Author Archives: Pui Ling Tam

  1. Adventures in Silo-Busting and Trust-Building

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    Since 2020, we’ve been taking deliberate steps at the Walter & Elise Haas Fund to re-examine our grantmaking purpose, reimagine our practices, and strengthen our commitment to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. We didn’t know where these steps would lead, but we knew we were building towards something transformative. 

    What has resulted is a re-articulation of the Fund’s values and the development of a new grantmaking philosophy that centers three big practice shifts that anchor our work. We have detailed these shifts in a previous post, but, briefly, they are: Silos to Integration, Contributions to Commitments, and Symptoms to Systems Solutions. (Since establishing these shifts, we’ve added three ideas: Use Trust-based Philanthropy, Always Center Community, and Build Right Relationship, the sum of which we call our operational pillars, which we now use to guide all our work.) 

    In many ways, the Fund’s story of learning to work in new ways is still at the beginning. We share where we are now in this evolution to spark new questions and ideas for you. 

    Integrating teams, ideas, and roles

    As we began to operationalize the three big shifts into our grantmaking, we realized that if we wanted to truly succeed, those changes had to apply to our organization internally. We looked at what our work was, how we delegated and how tightly we held onto it, what it meant to be on a team or lead a team, and what was deemed “expertise.” We began moving from siloed workers to integrated teams, implementing new ways of working collaboratively. 

    One example was the Creative Work Fund (CWF), which supports nonprofits and individual artists creating new work together. CWF is a funding collaborative, with other philanthropies participating in the project over its 30-year history. But it wasn’t an internal collaborative: the work was held in a siloed space within the Fund. When that leadership transitioned to a new relationship manager (Natalia), embracing integration was the priority. Team CWF now represents a cross-organization roster of administrators, project managers, learning associates, and grants managers. The diverse lenses and experiences of the team members, including two active artists, lends strength to the project as they handle the day-to-day, run the application cycles, and envision larger programmatic changes. Having grants management (Marcel) and finance team (Suki) members in early conversations about how to center grantseekers led to streamlined application and due diligence processes that are lighter lifts and deeply insightful: collecting and analyzing only what is necessary. With a bigger team powering CWF we have engaged with community more, running surveys and holding focus groups. By including and valuing our internal community first, we built trust among grantseekers and grantees, and we share our methods with our colleagues toward a Fund-wide approach.

    Designing for, and with, collaboration

    The Endeavor Fund — our flagship program under the Economic Well-Being program — has also benefitted from our move from silos to integration. When Relationship Manager Pui Ling Tam began to design this new initiative, well before there was a list of possible grantees and before it even had a name, she invited others into the work. Fund staff members were invited to meetings, asked for feedback, and welcomed into a process of co-creating a program in which they would feel connection, responsibility, and pride. 

    By valuing and recognizing our existing expertise we could tap into it early. The Strategist (Anna) and Grants and Learning Associate (Deep Chadha) were invited to create a rubric and align our interview questions. Program team member Natalia was invited to share lessons from the Creative Work Fund’s group decision-making model. Based off the CWF model and the new rubric, Marcel created the internal review process in our grants management system. Suki piloted a financial analysis process that prioritized insight and understanding. 

    Interviews with potential grantees were open to anyone on staff. Staff chose which interviews they attended and alternated between which roles they took on: you might be taking notes in one interview and asking the questions in the next. Everyone had to apply the rubric to every organization, based on their own perspective and interpretation. 

    When it came to making grantmaking decisions, the process was done collectively by a seven-person team. While we entered individual notes and scored organizations based on the rubric, we also scheduled several working sessions for rich discussion, and to allow for people’s different processing times. Coming to a decision was difficult, but we did it as a group — with all of the wisdom, experiences, and curiosities that we hold collectively. 

    This fruitful collaboration continues. Our Economic Well-being team members continue to meet every other week. We have strands like learning, events, communications, and grantmaking. Individual staff members lead work in a particular strand and report back to the rest of the team, asking for help, or offering it. 

    We also brought on our board early in the process of designing the Endeavor Fund, sharing our thinking with them and asking what questions they had so we could incorporate their feedback into the design of the initiative. So, when months later staff recommended the seven nonprofits that had been selected, trustees unanimously and excitedly approved a program that they were already a part of. 

    With the Endeavor Fund, we had the advantage of building a program from scratch and being able to think critically about how we would use equitable grantmaking practices. Throughout the process, feedback from all the involved parties was immediate and frequent, resulting in changes that strengthened our process. This unfolding, emergent, organic process was something very new for us as an organization. It was a different way of working collaboratively with each other and a different way of showing up for nonprofits.

    Continuing to learn and repair

    As we have shifted toward becoming an equitable, learning organization, we have become more and more comfortable knowing that we don’t have all the answers. We see our role as continuously learning about and re-examining ourselves, our history, and whether we are creating and sustaining the conditions that will bring about more equitable and just results. 

