Community foundations deny funding to Black communities, a report says. Could that be true?
Martha’s Table, a widely-respected charity in Washington, D.C., provides healthy food to families and operates preschool and after-school programs for kids. It serves all comers, but many, if not most, are Black people. After all, more than 60% of Washington, D.C.’s poor people are Black people.
Yet a new report from the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) does not consider donations to groups like Martha’s Table to be investments in Black communities. The report is thus able to make a startling claim: That just 3.3% of the grants made by the Greater Washington Community Foundation between 2016 and 2018 went to Black communities, in a region where 27 percent of the population is Black.
Other community foundations fared even worse, according to the NCRP, a watchdog group. Its report, headlined BLACK FUNDING DENIED, analyzed 25 community foundations across the US and found that “only 1% of grant-making by some of the largest local community foundations goes to Black communities.” The NCRP says the foundations gave “13 times more for non-Black communities than they have for Black communities.”
That would be distressing, if true. It’s not.
