Equitable Recovery

An internal advisory group, drawn from Staff across the Foundation, assisted the President and Board in developing priority concepts, identifying grantees, and processing the awards. And we invited external advisors to guide us in setting priorities. For each of the two waves of grantmaking, Staff formed three subgroups focused on specific issues and concerns, moderated by a Managing Director of Programs. In consultation with the President, the subgroup moderators and others, a Senior Program Officer coordinated the overarching engagement with external advisors and implementation of participatory practices.

Staff participation was voluntary and allowed people from across the institution to work together. The subgroups were open to all Staff, whether or not they normally played a grantmaking role. Consequently, people in the subgroups built new connections and for many this was the first opportunity to be involved in identifying and making grants. This contributed to new approaches and opportunities, while the external advisors helped direct and focus our grantmaking, serving as a community voice.

For the first wave of grants, an initial $43 million of the bond proceeds was deployed to fund urgent recovery work addressing systemic inequalities, discrimination, and racism in America, including election mobilization and protection strategies. The funding priorities were to:

• Hasten an equitable recovery from COVID-19: to hasten the equitable recovery, we worked to sustain and strengthen nonprofits and communities in the wake of COVID-19.
• Create lasting transformation: we focused on democracy and voter mobilization as opportunity for transformation.
• Reimagine what is possible for communities and organizations: we sought new ways of thinking and working that can serve people in our city, country, and global communities.

For the remaining $82 million in funds, new subgroups formed: Racial Justice Field Support with a Focus on Combatting Anti-Blackness, Self-Determination of Indigenous Peoples, and Public Health Equity and COVID-19 Mitigation and Recovery. The places where we work—North America, Nigeria, and India—were the geographies of focus. The funding priorities were:

• Racial Justice Field Support with a Focus on Combatting Anti-Blackness: Grantmaking considered efforts to build Black power through supporting Black-led and Black-focused organizations and aimed to take a leadership role in positioning reparations and racial healing as issues that philanthropy meaningfully helps to address.
• Self-Determination of Indigenous Peoples: Grantmaking worked to uplift Indigenous communities by providing support to enable their autonomous pursuit of a recovery that is guided and informed by their priorities, culture, and practices.
• Public Health Equity and COVID-19 Mitigation and Recovery: Grantmaking aimed to improve equitable access to resources for immediate health-related challenges while simultaneously advancing new models, policies, and infrastructure for greater public health equity and resilience in the future, with a focus on community engagement, vaccine confidence, and accountability—including data, research, and advocacy.
• Equitable Housing Demonstration Project: Cutting across both the Racial Justice and the Public Health strategies, we prioritized an Equitable Housing Demonstration Project to reduce incarceration and housing instability and restore communities by generating an array of solutions that can permanently end the use of jails and prisons as housing of last resort.

In addition to the bond proceeds, we supplemented the initiative with roughly $8 million in additional funding and support.

The initiative disrupted our grantmaking practices for the better. An initial 2021 Report on the initiative shared progress and challenges toward our goals of disrupting traditional philanthropic, organizational, and grantmaking practices.

Our 2023 evaluation of the initiative shared further insights about how we engaged new voices, sought to build trust, and balanced urgency within an inclusive participatory process. Due to these efforts, 63 percent of Equitable Recovery grantee organizations were first-time MacArthur grant recipients, and we responded to the needs of grantees and communities we served in 2020.

We continue to work to reduce the burden of our grantmaking processes on grantees and consider whether parts of our emergency response should become established practices in our everyday work.

Seventy-nine MacArthur Staff collaborated in a Bond Proceeds Advisory Group to determine our strategy and direct funds. We were supported by external advisors, who were from outside our established networks, provided critical new perspectives that helped us better understand communities and their needs.

The group included Staff from all areas of the Foundation, including some with no previous grantmaking experience, structured in four subgroups. Three subgroups focused on identifying the areas of grantmaking and approaches in each wave of the Equitable Recovery work, and an overarching group led our engagement with the external advisors and participatory practices.

Read the Executive Summary