 Good day, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I'm delighted to have you all here. I'm Stacy Palmer. I'm editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, a news organization that covers the nonprofit world and all of the efforts to advance the common good. I'm excited to kick off the first in a series of discussions about philanthropy that is part of a partnership we have with the Associated Press and the Conversation to help the public better understand how philanthropy works and what it achieves. Thanks to the Lily Endowment for providing significant support for this effort and for enabling us to do more discussions like this. We'd love to hear from you about what other conversations we should hold. So please feel free to let us know in the question and answer box what kinds of topics you'd like us to pursue. We're also going to take lots of your questions and answers. So throughout this discussion, please feel free to let us know what's on your mind and we'll try to get to as many of the questions as we can. The session is being recorded so you'll have a chance to listen to it all again and we'll be sending that out as soon as we can. Today we're assessing how philanthropy responded as the nation faced multiple crises. The death of George Floyd, the pandemic, threats to democracy, so many things that triggered a flood of charitable donations and a wave of activism to groups focused on promoting racial equity. That area covers a wide, wide range of giving. Donors sent money to groups like Black Lives Matter, the NAACP, Color of Change, and many other racial equity groups, but also to many other efforts. Historically, Black colleges received many donations. Art museums received money to be able to help ensure that their narratives were more expansive and inclusive. Efforts like housing received a boost. So we've seen a wide range of donations and we've seen many other things take off. Just in the past few weeks, the Asian American Foundation announced that it raised a billion dollars to be able to work on efforts that focus on Asian Americans. So really a wave of activity. Just to give you a sense of the numbers and how amazing they are, the early estimates are that at least 11 billion dollars flowed in over the past year. In the past 10 years, we've only seen 9 billion dollars come in. So an outrageous amount of giving, but now the question is, what is it doing? How does it make a difference? And what do we need to do next? And so that's what we're going to talk about today with our panelists. I'm going to let them introduce themselves so they can tell you a little bit about who they are. And Anna, I'm going to start with you. Terrific. Well, thank you, Stacy. I'm really honored to be here with you. It's an honored be here with Earl and with Daniel. So in this important conversation, it's great that we're kicking it off. Hispanics in philanthropy, affectionately known as HIP, is the largest impact catalyst working across the Americas. We like to say that we're driving resources to the Latinx global community. We're strengthening power, participation, relationships, leadership. Simply put, I describe this as an international network. In Spanish, you would say a collective corazón, a collective heart of different types of funders, individuals, corporate, foundation, impact investors. And we do lots of convening, connecting and forming advocacy. So that's one leg of what we do. The other part of our work is as an intermediary. I sit on the board of Rockefeller philanthropy advisors. So we're similar to them. And our work as an intermediary means that we're the go to resource for charities, foundations, philanthropists, impact investors, and even actually the public sector. When they're looking to invest in the Latinx community, and they want to have a long lasting impact. So we don't tend to do one offs. We tend to do work that really evolves over time. We have staff all across the US and the Caribbean. And also in Latin America, we have about 12, 13 staff in Mexico City that are working on Central America, Venezuela, Colombia. So our work as an intermediary takes the shape of crowdfunding, grant making, and lots and lots and lots of capacity building. Right now our funds are addressing essential workers, migration, the borders, small businesses, women and girls. Whenever there's an earthquake or a hurricane, we tend to be there too. So for example, we've been in Puerto Rico a lot over the past three years. And that's how long I've been the CEO. And it's just been such an honor and a privilege to do this work over the past three years, every single day is different. It has been, hopefully we'll get a little bit more flatness going forward. But that's me in a nutshell. Thank you. Wonderful. Earl? Hi there. And thanks, Stacy. And it's a pleasure indeed to be part of this conversation. These days I'm the Thomas C. Holt Distinguished University Professor of History of American and African Studies in Public Policy, as well as the founding director of the Center for Social Solutions at the University of Michigan. I moved back to Michigan in 2018. So it's a little over three years now. And the Center works in four areas. The first is dealing with diversity and democracy. Another area is slavery and is aftermath. Third area is water insecurity. And the fourth area deals with the dignity of labor in an automated world. And as part of this effort, we span a lot of projects, including really steering a conversation about reparations in the United States post the events of last spring and summer. And so I'll talk about that a little bit more in a few minutes. But that's our scope. And it's been fun to be back in where I no longer give away money as I did when I was president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. And now I get to be on the other side of the table trying to find and beg for money. But to use it to actually come up with tangible solutions in real time. Daniel? I'm really glad to be here. And it's and really wanted to to offer kudos to the Chronicle, the Associated Press and the conversation for banging together and having a conversation like this. It's an honor to be flanked by Earl and Annemarie. I'm actually in the beginning part of sabbatical right now and haven't put two or three sentences together in some time. So I know if I triple for my shoelaces, we're going to be in fine hands with Earl