Minnesota Council on Foundations Blog – Philanthropy Potluck

“If people are supported to work towards equity, diversity and inclusion, they will do it.” This was the inspiring message delivered by Susan Taylor Batten at the MCF 40th Anniversary and Annual Member Meeting.

Susan Taylor Batten, President & CEO of ABFE, presented as keynote speaker at the MCF 40th Anniversary and Annual Member Meeting.

More than 70 MCF members, trustees and staff joined together on a snowy Dec. 8th evening to celebrate MCF’s 40th year, and to hear Susan Batten, president and CEO of the Association of Black Foundation Executives (ABFE), deliver her keynote presentation titled “Philanthropy’s Leadership Challenge.”

According to Batten, the challenge before us is the need to foster leadership that is diverse and reflective of the populations that foundations and nonprofits serve. As she repeated during her speech, “We share a common fate.”  To ensure that our fate — and our future — is the best of all possible outcomes, leaders across spectrums of race, ethnicity, gender and ability must be represented in the highest ranks of the philanthropic field.

Batten presented the teachings that she’s learned over the course of her rich career in the independent sector through the framework of MCF’s own STRATEGY | 2010 strategic plan. In order to meet the challenge of encouraging diversity in philanthropic leadership, foundations and grantmaking organizations must:

• Lead:
  We must use our unique platform to speak specifically and intentionally about race, gender and class disparities. We need to communicate that we share a common fate. We live, now more than ever, in an ecosystem of communities. The health of one community can not be neglected in this interconnected web, or all will suffer the consequences.
• Serve:
  We must continue to deliver high-quality services to our communities and stakeholders. We must do that by working differently using the sophisticated analytical tools available to us to determine the effect of our investment strategies on specific demographics. We must build cultural skills and competencies within our organizations, and we must actively engage end beneficiaries in our work to ensure the design of our investment strategies is sound.
• Build:
  Finally, we must build new practices and policies that create opportunities for all. Racial disparities are created and maintained through policies and practices that contain barriers. The only way to fix these inequities is to identify and focus on actively correcting these barriers within our institutions.

“Given the right messages and tools,” Batten confidently reiterated at the closing of her speech, “…people will work towards equality, diversity and inclusivity.” As philanthropic leaders, we are ideally positioned to be the change that we want to see in the world. This is, as Batten stated, “The field of ideas and innovations — where you can take risks.”

If you are ready to accept Batten’s challenge for the field of philanthropy, we invite you to begin by reading up on MCF’s Diversity Resources. There you will find useful tools to assist you in your work, including the Race Matters Toolkit, a kit developed by Batten and her colleagues during her time as senior associate with the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Start the conversation: Funders, what tools, like the Race Matters Toolkit, have you used to make decisions about your organization’s philanthropic investment strategy? If you’re a nonprofit reader, have you changed the way you report on your work to help you and potential funders see the impact your work has on different demographic groups?

- Cary Lenore Walski, MCF web communications associate