    Part of how we hold the work of acknowledging and committing to repair harm is through our Reparative Action Framework — our ongoing effort to name the ways in which, throughout our long tenure in the philanthropic field, our practices and grantmaking have caused harm to communities and organizations. Our practices are changing with the hope that we don’t continue inflicting the same or new harms, but instead start making strides towards repair, healing, and righting our relationships. 

    The Reparative Action committee was an internal learning lab, where we were could flex our growing muscles for building diverse teams, cooperating, sharing the work, and leaning into transparency. We began by inviting staff members to analyze past grantmaking programs using JEDI lenses to determine who we were, and were not, funding in our core program areas. We grappled with questions about who had been excluded and who else we may have harmed. The result was the co-creation of the Reparative Action Framework — a living document that we have committed to revisiting each year as we evolve and sharpen our thinking. We then used that framework to guide our capital grantmaking. 

    A self-selected team came together to guide the process, and decision-making was made by all staff. We used the tools and skills we had been building; we borrowed from the Endeavor Fund rubric, recreated the CWF’s reviewer portal, and relied on our culture of trust and inclusion to come to a unanimous staff recommendation to present to our board. At one point, trustees rightfully questioned our change in strategy — we had not been actively communicating our work around bridging capital and reparative action and so we found another opportunity for discussion and learning. Deeper engagement also brings in new questions, and greater clarity. We realized we also need to have a shared understanding of vocabulary such as capital, real estate, and risk through a justice and equity lens. It was also a good reminder that alignment with our board is paramount and have since revisited and shared our learnings with our board. 

    In the end our recommendation was approved, and the Fund’s biggest capital grant in over ten years was awarded to a project that will be built in an area of Oakland that the Fund’s previous grantmaking had not focused on. We are proud of how we held ourselves accountable to the framework and of how much our team’s collaboration skills have grown. Our reparative action work enabled us to name our operational pillar of right relationship, and from the practical work of making grants together, we’re finding new ways to embed our shared understanding and practice throughout all our work. 

    Starting over, and over again

    All of these changes are part of an evolutionary process. We know this work will continue to shift, and we look forward to hearing how others are also approaching internal changes toward greater collaboration, learning, repair, and more. 

    Transformation is a journey requiring vision, motivation, a willingness to start (and start over again), and the right set of tools. We hope you share our analysis that there is power in bridging program and operation teams; in connecting to community; and in breaking down silos and building across departments and teams. We don’t have a perfect story of transformation, but we invite you to take inspiration from our wins, gather wisdom from our mistakes, and find more opportunities for reimagining how we work together to transform our institutions, in order to better serve our community and nonprofit partners. 

    (This blog was based on a presentation at the PEAK Grantmaking Conference, March 18, 2024, Seattle, Washington.)  

  2. Aiming to be an Equitable Learning Organization

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    In this blog, we share the big picture of why the Walter & Elise Haas Fund aims to be an equitable learning organization, why learning matters to us, and how it drives our relationship with grantees. As we build our learning practice, we’ll share tactics and processes in future blogs.

    Justice, equity, and learning are linked

    True to our founders’ personal values, the Fund has always had a strong sense of justice. For decades we have supported organizations that work towards equitable outcomes for the people of the Bay Area. Yet, we have not always been explicit about our commitment to racial equity. In the summer of 2020, the Fund voiced our commitment to racial equity, publicly committing to speak out against the inequities and injustices caused by systemic and institutionalized racism.

    We are making good on our commitment by using JEDI – Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion – as a lens applied to all of our work. In 2021, we created a new position on the team, the strategist for justice, equity, and learning, to lead this work. As one member of an eight-person team, this is a significant commitment of our resources and talent to work towards becoming a learning organization that centers justice and equity. Becoming a learning organization and committing to a JEDI lens are inextricably linked. We can’t envision doing one successfully without the other. If we say we want to further our JEDI practice, then we must learn deeply from our past and current grantmaking and grantmaking practices with racial equity in mind. We must reflect, and make changes that lead to more equitable grantmaking.

    We know that we don’t have all the answers and that conditions and community needs change. We know we have gotten it wrong before, both as an individual funder and as part of the philanthropic sector. And because conditions change, we know that we must continue growing and evolving with them. We seek to be an equitable learning organization, to pay attention and listen actively to those who know better, to be open to question our practices and hold ourselves accountable to our commitments, so that we can contribute to a more just society.

    Throughout our grantmaking shifts, the launch of the Endeavor Fund, a $24.5M multi-year initiative, program integrations, and program sunsets, we reviewed our grantmaking portfolios taking note of when we were (or were not) taking JEDI approaches, which leaders and communities we overlooked in our funding, and interrogating whether our grantmaking practices and policies were burdensome or harmful, rather than equitable and accessible. These learnings continue to inform every part of our work, especially our approach to learning with grantees.