and Annemarie. Until two months ago, I served at the Levi's Grass Foundation, including 12 years as the executive director. And that's a global foundation that operated in about 40 countries in three areas, the rights and the well-being of apparel workers, the fight against HIV and AIDS, and social justice. I also serve on the board of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. And that's an organization that is willing to to be critical about philanthropy. It also serves as a space where it takes the best thinking of the nonprofit sector and brings that to bear to inform better practices for philanthropy. So I sit on that board with movement leaders as well as leaders in philanthropy, and that keeps it really real. Also on the board of the Open Society Foundation's public health programs. Right. Wonderful. Earl, you mentioned that you've been on both sides of the table. So I'm going to start with you because that helps really sort of illustrate for us what it's like to be both on the giving and the receiving side of these dollars. You're working on a project that's really fascinating. I'd love you to dig into it and explain what it is you're doing and why philanthropy is such an important piece of the work that you're doing. Thank you for that question. So last summer, coming as you noted with the confluence of this sort of three streams, both COVID, the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among others, and then massive unemployment that all came, we were sort of faced with a question of what will constitute a just future. And so the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which I had been president of for five years, sent out a call for a proposal and all, and our center actually responded by saying, if we're going to talk about just futures over this next period, perhaps we should actually turn to the question that has been on and off the American social table for well over 100, 150 years. And that's the question of reparations. And reparations can be thought of as actually accomplishing three different time periods. There's certainly the question of reparations to those who were descendants of American slaves in that period of slavery and his aftermath. But there's also questions about reparations in Jim Crow and this period that came in the late 19th through the middle of the 20th century, when there was systematic discrimination. We highlighted the Tulsa massacre and many different venues the last couple of weeks. But we realized that Tulsa was only one of many sites where there were such massacres. Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898 would be another one that I could highlight. But third, we realized that the timeline actually didn't stop in the 1950s and 1960s, that indeed the period of mass incarceration and is really deleterious effects on black and brown communities in the United States needs to be thought of as a period that also should focus on repair. So we ended up writing this grant and receiving it. And so we're using colleges and universities anchors, institutions and communities from Minnesota on the western northern edge and Minnesota, North Dakota. So Moorhead, Minnesota and Fargo, North Dakota with Concordia College being the institution there and dealing with the Ojibwe people coming up and down the River Valley and what that sort of constitutes therefore a story about reparations. Michigan, where the University of Michigan is the institution and where we have three nodes, Flint, Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti and Detroit and Dealborn, the three nodes there. Then we move east to Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University as the anchor institution. And Pittsburgh is greater Pittsburgh and that part of western Pennsylvania. And then we go to Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut as the next in the sort of lineup. And then as we go down the eastern seaboard, we find our way to North and Rutgers North. And then we jump a good part of the Mid-Atlantic until we get to South Carolina and Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina then joins this lineup aided by Wesleyan College, the first all women's college in the United States in Macon, Georgia. And then we settle in Atlanta and two versions of Atlanta. And there's Emory University and that used to be one of my employers. And then there's Spelman College, historically Black College University for women. And in each of those locations, the questions of reparations takes on a different kind of cast. And what we wanted to do was to say, this is not something that academics bring to communities and define what our reparations, but this will only work if communities are themselves involved in defining what kinds of reparations. And I was reminded I was telling someone yesterday that sometimes in the academy, we failed to realize that a lot of community folks are intellectual workers. And what we need to figure out as a way is to validate and to highlight the intellectual work that they are doing. So over the next three years, we're working in these different locations to begin to sort of highlight from the community perspective in partnership with colleges and universities. What are the racial reparation narratives that should be surfaced? And how do we then go from surfacing those narratives to coming up with tangible solutions that can be used to educate policymakers in those particular areas of the country. And I used the word educate because I've been reminded by my colleagues in philanthropy, I cannot lobby, but I can educate. And so we're going to educate the heck out of this. And that's key. But we also have another partner in this is actually WQED, the media conglomerate out of Pittsburgh and public media channel, because they're going to help us to actually produce a documentary on the backside of this that begins to explain to a national audience. What do we mean by reparations? What do they look like? How do they vary by community? Why is it important at this point coming out of the summer of 2020 into 2021 that we're dealing with racial reparations in the United States? And as we can anticipate, and we already know, there's going to be some blowback and there are going to be folks who are going to question the whole legitimacy of this enterprise. We anticipate that we welcome it. And we look forward to trying to transform the narrative. And