Grantmaking with a Racial Equity Lens

About Your Foundation's Own Policies and Practices:

Respond (don’t react) to resistance.
Most people who try to advance the cause of racial equity grant making inside their foundations run into resistance at some point. Sometimes the pressures are overt. For example, a woman of color who was introducing a racial equity lens into her foundation’s arts programming recalled meeting with the board members of another foundation. At one point, “one of the trustees leaned over and said, ‘When is this whole multicultural thing going to blow over so we can get back to the business of making good art?’” The question was insulting, she felt, yet she answered with an explanation: “Multiculturalism is a reality. Demographics tell the story. It’s not going to blow over.”

A grantmaker found, for example, that the foundation generally funded groups organizing for policy change at state, regional, and national levels — a practice that had the unintended effect of disqualifying many people-of-color led groups, which tended to work at a more local level.

Because racial equity is such a charged issue, grantmakers often need to create opportunities to explore issues of racial equity with each other. Ideally, those should be structured so that they can eventually seed larger institutional investments in racial equity.

Internal Diversity, Inclusiveness, and Equity

• Community Foundations of Canada. Building Bridges: A Tool for Engaging Diverse Communities.
• Minnesota Council on Foundations. Building on a Better Foundation: A Toolkit for Creating an Inclusive Grantmaking Organization.

1. Modeling Diversity and Inclusiveness: “As you’re unpacking this issue and trying to figure out what to do,” a white grantmaker suggested, “it makes sense to start by asking, ‘How do we increase diversity in our own organization? Do we need a more diverse board? Do we need a more diverse staff? Do we need a more diverse vendor base? Do we need a more diverse fill-in-the-blank grantee base?’

For a grantmaker running a national initiative in juvenile justice reform, a racial equity lens helped identify a rigorous way to trace the impact of a program intended to improve “a broken system that relies much too much on incarceration and does not produce good results, either for kids or for public safety.”

1. Get People Talking
“What we’re finding,” said a grantmaker whose foundation has embarked on an explicit course of racial equity grantmaking in education, “is that we’re getting more people and different people to the table. By engaging in this conversation, we’re getting people who would have been afraid on their own to come forward” to talk about racial disparities in student performance.

A racial equity lens can be used with other lenses. A racial equity lens sheds light on racial dynamics that shape social, economic, and political structures. Other lenses illuminate other important dynamics that shape issues grantmakers seek to address.

A racial equity lens reveals how race is relevant to all groups. “Like everyone,” said one program officer, “grantmakers sometimes fall back into very narrow definitions
of racial equity.”