Rethinking Grantmaking: Using Data to Inform Investments
The D5 Coalition showcased Meyer Memorial Trust in its final State of the Work report as a story to inspire other foundations looking to be more equitable in their grantmaking.
This story is from the annual D5 State of the Work report.
Doug Stamm, chief executive officer of Meyer Memorial Trust, in Portland, Oregon, is a convert to the cause of diversity and equity in philanthropy, and he speaks and writes with a convert’s passion. To be sure, equity has for years been part of the mission of the Meyer Memorial Trust, which in FY2015 awarded more than $46 million in Oregon and in Clark County, Washington, via 515 grants and three loans. But turning well-meaning words — aiming “to contribute to a flourishing and equitable Oregon” — into the aggressive pursuit of social justice along lines of race, gender, disability, and other identity-based measures, “has been one of the most difficult things we’ve taken on,” Stamm says.
He describes a dawning realization about four years ago, as the foundation was undertaking a routine review of its mission and values: “We all embraced the idea of an equitable Oregon, and aspired to it. But we didn’t all share a common agreement as to what equity looked like.”
That wasn’t the kind of disagreement that could be reasoned through; it had to be confronted on a deeper level. Meyer initially brought in diversity and inclusion consultants to facilitate Meyer’s equity learning, which led to challenging and uncomfortable conversations. “Intimate and personal details were shared by our staff, particularly our colleagues of color, who had experienced episodes of racism in their life. The costs of personal and systematic prejudice were laid bare,” Stamm says, “deep personal aspects you wouldn’t ordinarily share in the workplace.” Hearing these intimate and painful stories “was, frankly, a major call to action for me, our staff and trustees.” We realized that meaningful equity work is never easy but challenging. We learned that the approach and style of our initial consultants was not right for us, so we then begin an ongoing equity learning journey with new facilitators that has continued over the past two years.
The definition of “equity” that the foundation settled on (and posted on its website) was: “the existence of conditions where all people can reach their full potential.” But the statement makes clear that understanding the concept requires grappling with how “bias and oppression” manifest themselves in society along lines of race, gender, sexual orientation, disability status, and other factors. For the foundation as an organization, it “means grappling with our identity in a field born out of wealth and power.”
“We don’t expect every group to have mastered equity,” he says. “We expect every group to be considering it and thinking about how to integrate it into their mission, strategies and daily work.”
A product of Portland’s Beaverton High School, Stanford University and Lewis & Clark Law School, Stamm went into corporate law, worked for NIKE and eventually went on to lead the national office of the Portland-based nonprofit Friends of the Children. Stamm, who is white, had always enjoyed a fairly privileged existence, but felt a growing commitment to justice and the nonprofit sector. To make Oregon a fully equitable place, he says, he came to realize that “you have to start with the people who have not had the benefits that I have — people who, unlike me, might have to worry about being pulled over when they drive down the street.”
The urgency was magnified when Stamm became a grandfather and began imagining the diverse Oregon his young grandchildren would inherit.
In the end, Meyer decided to overhaul its approach to grantmaking: It would move from a responsive and broad approach of funding worthy groups that shared its values to something deeper and more systemic: working to identify the barriers to racial, gender, and disability status equity — and other forms of equity — and attacking them.
As it embarked on changing its focus, Meyer decided that it needed more data in order to determine which populations were actually being served — or underserved — by grantmakers and grant recipients. In a pilot project from late 2013, Meyer asked the 53 organizations applying for grants to provide demographic data about their staffs, boards, and populations they served. It also hired an outside group to survey applicants and grantees from the prior three years, looking for similar data — surveys that caused some consternation in the Oregon nonprofit world. Groups that funded low-income people, but perhaps mostly low-income white people, wondered if they’d be automatically disqualified.
“Our response,” Stamm says, “is that equity is about closing gaps and disparities for marginalized populations. It’s not exclusively about race.”
“We don’t expect every group to have mastered equity,” he says. “We expect every group to be considering it and thinking about how to integrate it into their mission, strategies, and daily work.”
Meyer trained the same demographic lens it aimed at others on itself. From 2013 to 2015, Meyer staff moved from 27 percent people of color to 47 percent people of color. The trend toward greater diversity has continued with hiring for new initiatives. (At the trustee level, five of six current board members identify as non-white.) The discussions about identity and surveys of staff have even led some staff to reconsider their own identities (shifting from a single category to “multiracial,” for example).
As Meyer reshaped its grantmaking approach to focus on equity, it went so far as to discontinue its existing grant programs in the spring of 2015 and has used the past year to process awards in the pipeline while retooling and developing new targeted funding priority areas. It has already reached out to stakeholders in one main area of focus, affordable housing, for advice on developing a comprehensive approach.
“We worked on developing what the key priorities in the state are, and we went out and issued calls for proposals that fit those priorities,” Stamm says. As Meyer supports the preservation of affordable housing and lowering the costs of building new housing, it will now carefully track populations served to gauge progress. It announced its new framework and grantmaking parameters in early March, soliciting proposals in the areas of Building Community, Healthy Environment and Housing Opportunities. Its Equitable Education portfolio will likely begin soliciting proposals in early 2017.
“It can be powerful, I think, when people who aren’t expected to speak out on equity and race issues do so in a very personal way.”
It is building coalitions and putting more money into supporting advocacy groups. One grantee, the Oregon Housing Alliance, “subsequently secured by far the greatest gains from our state legislature in years,” Stamm says.
Meyer is doing a similar “statewide sweep” for ideas about building communities — a core priority — with 10 listening sessions across the state so far and has followed a similar path of stakeholder engagement in shaping the other funding areas.
As the Portland Tribune reported in October, some arts groups worry they will be shut out from Meyer support, fearing that their connection to “equity” may be hard to demonstrate. Meanwhile, social justice organizations, such as Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN; Northwest Treeplanters and Farmworkers United), a progressive Latino advocacy group that lobbies for farmworkers rights and immigration reform, wonder whether Meyer will support establishment-rocking groups like theirs. In fact PCUN recently received an award from Meyer, but Stamm is not tipping his hand about future recipients. In recent years, Meyer has begun to increase its support for those and similar organizations focused on grassroots advocacy.
Stamm has taken an unusually personal tack in a blog on Meyer’s website, wrestling openly and candidly with notions of race and white privilege. “When I get into conversations about race with people of color, I can at times feel my heart rate go up or I get anxious,” he wrote in July. After the Charleston church massacre, he wrote: “My heart breaks and I am trying to figure out what more I can do.”
“At times I feel like I’m one of the maybe least adequate people to speak on these topics,” Stamm says. “On the other hand, it can be powerful, I think, when people who aren’t expected to speak out on equity and race issues do so in a very personal way.” He has been consulting with a diverse group of peers in the Pacific Northwest, the Philanthropy Northwest CEO equity cohort, which he uses as a sounding board to gauge whether his approach has gone too far, or not far enough.
He has also tapped this network as he tries to make a meaningful impact on internal diversity. “At one point I said, ‘I am hell-bound on hiring a diverse staff here at Meyer. I need your help. Talk to me’.”
For Stamm, embracing equity has been “heartfelt and real — and not without a lot of challenges.”
“I personalized it, I took it beyond work,” he says.
Personal passion has clearly been one key to this reorientation. At the same time, that passion has been tempered, shaped and guided by the data that Meyer has diligently gathered in order to figure out who is being helped — and who isn’t. It is these gaps in equity that the new Meyer hopes to close.
Authored by Chris Shea
