What One Grant Maker Learned in This Pandemic Year: Keep Asking Questions

Illustration by Maria Mottola

Editor's Note: Lisa's year-long Chronicle of Philanthropy series has come to a close, and we are now publishing her final pieces. Below is her penultimate column. You may view the original piece here.

I did not intend to become a columnist for the Chronicle of Philanthropy, nor did I imagine becoming a cartoon character. I wrote a piece about my foundation’s initial response to the pandemic, and my friend and colleague Maria Mottola offered to illustrate it. (She is the executive director of the New York Foundation when she is not illustrating.) But we kept going because it turned out that writing helped me process the rapidly changing landscape of New York City — both at work and at home — and Maria’s drawings are so funny.

And now, at the first anniversary, we are going to wrap it up with this penultimate column looking back at the year and one final column that looks ahead. Then we will call it a year.

To prepare for this column, I forced myself to go back and read everything I have written. Do you know that slightly sickening feeling you get when you reread old diaries? A hyperconsciousness of both how earnest and how trite you were? I definitely had some of that. I noticed that I repeat myself a lot. And that my cartoon avatar apparently showered more often than I did last year.

And here are a few other things I noticed while reading my past columns:

I was scared. Every column — especially in the early days of the pandemic — was filled with anxiety and uncertainty and the challenge of getting through the moment while also planning for the future. I was right to be scared. Last year was so, so scary. On so many levels. And we all tried to keep on keeping on while we were terrified. Sometimes that worked, sometimes not.

We were able to move fast. Many foundations, my own included, took action during the year, and more quickly than the usual glacial pace of philanthropy. Many of us raised our payouts, made more resources available to our grantees, and released them from some of the unnecessary requirements we asked before. We started thinking differently about how to use our endowments in a manner consistent with our mission. We put more money to work that explicitly addresses racial justice. These moves were also happening at many of our peer institutions, big and small. Now the question is whether we can make these actions part of our ongoing work and not just our emergency response.

I was uncertain about the righteousness of philanthropy and my role in it. The questions about where philanthropic wealth comes from, where it sits, and how it is deployed are deeply mired in the issues of race, class, and power. I am uncertain about how much we can do to address the dynamics within these confines, how much can be changed, and what my role should be.

I have brave grantee partners. As things were unfolding, I had the luxury of doing a lot of hand wringing and ruminating on the uncertainty about my role. In the face of that uncertainty, our grantee partners were strong, brave, and resolute in their own work. Dealing with closed offices, a pandemic, economic crisis, lack of leadership in government, racism, rallies, social distancing, home schooling, illness, and the Capitol insurrection, they still stayed focused on mission while taking care of their staff, members, and clients.

I have smart friends. In most columns, I cite the wisdom of fellow grant makers or grantee partners. I learned so much from them this year about fear and bravery, about racism on many levels — personal, organizational, and systemic. I learned about tax structures and investment strategies within philanthropy. I learned how different kinds of foundations face similar challenges. I learned how to Zoom and how not to Zoom. I found community in unexpected places, and am so grateful for it.

People are the worst — and the best. I started this column talking about hoarding toilet paper and end it talking about hoarding vaccines. People are brilliant and beautiful and scared and spiteful. Science is amazing. Toxic masculinity and systemic racism abound. All these things are true.

I have a lot to learn. These columns are full of questions — big and small. They contain very few answers. And one of my central observations is that grant makers come up with answers more quickly and more often than they need to. The big question I tried to explore is, What is ours to take on, and what is not? The thing that made me feel best in reading through the year that felt like a decade was rediscovering a quote from Lateefah Simon, president of the Akonadi Foundation who wrote to a group of colleagues: “The heartbeat of change is beating. How cool is it that we all get to be of service in this moment.”

It is cool.