Behind a Funding Push for Boys and Young Men of Color, Lived Experience and Trust in Grantees

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While many foundations talk about participatory grantmaking and providing general operating funds, a unique coalition of foundations has made these strategies integral to its work.

The California Funders of Boys and Men of Color (CFBMoC) is a group of 16 family, private, corporate and community grantmakers that support the work of people impacted by racism, the criminal justice system and poverty. Several of the philanthropy leaders who are part of this collaborative know these challenges first-hand from their own lived experiences, giving them a greater ability to trust organizations on the ground.

The result, said Liberty Hill Foundation President and CEO Shane Murphy Goldsmith, has been “magic.”

“When we trust our grantees and trust organizers on the ground and people who are directly impacted, magic happens, and we make the impossible possible,” she told Inside Philanthropy. Liberty Hill is a CFBMoC “Backbone Team Member,” a founder of the coalition, and administers the group’s work in Southern California.

Results So Profound Foundation Leaders Are “On Cloud Nine”

That “magic” also leads to dramatic results, as happened in September when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law closing the state’s juvenile prisons. The magic struck again in November when Los Angeles County’s Board of Supervisors voted to shift responsibility for troubled children away from the county’s probation department. Instead of placing troubled youth in probation camps or juvenile detention halls, the plan calls for diverting them into “more of a homelike setting” where they’ll receive treatment in a setting that’s still secure. 

Both reforms were championed by CFBMoC and its grantees.

“Our minds are pretty blown right now that we accomplished this thing,” Murphy Goldsmith said about the dismantling of the state’s youth prison system, and added, “We are on cloud nine” about L.A. county’s reforms. 

Murphy Goldsmith is one of CFBMoC’s leaders who has a direct understanding of the difference that diverting children away from the prison system could make. Having grown up in poverty herself, Murphy Goldsmith watched as her brother, who was first incarcerated at just 17, struggled with the criminal justice system.

Seizing an opening in California

California Funders of Boys and Men of Color was founded in 2014, growing out of an effort to support California’s division of My Brother’s Keeper, former President Obama’s initiative to address the lack of opportunities for boys and men of color.

“California Funders was really following up on much of the work that was being done by the Executive Alliance for Boys and Young Men of Color,” a ‘master group’ of foundations that formed to support My Brother’s Keeper,” said Chet Hewitt, president and CEO of the Sierra Health Foundation and the Center at Sierra Health Foundation, another CFBMoC Backbone Team Member. As a youth, Hewitt was incarcerated at New York’s notorious Riker’s Island.

While the foundations supported the national work of My Brother’s Keeper, Hewitt said the California funders believed that developments in California would set the work there apart from, and ahead of, some other parts of the country because the state was already considering criminal justice reform and reforms to school suspension policies. 

“We thought that while we would support the work that was going on nationally, we would also try to move as quickly as we possibly could within the state of California to take advantage of both the policy and political opportunities that we believed were present,” he said. 

CFBMoC’s founding members also had a clear vision of the work they wanted to do, and who should lead that work.

“We really wanted to have something that was ours, to make sure that we could generate resources and support for work on the ground, led by folks who are directly impacted,” Liberty Hill Foundation’s Murphy Goldsmith explained.

Shared experiences lead to “transformative relationships” with grantees

Leaders of organizations that are supported by CFBMoC member foundations say that the coalition’s commitment to letting organizations on the ground lead the work—and the fact that a number of the foundation’s leaders themselves come from impacted communities—makes a huge difference. 

“These people are part of our extended movement family. They are not just people who are providing resources, but they’re movement allies and partners,” said Marc Philpart, managing director of PolicyLink and leader of the organization’s boys and men of color team. “We have a very different relationship with them in terms of the level of access and involvement that they have versus other philanthropic institutions.”

CFBMoC’s level of “access and involvement” was demonstrated in 2018, when PolicyLink was called to take a much more active role than usual during the Youth Policy Summit, an event that draws hundreds of youth advocates of color from across California.

In addition to the CFBMoC foundation members, including the California Endowment, that gave a collective $300,000 to support the summit, Philpart said the organization provided communications support, and even facilitated the administrative work of sending event invitations to a list of “select and important stakeholders” that Policy Link wanted to be sure were in attendance. 

