Glen Galaich: Welcome to another edition of Break Fake Rules. It's our little show where we talk about the various practices that we can engage in, what we call the rules, the fake rules that prevent us from doing the best in social change. And today we are joined by a person making lifelong fake rule breaks. And not only are we joined by Julián Castro, we're joined by an entire audience here of people in Atlanta, Georgia at the National Center for Family Philanthropy Conference. And it's a conference that happens every two years and they were so nice to have us here, Nick Tedesco and the team. And what a place to do a conversation like this where in Georgia, I understand Julián, that Georgia may have some relevance in the next election.

Julián Castro: Oh, I have no doubt. Yeah, I bet the folks here are sick and tired of political ads.

Glen Galaich: They are tv, I'm sure

Julián Castro: They are staying away from their devices, all of that.

Glen Galaich: And let's talk about that if I'm right, you entered Congress at, what was it, 12 years old? Is that fair to say? You were mayor, city council, mayor at eight or something like that.

Julián Castro: It feels like that.

Glen Galaich: So you have been someone that has challenged political orthodoxy right out of the shoot. So tell us a little bit about that. When you looked out at social change for you, why did you look at what most people would say is something you do later in life and say, I'm going to do it now?

Julián Castro: Yeah, it's funny when you were talking about breaking fake rules, and that's one of the first things I thought about in the context of when I ran for office is you always hear basically wait your turn and that it's an older person's kind of game. And I ran at 26 years old. At that time I got elected as the youngest city council member in modern San Antonio history. But I had some inspiration. My mom, who was a Mexican-American civil rights activist, had run when she was 23 for city council and she lost. It was very difficult for women and people of color to win to change that, but it was kind in my blood too. So it was sort of breaking a rule for the general population, but maybe within my family, that was the rule. You got to run early. Wow.

Glen Galaich: So when you made this decision, when you go into politics at that age, what are some things you ran into right away that you said, we have to push past this?

Julián Castro: I think you see the influence of money in politics also navigating my own career. At that time, my brother Joaquin and I were twins. We basically walked through the world together. We went to Stanford together, we went to law school together, went to the same law firm, and then I got elected to city council about a year after I got back and I was doing both. I negotiated with the firm to get less salary to be able to serve on the city council. But a few months after I got on the council, they had a client that had a land deal before the city council that environmental activists were very concerned, might pose a threat to the underground aquifer that is the primary source of water for San Antonio. And I wanted to vote against the client's deal because it needed council approval

Glen Galaich: Really.

Julián Castro: So I was facing basically you want to keep your job, which job do you want to keep the job that I

Glen Galaich: Think what they call this, I may be wrong, but it sounds like conflict of interest

Julian Castro: Just a little bit.

Glen Galaich: Am I right? Just a little bit.

Julián Castro: Yeah. Well, one job was paying a hundred thousand dollars back then, and the other job on the city council was paying $20 a week. The most that you could make was $1,040 a year under the charter. But I wanted to vote against their deal. And so one day in January of 2002, I walked into the law firm and I quit my job. And then I went on and voted against their deal and my house went into foreclosure. I almost lost it. Literally got mail that said it was going to be on the list of properties at the courthouse and scrambled to get money with my mother and my brother and was able to save it. And my brother and I started our own little law firm. But I mean navigating that part of it, and I think when I think about the rules, one rule is basically you're put in this mode where you're supposed to be the good boy or good girl in politics,

That you're on a rise and just do things the right way in quotes. And I was proud at that point in my career that I was willing to take that risk to say, no, I'm going to go with my conscience and I'm going to go with what I think the people that I'm representing want and need and be a representative for them and risk that it was also, thinking back on it, I could only have done that at the age of 27. I had bought a car, bought a house, and I had student loan payments of 900 or a thousand. But I didn't have a family to support. I didn't have kids. I didn't have all of these things that make that decision even more difficult later on in life. I mean, that's an extraordinary story. That's my youth actually helped.

Glen Galaich: And so something we talked about this week while we've been at the conference, a topic that's come up, well, I guess it may be my fault, but we talked a lot about control and what you just described was a situation of control. I mean, being the good boy is a control. And so what does it take to buck that?

Julián Castro: I've thought about that in the years since then. It made it easier, my stage in life. But also I think you have to have a belief in yourself and a belief that things will turn out well, whether that's translated as faith in God or faith in something, but a belief that, okay, this is a big risk, but I think it's the right thing to do. And I think things are still going to work out.

Glen Galaich: I mean, it's such a classic case of what we think about here on the show. I mean, it's a one person in a unique situation, but you put yourself in that unique situation and you face down what I think I'm going to generalize here, but I would imagine most politicians would've found a way to justify a vote in favor. So that was essentially momentum created by a series of fake rules that people were following. You broke that. That takes a lot of courage.

Julián Castro: I mean, when you're going through it, you feel like, well, I guess I didn't see the perspective of it as much as I do now, but now having lived more of life and having more stakes with a family and where I'm at, yeah, I mean, I think where, but I'm proud that I made that decision.

Glen Galaich: So let's go forward into what I think is probably one of your most interesting courageous moves. Currently, you were a candidate for the White House, you were running an entire department, and now you've taken the most courageous step of your life into the world of philanthropy. Yeah, that's right. Welcome aboard. Whole new

Julián Castro: World. Different world with both a lot of charms and a lot of things that make you scratch your head.

Glen Galaich: Well, and we appreciate having you come into it and come with a fresh look. And so tell us a little bit about what you're doing now.

Julián Castro: Well, I went into public service growing up in a household with my mom. She had been an activist, and my brother and I were raised with this sense that you should use part of your talent and your effort, your time to try and help other people. And for me, public service was the first way that I did that on city council as mayor at hud. And I just see this as a different way to do it. It definitely is distinct from public service, but ultimately I see the result of the work as being very similar. I mean the Latino Community Foundation investing in hundreds of Latina and Latino led organizations or serving organizations over the years and all the good work that those organizations are doing out there in community, it makes a difference. And so I see these roles as similar in that way.

Glen Galaich: And so when you are approaching donors, and it's something we talk about a lot around here, what's the value? What's the advantage to getting them to come into partnership with an intermediary in this case? So an entity that is going to raise money and then re-grant it out to a community. What's the advantage to them to going with Latino Community Foundation than say their local community foundation?

Julián Castro: Yeah, I think that the track record of LCF has been that it's very close to the ground. One of the things that I've been most delighted by as I've traveled to the Central Valley of California, we were in the Imperial Valley and the Inland Empire. These places that are not as invested in the state

Is that time. And again, the nonprofit leaders would say that their relationship with the Latino Community Foundation was different. That the LCF folks would show up at their events, that they would help them in planning, that they would help them get media for their events, that they would go the extra mile of sharing on Instagram story, their events. And so the relationships that have been forged, maybe it's because a lot of those Latina and Latino led organizations, they haven't been getting traditionally a lot of dollars from big philanthropy. And so they love the friendship and they really cement a bond with our team at LCF, but that's the value. It's an organization whose team is in community, who has those relationships, knows absolutely who's doing good work, where the needs are, and that's the value of the intermediary relationship. And that part of it lend to me, when I came in as CEO, that was the part of it that gave me the most pause because coming from government, you're used to putting the dollars generally into those nonprofits directly or another governmental unit or whatever. And so I had this, what basically, just to be blunt, how do I sell essentially the idea of being an intermediary?

And then I actually had the chance to go out there and see it and see the relationships and see the difference that it makes, and also understand on the other side, whether it's a family foundation or other institutions, a lot of times folks don't have the staff to go and be on the ground and understand or keep track of what's happening out there. And interestingly enough, this year, one of the things that we're doing to keep that culture of being in community is that we're setting a goal for our team members to spend a certain number of hours every month in community, whether it's at an organization's event or helping them plan or in some other way being rooted with them. Yeah, I'm excited about that.

Glen Galaich: And that's kind of a shift too, speaking for a family foundation. When Joyce Stupski was alive, she used to come into the office and say, boy, there are a lot of you in the office today. Why aren't you out? Why aren't you out there? Why are you in front of your computers? We talk a lot in the private foundation world about community. It's a big word. It's a big loaded word, and it's a big challenge to figure out who is community, who should we talk to? From what you're telling me, there may be some rules in there, some fake ones that prevent people from getting out there. And maybe the one is just simply walk out your door and go be in community.

Julián Castro: Of course, for all of us in the new reality after COVID with remote work at one time, it was very easy to just spend all your time in the office. Now, in some ways, it's very easy to just spend all your time at home or at the coffee shop if you do your zooms there and people have family obligations. So you're doing that and then you go take care of the family obligation.

Glen Galaich: Actually, I've told Claire many times, who's a producer of the show, if it weren't for this show, I probably wouldn't wear pants today.

Julián Castro: There you go. You're probably not alone out there in the world.

