A focus on racial equity can increase your effectiveness at every stage of the grant-making process. Explores how a racial equity lens can help you scan your field or community, cultivate new leaders, encourage creative approaches, and nourish change inside your own foundation from Grantcraft. 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 

What's in the Guide?

What Is a Racial Equity Lens? For grantmakers and foundation leaders, using a racial equity lens means paying disciplined attention to race and ethnicity while analyzing problems, looking for solutions, and defining success. Some use the approach to enhance their own perspectives on grantmaking; others adopt it as part of a commitment endorsed across their foundations.

How a Racial Equity Lens Works: A racial equity lens is valuable because it sharpens grantmakers’ insights and improves the outcomes of their work. People who use the approach say it helps them to see patterns, separate symptoms from causes, and identify new solutions for their communities or fields.

Applying a Racial Equity Lens: Skills and Strategies: Where, specifically, does a racial equity lens get put to use by individual grantmakers? The answer is simple: everywhere. A keen awareness of race and ethnicity, and of their impact on access to power and opportunity, is a distinct asset when applying the classic skills of effective grantmaking.

Implementing a Commitment to Racial Equity: Policies and Practices: When a foundation decides to focus on racial equity, how does that commitment get translated into the organization’s goals and routines? Foundation leaders and program staff share examples of what they have learned about applying a racial equity lens to their programming, operations, and external affairs.

Looking Inward: Using a Racial Equity Lens Inside Your Foundation: Grantmakers who have championed racial equity within their foundations describe a handful of tactics for getting over the predictable hurdles. Ground the discussion of racial equity in the foundation’s mission, they say, be open to learning, and be upfront about your goals. But don’t lose sight of the possibility of resistance and setbacks.

Diversity, Inclusion & Effective Philanthropy provides a fresh perspective on how social diversity and inclusiveness can be used as practical considerations to achieve more impactful results in philanthropic giving.

Philanthropists who want to increase impact and reduce waste are turning to diversity and inclusion as tools for effective giving. Good intentions do not make for philanthropic success on their own.

Blind spots cost philanthropists—and the causes they espouse—dearly. A gift can be given for the right reasons to the wrong group. A grant can be generously dispersed, but without careful research. An investment in a social enterprise with great promise can be rendered impotent by a misguided business plan. To make the most of their philanthropic dollars, donors practice due diligence. Staff, advisors and even donors themselves check financial information, perform site visits and talk to experienced stakeholders. This much is well known. But when the concepts of diversity and inclusion are added to basic due diligence, the result can create a philanthropy that is both responsive and efficient.

A publication of the Internal Revenue Service, this document addresses activities that may jeopardize a charity's exempt status, recordkeeping, required public disclosures, and other issues of importance to public charities.

A guide provided by the IRS outlining the law and its restrictions, detailed reporting requirements, IRS forms that must be filed, and a summary of record-keeping obligations for private foundations.

This is a collection of resources developed to support a complete and accurate count in Census 2020.

Through Ask CMF, community foundations and other philanthropic grantmakers frequently submit questions related to making changes to fund agreements for the funds that they hold. This resource is intended to provide further clarification on this topic, building on the material included in the CMF resource, “Frequently Asked Questions About Fund Agreements.”

Recognizing that much of the educational material available nationally to assist foundations is designed for foundation orientations – to assist those just getting started – this resource alternatively focuses on the needs of executives, staff and board members of maturing foundations.

Boards serve an essential governance role within foundations. Each board varies in terms of its policies and procedures depending on the structure required to achieve its strategic goals and organizational mission. Foundations may choose between a wide spectrum of board terms, ranging from strict term limits to lifetime appointments. This document explores the pros and cons of board term limits and provides insights on how to choose an optimal term limit length.

This manual, from Morgan Stanley, highlights some of the things private foundations must do, must not do, and may do. It describes how trustees can use Form 990-PF to examine the inner workings of a private foundation. In fact, Form 990-PF is a useful “check-up” mechanism for evaluating the overall “health” of a private foundation. This manual identifies sections of Form 990-PF that reveal possible improprieties and suggests “best practices” to avoid violating the private foundation rules.

Growing numbers of charities are using the theory of change as a strategy and evaluation tool. This popularity is partly a symptom of funders asking charities to provide a theory of change in their application or evaluation. But can the approach also be useful for funders themselves; and how does the tool differ in this setting?

The theory of change describes the change you want to make and the steps involved in making that change happen. It also captures the assumptions behind your reasoning, and where possible, provides evidence to back them up. It is enormously helpful as a tool for both strategy and evaluation—and yet most funders do not use it.

Without the kind of strategic thinking it encourages, our concern is that funders could be missing opportunities to identify neglected issues and join up funding with others.

Theories of change are not for all funders; the benefits will differ depending on how far a funder is able to go in completing one. Some funders are able to draw out a full theory of change, whereas others are only able to do a partial theory of change.

This report talks through three different types of theories of change, each relating to one type of funder impact:

• a theory of change for impact on beneficiaries;
• a theory of change for impact on grantees; and
• a theory of change for impact on a social problem.

For each theory of change, the report discusses the associated benefits, how the theory of change should be used, and what types of funder it is useful for.