I'll end with this point. African American peoples began to talk about reparations right after the end of the Civil War. And so we have been engaged in a conversation about reparations since 1865, if not before, in fact, African Americans actually introduced the idea of reparations even when the country was being formed in the 1770s. We have actually had chapters of reparations. Native Alaskans, when Alaska became part of the United States, received 64 million acres, 16 percent of the landmass of Alaska was part of the agreement and close to a billion dollars to create 12 corporations in Alaska. There was a way in which reparations were put on the table in that particular setting. And then, of course, we get to 1988 in Civil Liberties Act in our attempt to bring some redress with respect to Japanese Americans. And so globally, reparations is a topic and we have many examples, but even in the United States, we have examples. And so we're building on that. We're all going to be watching this very, very closely. And it is a fascinating way, especially of getting colleges to work with their communities in ways that we don't often see. Many of you may want to know a little bit more about Earl's project. And Glenn Gamboa, the Associated Press, who's part of this partnership, wrote a wonderful story last week that we'll post a link to so that you can find out more. I don't know, Maria, I'm going to turn to you next because Hispanics and philanthropy, as you describe the organization, you see a little bit of absolutely everything in philanthropy. You do crowdfunding and sort of the kind of work that comes from everyday donors. You are the recipient of an amazing gift from Mackenzie Scott for $15 million. Some of you may know she has given $8 billion over the past 18 months or so, which is remarkable. We haven't seen a living donor do anything like that and really surprise a lot of organizations. So I'm curious from your perspective, what are the things that you're seeing as the key trends in how Hispanics are responding to the racial reckoning? Thank you. In my opinion, the real champions that are responding, the champions of philanthropy, have been our abuelas, our tías, our neighbors. They've been getting so generously of their money and their time supporting one another. And unfortunately, as you know, given that you're at the Chronicle of Philanthropy, you know that Latinx philanthropy is vastly understudied. We know that Latinos are very, very generous, but our philanthropy, since it looks so different, it's much more relational, less institutional, it's less formalized. And so what we know is limited to exciting news is that we're partnering with the Lily School of Philanthropy. And by this fall at our conference in September, we're going to have a lot more research that's going to help us understand the face of our donors and what they look like. It looks like remittances to family, it's giving to churches, giving to different community organizations. It tends to also be to education and to entrepreneurs, given that so many of our folks have bootstrapped their way. They understand the value of education and small businesses. Last year though, specifically, it was really affirming to see how Hispanics and actually all donors responded. We saw a significant rise in donations and in resources to propel our racial justice work. And a lot of the funds that we are holding right now, a welcome side effect was also how everyday givers stepped up. And as an example, our crowdfunding site, it's a free bilingual crowdfunding site called Hit Give, which we've had it for about five years. Last year, we saw a 30% increase over the year before. So we had almost 20,000 givers and between them, they raised about one and a quarter million dollars in 2020. So that was 30%. And so that's pretty impressive because you're, you know, these are folks that are giving $25 and $50. And many of them, once they start in crowdfunding, they become recurring. And that's, that's really great. And I think that what we saw at Hit was mirrored with other nonprofit organizations and other similar organizations. In terms of trends, we saw, as you mentioned, high net worth stepping it up. Mackenzie Scott received most of the media attention, but there were many, many others, both inside the Latino community and outside. And if you talk to folks who manage donor advice funds, the DAFs, they will tell you the same, many donors who were holding their accounts for something in the future, but they understood the urgency of the moment and they made much larger disbursements. And many of them also started thinking about the general operating support, which is so important and so critical so that organizations can actually do the work, the pipes that we need so that we can do the work. When we think about what motivated givers, I think a lot of the new donors gave because for the first time, the very invisible inequities became visible. They were confronted by the pandemic. And people, many of us had the luxury of working from home literally in our bubbles. And so that was very much juxtaposed to the farm workers and all of the essential workers that were making our lives possible. And I would venture to say there was maybe a little bit of guilt involved in what happened last year and how do we translate that into long-term future giving that is looking at systems change and at the racial inequities. You also asked me to address Latinidad, the meaning of Latinidad, Latiness and how Latinos are giving. And that's a little bit complicated because there's a part of the Latinx community that has during the last year taken on an us versus them attitude. They've seen all of the attention on the Black community, the Asian community. And if I'm honest, I'm going to say they're thinking about what about us and they're feeling like Latinos maybe are overlooked, but that's not accurate. And I think we're doing a lot of work around colorism and really lifting up how even though we have different origin stories, we speak different versions of Spanish. We look very different, understanding that we are all in this work together and understanding the legacy of colonialism and the legacy of colorism and recognizing how it had influenced who gets a seat at the table. I mean, those of you that have seen in the Heights who gets to be portrayed in movies. And that really trickles down to who gets funding