But yeah, either way, what can get missing lost in the shuffle is that direct connection with people and with the work of those organizations that are impacting the community. And that's what we want to make sure that we never lose at LCF is that connection. We administer 17 giving circles. We're trying to cultivate the largest network of Latina and Latino philanthropists out there. And that also is something that keeps us rooted among people all the time in person giving circles, not virtual.

Glen Galaich: So there's a statistic underlying all of this, which is how much of philanthropic capital goes to the Latino community? I think it's under 2%. Yeah, I believe it's even closer to 1%. Yeah. So what's happening there? What's going on and how do you guys break that?

Julián Castro: Well, we're not waiting. That's the idea behind these giving circles is to cultivate a generation of Latinas and Latinos that themselves are philanthropists, and also to kind of buck notion or the stigma sometimes that the community has as not a giving community. They absolutely are, whether it's at church or in their family or in other ways. But through these giving circles, one of the strong messages that we want to send is it's happening. They're getting stronger, people are giving, and hopefully that also helps inspire more giving because many of those organizations that they help seed are organizations then that are able to grow, to start to scale, and to get philanthropic dollars or investment from bigger philanthropy. So we feel like that's one way that we're doing it. Also, helping to launch these organizations.

Glen Galaich: I'm always struck at this time of year, I'm sure everybody in this room has the same experience. We start really focusing in on demographics in this time of a presidential cycle. If the Latino community, Latino community comes out in this state that could affect this, we start talking a lot about these communities, different identities showing up in different ways, and then we stop after the election's over. Going back to the start of our conversation, you're coming in from a political environment where I'm sure you were in the room all the time, slicing and dicing data. How does an organization like yours keep the Latino community front and center all the time so that it's not just a tactic for cyclical movement building or get out the vote operations?

Julián Castro: Yeah, it's a great question because we do invest in organizations that are doing civic engagement and trying to educate and mobilize voters in a 501(c)3 way. So some of it is focused on, Hey, the election is coming, people need to get out, get mobilized. But we also, because we're a community foundation, we're able to do advocacy for instance. And so there's a consistent voice on that. We do polling not only around the elections, but actually off cycle too. And not just candidate polling, but we just did a poll, for instance, a California statewide poll that delved into issues related to housing policy and AI policy, what the community believes about that. And so in those different ways, we continue to make the opinions, the perspectives of the community known, including to elected officials.

Glen Galaich: And so let me switch gears on another topic that came up for me as I was listening to you there. You just said a moment ago that you made a lot of investments straight into nonprofit organizations out of government. Government is not known for being a great partner when it comes to control and rules.

Julián Castro: Well, they want to control everything.

Glen Galaich: Okay. So how do you compare the environment you used to oversee to the environment you now oversee? What did you learn from before in terms of engagement with community, community organizations? What worked then? And then what do you see that you can bring from that environment or change from that environment as you come into philanthropy?

Julián Castro: I think one of the insights that I have from having served in government was just the role that philanthropy can play where I saw gaps in shortcomings in government. One of the things that fascinates me now that I have this role is that when I was a city councilman when I was mayor, I can count on one hand the number of times that anybody from philanthropy approached me just to ask, Hey, I am like, what are y'all working? Where are the areas do you think? Why do

Glen Galaich: You think that is?

Julián Castro: Do you think we're afraid of you? This is one of the rules in philanthropy almost, and this is not unique to the sector of philanthropy, but people see politics as kind of dirty and unpredictable, and you don't want to roll the dice basically, that you're going to talk to somebody and they have some ulterior motive in. And we've all seen people that do in political, I'm not saying that that perception is completely unwarranted, right? But I think also that there are a lot of above board elected officials at the local level, the state level, and the federal level. And one of the things I wish that our sector would do more of is to figure out, okay, directly with those, how can you work together? If somebody is doing an education initiative or doing housing initiatives, it happens. I know, but I think it doesn't happen nearly enough. And I think that philanthropy in that indirect way could actually end up influencing the budgeting of especially local city councils and county commissions or county boards in the country if they were more engaged like that.

Glen Galaich: So you just referenced the fact that politics has a reputation for dirty money for bad actors. And as much as we in the philanthropic sector would like to think that we are pure of heart, we are very unrolling giving lovely people, it turns out that there may be some of that in philanthropy as well. So how do you look upon that or have you seen it yet? And more importantly, how do you see working with that at LCF?

Julián Castro: Well, for us, I think it's important that we understand the needs of the community through the eyes of the community and through the input of the community. And so that it's not just our vision of what needs to get funded and needs to happen in a community. And I learned that early on when I was mayor of San Antonio, soon after I got elected, I launched this process called SA 2020, which was aimed at bringing people from across the city together and setting a vision for the city. Because one of the rules in politics is the vision belongs to the politician. You think about a president. But there have been instances in local communities where they set a community vision. So I tried to translate that to now, and how do we take the input, use our convening power, take the input, be able to come up with a community vision that LCF is pursuing?

Glen Galaich: So lemme go back to that question a little bit. I'm going to put you on the spot here. Maybe it's a preparation for something that could come up in your life here in the future. Can you envision a time where you might challenge a donor who shows up with questions and an agenda you're not comfortable with? Boy, I just heard a story the other day is that someone rejected a grant because they really felt that it pushed them way off mission.

Julián Castro: Yeah, we can, I mean, we put our dollars into civic engagement and economic justice and opportunity. And I think that there's a discipline that you need to have that already. In just the nine months that I've been in this role, I can see there's a tendency to chase money and to then build your team and your infrastructure around that. And pretty soon you can get way off course from what your original mission was.

Glen Galaich: There's a famous phrase for it. They call it the mission creep.

Julián Castro: Yeah, there you go.

And so the answer to that is it's a powerful thing. Yes. And I think you do that in a couple ways, right? I mean, it's that you're not necessarily pursuing those opportunities. You're pursuing the opportunities that are in line with your mission. And it's still for us, we have one foot in the world of just traditional philanthropy giving money out, and then the other world if fundraising. So that can be kind of a whiplash effect, too. On the one hand, you have people that are laughing a little bit louder at your jokes because you might give them money from the foundation. Is that why they do that? To me, damnit, I thought it was funny. And then on the other hand, you're the one laughing a little bit louder in people's jokes because you have to fundraise very true statement. And you're thinking in terms of your question on both of those ends, how do you stay true to your values and the mission that you've set out? Because just like you could go and fundraise and start going in a direction that it really shouldn't be your priority, you can do the same thing on the other end too and start giving dollars out. Because we've started getting requests.

Glen Galaich: Of course.

Julián Castro: People found out that I was at LCF and then all of a sudden getting calls for this request and that request, and probably 40% of those requests are in line with what we fund, and the other 60% they're not. So there can be a or a temptation to Oh yeah, but this is okay this time. So we kind of have to be vigilant on both ends. So

Glen Galaich: That's really an interesting place to be. So I just want to ask you, I mean, this has been really in a short period here, we've covered an amazing part of your life and you really are someone that I really respect for just the story you've told and how you've lived your life and you are uniquely doing something that we really feature here on this show. People that fake rules, that those fake rules ultimately are why we have systems we have that may not be functioning effectively. And all through this conversation, you've been pointing to various moments where you've done it. So for people out there that watch this show, what's one thing you would share with people about how to be a fake rule breaker?

Julián Castro: I'd say always keep a little bit of a contrarian in yourself. All of us have that part of us that is questions. And I don't know if it's something from childhood or whatever it is,

Glen Galaich: A mother who ran for office at 23.

Julián Castro: Something. And some people probably have it more strongly, I'm sure, than others, but everybody I think I've found at some level has that contrarian voice and harness that voice and don't let it overwhelm you but know how to use it. And I think especially when you come upon like I've come upon this year a new experience in a new sector that I'm just learning about and love getting feedback and guidance. There have been several people already who have been wonderful, including my predecessor, Jacqueline Martinez Garel, and also Carmen Rojas. I'm on the board of the Marguerite Casey Foundation, and she's a Bay Area alum there from Workers' Lab. And both of them are doing great work. But I think keeping that contrarian voice to ask questions, why do we have to do it this way? Or why can we do it differently?

Glen Galaich: When you hear in your head the answer, the direction you need to go, what gets you to go over the line

Julián Castro: If I feel something is right? And also, I mean, just at a practical level, can you marshal the support of others to do it right? I mean, many of us are dealing with a board. Now we're talking mechanically. You're dealing with a board. I've already talked to a number of people in this sector. They would love to fund this or that or whatever. But my board, who you love, you love your board. Yes. No, I have a great board. I say that with that, but I really do a very, very supportive board. We all say the same thing. And I always tell, in fact, I tell Carmen all the time, Carmen, you're in a wonderful position because Carmen is an innovator in the field and really trying to press forward. And she has a board that is very supportive of her.

Glen Galaich: And a very unique board.

Julián Castro: Carmen, actually I do.

Glen Galaich: So people know they can look back and they'll see. Carmen was on the show earlier in the year and talked about some of this, how she works with you and how she works with the board. So let me ask you this, if there is one rule, one fake rule out there that you think we should all think about breaking that you've seen through your life, because again, you are one of our top fake rule breakers out there, what would that be?

