The Diversity of Grantmaking: Learning from our Grantees

By Hope Lyons

With thanks to our grantees, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund is midway through a year-long pilot project to gather data on diversity, equity, and inclusion in our grantmaking. We want to gain insight into how our grantees view diversity—in the fields in which they work, the constituencies they engage, and within their own organizations. Our aim is to better understand how our grantmaking is encouraging and supporting diversity, while at the same time meeting a variety of programmatic goals in differing geographic contexts.

Exploring diversity in our grantmaking complements related efforts in the Fund’s Human Resources and Operations departments and at the Pocantico Center. This follows on the Fund’s Diversity Project, a foundation-wide effort to assess and improve diversity and inclusion in our operations and grantmaking. During our work on the Diversity Project, we consistently found ourselves wanting more information about the profiles of our grantees and the ways in which they consider the diverse perspectives of affected communities in the projects that we are supporting.

The fact that much of the RBF’s funding contributes to work on public policies related to national and global issues, addressing concerns ranging from climate change to the influence of money on politics, presents a challenge when aiming to define and engage affected communities. It is often straight forward to determine who benefits from direct charitable services. But how do you define affected communities when, arguably, an entire country or even all of human kind will benefit?

We came to realize that the best way to find out was to ask our grantees.

Our first foray into asking our grantees systematically about diversity and their work was through the 2010 Center for Effective Philanthropy survey of our grantees—during that process we learned that 66 percent of our grantees explicitly address diversity in their work. We were impressed by this figure, but it had us wanting to learn more. How do our grantees define ‘diversity’? How are our grantees addressing diversity? What groups are they working with? How important is diversity within their organizations?

Following on this, we developed the Diversity Worksheet to be completed by grantees during the application process in 2011. In addition to asking for information on the racial/ethnic and gender composition of board and staff, the worksheet asks two programmatic questions:

• How does the proposed work engage diverse perspectives in the community or field in which you work?
• Are there other aspects of your work that reflect diversity, equity, and inclusion?

At its core, the objective of this exercise is simple: we want to learn from our grantees.

We were initially apprehensive about adding an additional requirement to the application process, but have been encouraged by the positive and supportive responses of our grantees—at times bordering on, ‘What took you so long?’

We will be coupling an analysis of the information provided by our grantees in the Diversity Worksheets with metrics that the Fund already tracks, including, the type of grant support provided, the size of grantee organizations, location of grantees, whether grantees are new or returning, and if a grant is for new or renewal purposes. Together, we expect that this will provide a more robust picture of the grantees and work that the Fund is supporting.

We are excited to have this analysis completed in early 2012, at which time we will share our observations, and determine whether—and how—to continue collecting this information going forward. We are grateful to our grantees for partnering with us in this endeavor and are excited to continue learning together.