and who we consider as really the rightful leaders of the community. And so this is something that we're working really hard to address of this untyped Blackness that exists not just in white communities, but it exists in the Latino community. And there's donors that understand that our communities are inextricably linked, I can't say that word, inextricably linked. And we're doing a really cool project that's called Together We Win, which was really bringing together Black and Brown businesses so that we would buy Black and Brown. It sounds complex, but the key I think is to listen, to listen deeply and to work with trusted partners that are led by the community and serving the community. One is not the other, you need to have both. And I think what you just mentioned is interesting too. Some of the money that you're using from Mackenzie Scott in my right is some of it to invest, help businesses get started, because it's very hard for entrepreneurs to get the funds that they need. Could you talk a little bit about that? Oh, happy to. It's just the whole ecosystem is messed up. The federal government doesn't invest in our community. Banks don't invest in our community. I think that in terms of, well, this last round of the PPP loans were a lot better. But in that first round, when everybody was really suffering, only 9% of BIPOC businesses were able to access those loans. So our businesses were left to really falter. And it had taken us a full 10 years to recover from 2008, 2009. The community was finally starting to make up some of that wealth that was lost in the Great Recession. And now it's been erased. It's going to take some more, say, estimating 2050 is when we're going to recover what was just lost. And so, yes, at HIP, even though we've always been doing, well, for the past 20 years, we've been doing grant making nonprofits. When COVID started, we realized that we needed to start making cash assistance to businesses as well. Because how are we going to have donors if all of our wealth has been stripped? So we wanted to keep as many businesses as possible up and alive. So that was our power up fund. And we did about $3 million in cash assistance to small businesses. And now that's being, we're pivoting, and we're now doing impact investing, we're doing equity investments, and that the entrepreneurs, because there's also very few fund managers are people of color. And so if you don't have fund managers that are people of color, that trickles down. We don't have investments that are going into entrepreneurs. So it's the whole ecosystem has to be looked at is what we have realized. That's really important. Thank you for all that. Before I turn to Daniel, let me just remind you all that we'd be happy to take your questions. So please go ahead and put them in the box and we'll answer them. Daniel, you just stepped down from Levi Strauss, a company that's very well known for supporting social justice. And one of the things that was really striking about the response to the protests and everything else was that companies just gave very fast and were among the leaders. I think at least at this moment, it looks like JPMorgan Chase is the biggest giver, bigger than Ford, Kellogg, all of the others that it was companies that really sort of gave some of the most significant support. I was wondering if you could put that into context for us. What are some of the kinds of organizations that companies are supporting? And how are they thinking about changing the way that they respond to social justice issues? Stacey, we're indeed living through one of the most disruptive five-year spots of history. And when it comes to the corporate response to this moment, it's certainly been a space that's interlaced with disruption, some promise, a surge in statements and activity, and I must say a good deal of head-scratching. The tectonic plates are really shifting, and the big news is that the nexus between business and politics, which used to be sacrosanct, is really seeing a fundamental shift. Politics, prior to five years ago, used to be a third rail, something to be avoided at all costs in the CSR sector. But now we're seeing it's an inescapable part of the business conversation, and it's spilling over from the public sector in the face of gridlock, in the face of inaction, and sometimes in the case of outrage over repressive policy initiatives. Four years ago, if you recall, we witnessed the dominoes falling in the face of the response to the Muslim and African travel ban in the rescinding of DACA, the prior administration's handling and creation, if you will, of the southern border crisis, and the efforts by the prior administration to define transgendered people out of existence. Many companies put their voice, their influence on the line, and we're now seeing a small swath of companies that are leading the charge on unaddressed social issues. And the swath of areas where this falls tends to be in sustainability, particularly with the Paris Accords, equality, immigration, gun safety, and voting rights. And some companies, and I want to highlight these, have gone even further to pair their voice and advocacy with making investments in movers and shakers in the community that are leading these issues in civil society. These include Ben and Jerry's and Lush, and those two companies have amazing websites where they've created a conversation with their consumers in a very courageous way. Tom's around gun safety, Patagonia, Salesforce, Levi Strauss, and Google.org in particular. So let's fast forward to 2020. You said in your introductory remarks that $12 million or so in cash contributions were earmarked for racial justice. The staggering news from candid data is that 8.2 billion of this total, and that's 68% hails from the corporate sector. And for context, what's the so let? In a given year, less than 5% of all giving comes from the corporate sector. And foundation giving usually outpaces the business sectors giving by a factor of three to one. It's also fascinating to see that in a given year, NCRP has done a study of what percentage of the corporate sector's giving has gone to social justice causes. And then a 15 year sample, the average is around 3.2%. And that includes racial justice. So this is some major changes that are happening. As you mentioned, J.D. Morgan Chase is the largest investor there. And if we add on business investments, and here I