Julián Castro: You don't have a place. You can make your own place and also let people have the chance to have different places. I think in our society and in this sector, we assume this role with this power dynamic of our place is we're in charge. We're giving the money out. There's this power dynamic. I think it helps to be able to get into different places to try and understand the perspective of the community that we serve, and to humble ourselves in a way to them in that way to switch places. We have to find a way in the sector to break down the dynamic of power that I think has created this gulf between us and oftentimes who gets funded and figure out a way to root it more in the community. And so if any of that makes sense.

Glen Galaich: It makes a lot of sense. And I think what you just did speaks to what it takes to do it. Alright, so as we're wrapping up here, I feel you are a political expert. So what's at stake in this election as you see it?

Julián Castro: I think democracy as we know it, and to a lot of people, that may sound like hyperbole, but I think that the events of the last few years bear out that that's true. I think we have the choice of whether we're going to continue to be the kind of democracy that respects institutions and continues to build a multiracial democracy that reflects the reality, the demographics of the America that we live in today or we're going to go backward. And so there's a lot at stake. And at the Latino Community Foundation, we don't support a candidate or a party, but we do support the community being well-informed about issues, about candidates and exercising their right to vote. And that's what I hope the most is what I want to read in the days after the election is not that the Latino community didn't turn out. I want to read that people went to the polls, that they exercised their right to vote, and whatever happens that they made their voice heard.

Glen Galaich: Well, thank you so much for joining us on Break Fake Rules. It's just wonderful to have you in the sector. I know we'll see you around and I'm really looking forward to that. So I just want to celebrate you and thank you so much for coming to the show.

Julián Castro: Thank you, Glen.

Glen Galaich: And thank you for joining us on another episode of Break Fake Rules. Get out there and make space and places for others. We'll see you next time. Thank you for tuning into Break Fake Rules. This show is brought to you by the Stupski Foundation, where we are returning all our resources to the communities we call home in Hawaiʻi and the San Francisco Bay Area by 2029. Our producer extraordinaire is Claire Callahan. The show is mixed and edited by Patrick Childers of Odd Conduit Media. Special thanks to our videographers and visual production team who fly from all over the world to be a part of this. Steve Johnson and Brook Van Dam of See Boundless. Subscribe to the Stupski Foundation YouTube channel to watch videos of each episode. You can find us on YouTube by searching Stupski Foundation. We hope these conversations don't end here. So join the conversation with me on LinkedIn.

Glen Galaich:

Welcome to another exciting edition of Break Fake Rules. This is our little show where we talk about how fake rules exist in our society, and if you break them, you might make the world a better place. And I am delighted to be joined today by one of the rare rule breakers in the donor world. Jennifer, Risher. Thank you for joining us.

Jennifer Risher:

It's great to be here.

Glen Galaich:

Yeah, I'm really glad you can because what I really appreciate about the work you do is that you are going right at some key fake rules that have prevented capital from moving, charitable capital from moving. And I really want to talk about that today and spend some time on it. And let's start right there. What motivates you to do something that I doubt many donors think about at all? You have a donor-advised fund, so we need to explain what that is. And you actually choose to move money out of it, which is earth shattering because most donors, and number two, not only do you move money out of it, you want others to do the same and you incentivize 'em to do it. That's wild. I'm on the floor here. What's going on with you?

Jennifer Risher:

Well, I didn't know it was wild. I am actually a rule follower in my life, so I walked into all this without knowing the rules, and I think that helped.

Glen Galaich:

Is that right?

Jennifer Risher:

So yeah, when I started, and you're referring to HALFMYDAF, when we started that it was all about an emotional response. It was very human. And as a donor, I wasn't thinking about myself even as a donor, I was thinking about myself as an individual person in the middle of COVID at a time when there's more uncertainty than ever. Who knew? I mean, it was like March, April of 2020 and my husband and I were sitting in our backyard and we're like, what can we do? My husband ran a nonprofit, so he felt it from the nonprofit side. The funding was drying up and our hearts were going out to nonprofits, and we were looking at all the need, and we're like, what can we do? And I was already doubling down on places I already gave and accelerating those three year gifts, but we could do more. So we discussed what to do. Should we just give to nonprofits? What do we do? And we had our eye on the money sitting in DAFs.

Glen Galaich:

Okay, so let me stop you right there. What is a DAF? This sounds, this is one of these, this is screaming philanthropy jargon moments. So let's break that open. What does DAF stand for? What is it?

Jennifer Risher:

What is it? It's a donor advised fund.

It's a charitable vehicle that allows people to give and give more easily and help organizing their giving because they can put money into one of these vehicles, a DAF, and they get their tax break up front. So you get your tax break, your money sitting there, it's charitable dollars sitting in your DAF, and then you can give it out over time. And people have said it's like a charitable checking account. You can just write checks from this account. It's a great idea and it does make giving easier, but what's happening is people are not taking that next step. They get their tax break and then they're not moving the money through. And so when we were looking at the money sitting in DAFs in 2020, it was $120 billion. That's public money sitting. So the DAF sponsor, the person who's holding these DAFs is essentially considered a charity. So where am I giving that my money when I give to a DAF? I'm giving to

Glen Galaich:

A struggling organization like Vanguard.

Jennifer Risher:

Exactly.

Glen Galaich:

Or Fidelity Mutual.

Jennifer Risher:

Exactly. Or Schwab, some of these larger organizations or to a community foundation. And these sponsors are seen as nonprofits. In fact, there's an article written that Fidelity is the nation's largest charity. Silicon Valley Foundation

Glen Galaich:

It just kind of blows you backwards, right?

Jennifer Risher:

Yes. Because they're holding DAFs and what are they doing? They're holding the money and they're keeping the money sitting. I didn't realize this until when we started half my DAF. I was like, well, let's partner with Fidelity and get this money moving quickly or not quick enough. But I recognize that the system is set up so that the money actually doesn't move because the incentives aren't aligned with moving the money.

Glen Galaich:

So let's go to it. Is it in fact a rule that the money should sit there and never move?

Jennifer Risher:

It is not a rule. Well, I think the rule that I want to say is, or it's like the structure that is saying that a DAF is a charity, shouldn't be. Because I think too many people think, oh, I'm going to open a DAF. And just by opening the DAF, I'm being charitable. Yes, you have charitable intentions and you're earmarking that money for charity, but you're not charitable until you put that money to work somewhere helping solve a problem or fulfilling a need or working on something that's on the ground.

Glen Galaich:

Absolutely. So how do you feel about money just sitting in an intermediary space before it goes out?

Jennifer Risher:

I hate it. I mean, it's very problematic, but I don't blame donors. I don't blame individual donors. I blame a system that is set up to keep that money sitting. And also a lot of systems that are working alongside the DAF system, the whole wealth management system contributes to the way things are moving or not moving.

Glen Galaich:

And so let's go back to you sitting in your backyard. You were holding this DAF, you're concerned about COVID, and you make a big decision. What do you decide to do?

Jennifer Risher:

Well, we come up with the idea of we can give, but we can also inspire others to do the same. And so that would amplify the giving. So we came up with the idea of addressing DAFs and addressing DAF donors and inspiring them to give and to give now. So we came up with the idea of HALFMYDAF. We created a website. We started talking to people. We launched in May of 2020, the beginning of May, and told people, commit to spending down half of the money in your DAF and anywhere you give will be eligible for a match from us. We put up a million dollars of our own money in the form of matching grants.

We said, give wherever you want. We wanted to inspire that movement. And we said, no hate speech, no gun violence, but you choose. So it was very exciting. So first of all, I was working with my husband, which was really fun.

Glen Galaich:

That's great.

Jennifer Risher:

And we got a lot of press, and this is where I really entered philanthropy. I didn't even know that this philanthropy ecosystem existed.

Glen Galaich:

That's surprising. It was such a sophisticated move.

Jennifer Risher:

Well, that's what really surprised me. I was like, wait a second. Why are we in the Washington Post and in Bloomberg, and are we the most creative things going on in philanthropy? This is a problem. This is a real problem. And as I learned more about how the whole system works, and we ran a webinar for community foundations to help them move their donors and tell their donors about the opportunity for matches. And we got a lot of pushback. We got a lot of scarcity mindset. At a moment of COVID, there was a worry about, well, what if there's an earthquake or a fire? And people didn't jump on board, which was a really big red flag to me, what's going on in this space? We talked to people at Fidelity and at Schwab and at Vanguard. They all loved the idea, but none of them promoted it.

Glen Galaich:

No one promoted the idea.

Jennifer Risher:

No. So this is where I kind of started to run up against rules that I felt like, why is this the way it is? When we started, our intention was to move money and to get money moving at a time of need. We hadn't planned to do more than that until what we were doing had such an impact and created so much buzz and moved money. We moved $8.6 million in five months that year, and we got so much amazing feedback from nonprofits and from donors saying, wow, this is the nudge I needed. This is getting me to talk to my adult kids and talk about our values and talk about where we want to give. It's opening conversations. And people started to say, well, when you do this next year, and we hadn't really planned to do it again. I mean, this was a one time a reaction. But the more I learned, the more I realized how important it was to do what we were doing.