    Learning, not evaluation

    When we began designing the Endeavor Fund in 2022, it was in response to grantees’ calls to provide long-term, flexible grants that enable nonprofits to make the decisions needed for community to thrive. We knew early in our design process that the grants would be seven year-long general operating grants, a period we understand to be the cycle of organizational change. The Endeavor Fund was created for the long haul. We designed our grantmaking to create sustainable relationships for the long term.

    Taking the expansiveness of time as one of our greatest resources, we structured our grantee-grantor relationship to grow over time so we can listen carefully and learn from and with the Endeavor Fund grantees. We had a rigorous and in-depth selection process where we identified and selected organizations that are deeply embedded and accountable to their community. We spent hours with multiple staff, board, and community members, hearing about their organizations, their visions for the future, and their aspirations. All Endeavor Fund grantees, using different approaches and models to further their missions, are working to close the racial and gender wealth gap.

    Those early interviews catalyzed our interest in adopting a learning orientation. Rather than placing burdensome reporting requirements or setting goals and metrics just for the Fund’s benefit, we are hearing directly from grantees about their goals, how they track their progress, and what impact means to them. Learning with and from grantees allows us to amplify and elevate their challenges and wins, influence our philanthropic peers, and advocate for policies that create the conditions for nonprofits to be successful in their work.

    Based on our conversations, we drafted and then finalized a learning agenda with the Endeavor Fund grantees. The learning agenda has multiple priorities that reflect what they told us were important to them. We didn’t define their individual goals. Instead, grantees identified their own goals for their organizations under the learning agenda priorities, depending on that organization’s mission and trajectory. And each year we are asking if those goals are still relevant to them.

    Each year we spend half a day with each grantee for the express purpose of learning. We use the learning agenda and the organization’s goals as a guide for our time together. While we learn we ask Endeavor Fund grantees what else we could be doing, so that we can learn how to better play our role as a funder. Our conversations are candid, deep, wide-ranging, and instructive.

    We do it this way because we believe that if we are to be in genuine relationship with a grantee partner — with all the history, the resonant power dynamics, and the often unmet need to earn our partners’ trust — then this is the only way to do it. We must spend our resources, our time, and our human capital to actually, genuinely, learn and center grantee organizations, their staffs, and their communities. This means understanding what is important to them, in their own words, with all the nuance and complexity their answers and experiences deserve; and, understanding what is actually happening for them, in this moment, informed by the past and the future, all at once.

    What we’ve learned so far, one year into the Endeavor Fund, is that we can design an experience that helps us gain context, information, and language to go deeper with our grantees and grow our partnership. This is more than going over an annual report. It’s active listening, humility, and respect, always asking: what role can we play so that they can win?

  3. Shifting Power to Young People:
    Our Journey So Far

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    At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Walter & Elise Haas Fund embarked on a learning journey to explore new pathways for supporting young people in the Bay Area to find the education and opportunities they deserve.

    Our fellow travelers in this work were representatives of a community that philanthropy too often ignores — young people themselves. We wanted to hear from BIPOC-identified public school youth in Oakland and San Francisco about how they were experiencing the shock of the pandemic. More importantly, we knew that young people are the right advocates for shaping the solutions to the immense challenges facing them and their peers at a time of immense uncertainty, inequity, and unease.

    Who Has Power? Who Doesn’t?

    The COVID-19 pandemic and the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and far too many others have forced philanthropy, along with other sectors of society, to question longstanding practices and assumptions related to power. Who has power? Who doesn’t? And how can we truly shift power to effect change?

    At the Walter & Elise Haas Fund, our answers to these questions have helped shape our decision to center youth in our youth-focused grantmaking. There is no denying the privilege and power that philanthropic organizations like ours have long enjoyed. At the same time, young people (and directly impacted people as a whole) historically have lacked power as decisions about their education, their communities, and their future have been made — and held tightly — by their elders.

    How We’re Shifting Power

    We believe philanthropy has an opportunity to help shift this inequitable balance, and we’re exploring how to do that. We are reimagining how our practices could be different if we took up the values and principles of the nonprofit partners we support. Here’s how we have taken action so far:

    • Hired young people to make grants to support youth-led change because their time and insights are valuable. Through our BAY Fellows program, now in its fourth year, 11 high school and transitional aged youth from across the Bay Area become part of our grantmaking team. We are paying Fellows as they learn about philanthropy and make decisions about how to allocate $1.5 million in Possibility Grants each year. Currently in its pilot/learning stage, Possibility Grants provide general operating support of up to $100,000 each for organizations nominated and approved by young people in our community, with a focus on groups serving BIPOC and LGBTQ+ populations. This grant program prioritizes smaller organizations whose organizational or youth organizing program budget is equal to or under $500,000 annually.
    • Partnered with a youth development organization to support our Fellows to succeed. We partnered with youth development nonprofit Youth Organize! California (YO! Cali) to train and support Oakland and San Francisco young people as part of our grantmaking team. As we entered this work, we recognized that we are not a youth development organization ourselves and have limited capacity and skill in this regard. That’s why we are partnered with YO! Cali. They build youth leadership pathways and serve as a youth organizing hub, with directly impacted young people at the forefront of a bold, multi-issue movement for liberation, healing, collective power, and justice.
    • Organized five learning labs where young people join as equal partners with adults from the community to explore key questions about COVID-19 recovery, reopening and reimagining our schools, and supporting girls of color to find equity, joy and opportunity. Youth are key participants in these conversations; they are neither tokenized nor expected to defer to adults. These learning labs are deliberately structured to drive concrete action by the Fund, educators and others.

