New report: 2012 State of Diversity in Philanthropy

- by Andy Ho

A new report on the state of diversity in philanthropy was released today by the D5 (diversity over 5 years) coalition. This is the second annual report of D5, which is a five-year effort to grow philanthropy’s diversity, equity, and inclusion. The coalition includes 18 philanthropy organizations—and counting—with connections to thousands of grantmakers.

D5 seeks to help philanthropy achieve four big sector goals by the end of 2015:

1. Leaders: New foundation CEO, staff, and trustee appointments more closely reflect U.S. demographic trends.

2. Action: More foundations take meaningful action to address diversity, equity, and inclusion issues in their organizations.

3. Funding: Annual funding for diverse communities—from foundations and from within those communities themselves—increases substantially.

4. Data: Philanthropy has the research capacity to be more transparent about progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Some of the interesting findings include this chart on foundation diversity, by ethnicity:

It is clear from these stats that foundation leadership does not reflect the diversity of the U.S. population, especially at the CEO level. In response, D5 is creating national networks of foundation CEOs, executives, and board trustees to establish stronger links between diverse communities and positions of leadership. Called Regional Association Leadership Networks, these groups have developed significantly in the past year and expect to grow in number and capacity. Using the power of networks and a coordinated, sector wide approach, D5 plans to advance our goal of new CEO, executive staff, and trustee appointments more closely reflecting U.S. demographic trends by 2015.

Organizations like AAPIP are leading the charge to get greater foundation funding to AAPI communities across the country. I’ll share more future posts about how they’re doing this, both at the community level through giving circles, and working at the national level by developing public philanthropic partnerships. It’s exciting to see these developments that will continue to grow philanthropy’s diversity.

Comments

[Cheryl Chapman]

Are there any statistics on diversity among philanthropists? Philanthropy UK is reporting on this in July magazine. So far very little research which show how far off the radar this hugely important issue is in multicultural Britain!