March 6, 2008 | Read Time: 4 minutes
The California State Assembly recently passed a bill that would require foundations with assets of more than $250-million to collect and disclose data on the race and gender of their board and staff members, as well as the race, gender, and sexual orientation of the boards and staffs of their grantees and the communities they serve. The bill is now pending in the State Senate.
Joe Coto, author of the legislation known as AB 624, says that his ultimate goal is to “ensure that foundation giving represents the diversity of California.”
But the proper objectives of philanthropy are as diverse as the contents of a great library. Leaving aside whether a legislature should dictate a library’s holdings, the Assembly measure ignores the wise adage that one can’t judge a book by its cover. And it would require a collection of three and only three books — the books of race, gender, and sexual orientation. The bill does not exactly burn the other texts that inspire philanthropy; it just remainders them.
Because I am intimately familiar with our own grants, I’ll use examples from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, but the points made here apply as well to other foundations covered by the legislation.
Sometimes a book’s cover tells you just what’s inside. That’s the case with our grants to reduce air pollution in the predominantly minority neighborhoods of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, to improve public schools in East Palo Alto and Hayward, to reduce teen pregnancy in the San Joaquin Valley, and to support music education for disadvantaged kids in the East Bay.
While those grants mainly benefit members of minority groups, we select the grantee organizations to carry them out based on their effectiveness and not the race, sex, or sexual orientation of their staffs.
Most of the time, though, you really can’t judge the book by its cover.
A recent essay in these pages (“Are Foundations Doing Enough for Society?,” February 21) critically contrasted the Hewlett Foundation’s 2001 grant of $400-million to Stanford University with the total sum of its direct support for efforts to benefit minorities. Yet Stanford is the path to success for the 47 percent of its undergraduate students who are members of minority groups. One could tell the same story, even more so, about the foundation’s recent $113-million grant to the state’s pre-eminent public research institution, the University of California at Berkeley.
But focusing only on minority students misses the point. The pathbreaking work done by faculty members of all colors at Stanford’s medical school and Berkeley’s School of Public Health ultimately benefits California’s increasingly diverse population. So too does research to avert global warming, which will be particularly catastrophic for people of color worldwide.
Even within its identity-based approach, the Assembly measure perversely ignores many other disadvantaged groups, like older Americans and people with physical and mental disabilities.
More fundamentally, the bill sends a message that while African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Asian-Americans matter, those living in abject poverty in Africa, Mexico, and Asia do not.
While the Hewlett foundation’s grant making reflects William and Flora Hewlett’s special sense of obligation to the state in which they lived and prospered, more than half of our grant dollars — more if you include our work to avert global warming — are directed to alleviating the poverty of the people in these regions who live on less than $2 a day.
Foundations make grants that benefit all citizens of California, the nation, and the world without regard to their economic status, race, or ethnicity — for example, grants to make information available free on the Internet, to make the arts of all cultures widely accessible, and to promote scientific knowledge that can make life healthier and more sustainable for all, though especially the poor, who are always hardest hit by health and environmental problems.
Given the tremendous range of problems in California and the world that philanthropy can help to solve, legislating favoritism for particular groups is myopic public policy.
It is perfectly appropriate to ask foundations to disclose to whom they make grants and for what purposes; the Internal Revenue Service in fact does so, and these reports (IRS Form 990-PF) are freely available to the public online and from each foundation.
Many foundations agree that the time is ripe for us to explain to the public just how we are trying to improve society and what evidence we have to indicate that we’re succeeding; an increasing number are making this information available.
But that is a far cry from the California Assembly’s requirement that foundations collect and disclose information about three personal characteristics that are deeply misleading proxies for the good that foundations do.
Paul Brest is president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, in Menlo Park, Calif.