    In all of this work, we’re trying to shape a new model for what it looks like to truly engage and support youth — not just as advisors but as full partners and leaders in our grantmaking on issues affecting them and their peers. In the process, we are also exposing young people to philanthropy as a material expression of power in our society and activating them to see how it can be a vehicle for transformation by moving money and resources to communities.

    We’ve been able to gain new connections and fresh perspectives from the Fellows, the questions they’ve asked us, and the teach-ins they’ve led for our staff. We are eager to continue sharing stories and lessons from our ongoing journey in youth-led grantmaking and learn more about how other funders are thinking about this urgent topic for philanthropy. We’re also looking forward to sharing the experiences of the young leaders we’re working with in the months ahead. In 2024, we will be publishing the writings and reflections of young people who have participated in the Fund’s BAY Fellowship; stay tuned.

    Please also join us as we and some of our BAY Fellows reflect on this journey in October at the Grantmakers for Education conference. Two of the fellows will participate in a “Get Ready for Gen Z” panel of youth grantmakers from the Walter & Elise Haas Fund and the Skillman Foundation to reflect on their experiences and how philanthropy can lift up the power and voice of young people in our work.

    Together, we can make youth-led grantmaking a new norm across philanthropy and a means for shifting power and voice to young people in our communities.

  4. Operationalizing
    Trust-based Philanthropy:
    A Learning Lab for the Field

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    Endeavor Fund as case study, part two

    Today, we’re continuing the case study of how the Walter & Elise Haas Fund established the Endeavor Fund as one way to operationalize trust-based philanthropy. Part one of this case study walked through the process of establishing the Endeavor Fund, from community-led insight as research, to screening and deeper learning interviews, to W&EHF-led transparent financial analysis, to compensation for community and grantseeker’s time and insights.

    This blog, part two of the case study, offers reflection: to learn out loud and in community with you. This post shares our reasons for some of our key choices, and the mistakes we know we’ve made so far.

    As always, this blog series is an invitation into a learning lab. We want to hear from you. What questions or sparks of new ideas come to mind as you read this blog? What have we missed? What would you add? What have you already done in your own practices? How might we, and all of us, do better?

    Need a refresher? Review the Endeavor Fund process.

    How We Were Trying to Operationalize Trust

    The Endeavor Fund has two central tenets: to close the racial and gender wealth gap, and to improve nonprofit well-being, especially through supporting nonprofit jobs as quality, empowering jobs. That the burden of low-wage and usually front-line nonprofit work — what some call poverty jobs — seems to be carried disproportionately by women of color workers is not lost on us. These tenets inform and are embedded in our choices in establishing the Endeavor Fund with nonprofit organizations.

    We tried to center nonprofit organizations in the process. This means we did the work instead of the grantseeker, including: transcribing the entire interview and sharing it back within 48 hours for them to check; and analyzing financial materials, such as 990s available from the IRS and Candid. We started with a rubric that turned into the eligibility questions, and then the deeper learning interview questions. We sent the 18 interview questions to the organizations at the start of November, in advance of the January interviews. We went to their offices to meet them where they are instead of having them come to us.

    We spoke explicitly about shifting power to them. One of the 18 questions in the deeper learning interview was, “How would you have us be accountable to you?” We invited them explicitly to tell us how they want us to show up for them. We listened carefully to them in order to better serve them and their communities. Most of the 30-minute screening conversation was reserved for their questions, because we already knew the organizations from past grants and from their work in the community. We considered that we didn’t need to learn about them as much as they needed to learn to trust us.

    We were as transparent as possible. We were honest about what we wanted and what we knew, as well as what we didn’t know. We told each organization we spoke to that a key tenet of the Endeavor Fund was to “fund them to win on their own terms,” and it follows that we didn’t, and couldn’t, have answers on details like how we expected the cohort to work together in the future. A key refrain from deeper learning interviews from W&EHF staff was, “I don’t know.” “I don’t know” does not equal “I don’t care.” That answer means we believe that the future must be created together, with patience to be in collaboration together. It means we understand that we need to get out of the way to support the agency, visionary leadership, and creativity of community-based nonprofits.

    What We Didn’t Do

    There are choices we made through this process or things we forgot to do that impacted former or current grantees. You could even argue that some of these choices don’t entirely line up with a holistic trust-based approach.

