Sarah C. Murphy

Building Racial Equity Capacity: Justice Philanthropy

In 2014, a police officer killed Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson, MO. A global uprising followed, sparked by the region-wide uprising’s intensity and the compelling passion of local leaders demanding change. In 2016, Forward Through Ferguson (FTF), a social-impact 501(c) (3), was established to ensure that the legacy of the Ferguson Uprising remains in the collective consciousness and political strategy of the St. Louis region.

The Ferguson Commission recommended 189 actions, including creating a sustained, community-led fund to catalyze racial equity, community healing, and justice in the region. In 2019, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Missouri Foundation for Health, and Deaconess Foundation answered the call to launch a pilot version of this fund with FTF. Through this investment, the 2020–23 pilot enabled antiracist, trust-based grantmaking infrastructure to set the foundation for new practices of Justice philanthropy. The call for such a fund acknowledged the powerful systems-wide impact potential the philanthropic sector has to advance racial equity.

More and more philanthropic organizational leaders see this, but they struggle with the "how." This session will focus on tools and lessons of how FTF’s Build Racial Equity Capacity (BREC) team has worked with philanthropic leaders, including: organizational racial equity capacity assessments, education to build capacity, the philanthropy-specific Racial Equity Roundtable cohort model, and key lessons from the pilot fund.

Activities will engage key components of BREC’s approach: building a network of radically collaborative leaders to grapple with next practices, and infusing racial equity principles and processes into organizational transformation plans.