Innovator Insights: Peter Buffett, Co-President of the NoVo Foundation

This week, the NoVo Foundation announced its grantmaking strategy for its seven-year, $90 million commitment to support the movement for girls of color in the United States. The outcome of a year-long listening tour across the country with girls of color, movement leaders, and organizers, NoVo’s strategy is designed to support efforts defined and driven by girls and women of color to address the deep systemic, societal, and institutional challenges girls face.

Taking a holistic approach to grantmaking, NoVo will deeply invest in community-based organizations that center girls of color as agents in their own decision-making and create spaces for connection, healing, and consciousness-raising with and for girls of color.

“We believe that girls of color are experts in their own lives and wield immense power to transform their communities and the country. We are excited to partner directly with girls of color and their advocates so that they can live in safety and peace, dream and imagine all the possibilities of their futures, access all that’s necessary to live in dignity and fulfill their dreams, and feel celebrated and seen through love and connection.”

NoVo’s conversations in the field informed the initial tenets of its grantmaking strategy, which will:

• Provide flexible funding to community-based organizations:
  NoVo’s strategy will prioritize community-based organizations working directly with girls to build sisterhood and connection and those addressing structural barriers facing girls of color by centering them in the movements that impact them locally.
• Partner with regional grantmaking and movement building infrastructures, starting with the Southeast: In addition to prioritizing community-based organizations across the country, NoVo has issued an RFP to identify a regional infrastructure to partner with on grantmaking and movement capacity building, starting in the Southeast. The regional partner will house efforts that provide grant making to existing organizations and help seed new organizations, with the goal of eventually also supporting individuals and collectives outside of formal c3 structures. In addition to grantmaking the regional partner will provide the healing, political education and organizing capacity needed to sustain a healthy field.
• Invest in select national efforts that center girls in changing systems that harm them: National organizations that center the voices and needs of girls of color play a critical role in shifting systems and shaping narratives across the country. NoVo will continue to support national organizations and partners who center girls and provide the resources needed to transform the systems and structural barriers that are most harmful to girls.

Below is an interview with Peter Buffett, which took place before NoVo’s recent announcement.

II: What’s your North Star?

PB: Our mission at the foundation is to help foster a transformation from a world of domination and exploitation to one of collaboration and partnership. For me, that also means asking: “where is life happening?” — what encourages nurturing and support for life and how can we at the foundation create conditions for this fundamental and necessary act.

II: Can you talk about what you mean by philanthropic colonialism? Are there particular practices that can help institutions and individuals avoid becoming philanthropic colonizers? How is the practice of donor stewardship connected to such colonialism?

PB: I came up with that phrase early on in my philanthropic learning journey. I would hear organizations talk about foundations coming in with all sorts of ideas and restrictions on grants without truly understanding the issues at hand. Colonizing consciousness is, to me, an infection that has spread throughout the (mostly) Western mind. This country has a deep relationship with ownership and control… it’s very difficult to root out. The simple antidote is to be humble and listen. If donors are truly listening, stewardship becomes partnership.

II: What do you make of the growth of the philanthropic sector’s growth (which sees both an increase in the number of foundations as well as the size of individual endowments/assets) that has occurred as rates of poverty have increased?

PB: I think that’s a clear indicator that philanthropy is the other side of the coin of what capitalism creates socio-economically. Ultimately, it’s completely wrong to have the level of both — poverty and endowments — inside a supposedly successful economic system.

II: As the Gates Foundation discovered, philanthropy may not have all the answers nor supply the best solutions to complex problems. As the president of the foundation reflected this summer, “Unfortunately, our foundation underestimated the level of resources and support required for our public education systems to be well-equipped to implement the standards.” What can other foundations learn from this and how do they incorporate such lessons into their institutional practices? How can foundations become accountable to the populations they serve- and what does that accountability look like?

PB: Accountability looks slow and long term — it looks a little uncomfortable, perhaps, for people that are used to the business of short-term results and quick fixes. Foundations should learn to look further “upstream” to see where the issues that they’re trying to solve start. Band-aids may be fine for a surface wound… but if one is trying to solve deeply systemic problems, a much more complex and nuanced solution is often necessary. And those solutions take time and many iterations to learn.

II: What are the most important practices for philanthropic institutions to implement to become more effective and more justice-oriented? What traits are necessary to be just and effective?