    For example, the W&EHF did not use an open call, an RFP, nor written proposals for the process. This was a deliberate choice. There are benefits for doing it this way, but we also acknowledge the clear disadvantage to creating a closed grantmaking program — we missed out on brilliant organizations newly introducing themselves to us. What we focused on was the reality that W&EHF’s decision to make larger grants within the same grantmaking budget meant a trade-off to having grantmaking relationships with many fewer organizations. As an organization with ten staff in total, we didn’t think we could take the care needed nor be responsible to people submitting LOIs in an open call. The trade we made was to focus our efforts on known organizations and allow our staff time in cultivating deeper relationships in order to serve Endeavor Fund grantees better.

    Some of our choices were mistakes. We did not share our rubric publicly, nor with the organizations that were under consideration for the Endeavor Fund cohort. This was something we didn’t think about doing until far too late. In addition, we could have had a more individualized approach to communicating the sunset of three program areas — Economic Security, Education, and Safety Net — and the resulting exit of grantees. Though we had one-on-one conversations with approximately 30% of grantees about the details of the transition and exit, and indicated that renewal grants were unlikely, we did not have one-on-ones with 100% of impacted grantees. We wish we had spoken to everyone directly.

    Inviting Your Thoughts

    Frankly, there’s even more to the process than we’ve covered in these two posts, particularly around what we learned from structuring the Endeavor Fund this way, our in-depth interviews, exit conversations with former grantees, and holding a town hall with all former grantees of the closed programs. We plan on sharing some of those learnings in future blogs. These first two posts summarize the broad strokes of our process of intentionally activating the trust-based practices we saw within reach for us. The story, at this moment, is about the choices we’ve made thus far.

    There are tweaks we would make — like share the rubric sooner, be more transparent to all grantees — and, as we take a moment to pause, reflect, and actively learn, there is much we would do again in the same or similar ways. Working as a team across roles was transformational for our organization. Centering grantees in our choices gets another resounding yes. Taking these steps, that were also steps into the unknown — another yes.

    A Philanthropy Learning Lab

    We offer this case study as the first part of a philanthropy learning lab and blog series on how a foundation might operationalize trust-based practices. As W&EHF aims to be in a state of constant public learning, with the mindset that mistakes, just as much as successes, are opportunities for progress as long we are moving forward, thoughtfully, and in community, we invite you to tell us:

    What’s your take? What do you notice? What would you change? What questions to do you have?

    Let us know. We’re here to learn and do better.

  5. Operationalizing
    Trust-based Philanthropy:
    A Learning Lab for the Field

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    Endeavor Fund as case study, part one

    At the Walter & Elise Haas Fund, we’re making shifts in our practice and, at 71 years old, learning new things.

    This blog shares our recent process for establishing the Endeavor Fund, a new $24.5M, seven-year initiative aimed at closing the racial and gender wealth gap that we designed with trust-based practices in mind. We’re offering it here for two reasons:

    1. to share our process in the hopes that you — our peers, our ecosystem, and community — can use it as a case study, perhaps like open-source trust-based philanthropy for you to build and improve upon and;
    2. to get better at using our learning muscle by openly showing, sharing, and reflecting on our work.

    The changes our world needs are urgent, important, and often, massive. We neither have the time nor individual knowledge to work slowly towards creating perfect solutions. To quote our friends at the Stupski Foundation, “change can’t wait.” Thus, W&EHF aims now to be in a state of constant public learning. We’re of the mindset that mistakes, just as much as successes, are opportunities for progress as long we are moving forward, thoughtfully, and in community.

    In other words, this blog is the first of what will become many opportunities to share practice and process, to reflect on lessons learned, and above all, to invite you, our peers in philanthropy, into the work with us.

    This blog is an invitation to join a philanthropy learning lab. We want to hear from you. What questions or sparks of new ideas come to mind as you read this blog? What have we missed? What would you add? What have you already done in your own practices? How might we, and all of us, do better?

    Endeavor Fund: What We Did

    The Endeavor Fund process was focused on deep learning and operationalizing trust-based philanthropy. It was shaped by a decision-making rubric broken into five categories: purpose, practice, ecosystem, financial diligence, and commitment to learning. W&EHF focused on organizations that we were in current grantmaking relationships with, recognizing that we would be exiting 75% of grantees from the former programs of Economic Security, Education, and Safety Net. We listened carefully to how young people from our Learning Labs and BAY Fellows program directed us to act. From there, eligibility for the Endeavor Fund was determined by organizations’:

    • Mission alignment to closing the racial and gender wealth gap
    • Active prioritization of quality, empowering jobs within their organization
    • Geography — hyper local to Oakland and/or San Francisco
    • Service to primarily BIPOC communities
    • Service to/with youth and adults
    • Practice that is a combination of direct services and structural change work
    • Majority BIPOC leadership among at least two of the following three: the executive, senior staff, and board
    • Budget size (organizations with budgets under $5M and no more than $10M)

    These factors affected individual selection as well as group composition.