When it comes to working with foundation leaders who themselves have been impacted by poverty, racism or incarceration, Philpart said that CFBMoC is an example of the way that “people-of-color-led philanthropic institutions have really been changing the culture of philanthropy.” 

Having a group of philanthropic institutions, some of which are led by men and women of color who come from similar or the same backgrounds as the people leading the organizations being funded, has been “really powerful,” Philpart said, because their approach is “felt and personal.”

“Not to knock people who don’t have any familiarity but are passionate, but they have a different level of investment in the game,” he explained. 

According to Abraham Medina, “Having that lived experience just gives people deep insight into what to change and how to change things.” Medina is the co-coordinator and co-convener of the California Alliance for Youth and Community Justice, which is fiscally sponsored by The Center at Sierra Health Foundation, the 501(c)(3) agency also serving as the organizing entity for the funders network.

The “lived experience” shared by some CFBMoC leaders helps philanthropy shift from “really transactional relationships to more transformative relationships,” he added. “I think part of what defines that transformative relationship is that we’re not treated like objects of investment.”

“CFBMoC really, I’ve always felt that’s sort of a soulful endeavor, not the customary kind of just business endeavor,” said Liberty Hill Foundation’s Murphy Goldsmith. “In addition to coming together because our institutions are committed to justice and equity, and especially racial justice and racial equity, we all come to it with really personal experiences” that have helped them build “really special relationships,” both between the funders and between the funders and grantees. 

“I think it’s really powerful that so many of us have upfront and very intimate perspectives,” said Hewitt. “I think we bring a level of commitment, a level of understanding and a realization that it’s not going to be a single funder, or a single perspective, that’s going to get this country to the place that we want it to be.”

Trusting and working with the people on the ground

CFBMoC’s “really special relationship” with its partners is reflected in the processes the group uses to select grantee organizations to work with. While working to support the reforms to L.A. County’s youth justice system, CFBMoC CFBMoC members raised $3.4 million to leverage an initial $250,000 investment from the statewide network, ultimately giving its partner grantees $3.4 million to distribute through participatory grantmaking, according to Program Manager Sergio Cuellar.

Overall, Cuellar said, CFBMoC begins by working with its community partners to identify issues facing boys and men of color. The organization uses the life course framework, which, according to its five-year progress report, seeks “to improve the health, educational and economic opportunities for boys and men of color over the course of their lives.”

After a funding strategy has been developed, the CFBMoC group in the area in which the work is to be done —the collaborative has three Regional Action Committees—develops an RFP process to award the grants to its community partners.

“We generally try to make general operating grants,” said Murphy Goldsmith.

They also give generously—according to its 2019 five-year report, since 2015, the group has collectively invested $149 million annually “to support better outcomes for boys and men of color and remove barriers to opportunity.”

The work doesn’t stop after the check is written. After the money is awarded, Cuellar explained, the RAC works with its community partners “to uplift their work, educate local philanthropy, businesses and donors about their work, and create a local pooled fund to leverage the initial investments.”

During the work to support Gov. Newsom’s initiative to shut down the state’s youth prison system, CFBMoC leaders used both their lived experience and their influential positions as the heads of million- and billion-dollar organizations to sway legislators from op-eds to invited personal testimony. 

Building “on-ramps” for other funders

While CFBMoC’s funders are simultaneously busy working to ensure that California’s counties follow L.A. County’s lead and use the new reform law to create youth justice systems that actually serve youth and working on other initiatives, they also hope that the obvious success of their approach to giving will have an influence on other funders. 

Murphy Goldsmith told Inside Philanthropy that CFBMoC is exploring ways to build “on-ramps” for foundations that don’t yet operate “in that sort of trust-based philanthropy” so they can begin to develop similar close relationships with the organizations on the ground. 

After developing those relationships, Murphy Goldsmith hopes, “over time, [other grantmakers will] invest more of their resources in these organizations and move toward general operating grants.”

Medina of the California Alliance for Youth and Community Justice said that while “it’s really been a journey” to get other funders to do things like examine systemic racism or look critically at the reasons the criminal justice system exists, CFBMoC’s efforts are making a difference. 

“This group of funders has really pushed other funders to try to be comfortable with being uncomfortable,” he said.