Foundations That Are Serious About Achieving Equity Need to Rethink How They Work

Illustration by Maria Mottola

Editor's Note: This is Lisa’s eleventh piece in a Chronicle of Philanthropy series that originally focused on grantmaking in the coronavirus era. Recent pieces explore philanthropy's role in dismantling a system of racial injustice and suggests ways for the sector to evolve. You may view the original piece here.

Before I had kids, I never saw playgrounds. But once I was pushing a stroller around town, I noticed that they were everywhere. Until they became relevant to me, I didn’t notice them — and then once they were, I couldn’t stop seeing them. Even though my kids are now 16 and 19, and use playgrounds only for late-night hangouts, I still make a mental note of a really good climbing structure when I pass one. Perhaps you have experienced something similar.

A recent example of this phenomenon for me is the “prefigurative” organization — an idea that is growing in popularity in grant-making circles as we all seek new approaches to leadership.

Carl Boggs, a professor of social sciences at National University, who coined the term in the mid-70s, says the idea is to form a group whose structure looks like the future it seeks to build, including through its approach to “social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience.” My simple (and perhaps inaccurate) interpretation is that these are organizations that practice what they preach: that have organizational systems and structures consistent with their missions.

I had never heard of the concept until I started looking for alternative governance models for nonprofit organizations. In conversations with our grantee partners, I often heard that a traditional 501(c)3 leadership model did not work for them, and yet I have been woefully unable to imagine alternatives. A prefigurative organization that focuses on equity could be the solution. By definition, it would have equitable operating structures and systems.

That is not really revolutionary thinking, but something about the word and definition of a prefigurative organization has gotten me to constantly ask questions about how I am doing business within the foundation. What would it look like if our foundations chose forms of decision making, culture, and relationships that are truly expressive of our missions? Is the way we are structured now reflective of our lofty goals?

What Kind of Organization Are We?

It has always struck me as kind of silly that we in philanthropy so often use the title “‘program officer.” What does that convey to most people? The commonly held understanding of an officer is someone who holds a position of command or authority in the armed services, in the merchant marine, or on a passenger ship. Do we want foundation staff to “command” our grantee partners? Are we a sphere of society that wants to employ people who control the money to command the people doing the work?

And what kind of organizations do these titles support? The other day I held a meeting to talk about how my foundation holds equity as a value. But I invited only program officers, excluding our operations staff. It took me a few days to realize that I had excluded the people who hold the least positional power from a serious conversation about equity within the organization. (Why would I do that? Maybe so I wouldn’t really have to make any changes?)

I don’t want to live in a world where the people who make the most money get to define the terms, and yet those are the conditions I was creating. Once I got it together and included the whole staff, the conversation became richer, with the operations staff bringing critical perspective and insight that we would have missed without them.

Ripple Effect

Now that I have the question of what makes a prefigurative organization in my head, I am seeing the ripples for it everywhere — just as I was seeing playgrounds years ago. I am testing myself to see if the way I raise my kids is prefigurative to how I hope they will be in the world. If I do their laundry, am I setting them up to expect a world in which other people do their laundry? If most of my friends are white middle-class women, am I showing them how to live in a world where people stick to their own?

I am failing this test on many levels, but I take some comfort — both at work and at home — in the idea that “since we don’t know the future, prefigurative practices must be inherently experimental and experiential,” as Paul Raeskstad of the University of Amsterdam wrote in a 2017 article.

I don’t think I can ever address someone as a program officer again without wincing. And I wonder: What else can I change, can we change, if we let our missions guide our organizational structures? I certainly don’t know how to do it. I just know that it needs to be done and concede that the only way to get there is to experiment, which means failing as much as we succeed. I am excited to try.