foundation initiatives and the dialogue on race

NATIONAL CIVIC REVIEW, vol. 87, no. 2, Summer 1998 © Jossey-Bass Publishers 127

Foundation Initiatives and the Dialogue on Race

Moderator: Robert ShermanPanelists: Dayna Cunningham, Henry A. J. Ramos, Miguel Satut, Lori Villarosa

In June 1997, President Clinton called for Americans to undertake a “NationalConversation on Race.” This conversation was to be a wide-ranging discussionof the complicated issues surrounding questions of race, racism, and racialconflict within the United States. A similar conversation was already takingplace within the philanthropic community.

The participants are individuals who have been directly involved in theefforts of philanthropic organizations to respond to questions of race, bothwithin the communities they serve and within the frameworks of their owninstitutions. Dayna Cunningham is the assistant to the senior vice president atthe Rockefeller Foundation. She also serves in the foundation’s equal oppor-tunity division and is the associate director in the arts and humanities division.Henry A. J. Ramos is a Berkeley, California, consultant. His current clientsinclude Levi Strauss and Co. and the Levi Strauss Foundation, where he man-ages the Project Change antiracism initiative. Miguel Satut is a program direc-tor at the W. K. Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan. Lori Villarosahas worked at the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation in Flint, Michigan, since1991. As an associate program officer, she is responsible for the foundation’srace relations grantmaking objectives.

The panel discussion was moderated by Robert Sherman, program officerat the Surdna Foundation in New York City.

Dialogue

Henry Ramos: I’m going to focus my comments on the work of the LeviStrauss Foundation, an organization with which I’ve worked very closely onthese issues during the past several years, and one that, in my opinion, doesextraordinary grantmaking, in this field especially. Let me start by talking aboutthe underlying assumptions and guiding principles that inform Levi’s work. AtLevi’s, we think we have a duty to be responsible in our grantmaking, but by

128 Sherman, Cunningham, Ramos, Satut, Villarosa

no means to be shy. We seek to go beyond mere dabbling around the edges ofproblems and to focus on real work that real people are doing to address realproblems in grassroots neighborhoods and communities.

We also think we have a responsibility to reflect practical and moral lead-ership in our work, particularly as it relates to race and social justice, whichare core interests of the Levi Strauss Foundation. We embrace these responsi-bilities for several reasons. First, we think it’s important, and even implicit inthe public role of foundations, that we should invest in and champion thosegroups and causes that neither the marketplace nor the government can or willadequately support. This approach is a controversial notion to some, but atLevi’s we see it as private philanthropy’s natural niche to address, in small butconcerted ways, the gaps in social assistance that our counterparts in industryand the public sector create, promote, or tolerate. “If not philanthropy, thenwho?” is the question that we ask.

Second, because our grantmaking resources are so closely connected tothe wealth generated by our company, we feel certain special responsibilities.We feel responsible, for example, to work for long-term social change that isultimately good for people and good for business, and we feel responsible totake tough positions on cutting-edge issues of the day that few others are aswell positioned to address as we are. We talk squarely about institutional racism,and we use that terminology consciously, because we think it speaks most hon-estly and most equitably to our society’s core issue and challenge. Part of thatchallenge is talking honestly—however painful that may be—about racism, inpartnership with leaders and groups who are prepared to acknowledge thatinstitutional racism still exists in America.

Let me define my terms: institutional racism is that place in institutionaland public life where race and privilege equal power, and where, on the basisof that formula, some racial groups benefit at the expense of others. Where dowe see evidence and persistence of this phenomenon? We see institutionalracism in banking and finance. If you are an individual of color in Americatoday, your chances of getting a favorable loan decision to finance a businessstart-up or a new home are markedly lower than if you are a white American,even if your personal financial data are superior to your white counterpart’s.Whether by actual redlining or through misdirected discretionary judgmentsin our financial institutions, something troubling is occurring here. This is anexample of institutional racism that is built into the status quo of our financialsystem.