Glen Galaich:

Do you think people needed the match once they were learning about how charity works?

Jennifer Risher:

It's such a simple concept and it's so powerful for donors. I mean, there's so much excitement. It was sort of like winning the lottery. When we announced our matches. We could see donors going to the website and looking to see if the organization they supported got a match. And they'd write us, oh my gosh, two of our organizations got matches. Thank you so much. I mean, it was really exciting. People loved it. And of course the nonprofits loved it. And what we realized when we first started talking to nonprofits about what we were doing, there was a whole kind of question of like, well, can we really ask donors? Can we ask donors if they have a donor-advised fund? Can we talk to? There was a lot of tiptoeing around donors, which I also thought that's strange. And then I learned about this power dynamic. And obviously the more I got into it, the more I'd say I learned that there were so many rules that were questionable, and I wondered why the structure was the way it was.

Glen Galaich:

Well, let's unpack that a little bit. In your conversations with grantees as a donor who I'm sure is seen as a much safer person to talk to, obviously they're telling you or asking you, can I actually talk to donors? What do you think grantees are experiencing out there when it comes to their engagement with donors?

Jennifer Risher:

I'm hoping it's changing, but I think there's a lot of fear of donors or fear of donors retracting their money. I mean, I love the fact that philanthropy is sort of moving more towards partnership, more towards relationship.

A recognition that people who are closest to the problem understand the problem best and probably can come up with a solution that's better than anyone else can figure out. And the equalizing, and I think even elevation of the grantee of the nonprofit because they're the ones doing the work. They're the ones dedicating their lives to solving a problem or to fulfilling a need. And I think donors are completely secondary. And they should be seen as the donors should be begging nonprofits to be part of the equation and hoping that they will accept a donation because the real work's getting done on the ground with people who are closest to the problems.

Glen Galaich:

That's amazing. I mean, that would require, and I hope it happens, and I hope this conversation gets around enough that it will happen of a mindset shift that is so necessary here, don't you think?

Jennifer Risher:

It is completely necessary. And since I entered the world of philanthropy, I mean, first of all, that in and of itself is a fake rule because it's so often from a donor's perspective, seen as my philanthropy, some sort of carve out of my money, a small portion of my time or something that I have to do. It really needs to be part embodiment of who I am as a human being. And so the rule of my philanthropy, 2% of my brain power or is separate from my family, my work, my vacation time, what I care about, my values, it's like, no, all of that needs to be part of it needs to be so much more human.

Glen Galaich:

Well said, well said. Really well said. I mean, it's what we do in our lives. It's how we should be. It's about being.

Jennifer Risher:

About it's about walking through the world. I mean, when you look from what we hear of time, treasure, talent ties testimony, okay, how am I spending my time? I want to be spending my time in a way that's aligned with what I care about.

And I want to be using my treasure in ways that are aligned. And I mean, since I've woken up to this, it's not only thinking about philanthropy different, it's like thinking about my money differently. And this kind of came from my book, but it's also telling my story. Narrative makes a huge difference. Raising my voice, being in spaces where I say what I think is right, ties using my networks. I mean, this kind of gets to the anonymous donor or the donor who doesn't want to show what they're giving. It's like, no, you have to get out there and be seen and lead because that's where other people are going to see what's possible.

Glen Galaich:

Do you think because so many donors and frankly lots of other people, it's not just donors. I think when anybody understands what a private foundation or a donor-advised fund is, they still see it as the donor's money. Do you think that is a major factor in how some of these dynamics play out, these rules that we follow?

Jennifer Risher:

Well, I think it's a detail. I think a couple things you said, first of all, donor, I never think, walk around and think of myself as a donor. Again, this gets back to I'm a human being, walking through the world. I'm not a donor.

Glen Galaich:

Very good.

Jennifer Risher:

And please don't think of me that way. And a foundation, why do people open foundations? And this is part of the structure of what happens when wealth is created or wealth is handed down. The typical thing that happens is someone said, oh wow, I have a lot of wealth. What am I going to do with this thing? I've already spent what I want to spend? I want to put some aside because I want to be charitable, or I want to teach my kids, or I want to create a legacy that is kind of the structure that exists out in our world. That's not the way it has to be. That's not a rule. It is absolutely not a rule. You do not, because right now you open a foundation, there's some status there, and you can talk about it. It's a carve out. It makes it a little easier. Someone else is going to be doing the work. It's what people know. So there's other ways. There are many other ways of handling wealth and thinking about wealth that aren't being examined. A foundation is not an obvious thing, and I think now that donor-advised funds have become more and more popular, they're a lot easier to manage.

So that's one thing that's starting to happen is people are like, well, I won't open a foundation. I'll just open the daf. It's so much easier. So whether or not you think of it as your money, should it even exist in the first place? These ways of carving out money and setting it aside, is there another way to think about what to do with money that exists in this world because there's a lot more being created.

Shouldn't it be flowing out immediately? Should we be thinking about different ways of activating it now? Should we be thinking about ways to give people status and power around the money they move? I mean, one of the biggest,

Glen Galaich:

That's a fascinating concept.

Jennifer Risher:

One of the biggest rules I think is assets under management. And I hear it all the time. I hear it in my banking. I hear it in philanthropy, and one of the times I hear it most, I talk to a community foundation. The first thing they tell me is their assets under management. And what I want to hear is assets under movement. I want to hear how much money's been deployed, how much money's been put to work. I want that to be the benchmark of what people are proud of. So when I talk to someone and they say, yeah, I'm from X Foundation and I'm from X Community Foundation, whatever, and I move $200,000 a year, or I move $20 million a year, or I move a billion dollars a year. That's what needs to be the benchmark, not how much you're sitting on.

Glen Galaich:

That's outstanding. That's the, you're right.

Jennifer Risher:

It's not crazy and it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure this out or to see the problem. So I think you're really onto something with breaking rules because it's really breaking down the structures of the way things are always done.

Glen Galaich:

There's so many of 'em that set up the system. Let's take a second to talk, because an author, what did you write about? What's the story you tell?

Jennifer Risher:

I tell my story and I wrote a book called We Need to Talk: A Memoir About Wealth.

Glen Galaich:

What's the story for you?

Jennifer Risher:

So I got really lucky. I joined Microsoft when I was 25. I met my husband at the time. I got stock that was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. David's stock was worth millions. Six years after we met, we were married, we were about to have our first child, and David decided he wanted to take a job at, we were both still working at Microsoft at the time, but he's always been very interested in books and technology. And he found this small startup that was selling books on the internet. And so he joined Amazon as the 37th employee.

Glen Galaich:

How have they done?

Jennifer Risher:

They've done okay.

Glen Galaich:

Okay, alright.

Jennifer Risher:

And crazy. So we're in our early thirties and suddenly we have all this money, and that is a whole thing. I mean, it's like, of course amazing. I'm incredibly fortunate, but it's also complex and emotionally challenging. And I was like, okay, what are other people doing? And are other people struggling with the things that I'm thinking about? How am I going to keep from spoiling my kids and why are my parents looking at me differently? Are friends looking at me differently? How do I think about philanthropy? How do I think about my brother's resentment? And I just want to keep this hidden. And this is very, so I looked around for books. There were no books. There was the Millionaire Next Door, which was, I gravitated towards that, but it was no, there weren't enough human stories about what people were doing. I wanted to hear from peers.

So I actually ended up writing the book that I needed and wanted to read because while my story's very rare, it is completely not unique. And I have found that it's really found an audience. There is a group of people out there that have been incredibly fortunate, and I have gotten so much positive feedback from this audience saying, thank you so much. Thank you for acknowledging and validating what I'm feeling. Were you, in my head, I feel exactly the same way things you feel. So now I really feel like it's important to, here's a rule that exists. Don't talk about money, don't talk about having a lot of money that shouldn't exist. Because when you don't talk about something, when you keep it in the dark, when you hide it, what happens with things that are hidden and in the dark that creates shame and it creates a whole sense of this is bad, which then just doesn't allow you to address the reality.

Glen Galaich:

It's kind of like a self silencing, you cutting off a whole bunch of conversations that you could be helping that probably would be helpful to yourself and helpful to others.

Jennifer Risher:

Exactly. It's exhausting. It's not fruitful for you or for anyone around you. So I'm really hoping to help move people out of shame and guilt and silence because that's not serving them and it's not serving our communities. It's not serving our society and move them into examining their relationship. We all have a relationship with money. We all have a money story, and I think it's important for all of us to know our money stories. What did our mother think about money? What did our father think about it? What did we learn growing up about saving or about spending or about giving? If we are not aware of those messages, those very emotional reactions that live within us, we are on autopilot and we just react when we know why. We kind of clench at the idea of paying for parking in a lot or when we can override some of those feelings and change them. So we all have our triggers and our biases. And so I think if you're in a space that's dealing with money, you've got to understand the emotional piece of money because money is very, very emotional. And so I'm sharing my story as a way to explore that and help other people explore it and help people look at themselves, connect with their families. I mean families within families, people aren't talking about money. So it's really important as a first step in using your money with meaning and with purpose.