    Thirteen organizations were invited for an eligibility screening, a 30-minute call conducted by video; ten were invited for deeper learning interviews, three-hour long in-person interviews with teams from the organization and W&EHF staff. Organizations were represented by their leadership, a staff person, and a board member; W&EHF was represented by three or four of our ten-person staff. W&EHF staff transcribed the interviews in lieu of a written application from the organizations. Organizations were asked to submit written consent, to continue in the process. We told organizations that “consent” could simply be one word; most statements were a few sentences. W&EHF staff performed a financial analysis for each organization from public documents, which was shared in the interview to check our understanding. Seventy percent of W&EHF staff were actively engaged in the deeper learning process with the potential cohort.

    Two references — a participant and a collaborator — gave testimony for each organization. What references said about the organizations was prioritized in the review and decision-making process.
    Each reference was compensated for their time; each organization received a $3,000 grant for participating in the deeper learning interview; three organizations received unrestricted operating grants of $25,000 at the end of the process; and the seven organizations selected for the Endeavor Fund received seven-year long general operating grants for a total of $3.5 million, paid out annually in $500,000 installments.

    All along the way, for 18 months, staff shared our thinking with W&EHF’s board so we were all part of the process of developing ideas, asking questions, and acting together.

    A month after the public announcement of the Endeavor Fund grantees, we hosted a town hall for all former grantees of the closed programs. We plan to share a future blog in this series on operationalizing trust on how we exited grantees.

    A Philanthropy Learning Lab

    We continue the case study of the Endeavor Fund in part two in which we reflect on what we were trying to do, and the mistakes we know we made.

    For now, with this case study as the first part of a philanthropy learning lab and blog series on how a foundation might operationalize trust-based practices, we’d like to start hearing from you.

    What’s your take? What do you notice? What would you change? What questions to do you have?

    Let us know. We’re here to learn and do better.

  6. Hearing Youth Voices

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    We’re committed, at the Walter & Elise Haas Fund, to youth — especially the youth of Oakland and San Francisco. What’s more, we know that young people are brilliant and have the perspective, empathy, analytical skill, and capacity to lead us all to a brighter future. Youth, we believe, are possibility personified.

    One way we have expressed this commitment and belief for the past three summers is through our BAY Fellowship, hiring Oakland and San Francisco public school students as part of our grantmaking team. BAY Fellows learn about philanthropy, have a well-paying job, and make decisions about how we, as a Fund, act. The following post comes from one of this year’s BAY Fellows, a recent graduate of Balboa High School in San Francisco, and someone who has spent the majority of their high school years navigating the greatest public health crisis in the world.

     

    My name is Noah S. and I believe it’s important to include youth voices in all conversations. I graduated from San Francisco’s Balboa High School in June 2022, then worked with the Walter & Elise Haas Fund as a summer 2022 Bay Area Youth (BAY) Fellow. As a BAY Fellow, I participated in meetings with Fund staff, partners, and grantees where I discussed recent changes in my community. For example, I was able to share my perspective on young people’s experiences throughout the pandemic as well as which programs proved helpful to me during those tough times.

    The Covid-19 pandemic really impacted young people in my community. Many people around my age went through hardships that affected their mental health, physical wellness, and spiritual well-being. Before quarantine, I had a mental health issue and that grew worse during the pandemic. My mental health issue was not noticed by anyone at school, not even my adult allies. I wanted the people who were close to me to know that my mental health was getting worse, but everyone had similar issues to deal with, and they were not able to help me. I responded with negativity — and this affected my friendships and relationships with others. Once we went back to school in person, many of my peers complained that it was hard to focus during classes due to mental health issues. This was exacerbated by our teachers assigning more work to make up for lost teaching time during online learning.

    Mental health is important because it affects how we think, feel, and act. Young people’s mental health was not good before the pandemic — and isolation only made it worse. We need more resources to help us heal.

    Spending a year in quarantine, we had limited interactions with the outside world and lost our connections to each other. Many young people shifted from hanging out with family and friends to having to work multiple jobs to help our families. In my family, my parents lost their in-person jobs. That resulted in them needing to find new jobs, which ended up being lower paying. With them no longer earning enough to feed our family of four, I took on two jobs. One was an internship and the other a job in retail.

    I know I helped my family so much during this time, but at the same time, the pressures of working made my mental health worse. I kept working even though I was already at the point of giving up because there was no other way for my family to make it through.

    I needed to do something, so I made some changes. I quit my internship and joined a program that pays young people while helping them cope with mental health issues and offering career advice. This program — Summer Youth Academic Employment Program (SYAEP) — helped me so much because I could focus on my mental health without worrying about working a second job. They showed me how to cope with my mental health issues and organized in-person events that really helped. I am so grateful that the program helped me but wish that it lasted longer than one summer.

    There should be more programs like this. Young people need more in-person interactions that provide work experience and income. I am glad I can share my experience with the people of the Walter & Elise Haas Fund, so they can understand how important these types of programs are. I speak as a 19-year-old on behalf of all the adolescents out there who believe youth voices are impactful and important. We believe our opinions and voices matter, and that we can change the world for the better.

