Racial Disparity in Today's Grantmaking Leaves Impact on the Table: A new report
Recent research from Echoing Green and Bridgespan discusses "the racial disparity in today’s funding environment and argues that population-level impact cannot happen without funding more leaders of color."
Cheryl Dorsey, Jeff Bradach, and Peter Kim explain that based on what they see as intermediaries in the sector, two of the biggest factors holding back philanthropy’s efforts to help advance social change are rooted in race: understanding the role of race in the problems philanthropists are trying to solve; and the significance of race when it comes to how philanthropists identify leaders and find solutions.
As the authors state,
If we assume—as we have described—that we cannot address society’s greatest challenges without a focus on race, then understanding racial dynamics becomes critical to finding effective solutions and achieving equitable outcomes. Funding leaders of color then becomes a significant piece of this puzzle because these leaders often bring strategies that intimately understand the racialized experiences of communities of color and the issues these communities face. Unfortunately by and large that is not happening today.