Glen Galaich:

You know, your perspective, your thoughts, your actions are so unique. HALFMYDAF is basically a spend down strategy in many ways. And the argument against a spend down strategy is don't give today because you need to be able to help tomorrow.

Jennifer Risher:

As you were talking, I am thinking that philanthropy is getting in the way of itself. I mean because donors, donors aren't thinking that way. Donors are. People remember. So when a donor is reacting, it's usually an emotional reaction they usually give to someone they know or a cause that they care about that touches their heart. And so the way philanthropy looks at these donors is really not helping philanthropy because if you approach people as people who have values, who have priorities in their lives and get to know them and tell them, we need money or we need your help and we need your partnership, people want community too. I mean, what drives happiness? It's our connections with other people and a sense of purpose. And so if you offer donors those things, they are going to step in. To me, it feels like all the structures created in the philanthropic space, these foundations with a lot of people and with a lot of administration and with a lot of strategy and a lot of thought. It's like, well, actually, if you've gone out on the street and talked to a person and said, we need some help, can you be part of this solution with us in community? You'll have people flocking to you. So I think you're getting in your own way.

Glen Galaich:

I hear you. So one thing I'm really struck by, as you talk about donors and you talk about the fact that they're human beings and they have emotions and they react to things, there's an argument being made out there by organizations like the Philanthropy Roundtable and the Council on Foundations that unless you provide significant tax breaks to Americans, generally speaking, but obviously the wealthier Americans benefit more, if you do not provide them tax breaks, you are taking away their freedom to give.

Jennifer Risher:

This is ridiculous. I think you said it and I said it. I'll say it again because I think people want to do the right thing. People want to be part of community. People want to, I mean, happiness, I mean, there's research that shows people get $20, they spend it on themselves, they achieve a certain amount of happiness, they spend it on someone else, and that happiness goes up. So giving to others makes us happy. And I could say that's true. I mean, I think the reason that people aren't moving money through the DAFs is they don't understand what's happening. I mean, we hear this, one of the reasons that it's not moving through, it's like, oh, I forgot I had a daf because the way the DAF got opened was a financial advisor said, this is a good year. Put money in a daf. You do it, and then you never hear about it again. No one ever reminds you. So I mean, what we're doing with HALFMYDAF,

Glen Galaich:

That's news. That's breaking news. I don't think I've heard anyone say that before.

Jennifer Risher:

Oh, it's a fact.

I mean, we're inserting a sense of urgency and a sense of inspiration into a system that isn't reminding donors. The other reason donors aren't giving is they're busy at work. It's sort of inertia, but they'll get to their philanthropy later. And this has come about, I think because we have this image, this old rule of like, oh, when do you do philanthropy? You do that thing when you're old, after.

Glen Galaich:

That's true.

Jennifer Risher:

Well, you know what, how are you going to build that muscle? How are you going to learn? This is a journey you're going to learn, you're going to grow. And the over intellectualization of philanthropy, things like effective altruism or you've got to make sure every dollar has those have destroyed the ability of a person to just enjoy and feel the joy of giving because there's a lot of fear that gets created. So that's another reason people aren't giving. It's like, well, I really want to give, but I'm scared of getting it wrong.

Glen Galaich:

Getting it wrong.

Jennifer Risher:

And people feel this is a real feeling that so many people have. So we need to reframe this and say, you can't get this wrong. If you are giving to an organization where people are spending their lives dedicated to something, you are not going to get this wrong.

Glen Galaich:

Yeah. Something I've always said to people is, you have problems that we have probably can't even put a quantity financially to the size of them, but let's say organizations that are working on these multi-trillion dollar problems on budgets of $150,000 a year, and you're worried if you give them any money that it may not have impact. My view is you could literally throw it out to 10 different organizations with your eyes closed and have impact because the deprivation is so high that any amount of capital going in is going to probably have a 10 x or a 20 x benefit. You have nothing to worry about. Just give the money.

Jennifer Risher:

Yeah, just do it. Just give, I think people could give a lot more than they think they can.

Glen Galaich:

Yeah, I agree. I agree. But let's just come back to one really important point, and that is, which is I'm really struck by the case you're making here, and I like your case, the case that some would say for the money sitting in DAFs and the need to push it out has to come through more of a regulatory body. It's time to force the dollars out of DAF. We've got to put a 5% minimum like we have with private foundations

Jennifer Risher:

Or something. Why start there? That's the wrong benchmark.

Glen Galaich:

10 or 20 or whatever it's going to be. And those same organizations I mentioned earlier are literally spending, I think they spent last year, $11 million to prevent any kind of regulation on donor-advised funds because they're worried that if people are forced to give them money, you're taking away their freedom.

Jennifer Risher:

The ACE Act, you're talking about Accelerate Charitable Efforts Act, which was in front of Congress that said that the DAF needed a 10% payout, or after 10 years needed to be fully paid out, which I think is a great start. Yes, lobbied by Fidelity and Silicon Valley Foundation who didn't want to see that money moving because they think about themselves as assets under management. This is a problem. Actually, when I think about, I'm just going to go for it because Silicon Valley Foundation, I just saw an article about that in Barron's, a lot of big names, a lot of big money. It's like this association with big names, big money, big power. Is that really a charitable organization?

Glen Galaich:

That's a fair question.

Jennifer Risher:

But back to the regulation of DAFs. Yeah, I think regulation is needed, and I think there's a number of ways to create change, and what we're doing is very grassroots. What I'd like to see happen is for donors to get educated in this donors to revolt, but also for nonprofits to step forward and we to approach this policy change again and lobby again for change.

Glen Galaich:

I would love to close on that point, however, we really like to ask the final question, which is, what's the one fake rule we have not talked about today that you think we need to address and break?

Jennifer Risher:

Well, I am totally leaning into the whole fake rule idea. And I think it's, when you say what one rule, I think it's like, again, looking at details in a system that really needs an overhaul so I can point to so many. And so I think it's really stepping way back, and I guess the one, since I am representing individual donors, it's like, okay, don't think of me as a donor. Think of me as a human being, as someone who has specific values, priorities, approach me as a partner, as someone who can help, who can support, who can be in relationship with you in solving a problem.

Glen Galaich:

Thank you so much, Jennifer, for coming by. I mean, this has been a truly inspiring and really interesting conversation, and I think it is in most part, due to the fact that you are willing to go into conversations that, I'm going to use the word, I'm sorry. Donors typically don't want to get into, and I know our audience really benefits from that. So thank you for coming on to break fake rules.

Jennifer Risher:

Thank you.

Glen Galaich:

And that is a wrap for another exciting edition of our little show, Break Fake Rules. Stay tuned. We still have another one left for you.

Next time on Break Fake Rules, get ready for another election of our lifetimes with political leader Julián Castro. You know him as a presidential candidate, former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and today he serves as the CEO of the Latino Community Foundation. Hear Julián's thoughts on the importance of investing in the civic and economic power of Latino Americans and philanthropy's role in protecting democracy.

Thank you for tuning into Break Fake Rules. This show is brought to you by the Stupski Foundation, where we are returning all our resources to the communities we call home in Hawaiʻi and the San Francisco Bay Area by 2029. Our producer extraordinaire is Claire Callahan. The show is mixed and edited by Patrick Childers of Odd Conduit Media. Special thanks to our videographers and visual production team who fly from all over the world to be a part of this. Steve Johnson and Brooke Van Dam of See Boundless. Subscribe to the Stupski Foundation YouTube channel to watch videos of each episode. You can find us on YouTube by searching Stupski Foundation. We hope these conversations don't end here, so join the conversation with me on LinkedIn.

Glen Galaich:

Welcome to another edition of Break Fake Rules. This is our little show and we are very delighted today to have you with us and to be here with my good friend Ryan Easterly of the WITH Foundation. Ryan, I have had the great opportunity of actually sitting in the boardroom with you and your board, really a dynamic board. You work at a foundation that funds primarily in disabilities. You have a board made up of people with disabilities, and you have an entire orientation toward advancing the field and providing greater support and empowerment to these communities. And I want to get into all of that, but I want to start at a place that I get asked about all the time about breaking fake rules. We are a spend down foundation here at the Stupski Foundation, and now you are a spend down foundation. Now, I believe you were there when the decision was made. So take us through it for a second, if you don't mind. How do you go from perpetuity to spend down and why?

Ryan Easterly:

Well, I would start by saying my brief synopsis of how does it feel to be around when that decision happens. It's a mixture of complexity and excitement. But as far as how it came to be, I think it's important to understand that with foundation was established in 2002 and its roots are as a family foundation, and I am not a family member, but when the foundation was established, it was intended to only exist for one generation, so 70 years.