    It is hard to be part of conversations with adults. We feel discouraged when it comes to discussing everyday social life issues as many adults believe we’re too young to have the power to contribute meaningfully. In some organizations and programs, adults take over. They speak for the youth, and make decisions on their behalf, leaving youth left out, unheard, and devastated.

    Every voice needs to be heard and considered and youth voices should be projected or written down. We need to feel that we are an important part of conversations and the communities in which we live.

  7. Reflections on Elementary School, from a Distance

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    This year, going back to school includes all the tumult and uncertainties particular to 2020. What does it feel like to return to the classroom — virtually or not — during a public health pandemic, amidst flaring racial injustice, deep economic hardship, and spreading wildfire? What does education become from the students’ perspective while adults struggle to adapt their work and parenting practices to meet safety protocols?

    All of these questions are too big for one blog post. And so, over the past weeks, we have shared a series of reflections from Bay Area youth, ranging from ages 9 to 18:

    • Melanie, an Oakland public school graduate;
    • Kathya, a San Francisco senior; and
    • Noah, a San Francisco eighth grader.

    Each wrote from their own perspectives about how they are learning, what fears they hold, and how they are adapting. Throughout, their resilience is clear.

    We now complete this series with an interview of Faith, a fourth grader in a South-East San Francisco elementary school. Faith was interviewed by Milo, a sixth grader that she knows through Radical Monarchs. Radical Monarchs is an activism program that creates opportunities for young girls of color to form fierce sisterhood, celebrate their identities, and contribute radically to their communities.

    ****

    Milo: How is school going for you?

    Faith: It’s good. I do have one of my friends in my class, and I’m very excited about that. But, it was kind of sad that I didn’t have my other friends in it.  I’m also not sure what I missed learning last year. Since I was in online school for the end of third grade, there were things I didn’t learn — like about units, kinds of thousands, and things like that.

    Right now, school feels different than before. Usually, I am sitting at tables, on my bed, or just somewhere — not at a desk. And then, because I’m at home, I can go get up and get snacks whenever I want.

    Those are two things make school feel really different.

    Milo: Is distance learning fun?

    Faith: Kind of? If we were in school right now, we wouldn’t be able to see our classmate’s dog on Zoom. Zoom can be very cute.

    Milo: How do you feel about logging into school every day?

    Faith: My teacher is really fun so it’s very fun. I like reading a lot, and right now I get to use a reading app which I really enjoy. Sometimes, the app reads the book out loud to you, and then you read along on your own. You can get reading awards. And if you don’t know a word, you can point at the word and the app zooms in on it to help you read it.

    Milo: Do you feel like you are learning as much as you can on Zoom?

    Faith: Yes, because I am actually good at using computers. When I was in school in person, I could only use the school computers on certain days. I am better at using computers now, but I still can’t really type without looking at the keyboard.

    Milo: If you were Principal of your school, or Superintendent of all the schools, what would do?

    Faith: If I was the Superintendent of all the schools in San Francisco, I’d make it so people can see each other. I would let students schedule meetings where we all meet in person, and see multiple classmates.

    ***

    As an adult, a parent, and an education funder, one thing these student voices remind me of is that schooling is constantly layered. It is an intensely individual experience — missing friends, finding the cute, the ways a school schedule orders your life — layered within a larger system.

    In that way, this anomalous moment isn’t that different from other, more regular times.

    I’m reminded of how schools are places where people come together and where we’re expected to connect. Movement through the halls, random interactions over lunch, the chats before class — all that is mostly missing in our distance learning model.

    Young people know it and, as these blogs consistently show, it’s what they miss most: each other.

  8. The Ups and Downs of Virtual Eighth Grade

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    Hello. My name is Noah and I am an 8th grader in San Francisco.

    School has always been a bit of a struggle for me. I never got very good grades and I never loved school, but I know that going is how I can become educated, forge my own career path, and hopefully have a joyful and impactful life. I hope to shape a better future for myself and the world through my education.

    This school year, however, education has changed.

    Online school and being in a classroom are very different — so different that it is hard to compare them. On one hand, being in a classroom, where you can ask questions and be more engaged, has its benefits. It also can cause lots of stress and anxiety. In my opinion, distance learning is superior. As long as I manage to stay focused on the lessons, there is far less cause for anxiety. It suits my learning style far better, even with its downsides.

    One issue with distance learning is the amount of time I spend looking at a screen. Although online lessons only last three to four hours a day, teachers make up for less frequent and shorter classes by assigning lots of online work. People, it seems, don’t realize that having shorter classes doesn’t equal less screen time.

    Another downside is virtual classes make it far harder to communicate with teachers and fellow classmates. If I want to ask my teachers a question outside of class, I need to email them and it may take some time to hear back. Also, online learning makes it so that I can no longer communicate with my friends during school. I’m social, and it gets lonely. It has been hard not to be able to talk to my friends at school for the majority of the day.

