in the sector. But you know what’s risky? Fascism. The Department of Justice arresting Judges judges whose rulings Trump doesn’t like. The executive branch ignoring orders of the Supreme Court. ICE disappearing protestors and journalists. An authoritarian regime sending people, including US citizens, torture camps without due process. A government creating a registry to monitor autistic people. Those are the real risks you should be worried about.
5. Trust your team and enable them to act: Your program officers are often the ones closest to grantees and understand what would be most helpful and effective. Acknowledge that they have way more accurate information, connections, and expertise than you do, which is why you hired them in the first place. Take their recommendations seriously. Grant them the authority and autonomy to make bold decisions instead of running everything through you.
6. Help save us time and energy for the fight. General operating support. Multi-year grants. Accepting grant proposals and reports we have already written instead of requiring your own unique documents. Stop asking for organizations you have funded to submit a grant application every year. Shorten your grantmaking timeline. These and other things will save frontline leaders’ time and energy, which we need to for the fights now and the ones ahead.
7. Be present where people are: We hardly ever see you. You are never there at important conversations where the people and communities most affected by injustice tell their stories and propose solutions. Yet you get to make all the important decisions, and they are often terrible because you don’t have the full picture. Be where people are. Show up to meetings and gatherings. Your team, no matter how brilliant they are, cannot fully relay the pain, joy, and hope experienced by people and communities.
8. Stop falling into traps: A colleague told me her foundation’s board accepted someone who didn’t align with the foundation’s values, because they wanted to have “diversity of perspectives.” No, you do not need to entertain bigots, racists, transphobes, misogynists, white moderates, contrarians, or devil’s advocates. That’s not “diversity,” that’s absurdity. These people take up seats that would be better filled with those who could advance your mission, and they are often the biggest barriers to getting anything done. Stop entertaining them.
9. Understand that all your charters, bylaws, and rules are made up: Stop treating your founding charters, bylaws, and other documents and rules/intents as if they were sacred texts carved in stone. They’re all made up, and a lot of them were made up by people who are now long-dead. You can change them. You SHOULD change them. Stop letting stuff created decades ago dictate your actions now. Worry less about “doing things right” and worry more about “doing the right things.”
10. Acknowledge things are worse than they are. If you are on a foundation board, chances are you are way more privileged than most of the population. This privilege has been shielding you from the horrors marginalized people and communities have been experiencing and will continue to shield you from the worst to come. So you might not feel the urgency or the seriousness of everything happening. Seek opportunities to listen to trans people, immigrants, people of color, disabled people, autistic people, poor people, and others who are most affected, who are unlikely to be on your board. Believe them when they tell you things are much, much worse than you realize.
11. Remember that it’s not your money. Your foundation’s endowment doesn’t belong to you and the other trustees. As soon as money was set aside and the foundation created, it’s not your money anymore. It doesn’t matter if your foundation is a “family foundation,” which is a weird and archaic concept, it’s still not your or your family’s money, so stop treating it like it is, such as only having your family members on the board. Get people from communities most affected by injustice onto your board.
12: Sometimes the best thing you can do is leave the board: If at this moment you still can’t see the threats to our communities, if you can’t empathize with people most affected by rising fascism, if you can’t even say the word fascism or understand why we must stand up against it, if you’re afraid of being seen as political, if everyone around you is spending significant effort trying to bring you along, then you’re standing in the way of progress, and you should resign so people with courage can do their work unimpeded by your presence.
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I know some of those points may sound harsh, but none of us has time to beat around the bush. This is not business as usual. We are in a fight to save democracy and humanity, and foundations have an outsized role to play. But that role cannot be fulfilled if trustees continue to operate in fear, hesitation, or detachment. We need bold, principled leadership from foundation partners. Be that leader—or step aside so others can.