So from the outset, they didn't have perpetuity in mind. But since that time in 2011, the board also began to focus directly on promoting comprehensive healthcare for adults with developmental disabilities rather than broadly disability. And it was also in that time that the board became very intentional in including people with lived experience of disability in the process. My first involvement with the foundation was as a board member and one of those community slots in 2015.

Glen Galaich:

So you started as a board member?

Ryan Easterly:

Yes.

Glen Galaich:

Interesting.

Ryan Easterly:

And so I think when I think about what led to the decision, I do give immense credit to the board itself and the bones of the board has constantly asking itself how can we be the best partner we can be? That combined with the family had had internal conversations about its future, its role within the foundation and how it saw itself. And there was some frank discussions about the family involvement that coupled with we've all experienced COVID-19 and especially as a healthcare funder, we understand how critical healthcare is, especially for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. So I would say that eventually led to a very frank discussion with the board to say, rather than exist for 70 years giving out 30 to $50,000 grants, what if we reexamine the overall lifespan of the foundation to enable ourselves, to enable our partners and our grantees to take some bigger swings at the challenges they're facing? And luckily, the board, it wasn't necessarily an easy conversation and it was also multiple conversations, but ultimately, again, the board is most interested in being a strong partner in the work. And so we did make the decision to ultimately sunset the foundation in five years. So at this point, that means sunset by the end of 2028, but in return, that enables us to make larger investments in our grantees and in partners and again, enable them to take some bigger swings at addressing the barriers that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities face when accessing healthcare.

Glen Galaich:

Okay, let me come back to that in just a second. People have told me at times that I say things that might upset some people, so this might upset some people. It won't upset you what I'm about to say. But a lot of family foundations see it as the mandate of the board to ensure that the foundation best solves, shares, invests in the family's needs, not the partner's needs. So you are already in this unique environment where you're working in a family foundation that's breaking a pretty big rule in the family foundation world, at least in my experience, Ryan, several families that I've seen, some I love dearly kind of make the foundation about them, not about the world in which they operate. You're already saying the environment was partners first, family, second, third or fourth.

What's going on there? Why did that happen?

Ryan Easterly:

And I too have those conversations with peers and usually the first question is, how do you have community member slots that is entirely due to Lynn O'Hara, our president and the family member who from the outset wanted to make a difference for people with disabilities, but also knew that she didn't have the lived experience and that there's value in having that lived experience. So I can take no credit. I do take credit in that that's how I became exposed to with foundation. But that is a privilege that with has and his history, that we didn't have to have those conversations to convince the donor family to have community member slots. They understood that from the outset and from my perspective, it's only strengthened the grant making, only strengthened the efforts of the foundation and help it better meet its mission.

Glen Galaich:

Okay. So you are validating a core tenant of this program, which is when you break a fake rule, something better happens on the other side, having a community spot, maybe several on a board has some kind of positive influence on your grant making. Huge fake rule. You're breaking there because normally we reserve 'em for the family and friends. Why does it make it better?

Ryan Easterly:

I would say it makes it better because there are ways in which people with lived experience can understand the issues, understand how multifaceted the issues are. In my own life, I identify as a black man with disabilities, both a parent and non apparent. I'm also a gay man who spent some time in the foster care system who grew up in the south. Those are several lenses I bring to how I inhabit space, how I exist in environments, how I tackle issues. I think every person brings their experiences to bear. And I would also point out that you touched on that it's important to not have just one. And I say amen to that. In the case of with foundation, not only do we have multiple board members who identify as people with disabilities, but we also have a self-advocate advisory committee that are comprised of adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. And I can tell you every day, every meeting, there are ways that they challenge and help me evolve my understanding of how we can better address the needs of adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. So even though I bring my own experiences to bear in the work and how we can address issues, having multiple perspectives and multiple individuals that bring their own, it only helps. The disability experience is also not a monolith.

In general, I can say I started my career in philanthropy. I was a young man, I was a young whipper sniper, the guy with fresh ideas. I am now the older man, a little bit more gray here, but unfortunately more often than not many of the rooms I walk into, there isn't that lived experience of disability in those rooms.

There isn't the same level of conversation that I would hope for, but many of the issues we discuss are the same. And that's why when I think about with journey, many of the barriers that adults with intellectual and developmental disability face as it relates to healthcare, they're not new. So that's why as a smaller foundation that we were making small and meaningful contributions and support for organizations. But to me the most effective way to partner with organizations is to put your organization in a position to enable organizations to take some big swings because obviously small investments wasn't cutting it. So at least from my perspective, we needed to do something to put ourselves in a position to be the strongest partner possible and enable organizations to do the hard work and the ways that they want to do it. Yeah.

Glen Galaich:

You've got a friend in me. Let's stay on this just for one second and then we'll move on to another topic. The traditional counterpoint to the spend down, which is, don't you want to be available for problems in the future?

Ryan Easterly:

I would say to me as a person with a disability, and especially as a healthcare organization, healthcare matters now. Lives matter now. And especially in covid, we know no one is promised tomorrow as it relates to people with disabilities. There's work that is literally making the difference between life and death, surviving and thriving, that needs to be supported. Now,

Glen Galaich:

What do you hope will happen with these grants?

Ryan Easterly:

So from my perspective, I hope for the grantees and partners that receive the larger investments, the strategic partnerships, that number one, they feel as though we were able to do what we wanted to do, not what with ask us to do, but what we wanted to do and the ways we wanted to do it. The second thing I hope to be able to see is that people with disabilities were involved in the implementation of the project. So not only as beneficiaries of the services, but also leading and advising on the work. Because at the end of the day, one of w wis core values is the leadership of the most impacted. So we hope to see many people with disabilities leading the work involving in the work and advising on the work.

Glen Galaich:

So knowing you're coming on the show, I've been thinking about a question for you, which I am really curious about because I actually, I should let everyone know. I know Lynn, the principal donor to not donor, I guess family member of with. And I remember when she said she was hiring you and she felt it very important that a man or woman with disabilities would come and run the program. She felt it was critical. So let me ask, I'll put it in our language here at this program. Is there a fake rule around hiring or not hiring people with disabilities to run programs, run organizations? Do you think there's one out there that lives in the minds of organizations that we need to break through?

Ryan Easterly:

Yes. Well, I think there are several.

Glen Galaich:

Well, I'm glad I asked.

Ryan Easterly:

I will start with that. There aren't qualified disabled professionals, fake rule, that are capable of working in philanthropy and in grant making. There are, I am not unusual, I am not special. I'm not particularly that shiny and great, trust me.

Glen Galaich:

I happen to think you're all those things.

Ryan Easterly:

But in actuality, there are many other Ryans, individuals that are doing and can do stunning things within grant making organizations. So I would start by saying, if you are a funder and you've told yourself I can't find qualified individuals with disabilities, number one, ask yourself internally, are you making sure that the environment you are working in is open and supportive of people feeling comfortable bringing their full selves? And then from there, I'd say reach out to your local center for Independent Living or your local university centers for excellence and disability and say, here are our jobs, or here are the folks we are looking to attract to work for us. There are qualified people in every community, in every state, in every county. There are qualified people. And then I know you haven't asked me, but another fake rule. I'd say break when it comes to hiring people with disabilities, again, when I started my career, I was a young man. I'm now a little bit older and I would like in my lifetime to also see the philanthropic sector. Not just hire people with disabilities for disability portfolios, but hire them for broader giving.

I have lots of life experience. I am honored and privileged to do what I do, and I love what I do because in my mind, if you can support people in getting the appropriate healthcare, it enables them to do many other things they want to do in their life and survive and thrive. But there are other aspects of my life and my professional career that would lend itself to other kinds of grant portfolios. So if you are a funder and you are thinking about having more people with disabilities involved in your organization and in decision making positions, please know that for me, one rule you should challenge yourself and one rule you should break is it doesn't have to be disability specific.

Glen Galaich:

Right, right. Well, I'm glad you said that. I was going to say, I asked the question and I was asking it, given your life experience, now I'm going to ask you a different question, a different topic, related topic, and that is one or one or two fake rules that are coming up consistently that really need to be broken to be an effective healthcare funder today.

Ryan Easterly:

That's a complex question

Glen Galaich:

I thought so.

Ryan Easterly:

I'm going to say from my perspective, I think first and foremost from the general healthcare funder perspective, it is understanding that you should look for programs that are led by disabled people that don't just have them as beneficiaries of care. But there are organizations, there are individuals out there doing the work that have the lived experience, that have the professional experience. I think of there's an organization called Doctors With Disabilities. Many people, they think about people with disabilities based off of their interactions with the healthcare system, not envisioning or understanding that there are medical professionals with disabilities. Again, there are organizations that are led by people with disabilities that should be supported, that should be funded.