think loans for home ownership as well as businesses, that amount from the corporate sector balloons to $50 billion towards racial equity. So I love the marketplace podcast and I'm going to do glass half full and glass half empty here. The glass half full is that from the space of insulation where politics wasn't touched, two thirds of all S&P 500 companies have made public statements about Black Lives Matter. We can evaluate those in a number of ways. And 36% of S&P 500 companies have pledged to promote racial equity through their donations. And there's no doubt these amounts are exponentially larger. Now to the other part, glass half empty. Of the 50 billion in cash gifts and business investments committed by the corporate sector in 2020, less than 250 million has actually been spent or committed. And that's actually, this is the data from a group called Creative Investment Research. And the bad rap the corporate philanthropy has is that it's a lot of talk and not a lot of actions. And for a sector that prides itself on a bias towards action and swift execution, the allocation of what half of 1% is a real head scratcher to be to be kind. And I would submit when we look at the surge of donations that happen immediately following last summer's protests. I would submit that the corporate response to Black Lives Matter has in many ways mirrored the norms of disaster relief funding. And here I mean one and done grants that are generally given two or three days, you know plastered on the websites of grants and there was radio silence after that for the most part. And when we think about the beneficiaries, there's a small spot of national organizations, the NAACP, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Equal Justice Initiative, the Black Lives Matter Organization, and the ACLU. These have gotten sizable infusions from companies like PayPal, Salesforce, Home Depot, Nordstrom, and Nike. But this is very reminiscent of the funding flows that happened right after the 2016 election, which saw the election of Donald Trump where only four organizations received surges in individual donations. At that time, if you recall, it was the ACLU Move On, Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club. But in both cases, the beneficiaries were national organizations with brands that were built over decades. And this didn't translate into just similar gains. So the question that I'm sitting with, you know, we sort of sipped tea from the fire hose is how can the business sector pivot from sort of this disaster relief one and done, a surge of statements and one off grants to a strategic, structural, and sustained approach. And that's the big question I think for the future. And I have a big bag of popcorn. It is a big one. I'm curious because one of the things we're trying to do is think about the ways that the public can get involved. You don't necessarily always have to be a philanthropist to make change. And that you don't even necessarily, it's not always about giving money. What difference do employees make, especially these days, in influencing what the companies they work for, how they're thinking about the statements, the dollars that they give, that kind of thing. Can you talk a bit about that? But this is a moment where we have a workforce that I think the data shows that around 69% of Gen Y and Gen Z, they expect companies should engage with Black Lives Matter. And, you know, the tide has moved to the direction where this new generation mentoring the workforce believes that companies should stand for more, not just for the shareholders, but have an impact on the world. At Levi Strausson Company, it was certainly the case that we saw a surge in concern about the communities that we care about, and a lot of awareness since we've been living the world through our screens here, and seeing the world. You know, I think we see employees calling on their companies to do more, to be more. And it's not just what you stand for, but what you stand up for. And it's been a really dynamic time the last four years, in particular in the face of disruption. We've seated over 30 sessions between our grantees and our employees. It's also been a time where I think with Levi Strauss being an American icon and our recognition that what we say about America matters, we really took stands for democracy in two ways. Number one, protection of the weak and vulnerable, with a $7 million rapid response fund, supporting groups in the crosshairs of the administration's policies. And number two, we invested $3 million in BIPOC communities, 20 organizations, 15 led by women of color, to ensure that all voices, especially BIPOC people, and especially women of color, are put at the center of democracy. I think it's also a moment that brands with access to not just capital, but also the influential platforms and vast brand audiences leverage these. And Levi's had a series on its Instagram live account called User Voice Live. And we were really honored to curate a series of our grantees talking about the importance of every voice being heard. People like Alicia Garza and Ai-jen Poo. People like Latasha Brown from Black Voters Matter. Folks like Amy Allison from She the People. We believe that it's really critical that this no longer be this insulated space where politics is seen as taboo. We know that companies have weighed in in very non-transparent ways, such as lobbying. The expectation is that we use our voice, we use our influence to make the world a better place. And I think the next frontier, and I'd love to see it, is standing with funding and engaging with the people who are the movers and shakers of these issues in civil society. And I'm glad you mentioned Black Voters Matter. One of the stories in the series that we've published together with Associated Press featured that organization. And Alulia Hadero did an excellent look at all of the money that's flowing in. And talking about the way that, you know, I think they had 90,000 contributions or something like that. Lots of small dollars added up to really big impact. So it truly can look such a different. Earl, I know one of the things you're looking at in your project is corporate giving as well. Is there anything you wanted to add to give the perspective of what's going on? And how we'll even know and hold companies accountable? So one of the tangible byproducts of our work is we're trying to come up with