Grantmaking With a Racial Equity Lens

A focus on racial equity can increase your effectiveness at every stage of the grantmaking process. Blending experience and candid advice from grantmakers, this guide explores how a racial equity lens can help you scan your field or community, cultivate new leaders, encourage creative approaches, get people talking, and nourish change inside your own foundation.

This guide was developed in partnership with the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity.
 

HIGHLIGHTS

• Three tools for activating a racial equity lens

• Your Race/Your Role

• Questions to ask inside your foundation 
  
   

SAMPLE QUOTES

"Issues of race are all over the work. But people approach their grantmaking as if they’re not."

— A program officer at a regional family foundation
on asking questions about racial equity

"My concern is that foundations are not pushed, nor do we push ourselves, hard enough on the issue of racial equity. We stand above the fray when we should be deeply involved in it."

- A foundation executive on how people
avoid the topic of race

"All funders need peers with whom they can honestly sort out their strategies and biases. The need is infinitely greater when the subject is race."

- A grantmaker on the advantages of collaboratives
focused on racial equity principles and goals