We also see institutional racism in education. In California, where the lat-est rage is dismantling affirmative-action programs, minority university enroll-ments are significantly in decline. This decline is especially troubling in thecase of key professional disciplines such as law and medicine, disciplines thathave strategic impact on upward mobility, leadership, and community life.Institutional racism is about systemic inequities, driven by institutional policyand practice. I could give many other examples in areas such as law enforce-

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ment, employment, housing, the media, and even in organized philanthropy.Last year, according to the Foundation Center, which is highly esteemed bymost of us in the field, U.S. foundations awarded an underwhelming 8 percentof grants to minority nonprofits and causes. We can surely do better.

To address the difficult problem of institutional racism, the Levi StraussFoundation is supporting an initiative called Project Change with nearly $10million. The project is supporting the work of multiracial task forces in selectedlocations where Levi Strauss does business: Albuquerque, New Mexico; ElPaso, Texas; Knoxville, Tennessee; and Valdosta, Georgia. In each of these com-munities, we are significantly and directly funding projects designed and runby local participants, which include but are not limited to efforts to partnerwith local banks to expand their minority employment and lending. We’re alsoworking with local school and university administrators to increase minorityrepresentation in school policy making and curriculum development, as wellas supporting efforts to coordinate training programs and policy reformsdesigned to improve police-community relations and also to improve thereporting and prosecution of racially motivated hate crimes.

Our investment in Project Change includes providing significant fundingfor community technical assistance and evaluation, so that we can maximizethe impact of our work and share lessons with other funders and communi-ties that have an obvious and strong interest in this work. We also complementour investments in Project Change with additional grants, totaling about a mil-lion dollars each year, to leading national organizations whose work practicallyor strategically advances social justice and progress on race.

Recently, we approved a particularly promising grant to the National CivicLeague to assess and assist the feasibility of developing an annual nationalaward—something like its All America Cities Award—for communities andcivic groups that demonstrate leadership in attacking racism and combatingmulticultural conflict.

In sum, at the Levi Strauss Foundation we are less interested in touting diver-sity and multiculturalism per se than in addressing the underlying problem,which we have defined as institutional racism. We believe in responsible, butaggressive, grantmaking that goes beyond mere dialogue and discussion to sup-port concrete, community-based action. Finally, we think it is essential to focuson critical institutions such as those in banking and education and law enforce-ment agencies, and to broadly share what we learn about how positive changeoccurs in these important places. These, we believe, are our social responsibilitiesand our contributions to philanthropy in the communities that we support.

Dayna Cunningham: The Rockefeller Foundation has a three-part effortthat we call the Building Democracy Initiative. The three parts are leadership,community building, and a national conversation on race. We see the variousparts as being very much intertwined. You really can’t have a conversation onrace without principled and strong leadership. You can’t build communitywithout taking on the question of race.

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Within the national conversation, we have three priorities. One focus is toget better information out to the American people: stories, information, his-tory. The second focus is to engage the public values of the American people;the third is to introduce new voices into the discourse about race in this coun-try. Again, these three priorities are interconnected; they have to do with oursense that the discourse about race for the most part is poorly informed andgreatly in need of new voices. Too often, the discourse on race involves thesame people in the same room having the same conversation about the sameissues. Yet there are a lot of people outside the room who have much to sayand would bring some important solutions to the table.

We see this lack of inclusiveness particularly in the context of policy dis-cussion. When we started doing this work, about three years ago, before theO. J. Simpson verdict, many people questioned why we were undertaking thisinitiative. They wondered why we were stirring the pot. Interestingly, this skep-ticism has changed in the last three years. We are now part of a collaborativepartnership among foundations working on race, and we get together fre-quently to talk about the issues of being grantmakers and dealing with ques-tions of race.