and develop what we are referring to as a reparations accountability and responsibility index. Where we take the broad claims and work that Daniel so nicely illustrated and not only track it for one quarter or two or three or four, but actually set up a structure where we're actually looking at this over a period of time. You fast, well, not fast forward, but go backward three or four decades to remember something that seems so quite now cooperation push and Jesse Jackson and his attempt to hold corporate America responsible and accountable. Me and part of that was getting more in that case blacks on corporate boards, but also for investing in buying and supporting black running on businesses and all. And I realize for a lot of us and last summer, it had a feeling of deja vu. That is they are series of crises that always erupt on some kind of schedule would lead people to respond because it was the right thing to do me and either because of pushing from their employees or because of some general sense that this is important. And so what we're trying to do is actually take all those people at their word see what they have said we have 14 categories are so so far in the index that we're looking at with loading these data we've been helped by candid actually and in breath Smith and his colleagues especially provided us with some data that they have as we and then teases out and then we will stick with it. We will actually issue essentially our own version of responsibility report card and some point later this summer into the early fall and then we'll update it. And so there we refer to it inside of our operation there are people above the line but as they actually said something done something and they should actually be touted for what they have done and then there are scores of others who are below the line they haven't said a word I've haven't done anything that is visible and so we want to praise in even as we analyze perhaps critically analyze those who are above the line but we want to note those below the line who also have some opportunity here to become a change makers but to MRA and Daniel point what we're also mindful of is that we want to begin to figure out a way how to identify and isolate individuals who are making community making improvements in their own communities who aren't necessarily part of well-heeled or well positioned corporations and and illustrated with two quick examples I was on a phone call this morning with my friend Dwight Andrews who's a senior among many things it's the senior pastor of first congregational church in Atlanta and Dwight is trying to figure out this church had the boys in attendance in the early 20th century Andy Young was the senior pastor at a point in the 1960s but the question that Dwight and I were talking about how do you position this church as a center of repair for the community looking forward how do you begin to actually use its tangible and physical assets to sort of think of its role in Atlanta and as a employment hub as a tech hub as a biomedical site as a site where people are learning skills that's a whole different kind of model of thinking through than that kind of philanthropy and this is philanthropy from within the community where the church itself becomes a philanthropic institution by giving back to the community in a different way from just people typing and giving some percent on a weekly basis and that has a corporate model to it and the corporate structure it's a different way and this is interesting and they're in the process of developing all of this but I was actually emboldened by some of the things that Dwight had to say and another one I actually will claim this is I know deeply and personally because it's actually my own brother whose sister-in-law who started this but they live in Fort Wayne Indiana and using their own resources and deciding to be philanthropic bought a building in Fort Wayne and are rehabbing this building not too far from a church they're connected to but with the goal of actually creating a new educational technology center in the heart of the black community in Fort Wayne and where they're using their own resources in which they will then try to marry with other resources to become a place where young people can actually position themselves for a future where they actually can believe that all things are possible these are the examples that sort of two one an institution like a venerable black church another one two individuals who come out of corporate America my brother isn't a vice president of Raytheon but who sort of uses this to actually move on those models are getting replicated elsewhere all over the country and and as we look at the corporate sphere and not zero in on the smaller places to Daniel's earlier point I mean my worry coming out of last summer is that some of my good friends who have done extraordinary work in building organizations and institutions were the recipients of a lot of our just because they were visible and had been around but there are hundreds of others who are in the throes of producing something that will be critically important for the future of this nation and in some ways for the survivability of our democracy. I'm so glad you underscored that because much as obviously we value all of the work that some of these large organizations are doing is some of these other efforts that are innovating and serving their communities in ways that make a tremendous difference and so we all need to you know watch them and hope that more of them spread we are starting to get some questions and so I want to be able to move to a few of those now. The first question is for you Earl can reparations at scale be truly successful without truth telling and sharing? The short answer is no and so I mean and we have to find a way to actually not run away from our history I mean it's all my historian by training and I find this last few months one of the most damning moments in American life where we have what is it 23 states right now who are claiming they're going to run away from someone called critical race theory although at least by the things that I've heard they don't really understand what that is it came out of a legal community and Kim Crenshaw and others sort of extended it's been around for 30 years and it's all of a sudden last summer somebody got some talking points and ended up deciding that these are the talking