Interviewee: A: I'm a director at the Shepard Broad Foundation, a family foundation founded by my grandfather who died in 2001. He was very much involved with the Foundation until a couple of years before his death. In recent years my mother, her brother, myself, and my three siblings have started to play a greater role in shaping what the Foundation does. My grandfather was an immigrant to this country who came here as an orphan with nothing, and became successful. He made most of his money in Florida and gave back to Miami, Miami-Dade County, and South Florida, primarily through institution building. I think that, now, when we look at where private money could have the most impact, there may be a different picture than when my grandfather was making grants.
Interviewer: Q: Donors Forum of South Florida recently gave your foundation an IMPACT Award for small grantmaking (grants of $10,000 - $25,000) that has made a positive impact. What was your advocacy related grant for, and how did you promote making it within your foundation?
Interviewee: A: The specific award was for a one-year grant we made in 2003 with a subsequent commitment for two more years of funding to start what became the Women's Advocacy Project at the Women's Fund of Miami-Dade County (the "Women's Fund").
Our Foundation had been giving the Women's Fund money to make grants to organizations that were providing services and programs like health care or ballet classes for underserved kids. But the Women's Fund had come to a point where they needed to build their organizational capacity.
I had some discussions with the Women's Fund about how we could help them grow in a way that would allow them to have impact. Consequently, I made a personal donation to them through a donor advised fund that I have, The Elliot Fund, and then told my family about the contribution, the organization's great work, and its need to grow.
I suggested that our Foundation do something with the Women's Fund that would both honor my grandfather and allow us, the trustees, to help shape it the way we wanted. Since he was an immigrant to this country and we live in a community filled with immigrants, we decided to look at our funding through an immigrant lens. The Women's Fund, which focuses on programs serving women and children, was thinking along the same lines.
The Women's Fund wanted to have a forum on immigration, and the Foundation agreed to provide funding for it. The Women's Fund pulled together six service providing organizations who were working with immigrant women and children. After holding the immigration forum the Women's Fund came to us and asked if we would be willing to support hiring staff for a coalition of these groups to follow through on recommendations from the forum's participants. And that is what led to the creation of the Women's Advocacy Project.
From my point of view, this kind of work at the grassroots level to organize people around issues has real impact. It's building a base for long-term advocacy and the voices are coming from the communities that are affected by the various policies and issues. If you want long-term change, advocacy funding can help make sure that people who need to be at the table are there.
Interviewer: Q: How do the women use the Women's Advocacy Project?
Interviewee: A: I will give you an example from last month. The women, knowing that there was a May Day/Immigrant Rights Day event, came together and talked about how they wanted to participate. They decided to take a bus up to Orlando where the big state rally was taking place. They took about 50 women, some service providers and some women in communities that were interested in the issues, to Orlando. They had advocacy training on the bus ride to Orlando and on the way back -- 4 hours each way.
Another example is about flowers that come into the country through Miami. Many of them come from Colombia and workers in a flower company in Colombia, Dole Fresh Flowers, had reported that they were laboring under poor working conditions. So, Colombian women connected through the Women's Advocacy Project organized a rally supportive of the women in Colombia. The rally was aimed at pressuring Dole Fresh Flowers to treat its workers better. There are other examples of how the Women's Advocacy Project has created a space for these women to come together to advocate around the issues. In each of these cases, there was no other place for them to turn to organize.
What was very clear to me, and I think what my family understood, even though they hadn't typically supported this kind of thing, was that there was a dearth of organizing and other advocacy work in south Florida, in Miami in particular.
We wanted to start to encourage real impact through social change funding so that we are not constantly doing the band-aid approach. So, we put funding in this organization that, through capacity building, had gotten to a point that it could really take on some social change work.
Interviewer: Q: Please talk about any resistance to advocacy funding you might have met in the Foundation from the older generation, and related suggestions you might have for other young foundation trustees.
Interviewee: A: I met some initial resistance but since the first advocacy grant I was seeking wasn't a lot of money, the family let me do it. Later, they saw that the small grant had impact. And the fact that sophisticated funders judging the Donors Forum of South Florida grantmaking impact awards chose us was great. It wasn't "Debby's little quirky thing" anymore. Because the Women's Fund produced, it made it easier to go back and say, "Look what they did with that $5,000.00 for the Immigration Seminar! We can't get this kind of impact from some of the several hundred thousand dollar grants we give to institutions."
In addition, when the Women's Fund grew through its advocacy, it brought its funders, its grantees, and its board members along on that journey. In this way, the grantee, the Women's Fund, made it easier for me to bring my family along as well. The Women's Fund supporters realized that some of their long-term grantees had expanded from service delivery to advocacy work. Even a grantee doing health services, for example, was enabled by the support of the Women's Fund to start to consider how their work becomes part of real change. In a sense, the Women's Fund became a demonstration grant for me to show the other directors of the Foundation how we could evolve as funders and support this kind of work.
The groundwork for our advocacy grantmaking, though, had actually been laid earlier. You can trace that back to Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Andrew was our Katrina, wiping out the southern part of Miami-Dade County. The hurricane took the lid off of South Dade County -- we started seeing more of the needs of the migrant farmworkers, and others. As a community funder, we were exposed to how rebuilding over the long term takes place, and the importance of getting money to the ground level in order to make social change over the long haul. Big organizations came in and left, leaving the locals holding the bag. Since we directly had suffered in this storm with my mother's home heavily damaged (she was displace for 18 months) and we recognized that we were in a more fortunate position to rebuild than were low income families, we were sensitized to the plight of the most marginalized in our community. The personal experience helped us understand the need to get money out on the ground quickly and to keep that money flowing so that grassroots organizations could have their voices heard through the many years of rebuilding.
Interviewer: Q: Do you have any suggestions for other young trustees in family foundations?
Interviewee: A: A lot is made of this generation gap in funding and I really don't think there needs to be a wedge there. In many cases, not all, the values underlying the giving are probably more aligned than everyone might think.
I think it is critical that the younger generation respect and honor the giving of the older generation. They need to acknowledge the spirit of generosity of those that came before them and then take the time to understand why they gave they way they did. This interest and respect begins a dialogue with the older generation and often can lead to their interest in what they younger generation is thinking and caring about. The giving of each generation is a window into their respective worlds and in understanding their respective giving, they will understand each other better.
You can find ways to transform the giving in a family foundation that isn't divisive. In addition to honoring previous generations and their giving, another piece is to look at values, what the family members really care about. In our Foundation's case, we wanted to give back to this community where our wealth was made, and had to think about how to help build this community. In 2006, it's a different picture than it was in 1956 when the Foundation was established -- just from immigration and changing demographics. The values are still the same, though. We just express them differently than my grandfather did. There is opportunity for each generation to show the other generation what they're doing or why they've done what they've done. I started to take my mother to visit the Women's Fund. I had her go on site visits with grantees, to go into communities where she had never been before, and she became excited by that.
Interviewer: Q: Were your trustees concerned about funding advocacy?
Interviewee: A: Well, we range across a political spectrum on this board, from right to left. And, to get anywhere with our funding, we have to take it out of this political framework and say, "It's not left, it's not right." It's saying, "This is what's going on in this community. These are the resources we have. How do we start to make a difference in people's lives?" Ultimately, we all want to do that, although we may come at it with a different philosophy.