This increased interest is an important development. Foundations are inpositions of authority. As such, they are able to take stands that are difficult forother people and other institutions to take. Foundations don’t always live upto this responsibility, but it is an important thing to try to do. The issue of raceis still threatening and mystifying to people. It really makes a difference whena foundation officer stands up and says, “We are dealing with race, and wehave a focus called the National Conversation on Race.” It brings people to thetable in a different way.

We see our project as trying to demystify race and racial discourse. Raceis perceived as a sort of five-hundred-pound gorilla. The question is how toget a handle on this topic, do something with it, and not be scared by it. Weare trying to figure out how to break it down into a simpler thing, dealingmuch more with values and stories, and ways of engaging the discussion thatdon’t scare people away. Not that the issues aren’t deep, historical, dangerous,violent, and frightening. They are, but we can have a conversation, and it canbe successful. It doesn’t have to scare people away. We are now in collabora-tion with other foundations, thinking about a communications strategy thatinvolves Americans in talking about race, lifting up successful examples, show-ing what good conversation is and how it can be done. From the foundation’sperspective, it’s not merely a question of discourse but also one of problemsolving—the possibilities that open up when a group of people in a commu-nity home in on an issue that they’ve got to deal with—for example, schoolsor security—issues that aren’t principally about race, although deeply inter-twined with it.

Lori Villarosa: I’m going to talk about three different things: how theMott Foundation got into this area of grantmaking, what we’ve decided on as


a general strategy, and what some of the underlying values are. I agree withDayna Cunningham: a few years ago you wouldn’t have gotten so manynational foundations taking on a race-relations initiative. It is not somethingthat happened overnight. Though the Mott Foundation has a long history ofworking in communities of color on community development, organizing oneducation and addressing issues that are symptoms of racism, it only beganworking explicitly on combating racism and improving race relations as a sep-arate funding area in 1994. Initially we did some exploratory work that sup-ported surveys and other research, and some basic assessment of what wasgoing on in the field. One of our early exploratory grants supported focusgroups with white Southerners, looking at their attitudes on race and race-based remedies. These focus groups were followed by a national survey tocompare attitudes among races.

This information is no longer very surprising. We found that 61 percentof African American respondents saw blacks facing a great deal of discrimina-tion. Only 27 percent of white respondents agreed. We saw a litany of statis-tics about the perceptual gap, and they led us to think about ways ofaddressing this gap. We thought about what we as a foundation can do, andbased on some of our research and our discussions in the field, we developeda grantmaking strategy that supports transformative dialogue as a means ofengaging and mobilizing people of all races in the battle against institutionalracism.

Like the Levi Strauss Foundation, we also specifically talk about address-ing institutional racism. This approach was approved by our trustees on June6, 1997. A week later, President Clinton had his speech in San Diego, callingfor a national conversation on race, something that a number of us have beentalking about for a while.

Although the president’s pronouncement seemed fortuitous and affirming,it was also a bit difficult to open up the newspapers every day and see thekinds of criticism that the president’s proposal elicited. We understood the crit-icism, because when you talk about dialogue it may seem as though you arejust talking about talking, and doing nothing further. I don’t believe that we inthe foundation community really are just talking about talking. We all veryclearly recognize that dialogue is one step in the process of moving towardcommunity action. One of the things that the Mott Foundation can do to con-tribute to this movement is shed some light on which practices are most effec-tive when it comes to community dialogues. We are not just looking at paneldiscussions, or lectures, or dialogues on race. We are looking at some sustainedwork in communities that are tackling some of these issues, efforts that bringdifferent people together. We are evaluating some of the activity going on tofind out how we can better get the right practices in place.

In conclusion, I would like to say that although we at the Mott Founda-tion see this inclusive area of supporting race relations as very critical, wealso recognize that this work has got to be addressed through all of our




grantmaking areas. We’ll continue to look at it through our education, eco-nomic-development, and community-building program areas, as well aswithin our home community of Flint.