Glen Galaich:

Alright, so let me throw another. I get this question all the time. They ask me, what are you going to do next? My answer is always, and it's sincere. I have no idea. I don't think about it. I'm just here in the now loving this job. What are you going to do next?

Ryan Easterly:

That is also a hard question for me because I never imagined this life for myself. I didn't grow up understanding foundations existed. It wasn't until I worked at a foundation that I realized that there were people whose job is to give money away. So I feel like my life has already been extraordinary in that there was a time where I worked for almost a decade at the coordinator, then program officer and various levels. And I would occasionally whisper to myself like, oh, one day I'd like to run a foundation. And I've done that. So I do think

Glen Galaich:

You've reached the don't tell me it's the top of the mountain for you. You've got something else out there.

Ryan Easterly:

It's not, but it's also, and I think many people, especially multi marginalized people, it's like, yes, I have dreams and I have hopes, but I also, there's not a roadmap.

Glen Galaich:

Yeah, for sure.

Ryan Easterly:

But I do know what I've promised myself is no matter what my future holds, I do want to continue to hold the door open for others to come through and others to enter philanthropy and work in philanthropy and lead and be in decision-making positions. So regardless of what my personal future holds, I do see that as something that I will always be committed to.

Glen Galaich:

So let's talk about your inspirations. Who's a rule breaker out there that you've been inspired by your life? There's no doubt if people don't know you already, if anyone watching this show will find great inspiration in your story, who is it for you?

Ryan Easterly:

I think for me, when I think about questions like that, it does come back to there are well-known people that of course we all look to. But I think in my own life, what continues to drive me are the people that may not be as well known but still broke rules. I think about my own journey. I had a resource teacher, Ms. Bowman, who she was one of the first people to be like, you can be a leader because the fact I'm having this sort of conversation with you and it's more public, even though hopefully I'm handling it,

Glen Galaich:

You're handling it.

Ryan Easterly:

It is not how I am wired. It is not how I view myself. But Ms. Bowman was one of the first to be like, no, you can be a leader. I've seen you do it. You're going to do it differently, but you're going to do it. And then I think about my vocational rehab counselor who I graduated with a college degree. I had run multiple organizations. I was kind of stellar in Alabama and I'd done a lot. And as I said, among those, I was the first ever former delegate that then became chief of staff for the leadership program.

I had been appointed to a commission by the governor. I was doing a lot of work. You're doing a lot of work. But I came back and the support that I got from voc rehab, they were sending me to jobs where one of my jobs would've been shredding paper. And although there is nothing wrong with retic paper for me and my journey and what I wanted, that wasn't ideal. And my vocational rehab counselor, Ms. Kennedy, she supported me in saying, Hey, we need to shake things up because we've invested a lot to help you graduate. You've also worked a lot. So we need to support you in getting a job that is more than shredding paper. And again,

Glen Galaich:

And this is after you've been a chief of staff?

Ryan Easterly:

Yes.

Glen Galaich:

Again, nothing against shredding paper. And you could have been a chief of staff who shredded paper. And my understanding is there's been some great scandals where chief of staffs have had to shred paper, but not for you.

Ryan Easterly:

Yes. And trust me, there is not much that is different about me. Now, that was the same person that had different people look and say, we know what job shredding paper. And there are people I know and that work with that there are talented people everywhere that they just need the opportunity. So as a funder, again, if you're telling yourself where are the qualified people? No, just reach out to organizations, reach out to people, they're there. The only difference between them and myself is that multiple times I had people break rules and open doors for me.

Glen Galaich:

Interesting.

Ryan Easterly:

For me, I also think Lynn in a way, broke a rule.

Glen Galaich:

She did. There's no doubt.

Ryan Easterly:

Because there was nothing necessarily in my background that says he's going to be a phenomenal executive director. I do think there was plenty to see that great program officer, awesome program officer, and I've been on my own journey. But she broke a rule and said, well, for one, I wish she was here, but she broke a rule in saying, this can be the person and we're also going to support him in ways that will enable me to thrive. And so I think, but there have been multiple people in my life that broke rules that enabled me to be who I am today. I hope that I myself continue to break rules to help others also achieve what they want in life.

Glen Galaich:

Alright, let's summarize this because we've covered a lot of ground here in very short order. Here's some of the rules you've broken. You've broken the perpetuity rule, you've broken the community seat rule that we covered earlier. And most important of all is you see it. You've brought it up several times during this interview. You've broken the rule about how people look for qualified people for their jobs. These are like three sacred rules that you've broken that have made a huge difference in with and in certainly your life. And kudos to all the people around you that did the same. Ryan, this has been a very inspiring time with you. I've had it a couple of times now. I've learned so much from you and I am confident that all of you have learned a great deal from Ryan as well. Thank you so much for coming on, and good luck with the remaining years of your spend down.

Ryan Easterly:

Thank you.

Glen Galaich:

And we will be back with another edition of Break Fake Rules. Thank you for joining us.

Next time on Break Fake Rules. You'll hear from Jennifer Risher, a philanthropist and author who wants donors to give away half their daf. That's charitable money that otherwise sits in donor-advised funds.

Jennifer Risher:

Donors should be begging nonprofits to be part of the equation and hoping that they will accept a donation because the real work's getting done on the ground with people who are closest to the problem.

Glen Galaich:

Thank you for tuning into Break Fake Rules. This show is brought to you by the Stupski Foundation where we are returning all our resources to the communities we call home in Hawaiʻi and the San Francisco Bay Area by 2029. Our producer extraordinaire is Claire Callahan. The show is mixed and edited by Patrick Childers of Odd Conduit Media. Special thanks to our videographers and visual production team who fly from all over the world to be a part of this. Steve Johnson and Brooke Van Dam of See Boundless. Subscribe to the Stupski Foundation YouTube channel to watch videos of each episode. You can find us on YouTube by searching Stpski Foundation. We hope these conversations don't end here. So join the conversation with me on LinkedIn.

Glen Galaich:

Welcome to an exciting edition of Break Fake Rules. I actually can't believe I'm saying this, but we are in front of a live audience right here. I mean, what an, it's incredible. This is like a dream coming true. So I want to jump right into it and quickly introduce our truly amazing guest, the incredible intellectual historian who's changed so many lives. Joining us today is Dr. Ibram Kendi. Thank you. And then I have to say just personally someone who has already in the short time, we have been friends, I think what a couple years now personally changed my life in many ways, just being with you. And that is Marcus Walton, the head of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. Thank you for being here. So we are live at Grantmakers for effective organizations in Los Angeles. The show has just ended for the conference, but Marcus has agreed to be with us here. So if he should fall asleep mid shoot, you'll know why. In case you've never put on a conference before, it's kind of exhausting. So welcome to our little show Break Fake Rules.

Marcus Walton:

Thank you.

Glen Galaich:

We're going to talk a little bit about the fake rules that stop us from doing things and how powerful it is when you break them and change the world or change even your day. It doesn't have to be the world, right? Just change the day. And I was just thinking, I've just gotten this great benefit over the last two days. I've had time with you, Dr. Kendi, and with you, Marcus, and had a chance to learn again from both of you. And I had all kinds of questions ready to go. But one thing that hit me this morning was I live a pretty big fake rule myself, which is when I think of philanthropy, I think of it in bits and pieces. I think of it in due diligence. I think of it in entrepreneurship. I think of it in donors, and I think about it in terrible donors and good donors, and that's where my head is. And after spending time with you guys, I realized that that's a huge fake rule I live in, that I'm missing something really important. And that is the real thing we're all in this for, which is what they say philanthropy means, a love of humanity.

And being with you. While I know the entry point oftentimes is through race at the end of the road, what you both get back to in conversation is the human part, the love of human, and how hard it is to break through all of that stuff, race, life categories, to just be humans doing our work together. I was hoping you might respond to what I've said because I learned it from you, Dr. Kendi, that fake rule I live in that you've helped me break in the last couple of days.

Dr. Ibram Kendi:

Well, it's interesting because I think racist ideas, and I would probably say sexist ideas, homophobic, transphobic, classist, ableist ideas, bigotry across different areas, not only prevents us from recognizing the full humanity of the other, but I think in being unable to recognize the full humanity of the other, we're actually not able to live in the full humanity of ourselves. Because I think it's that connection that I think allows us to be fully human. Because part of, to me being fully human is to recognize the fullness of humanity. And in recognizing the fullness of humanity, we recognize the diversity of humanity. We recognize the beauty of humanity, we recognize the entire human rainbow, and we see ourselves within that. But unfortunately, I think in many ways we're taught to not do that. And I think that's one of the things that has long plagued humanity, even from the ancient sort of world when sexism was rampant and certainly the modern world when racism emerged.

Glen Galaich:

And that encapsulation is what we've got to break through. I know you have thoughts on this.

Marcus Walton:

Five years ago or so, I was stumbling across this term of anti-racism after training and supporting foundations through racial equity training for about 10 years or so. And I was feeling a little frustrated because there's stages to that work. One is to make the case that it even matters.

