An Update on Our Strategy Review and Development Process
Over the last two years, the Foundation has been on a journey to examine our work, culture, and practices through the lens of racial equity. We realized that if we truly wanted to prepare all of New England’s young people to succeed, we needed to focus on where the need and opportunity gaps were. This meant thinking more intentionally about how our organization works to dismantle the structural, racial inequities that exist in our public education system.
As a result of this work, the Foundation adopted a new Mission, Vision and Values statement, and onboarded a Community Advisory Group — comprised of teachers, students, parents, community organizers, and others, in guiding us in the next stage of our grantmaking strategy.
We’ve made a commitment to being transparent through our strategy review and development process, and want to share with you what we’re learning along the way, while remaining honest about what we don’t have answers to yet. We hope to continue to model behavior as a philanthropy that is consistent with the values around racial equity that we have adopted.
We realize that to many — especially our grantees and partners, this feels like a long and drawn out process. It is not lost on us that philanthropic organizations have a privilege where they get to stop and start things in ways that are often abrupt or feel drawn out for the people they build relationships with. And we understand the urgency to support and move forward work on racial equity in education.
We also believe that in order for us to fully live into our newly adopted values it is absolutely necessary that we take the time to listen to the communities we seek to serve, engage communities as partners in the development of our strategy, and ensure that our own organizational culture, structures and processes are ready to support an agenda around racial equity in education.
Where We Are Now
We’ve been busy working alongside our Community Advisory members to develop potential grantmaking scenarios, which we presented to our Board of Directors at our June Board meeting. These scenarios were informed by conversations with community and field partners, lived experiences of those closest to the work on the ground, knowledge built from research, and lessons learned from our past and current initiatives.
At our June Board of Directors meeting, staff and Community Advisory members presented three grantmaking scenarios — each focused on meeting three goals that have come out of our strategy process:
1. Community, education and teacher leaders and their organizations are supported to advance change efforts at the local and state level that prioritize racial equity outcomes;
2. Sustained authentic partnerships between communities and their schools are identifying and implementing solutions to achieve racially equitable outcomes; and
3. Local, state, and national alliances and partnerships are effectively focused on dismantling and transforming systemic (structural and institutional) barriers to racial equity within the educational ecosystem.
Right now, we are working on gathering more research and data to bring back to our Board about the options that were presented at the June Board meeting. The types of approaches explored included capacity building within community-based organizations (CBOs) focused on racial equity, educator and leadership pipelines, growing and building networks among CBOs and/or between various types of organizations, communities, and schools, just to name a few.
Student-centered learning will remain a part of our grantmaking efforts — though what we mean by it is evolving. When we do support student-centered learning, we will emphasize racial equity outcomes — and we will focus on the cultural, structural, and policy environments that reinforce inequities within our education system and communities. Additionally, we are committed to engaging in conversations about what prioritizing racial equity means for student-centered instructional and system designs.
What’s Next?
Right now, NMEF staff and Community Advisory members are working to evolve what has been developed into a more focused core initiative that will include a few initial targeted grant funds. We are also using insights and recommendations from our Board members and Community Advisory members to provide more supporting information — evidence of effectiveness and lessons learned by others — that supports our new proposed strategy. At our September Board meeting, we intend to present a draft implementation plan for our grantmaking, along with an emerging strategy to engage and partner with communities at large. In December, we will present an operating plan for 2020 to our Board, as well as recommendations for how success is measured.
We do not anticipate adopting a five or ten year grantmaking strategy; in fact, our Board members are supportive of a new approach that entails deepening relationships with our grantees, and continuously learning and adapting over time, in ways that are supportive of the changes and impact that communities hope to see through their work. This means that our grantmaking practices are likely to change in ways that bring our core values to life. For example, we will aim to better understand the contextual realities of the work, and we anticipate changing our grantmaking and reporting processes to make them more reasonable and accessible.
We are grateful for your patience and trust while we have been on this journey. We know it has not been easy because your good work is often dependent on resources from foundations like ours. Therefore, we remain committed to moving the process forward in a way that is responsible and expeditious.
We hope to begin communicating more concrete information and next steps about our new grantmaking soon after we have reconvened from our September Board meeting, probably sometime in October. This will allow us to create a process to generate interest and engage in relationship building with potential grantees. Our new core initiative and grant funds will be officially announced early in the new year (after Board adoption of the operating plan), with a mix of new grantmaking happening in the early winter and spring of 2020, depending on the context (type of work, organization, etc.).
While the technical and timing dynamics of our strategy process are the focus of this message, we would be remiss to not add that our work to interrogate our organizational culture continues. We are reflecting on our ways of working, our leadership behaviors and the many tacit and explicit ways we need to rethink how we operate. While renewed processes and plans matter, it is our core beliefs and values in action that matter in our small part to combat racism.
Thank you for your partnership in helping us evolve and shape our grantmaking over the coming years, in service to communities that work tirelessly to challenge racial inequities so that all New England youth — especially those most marginalized and underserved — have what they need to be successful. We invite you continue to follow our strategy development journey on our blog.