Miguel Satut: We often think of the foundation world as monolithic. Itis sometimes assumed that if you press certain levers and certain buttons,things will occur. It doesn’t work that way. Part of the beauty of this emergingcollaboration on race is the opportunity for individuals across the United Stateswho are working at foundations—some corporate, some private, some small,some large—to begin sharing experiences and talking about best practices asthey have observed them.

When Bill Richardson was selected as the new CEO of the Kellogg Foun-dation, he and the board of directors engaged the program staff in a review ofthe programs and of the work that we were doing. Part of the strength that hebrought to the organization was the belief that we were really doing well in theareas of youth, education, health, food systems and rural development, phil-anthropy, and volunteerism; but he challenged us to talk across the foundationto develop cross-cutting themes. He wanted us to consider the question ofdiversity in the United States and the impact it is having on this society. Otherissues we looked at were information systems, technology, and access; fami-lies, communities, and neighborhoods; economic development; and leader-ship. These areas became cross-cutting themes for all programs to address. Wedid not create a unit in the foundation that was to deal with race and race rela-tions, or affirmative action or higher education. The challenge to all of us wasfor every program director at the Kellogg Foundation to integrate these cross-cutting themes into the work we did.

We organized steering committees that represented all areas of the foun-dation. We decided to be much more up-front in talking about issues of raceand ethnicity. One primary area of concern is youth development. We havealways been a foundation that has worked with youth. In terms of youth devel-opment, our sense is that even though we have supported youth in educationand higher education, health, and rural and urban settings, there are still thingssuch as racism that they will have to confront in the next century that we as asociety haven’t equipped them for. That discussion is going to involve youthdirectly, because we are not going to decide it for them. Our approach is towork on youth development and try to develop youth for the twenty-first cen-tury, being very much informed by them and what their needs and expecta-tions are.

We want to get involved more with communities and community engage-ment. That means working with communities as they define themselves. Mostof us live in places; very few of us live in hyperspace. Although we may haveaccess to national or even international communities, most of us are groundedsomewhere on this earth, and we have to know our neighbors.

In pursuing this community-engagement process, our goals are much thesame as they have been in the past in our work in health or education: to


engage with communities and processes to identify their issues and concerns.We feel race and ethnicity are issues that some communities are already begin-ning to address and get involved in. Part of our work has been to support thepublication of Bridging the Racial Divide, a work by Paul Du Bois of the Centerfor Living Democracy. His research has revealed that there are eighty-plus com-munities across the United States that are already engaging themselves on thisissue. We don’t have to tell them what to do; they are doing it, but they needsupport. For the Kellogg Foundation, the goal is to work with communitiesthat are engaging with issues of race and ethnicity, and then provide supportin whatever capacity we can.

Questions and Comments

There has been so much talk about dialogue in communities and of transformationthrough dialogue. What are people going to be talking about in these dialogues? Givespecifics if you can. What are people really going to be engaging about? Let’s make itless abstract. How to you see this set of conversations actually moving toward thekind of transformation that we would like to see?

Dayna Cunningham: I don’t know whether the people that we are sup-porting would even think of themselves as being involved in a “dialogue.” Theyare talking about the pressing issues in their communities. I’ll give you a cou-ple of examples. The first is a project called Partnerships Affirming Commu-nity Transformation, a funding stream that seeks to support efforts in localcommunities through arts and culture to deal with questions of race. One ofthese efforts is the Asian American Renaissance, a project that brings togetherAfrican American and Southeast Asian boys in Minnesota to talk about theirimages in the media, and to move from talking about a media literacy approachto actually developing their own videos and films and creating their ownimages. What they are talking about is how the images in the media have cometo define them, and how to create another set of possibilities by creating theirown images.