points that latch on to and so no we have to actually deal with truth and there are several different models that are being approached so San Darity and Kirsten Mullin who in their new book on reparations have what they refer to as the ARC model where there is acknowledgement and then some temp at restitution and recovery followed by closure and that's one model aria floranta and her colleagues at venture liberations liberation venture further have a different sort of model of sort of racial reckoning as a model I think and totally believe that if our project is all successful we may not have a TRC equivalent to South Africa or even the one that we found among first nation peoples and dealing with the boarding schools and other situations in Canada but we will find ourselves having to come up with and come to some reconciliation over what we know and how we know it and why we know it and that in and of itself will be all together important and and and and it may be just maybe yeah I I taught I jokingly said I taught undergraduates this past fall of morning two for the first time in 25 years the last time I had that many undergraduates in the class I taught these kids parents and that's literally true and but I was sitting there and the first day of classes and so why are you taking this class and what do you want to learn and they said I'm taking this class because I know there were things I was not taught in high school and there are things that I want to make sure when I leave a college that I can say to myself and to my friends and to my family and my children that I learned things and that I was not taught in high school so there is an earnestness on the part of many who want to know more and I think part of dealing with some version of truth and reconciliation will get us closer to filling in those big gaps but is this across the nation about what has happened how it happened why it happened into whom it happened the next question is one we discussed quite a bit when we were preparing for this panel so I'm very glad to see it many grant makers have funding reporting criteria that makes it nearly impossible for smaller often minority or woman run nonprofits to meet what are your thoughts on the ways to make the grant process less stringent or cumbersome to under-resourced or less savvy nonprofits do you think we can move from grants to gifts with fewer strings attached and I know all of you have thoughts on that topic um Adam can I start with you me yeah I mean we saw it done this year uh so many of the grants that we had that were project support very specific were then turned into general operating so we could do it last year why don't we just keep that trend going forward there's plenty of research that shows that a healthy organization actually needs 20 percent of each grant to go into that dirty word indirect but that dirty word is what allowed us last year to take all of our plans for like 2020 throw them away and start it allows us to be nimble and to be flexible and that general operating support then puts the people affected um and in the driver's seat they know best and so let them decide how the monies can be used and it allows them to respond so it's just continuing to do that I know that a lot of folks feel like they want to see the results of a project but think instead about investing in great ideas great institution great individuals instead of project if you think bigger they will get to the results some of you may know the Dan Flotta who's an activist on the subject often wears a t-shirt that says I am overhead to remind people that it's the people who carry out the work um and that's a very important thing to fund um I had some people last year that wanted to invest like I want to give you $100,000 but every single penny needs to go to the essential workers or to the people that are affected um my staff are affected too we you know you know we're essential workers well we're protagonists in the in in the same work and so that you just need to understand that we need the pipes and the infrastructure to do the work indeed I'm going to go quickly to make sure did you want to say something now we go to the next question everyone is talking about the McKenzie Scott gifts and I think for me my takeaway is that this tranche of grants refashioning and redefining what a big bet means there's a study that was created by open impact Heather McLeod granted Lexa Caldwell they looked at big bets of 10 million dollars or more over a period and most of them went to hospitals universities and elite arts institutions 43 percent went to Ivy League grads 11 percent the two organizations led by people of color so what's sexy I believe is taking organization with a great idea and a great leader and asking them what they need and by Levi Strauss by bringing leaders to the board meetings every every chance that we could it brought people who sat on boards from the corporate sector or family shareholders into the headset of what is it like to to to lead a movement what is it like to run an organization what is it like to do change management and we often found that people were doing three jobs that of an HR head a communications head fundraising head having to fill out a report so this fundamental thing of not just saying nonprofits they're inefficient there's there's been this great distrust of the sector what I hope that Mackenzie Scott paves his way for more people saying what do you need and fortifying organizations with generous support please Stacy you guys covered and I know that there was a New York Times front page article um last spring uh an article it was something like in philanthropy race is still a factor in terms of who gets what and it was an organic study that um was followed by echoing green who invest in fellows um and they had like 20 years of data to show that all from all of their fellows which are picked according to the same criteria and go through the same exact curriculum those that were white and were leading white organizations were vastly overfunded than those that were I think there was a 20% difference huge the same kind of work the same kind of thing and yet so it's it's I mean it's good to have these studies that show us what is truly happening Earl I know you mentioned when we were talking um a case where you were at Mellon and you overheard a grant he trying to return a grant because of those restrictions