Philanthropic funders tend to provide meager support for programs explicitly earmarked for leadership development. The membership-based Leadership Funders Group (LFG) aims to change that dynamic, in part by making the case that investing in leaders can strengthen organizations and advance racial equity in an unsettled post-2020 environment.
LFG’s origins trace back to 2014, however, which is when Annie E. Casey Foundation Vice President of Talent & Leadership Development Donna Stark convened approximately a dozen funding reps in Chicago to share best practices around leadership development programs for individuals in the community.
The effort took on a life of its own, and four years later, stakeholders established a more permanent structure and installed its first co-chairs. The group, administered by the New York City-based Building Movement Project, now consists of 25 funders, including the Kellogg Foundation, Ford Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, Kresge Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation and Bank of America Foundation.
“I think of the group as a community of folks who run leadership programs or fund them, and are trying to find ways that program delivery can be more effective or inclusive,” said Robert Sterling Clark Foundation President and CEO Philip Li, a current member and former co-chair of LFG. The group also serves funding leaders who are “thinking about how leadership is integrated into their other organizational investments,” noted current co-chair and Barr Foundation Senior Program Officer Kimberly Haskins.
“We’re seeing how communities of color who were hardest hit by COVID and organizations that got large amounts of support after the murder of George Floyd, are seeing a decrease in resources,” Haskins told me. “That’s why this commitment is so important and why it must be sustained.”
The intersection of leadership development and racial equity
Looking back on the group’s early days, Li said that Stark effectively combined the knowledge sharing of philanthropy-serving organizations with leadership development practices and capacity-building. “There was a real belief that the investment in people was worthy of its own focus,” he said.
After that inaugural meeting in 2014, group members went on to meet annually in different cities and accumulated new participants. Two years later, Li joined. His employer, the New York City-based Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, exclusively supports organizations that build the field of leadership development.
In 2018, LFG formalized its work during a convening at the Barr Foundation’s headquarters in Boston. “We discovered there was an interest in the intersection of supporting leaders in our communities and racial equity,” Haskins said. “It came about because we all understood, from our work, that people of color are often working in communities that are bearing the weight of inequities, and yet those organizations are by far often hugely under-invested [in].”
Haskins wasn’t speaking hyperbolically. The Robert Sterling Clark Foundation’s website cites research showing that “only 1% of philanthropic dollars are targeted to investment in people.” This is in stark contrast to the private sector, which invests four times as much in leadership development compared to the nonprofit sector, according to the foundation.
“We need to have depths of relationship”
There is no shortage of ways to explain such a disparity, the most disconcerting being that some funders simply “don’t believe that investing in nonprofit workers is important,” Li said. Other funders have a policy to minimize how much they fund “overhead,” when in reality, that overhead includes “people who are actually doing the work to make things happen.”
The most likely — and understandable — reason boils down to a lack of dedicated resources. Tasked with tackling urgent problems, many foundations allocate their finite dollars toward organizations providing direct services through specific programs. For some funders, “investment in people happens in conjunction with that work,” Li said.
The problem is that under such a model, individuals rarely receive dedicated leadership development support — think peer learning opportunities or one-on-one coaching. Compounding matters is the fact that demand for direct services remains sky-high, and, to Haskins’ earlier point, post-2020 support for some organizations serving communities of color is drying up, thereby putting even more strain on already overworked nonprofit leaders.
LFG’s work is predicated on the idea that rather than existing in a kind of strategic vacuum that pulls funding away from front-line organizations, leadership development strengthens a nonprofit’s ability to support its community and advances racial equity. “If we want deep, sustained change,” Haskins said, “we need to have depths of relationship, both in terms of supporting that within our partner organizations, but also within our own community as funders.”
The pair also stressed that LFG’s definition of “leadership” isn’t confined to the executive suite. “We have returning citizens who are in a leadership development program to try to reform the justice system,” Li said. “People can lead from wherever they are.” At a time of severe burnout for nonprofit staffers at all levels, keeping this more expansive definition of leadership development in mind is probably a good start, especially among the funders charged with keeping nonprofits and their missions whole.
Digging into different models
Haskins manages the Barr Foundation’s Barr Fellowship for leaders of organizations located in or primarily serving greater Boston. The two-year program includes a group learning journey, a three-month sabbatical and facilitated retreats with peers. The fellows’ organizations also receive funding to support leadership and organizational development. Barr has recognized 80 fellows since 2005.
Haskins told me her participation in LFG helped her consider “the best way to support the individual leader and the organization.” She also noted that the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund earmarked funding for organizational development coaches to assist senior leadership team members who were designing that funder’s Flexible Leadership Awards. “It showed that they were being intentional in that process and thinking about what that support could do for the organization’s development,” Haskins said. “That kind of discretionary funding and investment in capacity doesn’t always happen.”
The Haas Jr. Fund’s Flexible Leadership Awards program was so successful that in 2021, it launched the LeadersTrust as a separate leadership development initiative. Building on the awards’ “core approach,” which includes flexible funding for leadership organizational capacity, coaching and peer learning, the LeadersTrust has disbursed over $30 million earmarked for leadership development to over 120 organizations in 20 states.
For Li, one huge benefit of LFG membership is the chance to dig into the structural nuances in members’ programs. “Kim’s program [the Barr Fellowship] offers a sabbatical as part of that in a learning journey, which is unusual amongst this group,” he said. “The Bush Foundation in Minnesota provides individual grants to folks, while we’re place-based, so everybody’s in New York, and the idea is to bring everybody together often.”
“So many sparks that happen”
LFG proved to be an invaluable resource during the pandemic, when members’ in-person leadership activities had to be virtual. “Fellowship programs tend to be high-touch [and] in-person, and everything had to change on a dime,” Li said. “And the community came together and said, ‘What are we doing? How are we figuring this out?’”
With the pandemic receding, Li senses a palpable hunger among funding leaders and those they support in this space to convene in person. “Informal talks and conversations are such an integral part of leadership and leadership development work, and I think that will come back and in a stronger form,” he said.
The value of the cohort extends beyond sharing tips for developing leadership programs — it also serves funders as a networking and recruitment resource in this space. “When we started work on our current strategy and were looking for consultants, LFG colleagues were among the first people we reached out to,” Haskins said.
An upcoming LFG session will focus on how the Supreme Court’s decision to end affirmative action is affecting organizations receiving support from participating funders. Looking a bit further out, Li said the cohort aims to boost cross-funder collaboration and bring leaders receiving support from various foundations under one roof. “We’re also exploring the concept of ‘network theory’ and decentralized or different ways of bringing people together to bring about change,” he said. “I think we’ll see more experiments using that approach moving forward.”
Nine years since LFG’s inaugural meeting, the group continues to welcome new members drawn to how leadership development can strengthen front-line organizations and advance racial equity. “Things are different in each community and there are so many sparks that happen when we bring each other together,” Haskins said. “The group recognizes that folks who are in the community are most effective when they have networks to support them.”
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