As the D5 Coalition’s five-year tenure ends, we are celebrating progress, learning from disappointments, and developing recommendations for what is still needed by strengthening the field’s competencies around diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our summative conversations at this year’s Council on Foundation’s conference, the annual State of the Work report and the preliminary summary of lessons learned, are key steps in this process. Over the next few months, we will finalize our formal evaluation and continue to engage the field about what comes next.
Recommendations for areas of continued work:
- Look beyond traditional philanthropic programmatic strategies to engage foundation trustees
- Assess and deploy mechanisms for connecting foundations to talent and resources that translate to actual practice
- Build capacity to assess organizational culture – the “readiness” for diversity and inclusion – and its relationship to talent pipeline issues
- Continue to advocate for the use of demographic data and for strengthening platforms that allow foundations to understand not only institutional impact but field-level impact
- Consider establishing standards for good practice with respect to diversity, equity, and inclusion so foundations can track and understand progress
Recommendations for how to do the work:
- Establish a sustainable mechanism to keep up the drumbeat and support the field as a whole to be accountable to these issues
- Facilitate the leveraging and sharing of learnings and resources across organizational and siloed boundaries
- Produce concrete examples that showcase “effectiveness” to substantiate the impact imperative
- Allow for organic collaboration and deploy work with sensitivity to the range of organizational forms, the natural institutional tensions and the inevitable changes and transitions within the infrastructure
- Ground strategies in an analysis of the nuanced mechanisms and networks of influence in philanthropy, particularly at the regional level and using a cohort based approach
- Better integrate the perspectives and capacities of nonprofit organizations
Download D5 Progress, Lessons, and What Comes Next.
