Strategies to address DEI

KarenWolf

What is your Community Foundation doing to address Diversity, Equity and Inclusion within the communities you serve?

[Deleted User]

As a member of Foundant's DEI team I would love to learn more about your strategies as well. Thanks for asking this question @KarenWolf

KentWeimer

I'm not from a Community Foundation, but this is a question I have for our hospital foundation and also as the national board chair of a professional organization. In both cases, I want our outcomes to be real and measurable and not just lip service and platitudes. Any advice is welcome!

AnnButterfield

Our CF is undertaking a significant DEI project. We established a task force made up of cross-departmental staff and board members; they then selected and we retained a DEI consulting firm. We are now about to begin a 1 to 1 1/2 year process which will include all staff, board and other stakeholders. More to come...

AnitaMcLaughlin

We are doing some ACES trainings and tying that back into DEI.

TobiBruhn

We are starting with a board diversity policy trying to define what diversity means for our foundation. Our board has talked a lot about the concept of diversity of thought rather than focusing on one particular category. We plan to use this policy as a starting point for our discussions since several positions need to be filled over the next 12 months.

KentWeimer

@TobiBruhn I'm chair of a national board. We are proposing a DEI policy at our next meeting that has diversity metrics for our board, all committees, working groups and task forces as well as for all of our educational offerings including our national conference. It's aggressive, but I hope it passes to give us a new and meaningful direction.

TobiBruhn

That's great @KentWeimer. Maybe you can share in this forum if it passes. We are not in a position yet to adopt diversity metrics but I would love to see how you and your board navigate this process in a meaningful and intentional way.

KentWeimer

Tobi, if it passes, I will be happy to share. It starts with a nice statement about why this is important.

Kent

[Deleted User]

On a webinar with PEAK Grantmaking about Equity in Tech and heard about this site: Equitable Evaluation. More info about upcoming event: https://www.peakgrantmaking.org/event/making-the-case-for-equitable-evaluation/

KarenWolf

@KentWeimer did your DEI Policy pass and would you be willing to share?

LisaStachula

@KarenWolf - Our Board approved a "Statement of Commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" in 2018 and formed an Equity & Inclusion Board Committee this year. We are using a matrix to collect all different kinds of demographic information (age, race, city of residence, industry of employment, etc.) on potential board members. On competitive grant applications, we are now asking for certain demographics of the applying organization's Board (since we are reporting this info to Candid on our own Board) - race/ethnicity, gender and ability status. A standard question - and evaluation criteria - for our competitive grant applications is: "how does your organization/program advance racial and other forms of equity through your work and your leadership"? We just completed a grants mapping project so we can literally see what we are funding (which will show most of of our dollars granted to white-led organizations). We are including a lot more education around racial equity in regards to equitable grant evaluations/scholarship evaluations with our grant and scholarship committee members. We also hired a consultant to do Racial Equity training with our staff and Board.

KarenWolf

@LisaStachula Thank you for your response. Our organization has also done some of the same things you have outlined above.