We’re grateful for this opportunity to share more with our grantmaking colleagues about our DEI journey.
At the request of PEAK Grantmaking—an organization dedicated to fueling positive change by helping funders strengthen their grantmaking practices—we’ve expanded an article on our diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) journey that appeared in our 2019 Annual Report.
The article describes the first time we explicitly committed a percentage of our overall funding to a specific community: our 2012 commitment to award 40 percent of new grant dollars to Native-led organizations. That commitment was a major influence in our decision to engage in our current DEI journey and to incorporate DEI into everything we do.
The article also describes our ongoing efforts to find the best ways to proactively track that our funding is directly benefiting the priority communities we serve. Currently, we’re able to confirm, through surveying leaders of our grantee organizations, that 75 percent of grant dollars awarded go to Native- or person of color (POC)-led organizations. Now we’re in the process of examining if tracking grantee leadership is comprehensive enough—or if we should look for other ways to best track how our grant dollars support our priority communities.