    During distance learning, my grades have gotten better — and I can say the same is true for a good number of my classmates. I believe this is because we feel less pressure and we have time allocated to do our work, which is very, very helpful. Also, in lots of my in-school classes, I had trouble organizing and keeping track of what felt like a million pieces of paper. With distance learning, I no longer have that problem.

    Distance learning brings certain topics to life, too. For example, in history class, this year, we might look at a slideshow or create a fake social media profile for a historical figure. Previously, we would have just read pages out of a textbook. It’s more engaging this way — and I believe that’s one of the main reasons why my grades have gone up.

    Although distance learning has its positives, it has its concerning aspects, as well. On top of the amount of screen time required and the lack of social interaction, it’s too easy for students to do something that they shouldn’t be doing during class time. It’s up to us as individuals to remain focused, and that’s hard. The quality of the education may be lesser, too. We seem to cover less material in distance learning and that could affect my future. For example, we skipped a little bit more than one-third of what we were supposed to learn in history class at the end of the last school year. I’m not sure how we will ever get a chance to cover content that students in normal, non-pandemic years would learn.

    It has also been particularly hard for me to understand assignments sometimes; when a teacher asks me to summarize or organize notes in a certain way, it is very hard to know exactly what they want. Something else to take into consideration are the pressures put on teachers. Many of my teachers are getting behind on grading and often do not respond to emails because they are too swamped creating lesson plans and taking care of their own families — their children are distance learning at home, too.

    In conclusion, I would like to reinforce two things adults should know about how distance learning impacts young people. The first is how lonely distance learning can make us feel. Lots of kids’ social interaction comes at school, and when students cannot really talk or have recess together, we feel lonely and sad. The second thing is that the amount of screen time is rough. A full day of being in online classes can make us feel super depressed and irritable. If you are a parent and your kid has just had a full day of computer time, take them outside.

    Thanks for listening,

    Noah

     

  9. On the First Day of a New Kind of School Year

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    If, on the first day of my Junior year, you told me I was experiencing my last first day of high school class in person, I would have laughed. But here we are, and no one’s laughing. During this pandemic in which millions are jobless and we’re required to wear masks and keep our distance from each other, youth and teachers are all logging into virtual classrooms to begin our first week of school.

    Kathya My name is Kathya and I am a senior at June Jordan School for Equity. I am on track to becoming the first in my family to graduate high school. Education has been valuable to me for as long as I can remember. It is the most effective way I have to impact positively the course of my life. I see so much value in education that I was elected to sit on the San Francisco Unified School District’s Board of Education as a student delegate.

    But things have changed dramatically.

    In this school year, the first week of school means a reality where I can virtually raise my hand and a teacher can mute me with the click of a button. Practically no one could have predicted that classrooms around the country would be closed down, and yet here we are, learning to adapt to a socially-distanced norm where students participate solely through their screens, and many of us don’t show our faces. It feels impossible to accept that this is what my last year of high school will look like.

    One week in, all I can think is, “How are we going to make it?”

    For years, researchers, doctors, and well-meaning adults have scolded people of my generation for being buried in their screens. Today, even the best teachers can’t avoid requiring us to stare at a screen for hours in order to get the education we need and deserve — even if that education feels as remote as it is.

    We’ve been told, “This is all we can do for now,” and “We don’t know when this will end,” and “Forget the old normal because it is long gone.” While some students watch their loved ones die without being able to hold them, others watch their parents lose the jobs that kept food on the table, and more — or likely even the same students — receive daily reminders from police and the government that their lives don’t matter. Amid this, we must open our phones or laptops to learn about Founding Fathers and ancient civilizations that are long gone. We are expected to do our best but have little way of telling our teachers that, although it may not meet pre-pandemic expectations, students, too, are doing the best we can do under the circumstances.

    This pandemic shines a spotlight on the inequities this country has long lived with: food deserts, lack of healthcare, homelessness, poverty, racism, discrimination, and other things that make living in this country feel impossible. I can’t help but wonder; are we taking advantage of this moment in history? Are we ensuring that communities such as schools will lead us into a better future? Are we offering students financial, emotional, and physical support? Are we teaching students that they must make the change they want to see in the world?

    The school I have known for twelve years feels very far away. My classrooms feel disconnected from the strong community I’ve been proudly part of at June Jordan School for Equity. And yet, I maintain my optimism. I’ve seen teachers become more open minded than ever before, teaching more creatively, creating more accessible spaces for more youth, and being willing to learn from students in new ways.

    Whether we like it or not, classrooms everywhere are changing. It’s in our best interest to make sure those changes are for the better — because the students opening their laptops or phones to log in for their first day of school are the future, and we will not be stopped.

    I hope you are inspired to play a role in ensuring students across the nation receive a great education, even during a pandemic: we deserve it.

    Kathya

     

    Kathya is a leader in her school’s Peer Resources program, where this spring they launched QuaranTeen, a blog to raise up youth voices during lockdown. Listen to past episodes here, and be on the lookout for Kathya’s podcast featuring this blog post.

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