Putting Racial Equity Front and Center

I used to work in a development office; I was the development manager for Chinese American Service League in the mid-1990s. There, I learned under the red pen of Bernie Wong, the president of CASL at the time. Over the two years I was there, I am glad to share that there were fewer and fewer red marks on my grant proposals. She was an amazing teacher and helped me understand this strange world of grant-seeking from grantmakers/foundations – always be concise, be compelling, and be grammatically correct. I went on to serve as the executive director of Chinese Mutual Aid Association and continued to write grants and engage with foundation staff, site visits, etc. It is a humbling experience and one that I carry with me now as a grantmaker.

All this to say, Woods Fund Chicago has made some significant changes to our grantmaking guidelines to more strongly demonstrate our commitment to racial equity and to provide more clarity as to what this signifies. These times certainly call for deeper and stronger work to fight against and dismantle structural racism, and we also believe that it is the logical next step in our racial equity journey. We would like to make clear that these changes are not to elicit an entirely new set of grantees; rather they are being made to encourage, inspire, and have our grantees evolve with us along the path of racial equity. I know that the decisions that grantmakers make — that we, at Woods Fund Chicago, make – have reverberations beyond our organizations and disturb the work of our grantees. Therefore, we don’t make shifts in our guidelines lightly.

We are committed to funding community organizing and public policy advocacy that advances racial equity and economic justice. A core principle of Woods Fund has been that the people most impacted by structural racism and economic injustice should lead the process of defining problems and developing solutions. Evolving from and building upon this principle, in 2009, the Woods Fund board of directors voted to approve a racial equity priority for the foundation.

Since that time, Woods Fund has been intentionally learning and implementing strategies to meaningfully live out this charge as a foundation. For the past nine years, this has included: developing a diversity requirement for board members and senior staff, providing capacity building grants and trainings to seed and support racial equity work, convening grantees and foundation colleagues to advance learning, increasing funding for campaigns and coalitions working explicitly to reform and/or dismantle structurally racist policies and institutions, and using a racial equity framework to guide the foundation’s entire operations.

Almost 10 years after Woods Fund identified racial equity as a priority, Woods Fund is taking an additional step in the journey to further our commitment by prioritizing this focus within an updated set of grantmaking guidelines. The key changes to our grantmaking guidelines include: requiring organizations to have an explicit racial equity and economic justice focus; requiring a majority of people of color in organizational leadership, including senior staff and board membership; and requiring organizations considered for multiyear funding to have their executive director or board chair be a person of color. These changes should not be interpreted as a departure from our previous guidelines, rather an extension of them with a more explicit racial equity focus.

We look forward to this new phase of work and to continued learning from and with our grantees and foundation colleagues. We hope that these changes will stretch all of us to better confront structural and systemic racism.

We recently hosted a webinar about the updated grantmaking guidelines; the recording of the webinar will be available soon on our website. You can also find the updated guidelines on our website. Please do not hesitate to contact me or any of our program officers with any questions.

Sincerely,

Grace B. Hou