could you tell us that for a sec yeah so uh in those days staff used to sit outside of offices and so it was happened to have my door partly a jar and I could hear one of the staff from our arts and cultural heritage uh on the phone uh and I'm like okay I'm probably shouldn't be eavesdropping but I can't help but hearing this and where um there was a grantee who was saying our paperwork was so onerous uh she was a one or two person operation that rather than continuing that she was going to send the money back and I kind of walked away from my desk and I came around I said uh Sunita did I just hear I wasn't meaning to eavesdrop but I couldn't help but overhearing is this a grantee who's going to send the money back to us and she said yeah and then she filled in the detail and I thought you know there's a problem uh if this is an organization that given how stringent our examinations were for even getting to that point of being offered a grant but then the back side of it is I mean there's two memories about overhead there's a second overhead because what she was saying is there was an initial overhead to get the grant then there's a second overhead to actually maintain the grant and report on it and all that um this at least uh pretend to one time grantee was saying it was too burdensome uh and that caused us to figure out and have to ask questions what are we doing I mean if our goal is to give money to support ideas and people as my colleagues were suggesting and then we make it so burdensome for them on the other side are we actually doing our jobs and I know that raised real hard questions for us and and an internal debate I mean because uh there you know it was a debate it's I would say about Mellon in those days it was a venerable institution uh and and so there were traditions that had been born and developed over a few decades and so I'm quite the discussion this moment I'm going to go fast again um because we are starting to run out of time there's a question for Daniel what do you think the driver of the change in corporate perspectives about raising their voices performally third rail issues such as social justice and voting rights is it pressure from employees or customers or some other driver what's behind it I think all all of the above um I think we're in a space where sitting sitting this out and the idea that you can sit it out is becoming more and more untenable I think if we look back at the recent response to the the Georgia um the Georgia law that restricted a lot of voting rights which was clearly targets folks of color it was just it was fascinating that that so many consumers were looking to um Georgia homegrown companies like um like Delta Airlines like Home Depot um to to take a stand and um you know many of them just said we're we're not going to take a stand here and that is that silence is glaring um and uh you know it was great to see groups like Major League Baseball put their business presence on the line and move the all-star game but um I think folks were realizing that those same companies were giving money to their lobbying to the very legislators who are coming up with these initiatives so I think this this idea of a moral compass and the business sector needing to be part of it is something that's really rising to the fore right now and I think it's something that millennials in particular um Gen Z are demanding and calling for um and we're in a place where we've been sitting and staring at our screens so we're demanding more of the institutions that we work for and serve to make the internet like the outer and somebody wants to know about some of the statistics we talked about at the top and who the company that gave the most was and that was JP Morgan Chase I'll from my Twitter feed send you a link to um some of the statistics I cited I'm at Stacey Palmer and I'm happy to help you um and I think we're going to try to squeeze in one more question in the time that we have um folks want to know whether crowdfunding precipitated a reduction in what donors are giving directly to nonprofits and Marie you probably are closest to crowdfunding do you think that crowdfunding adds to what's being given or takes away from traditional nonprofits I don't see a relevance I think that the crowdfunding is individuals and I'm not sure that foundations and boards are looking at what's happening in crowdfunding I do think that it's critical of crowdfunding because um for example to take the Latino community we're 20% of our population you would think that uh the dollars that are going out are proportional but it's not we receive only 1% of philanthropic dollars and that number has changed stayed the same for 40 years of that 1% so if it wasn't for individuals and crowdfunding you know we wouldn't be doing the things that we're doing so crowdfunding I think is key and I wanted to add um I work with Latin um with Candid as well I'm on their board and there's a really great website called Latinx funders.org so it's www.latinxfunders.org and they are tracking the dollars that are going to the community and right now they have five years they're about to add two more years I'm hoping that once we start getting data for 2020 and 2021 um that will be different and I know they're doing this for the Native American community for the Black community for racial um the racial equity work so that's important to take a look at. Oh I'm really glad you mentioned that. We could go on all day um thank you panelists for you have all been so wonderful in terms of giving us your time. Daniel, Earl, Annemarie um thank you for the wealth of insights that you had um we appreciate it and we'll try to answer as many questions as we can on social media or other ways from for some of you in the audience and I'm sorry that we didn't get to them all um and we will send a recording out to all of you and we'd love your feedback about what we can do on other things so please feel free to be in touch um and let me thank my partners at the conversation which really made this event happen um so thank you to them and the Associated Press was just been doing tremendous reporting um this is an exciting partnership that allows us to educate the public about the world of philanthropy which is often very mysterious um and we really hope to give you all more insights about how it works so thank you for joining us today we appreciate it have a great rest of your day