We know of another project involving a group of African American kidsin public housing in Chicago. The housing is on one side of the city, separatedfrom the rest by an industrial corridor and a superhighway, and who knowswhat other kinds of social and physical barricades. This group of kids is doinga video documentary seeking to explain the idea that even in the most devas-tated communities people survive and even flourish. In documenting thestrength of a community, I don’t think they are aware of being involved in adiscourse about race, but it’s all about what happens in a black community thatkeeps people alive.

I’m really happy to hear about the attention being given to learning how to live withdiversity, but it sounds to me as if there are a couple of tough issues that we haven’tmade much progress on. One has to do with the importance of empowerment.




Empowerment speaks to the social-justice issue, however, and I don’t hear a lot of dis-cussion from foundations these days about the social-justice implications of race asreflected by differences in economic indicators, opportunities for jobs, and educationlevel. I would like to hear more about strategy.

Lori Villarosa: Although we have a specific portfolio on race relationsat the Mott Foundation, that is about $2 million dollars a year. Our largest pro-gram is our antipoverty program, which is about $25 million a year, explicitlyfocused on empowering communities through community organizing, eco-nomic development, and education. That program is targeted on communitiesof color. We don’t by any means think this kind of relationship building aloneis going to solve the problem. In terms of coalition building and recognitionof power imbalances in these discussions, we are very mindful of supportingwork for Latinos, Asian Americans, and other groups that have been less rep-resented in the discussion on race. A lot of our work is identity-focused andorganizing as well as multicultural and cross-racial.

Miguel Satut: There is a Kellogg Youth Initiative Partnership that worksin three Michigan communities and makes long-term investments, in fact, atwenty-year commitment to those communities. We have already invested alot in terms of helping those communities to organize themselves. Some ofthese conversations on race are taking place in those communities as well.

Can you speak a little bit more about the degree to which discussion of these issues(of race and ethnicity) is creating change within the foundations, and the degree towhich decisions in your own foundation are being made regarding this situation?

Miguel Satut: There are some leadership organizations that help mowthe field somewhat. One of those is the Council on Foundations, which hasnetworks all over the United States. The council began a series of projects tolook at issues of diversity in terms of who is in foundations and who is on theboards of foundations. That work has been going on for ten years. As far ascommunity foundations are concerned, I know that the Ford Foundationworked on a project to support community foundations in diversifying theirboards and sources of revenue. There is a long way to go, but some progresshas been made.

Dayna Cunningham: In addition to the National Conversation on Race,which is programmatic, we also have an internal conversation on race, whichis administrative. This internal conversation is an ongoing dialogue, within andamong the staff about race and identity, how race affects the work, and whatit means about programming.

Lori Villarosa: Within the Mott Foundation, we have coordinationamong all the programs to ensure that we really are addressing race in eacharea. As far as other foundations, we are looking at doing a national partner-ship with community foundations to see how they can better support this kindof work in their communities.ne short –

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Concluding Remarks

Henry Ramos: I guess I would say that there are very serious limitationsto what organized philanthropy can do, and those of us who are in this fieldknow it as well as anybody. On the other hand, there is much more that wecan do that we’re not doing.

It is important that organized philanthropy be encouraged—and whennecessary, compelled—to think more about how we do our work.

Lori Villarosa: I’m excited about our having this explicit race-relationsarea. I’m hoping that it sends a message to smaller funders and regional fun-ders that this is an area they can get into. But I want to reiterate that by nomeans does the Mott Foundation see this race-relations piece in any way sub-stituting for its focus on community development, economic development,community organizing, or education. Rather, we intend to use the dialoguework to build more effective coalitions to carry out the work in these areas.

Robert Sherman is program officer at the Surdna Foundation.

Dayna Cunningham is assistant to the senior vice president at the Rockefeller Foundation.

Henry A. J. Ramos is principal at Mauer Kunst Consulting.

Miguel Satut is program director at the W. K. Kellogg Foundation.

Lori Villarosa is associate program officer at the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.



foundation initiatives and the dialogue on race

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