PB: It starts with the organization itself. Are there people inside the organization that look like the people it’s trying to partner with? Does the organization behave internally as it hopes to externally? Just as it’s necessary to “be the change” personally, it’s equally important organizationally. Look in the mirror, be humble…listen and learn.

II: Several reports have just been published highlighting the successes, failures, and challenges over time within the philanthropic landscape. The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy report “Pennies for Progress” shows that while foundations and their assets have grown exponentially over the last decade, funding for proven social change strategies that impact marginalized communities are dramatically underfunded. Additionally, the Center for Effective Philanthropy recently reported that foundation CEOs often feel that though foundations have the potential to make a significant impact, very few actually are. How would you address institutional leaders who want to have a greater impact but have the (validated) sense that they have been, to a certain extent, ineffectual to this point?

PB: This speaks to the complexity (or unwillingness) to look upstream to where many of the problems start. It speaks to a lack — or fear — of imagination. Perhaps the board is made up of corporate folks that are mostly white and male and comfortable inside the system. Perhaps there’s fear of upsetting the status quo too much.

Our culture — just like the one in the high school biology petri dish — wants to survive. Philanthropy’s job is to eliminate the host, quite frankly, so philanthropy no longer has a place. But very few people want to put themselves out of business. Especially in a business that, on the surface, looks like it’s doing good inside the culture.

Systemic problems need systemic solutions. This is very difficult to do inside a system that wants to keep itself alive at any cost. Marginalized communities are the canaries in the cultural coalmine. They tell us quite explicitly how the system is failing. If those communities aren’t improving, it’s only a matter of time before the entire system collapses.

II: Speaking of Pennies for Progress, the NoVo Foundation in particular is highlighted for its rapid rise to a leadership position among foundations successfully implementing social justice strategies. What are the benefits and challenges to creating institutional traditions, and strategies that prioritize social justice and elevate the voices within the populations impacted by your grantmaking? Conversely, what are the benefits and challenges facing foundations with long histories that are trying to change their institutional culture (the difference, I suppose being between charting a new path and rerouting the Titanic)?

PB: I’ve always felt that our greatest asset is our lack of history. Jennifer and I were very lucky that we did not inherit an institutional mindset or tradition. The challenge will be to stay nimble as we grow — and to make sure we’re always questioning assumptions.

What I hope we can be (and the ship analogy is a good one) is the “trim tab” for philanthropic approaches. It was a challenge to get large ships to turn their rudder once the course was set. Someone then learned that if a small tab was implemented on the larger rudder to turn first, it makes it much easier to change course. Hopefully, NoVo will be a trim tab to institutional thinking and approaches in the field.

II: How important is recognizing the role of structural inequity in this work? In your role, how do you ensure that social justice, equity, and inclusion become and remain fundamental elements of philanthropic efforts?

PB: Luckily, I don’t have to ensure that this remains fundamental to our work because it’s built into the foundation of the foundation! Which is critical if we’re to be truly effective and authentic in what we do. Again, we start with ourselves. We recognize the power dynamic that is inherent in our position and take every measure to examine it and dissolve it wherever and whenever possible.

Our responsibility is to constantly look at the structures that got us here and dismantle them (carefully) where we’re able — and always with the people with lived experience at the center of the work.

II: What is the process of soliciting and integrating grantee/community feedback? What are the steps the NoVo Foundation is taking to elevate the voices of grassroots innovators (who are often coming from the margins: communities of color, women)?

PB: This gets back to our people and approach. Our staff is humble and thoughtful… listeners and facilitators… we know that we cannot possibly be effective if we aren’t learning from the people with lived experience. The margins are where the truth is.

II: How does philanthropy understand the economic system that is its maker? Should philanthropy address the inequality of which it is a symptom? And if so, how?

PB: I think we’re entering a new era of truth and reconciliation across all sectors of society. In some places that’s coming easier than others. But across many it’s a painful — and painfully slow — process. If philanthropy is going to be truly successful, it must address inequality systemically.

The “how” is a big and multi-faceted question. We have multiple streams of dysfunction in our culture. And every foundation has their focus and interest. I would encourage every foundation to look closely at their giving and — if they’re truly interested in making the world a better place — are they treating a symptom or addressing a root cause?

Of course, more beds in a homeless shelter are important here and now. But what is causing the homelessness? What is causing the hunger? Even with these questions, the answers are too often economic — more jobs! But even that strikes me as unimaginative. We are inside a system that wants every answer to be economic. My goal is to change the metric from jobs to joy. How do we become human again? How do we shift back to a world of relationships rather than transactions?