A New Generation of Foundation Leaders Need to Act Like Community Organizers, Not Gatekeepers

Editor's Note: Our Lisa Pilar Cowan recently wrote a guest piece for The Chronicle of Philanthropy, exploring how new leaders of NYC foundations can rise to meet the challenges and opportunities of the moment. We've cross-posted it below, and you can check out the original here.

I am feeling something like hope these days. After many dark months and unthinkable trials, New York City is seeming more like itself again, or maybe like a wiser version of itself. We have learned so much about what good leadership and bad leadership looks like at every level over the course of these last 16 months. And like so many others, nonprofit and foundation executives are thinking about how to apply these lessons to our work. It feels like an exciting moment for new leaders who are committed to addressing the systemic racism and inequity laid bare by the pandemic and uprisings to step into the work.

I am hearing the same sense of possibility of a new form of leadership from colleagues across the country. To get a close-up look at what that really means at least in our hometown of New York, I talked to 15 organizational leaders who could help point out what good leadership means in the era ahead.

In New York, this is a pivotal point because the New York Foundation, the Brooklyn Community Foundation, the New York Community Trust, and the Robin Hood Foundation are major supporters of N.Y.C.-based community-change work. They are different institutions — some private, some community foundations — but they have an important commonality to their missions: commitments to create a more fair, just, and inclusive city; to promote a healthy, equitable, and thriving community for all; and to elevate New Yorkers out of poverty. Each of these foundations is at a different point in leadership transitions that will happen in the next year.

For these critical institutions to succeed in this moment, in a city that is emerging from the pandemic, experiencing a racial reckoning, fearing climate change, and about to undergo a turnover in municipal leadership — all exacerbated by deep economic disparity and systemic racism across our neighborhoods — they are going to need ingenuity, compassion, resources, intelligence, friends, and allies. Smart, savvy, compassionate, and rooted leaders will be especially critical.

I asked key grantee partners about the kind of leadership they hope for from these incredibly influential institutions going forward. In answer, they offered a clear mandate for what and who we need. So here is a list of qualifications as imagined by the people who will be most directly impacted by changes in foundation leadership.

New leaders of our foundations should be:

Proximate to the most challenging issues of our moment: systemic racism, economic inequity, climate degradation. They need to have a clearly articulated commitment to prioritize systems change over treating the symptoms of poverty and racism. They should have a lived — not just intellectual — understanding of the challenges faced by the communities their grantees serve. It is time to acknowledge that we do better, more effective work when we bring strategic leadership through new voices, identities, skills, experiences, and vision into the mix.

Knowledgeable about what it takes to confront these issues. That includes a real understanding of how nonprofit organizations work and an honest assessment of what their leaders, staff, and members need. One of the nonprofit leaders I talked to — a highly respected long-time president of a large organization — told me that he had never been asked for his opinion by a grant maker. We need philanthropic leaders who go to the experts — the people working and living in our communities — for guidance and direction.

Bold and ready to change the way we practice philanthropy. Foundations have a moment and a mandate to try new methods and strategies. To fund their partners like they want them to succeed: with big dollars for the length of time it takes to make real change and with as little bureaucracy and paperwork as possible. Many foundations made changes to their systems during the pandemic to give grantees more time to focus on important work. Here is a chance to double down on the respect and trust those changes signaled and, more important, to give back the time and energy spent on the grind of foundation fundraising for the real work at which they excel.

Ambitious about using all of the resources at their disposal. Foundation leaders should not only be thinking about how to use grant dollars but about how to increase the amount they give away and how to invest and use their endowments. The combined endowments of U.S. foundations total trillions. These resources can be powerful forces for change, above and beyond the grants foundations make.

Foundation leaders can use their voices to amplify grantees’ messages and use all of their relationships and social capital to promote grantee work. This reorientation to working to resource our grantees instead of overseeing their work is critical to change. We need leaders who are ushers, not gatekeepers. An organizer’s mind-set in philanthropy is useful for being strategic within an individual institution — and also for marshalling support of other grant makers to multiply resources and impact.

Clear-eyed about how to do this complicated work with integrity and honesty.Many of us would agree that philanthropy emerges from a deeply problematic structure. Donors are implicated in the systems that cause the inequities we claim to address. Many foundations’ fortunes are earned through exploitive labor and then taken out of our tax stream — in effect stolen twice from citizens.

We need leaders who will use the tools that philanthropy offers to address where we find ourselves but who are honest about the contradictions and pointed toward changing the systems that both support and necessitate philanthropy as it is currently practiced.

The people who meet these criteria are out there and ready for a new moment of transformational philanthropy. And before they start their first day, there is much work to be done. Foundation boards need to make sure that their operations, systems, and practices live up to their stated values. Boards need to make sure they are ready to move beyond a surface ‘diversity’ lens, to re-create themselves as places where new leaders can survive and thrive. Transition plans need to include not only expectations for the new leaders but also expectations for the board and staff that will set the conditions for success.

And for the rest of us in philanthropy, we need to get ready to follow and support these new leaders, to prepare our own institutions for transformation, and to follow the advice of the nonprofit leaders who gave us such a clear blueprint for who we need at this moment of transition.