Grant Making with a Racial Equity Lens

Grantmakers explain why a focus on racial equity gives them a powerful “lens” for understanding and advancing their work in this GrantCraft guide.  This report aims to provide grantmakers and foundation leaders with advice and tools on incorporating diversity and equity competencies in all aspects of their funding and daily operations.

Grant Making with a Racial Equity Lens is a 30-page guide offered in a partnership between the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity and GrantCraft. This report applies a comprehensive approach to understanding how equity and grant making are inexorably combined, despite a tendency for some leaders to ignore these issues when considering funding. It extends beyond applying racial equity to grant making to also providing perspectives on including diversity as a way to further the success of an organization.

Drawing on interviews with grant makers, consultants, and foundation executives, Grant Making with a Racial Equity Lens offers first-hand experience and stories from insiders – all meant to offer a tried-and-true learning experience in getting past the barriers between race and funding. From a practical standpoint, it includes skills, strategies, policies, and practical methods. This advice ranges from structuring programs with racial equity in mind to gathering data on specific grant making patterns.

It also includes a comprehensive list of further resources, three tools foundations use when supplying grants (one each from the San Francisco Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation), and advice on using a racial equity lens within a grant making foundation.

Access to the report is free with registration. It can be viewed here.