For All of Us in Philanthropy, the Moment of Rebuilding Is Here

Illustration by Maria Mottola

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

Last year I spent the first Passover of the pandemic quarantined in my bedroom racked with a fever and body aches. Assuming it was Covid, I self-isolated, leaving my family to figure out how to shop, cook, and lead a Zoom seder. My husband and kids are still convinced I was faking it just to get out of cooking.

This year’s Passover was a lot better. Vaccinated and tested, we were able to host my brother and nephews, and I was more help than hindrance. Though we missed a lot of people, we were grateful for how far we had come.

That’s where we seem to be all over — not all the way there but better than last year and hopeful that brighter days are coming soon. As we prepared for our seder, I read several reflections comparing the Passover plagues to the plagues of pandemic and systemic racism. If Passover is traditionally a time to celebrate freedom from constriction and oppression, then this year the celebration has special relevance.

I was especially struck by a note from the leader of our grantee partners, Bend the Arc, reflecting on the emergence of enslaved people from Egypt and where we find ourselves now:

As we sit with the heaviness of the world as it is, it can be hard to feel the possibility of liberation. In these moments, I remember that after they left [slavery], our ancestors trekked through the wilderness — headed, they hoped, to a place they had never seen and could only imagine.

We know that liberation isn’t the end of our journey. It’s just the beginning — what follows is the opportunity for transformation on a massive scale. Even in the pain of this moment, I’m filled with hope thinking about all of the possibilities ahead of us.

An Ending and a Beginning

Maria Mottola and I, informed by many friends and colleagues, started this column to reflect on where we have been as grant makers. (She is executive director of the New York Foundation when she is not illustrating.) A year later, new vaccines, a new administration, and spring in New York City feel a bit like liberation, and yet we are learning that coming out from this pandemic is just the beginning.

Philanthropy had a big year. We gave more and faster. We changed our systems, responded to racism and economic distress with greater seriousness. And we have done it without any of our usual trappings — no fancy offices, no flying to conferences in nice hotels, no going out to lunch with colleagues. We have done it from relative comfort — many of us in homes outside of the city where we work. And even after this year of economic distress across the country and the world, many of us end this year not only with our endowments intact but in most cases — my foundation, for example — sitting on more money than we’ve had in a decade.

Our grantee partners have struggled in an entirely different way — struggling to feed people, bury members and loved ones. They have learned how to respond to emergencies when you can’t be there in person, moved programs online, responded to hate crimes, police brutality, President Trump’s anti-immigrant, anti-women policy moves. Our grantee partners come to the end of this pandemic year worn out, missing loved ones and treasured institutions, broke, with the prospect of rebuilding still in front of them.

This is not the time to end our journey or to return to the old ways of doing things. Rather it is ours to realize that are just standing with our grantee partners at the very beginning of rebuilding, taking our first steps into the desert.

How to Keep Doing Better

As the Chronicle reported last week after reviewing the policies of the nation’s 10 wealthiest grant makers, changes made by many of the nation’s largest foundations on an emergency basis to give nonprofits more freedom during the pandemic appear unlikely to stick, with grant makers making few promises that they won’t slip back to their old ways as the impact of the virus wanes.

We can’t accept that. We have to come up with ways — large and small — to continue our journey to a better place. Our colleagues Aaron Dorfman and Ellen Dorsey laid out ways to continue moving forward in these pages last week.

At my foundation, we are contemplating removing operating costs when we determine whether we have met the 5 percent minimum grant-distribution rule, as we also consider whether we can keep a higher payout rate.

We are thinking about how to travel less, spend less on the trappings of professional philanthropy, and put more resources out to the nonprofits we support. We are thinking about how to be more accountable to our grantees in word and deed.

Now “thinking about” is certainly not sufficient, and that is where we in philanthropy must continue to challenge each other — share strategies, talk tough to each other, support each other to have difficult conversations with our staff and boards, whatever it takes. The conversations I had this year while writing this column pushed me to evolve as a grant maker and as a human. I am going to ask you all for 40 more years of that — of keeping each other company and keeping each other moving as we head, we hope, to a place we have never seen and can only imagine.