Executive Commentary for Diversity in Philanthropy Website
Evette Cardona, Senior Program Officer, Polk Bros. Foundation
President Obama's election has inspired multiple communities and generations to get back in the game, to care about what's happened to people in this country and, more importantly, what can happen in the future. As a grantmaker I recognize and appreciate President Obama's ability to give people at the margins hope and inspiration to make a difference in their lives and in the world. And social change funders can build on this groundwork to create new opportunities and possibilities.
At this particular historical moment, I think that the most effective way we can start doing things differently and making important changes is to begin by looking at intersections and breaking down silos. The combined realities of dire economic crisis and the new hope and political will inspired by President Obama's election should compel us to rethink what we are doing and how we are doing it. I don't know if I can speak for newer foundations, but certainly for those that have been around for several decades, now is a good time to reflect on the impact we have or have not been having and to consider new approaches oriented toward making structural change.
One important event that highlights this for me is the profound impact that the November 2008 passage of Proposition 8 had on the LGBT community and, in fact, on the non-LGBT community as well. Prop 8 was a serious wake up call for grantmakers who fund civil rights and LGBT issues because it highlighted conflicts internal—but not unique—to the gay community. The diversity challenges surfaced by Prop 8 actually reflect the country as a whole and, as such, highlighted competing claims on our agenda as funders. Race and class privilege underlie many of the social policy issues addressed by funders and are obstacles faced by many marginalized communities. But unfortunately the perception of the LGBT community as a monolithic and affluent group is strong and consequently certain single-focus issues are projected on to us as a whole. For example, the religious right is waging a concerted attack on gay marriage, leaving funders, especially LGBT funders, little choice but to dedicate resources to defending it. But on the other hand, the fact of the matter is that gay marriage is not embraced by the entire gay community. Marriage is not the most pressing issue for many gay people of color who are struggling for affordable housing, decent healthcare, access to quality education and good jobs. Gay people of color confront levels of discrimination that transcend the question of whether or not we have the right to marry our partners.
This means that grantmakers who fund LGBT issues have to weigh the importance of our investments in gay marriage against deepening structural barriers to racial and economic equality that impact gay communities. Especially in the current economic and political climate, we must take into consideration that gay undocumented immigrants who can't return to their home country will not be helped by gay marriage; nor will an undocumented lesbian couple.
Too often gay people of color are confronted with the impossible task of bifurcating our identities. Just as I can't walk into a room and leave any one of my identities at the door—queer or Latina—LGBT grantmakers cannot simply separate out what does or does not constitute a “gay issue.” For many queers of color, it's not just about the right to be gay or the right to gay marriage, but the right to proper health care, quality education and economic security.
Recognizing these tensions and grappling with the fact that many LGBT funders and gay organizations have failed to reach the entire gay community, the affinity group Funders for Lesbian and Gay Issues made the decision several years ago to revise our mission statement to address the inequalities that persist in the gay community and in philanthropy. The new mission of Funders for Lesbian and Gay Issues states that we “seek equality by mobilizing philanthropic resources that advance racial, economic and gender justice.” Changing our mission statement changed the game. In order to reach queers of color we had to do the research. We had to determine what does and does not serve gay people of color and how LGBT funders need to adjust their programs, practices and funding priorities accordingly. We had to say that if LGBT funders want to reach the most marginalized among the marginalized,we've got to change how we fund and adjust some of our protocols and guidelines in response to the needs of gay organizations of color.
These tensions play out at both the local and national levels. If a local grantmaker insists that they don't fund “gay issues” it should be pointed out that if they fund youth issues or civil rights or education that grantmaker is, in fact, funding issues that impact the gay community. If you're funding a homeless youth program, for instance, you're funding a “gay issue.” If you want to fund equal access to quality education, you have to pay attention to what's happening with gay students. So if you are an education funder and there is an organization advocating for better policies around sexual orientation in the school system or to establish a gay high school, you can't say “well we can't fund them because we don't fund gay issues.” Rather your responsibility is take into consideration the ways in which the school system may be failing gay students.
One of Funders for Lesbian and Gay Issues' biggest accomplishments has been the establishment of a national grantmaking partnership with local foundations called the National Lesbian and Gay Community Funding Partnership. The Partnership provided matching funds to community foundations in order to expand and diversify their local grantmaking in the gay community. To date the Partnership has worked with 40 community foundations around the country to create local LGBT funds, and approximately 85 percent of these local funds are now endowed, although the majority of those endowments remain very small.
Looking at the breadth and diversity of the gay community, Funders for Lesbian and Gay Issues also launched the Common Vision Project and Racial Equity Campaign to address the intersections among race, gender and sexuality in our communities. Other grantmaker groups took notice and the Common Vision Project has become a national initiative that now includes 14 other affinity groups around the country. The tagline of the Project is “to build healthy communities while ensuring widespread equity.” The first part of that statement everyone can agree with. All funders want to build healthy communities. But the second part of the statement gets tricky and raises a host of questions.
What does it take for grantmakers to work on building healthy communities in a manner that also ensures widespread equity? What does that mean and what approaches work? The process of asking, then trying to answer these questions has generated an intentional attempt among grantmakers in the Common Vision Project to address the “isms” at the heart of seeking structural change. The Project is drilling down to look at the kinds of structural changes that areneeded in order for true diversity and inclusion to flourish.
Complementing Common Vision, Funders also launched the Racial Equity Campaign in 2006, an initiative in the spirit of the National Partnership that has awarded nearly $1 million to eight public and community foundations around the country to support issues confronting LGBT communities of color by strengthening the capacity of those organizations led by and for LGBT people of color. Because of a matching requirement by the foundations the amount of dollars going to LGBT organizations of color will double to almost $2 million, an infusion of funding that will not only produce stronger organizations of color but that will also provide new models of grantmaking that can inform how funders can adapt or enhance their strategies to begin to look at the intersections and break down silos.
I believe that U.S. philanthropy is at a critical historical juncture in which we really have to start tackling two things: structural change and intersectionality. In my ten years in philanthropy, I've been a part of many conversations about diversity. But I think that now, with President Obama in the White House and in the face of the deep national economic crisis gripping our communities, funders—from individual donors to small funds to major national foundations—are going to have to challenge themselves by asking this question: “Is the economic freefall a reason or an excuse not to try new ideas and new initiatives?” Do we say “Well, because we don't have as much money as we had before or thought we'd have, we can't try new approaches and just have to maintain the status quo”? Or do we face up to the fact that the economic crisis has already shifted the status quo.
If we want to ensure equity, stop discrimination and make a just world, we've got to start looking at structural change. Clearly U.S. philanthropy has hit some important diversity benchmarks in recent years. If you look around the field, you'll see that while we now have more program officers of color and executive directors and board members of color, now we have to go a step further and start diversifying how we use our dollars for the purpose of confronting structural barriers to equity.
Evette Cardona is a Senior Program Officer at the Chicago-based Polk Bros. Foundation. She also serves on the Executive Committee of Chicago Latinos in Philanthropy and is the immediate past chair of Funders for Lesbian and Gay Issues. Ms. Cardona serves on the Board of Directors of the Center on Halsted, Chicago's LGBT community center, as co-chair of the Advisory Committee of the Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media and on the Lesbian Leadership Council of the Chicago Foundation for Women.