And I spent multiple years just getting audience to say, no, look at what the data shows. That even when you look at all those other indicators and identities and categories of identity and communities, when you look at the analysis of race, there's a difference. And it's a predictable, we can predictably say the browner, the population, the worst off people are doing inside of those categories of identity. And that made me frustrated that I had to make the case for that. And then there was something that happened about four years that's shifted to not making the case, but what are examples of what people are doing? So we went from this may not even be true to, can you show me other examples of what other people are doing? Which seemed absurd. Where was the space for that to happen?

Where's the innovation space? And then you came along and offered, in my frustration a light, the light was that who I am is not contained inside of those categories of identity. You reminded me that how I was thinking about some of these things are actually social and political constructs that in many ways dehumanize me and separate me from other human beings and contribute to our collective dehumanization. And so you transformed my way of thinking about leadership, of practicing leadership and as offering leadership a different way to show up in leadership by our mere existence. Thank you.

Glen Galaich:

Thank you. So I think you both listed a whole slew of things, of rules, fake rules to break through. And you've mentioned construct. So I've been thinking about this a lot and I've been thinking about the construct, the social constructs that we live in. And I'm wondering, is race a fake rule?

Dr. Ibram Kendi:

So I mean, I think on many levels it is. I sort of argue that race is a power construct. It's specifically what's created by racist power. That race is the child of racism, not the parent as we're seeking to show. And the reason sort of race was created and constructed, to get even more specific, the reason why blackness was created and constructed in the 14 hundreds was to justify the enslavement of all these different peoples who had different skin colors, who had different cultures and spoke different languages from different parts of West Africa. And the Portuguese were really the first to begin exclusively trading in what we now understand as African people. And so their justification for why they were doing that had to change. Previous enslavers in the Mediterranean world made the case that they were enslaving people who were remote from civilization if the Mediterranean is civilization. And people in northern Europe or Eastern Europe or Sub-Saharan Africa were remote. So that was just sort of justification in the 13 and 12 hundreds. But when the Portuguese changed the score of script from enslaving people from what's now the Middle East, or people from Eastern Europe and people from Sub-Saharan Africa and started exclusively enslaving people from Africa, they had to create a new justification. And that new justification was built on the construction of race.

So it is been a fake rule from the beginning, but what's striking is almost like it it's a fake rule, but at the same time, because people consider it to be a real rule, it literally really impacts the lives

Marcus Walton:

It really does.

Dr. Ibram Kendi:

of people. So the solution isn't necessarily for us to say, oh, race doesn't exist, so let's just not identify by race, because then that will eliminate racism. Because then what that will actually eliminate is our ability to see racism.

Marcus Walton:

Yes, yes. And when you say that, I think about measure racism, quantify racism, the value of that, in my opinion and from my experience is once we name a thing, once we acknowledge the presence of a thing, it has boundaries. Now acknowledging that this is a thing and I can feel it, it has edges. So okay, there's parameters. Now I can start to connect with others who have engagement around other aspects of that thing. And we can get to work, we can tap into that collective genius. We can work together to start to dismantle and rearrange whatever that thing is in service of our shared vision.

Glen Galaich:

Again, thank you, man. I always am. So where you take us, what I was thinking right there, Marcus, as you were speaking, as we've been doing this show, I've had so many people in such a short time walk up to me and say, I really like what you're doing with that break fake rules thing. Actually you've made me think about, I haven't made you think about anything. You just saw the show. But they are saying in their heads, I think about what are the fake rules around me? What's come up for me? And I don't want this to sound, I'm not trying to sound grandiose with it. It's just a simple thought, really. I don't get much beyond that. But the thought is,

Marcus Walton:

Come on, let's stop that fake rule. Come on, man.

Glen Galaich:

The thought is,

Marcus Walton:

Yeah, I'm sick of that, Glen,

Glen Galaich:

Thank you, Marcus. I know. Bad, bad me, Glen. Now don't do that in front of Marcus. Okay. But in its most simple way, an instruction manual, it's a systems change. I think.

Marcus Walton:

I love it.

Glen Galaich:

I think. Systems are built on a series of relationships and rules that we flow into. The only way to break a system is to start to break down the channels. Now hopefully the ones that are working, you stay with them, but there's so many that are not. And you guys today have named probably 400, I'll come to you right now, Dr. Kendi, that's kind of a big question, but you handle big questions well.

Marcus Walton:

That's what you do.

Glen Galaich:

When you think of systems change, is it potentially as simple as in your every day thinking about those fake rules around you and breaking them down?

Dr. Ibram Kendi:

What's happening is there isn't just this system or even sort of structure that's excluding or including people harming or helping people, but we're also misled into believing that system or structure doesn't exist. And so I'm saying that to say that I do think that it is important for us to sort of recognize that and break that rule, but that's where ideology comes in, play into play. Because I think people are constantly consistently taught that it's not actually the structure that's causing black and indigenous people to be overrepresented in prisons or poverty. It's their own individual depravity. And so I think that's why it's hard for people to even recognize the rules to break because they're so soaked in these ideas that rules aren't even shaping their lives.

And I think that's why it can become sort of exhausting, because first you have to almost bring yourself out of this ocean of ideas. And then you think once you get to the top that you're free, but then you look up and you're like, oh my God. Now I see the structure that I have to now break down. So we're actually only starting the process when we sort of liberate ourselves from idea, from those ideas. And so I'm saying that to say I think we shouldn't necessarily become disillusioned because we spent so much energy and time trying to see the rules. We need to break because once we get to that point in which we could see it, there probably isn't any going back. Now. They're going to create new racist ideas to bring us back, but hopefully we will recognize those new ones as we did the old ones.

Glen Galaich:

Let's hold here for a second. You wrote an entire book for all of us on how to be an anti-racist. So for those of us that have not yet read it, we have people in the room here now with signed copies of it. Thank you, Dr. Kendi. Thank you.

Where do you go with your book? Where do you say to us, what's a key message you took us to the point where we see it and they're going to make us, they're going to stop us with more things. What do we do?

Dr. Ibram Kendi:

Well, I think first and foremost, in sort of striving and continuing and not being disillusioned and pushing to sort of disrupt and deconstruct, it has to be an affirmative practice. And studying the history of people being racist or even the history of racist ideas and policies, it becomes apparent that really every generation is self-identifying those ideas, self-identifying those policies, even personally, self-identifying as what we now call not racist. When you track the history of people who claim they're not racist, you're tracking the history of people who are actually being racist. But we currently have a conception that the opposite of racist is not racist, which to me is deeply ahistorical. When you actually look at the history, and not just the history, but even the present, a scenario in which no matter what a person does, no matter what a person says when they're challenged on being racist, their typical response is, no, no, I'm not racist. And some people will say they're the least racist person in the world after they said one of the most racist things in the world.

So I'm mentioning that because the current sort of binary is actually a fake rule. The binary between racist and not racist. And I mentioned binary because one of the ways in which the book and my work, particularly as it relates to anti-racism, has been critiqued, has been for people to say, oh, he's just introducing a binary. Last I checked, there was already a binary which was racist and not racist. And I'm just sort of replacing it with a new binary. And that is that the opposite of racist is actually being anti-racist. And while those who are being not racist are typically in denial, to be anti-racist actually is to acknowledge those times in which we were being racist. If to be racist is to think in terms of racial hierarchy. What's the opposite of racial hierarchy? Notions of racial equality. If racist policies are leading to racial inequity and injustice, there's a clear opposite to inequity and injustice, which is equity and justice, which we can sort of measure. But then I also think that the other aspect of that fake rule, which is sort of this contrast between racist and not racist, is that these are fixed identities, that these are terms that define who a person essentially is, which is why you have people saying, I am not a racist. I don't have a racist bone in my body. That's who I am. Because they think racist is also a term that defines who a person essentially is. And so I show in my work that actually the term anti-racist, like the term racist, are descriptive terms that describe what a person is being in any given moment based on what they're doing or saying or not doing.

Marcus Walton:

I love this guy. Take your time, man. Preach this thing.

Dr. Ibram Kendi:

The reason why this is important is because you have people who can imagine, for instance, that black people are inferior to them in a particular type of way, but could imagine that native folks are equal to them in that same way. So then how would you describe that person? You can't essentially say that they're racist or anti-racist, but what you can say is when they're equating themselves to native folks, they're being anti-racist. When they're imagining that they're superior to black folks, they're being racist. But this also allows people to change, to grow, to engage on something called a journey, which humans typically are always on.

Marcus Walton:

Yes. Yes, sir. Yes sir.

Glen Galaich:

So how do we bring anti-racism into funding? Marcus, you just had an entire conference and I'd say that this topic was alive in the conference.

Marcus Walton:

Yeah, I would say so, too.

Glen Galaich:

And I would add to it. A lot of conferences and a lot of meetings these days want to have this conversation. You are bringing an anti-racist lens to funding, I think. So tell me how you do that.

Marcus Walton:

Well, I think I feel uncomfortable receiving what you described literally as factual. And so I'm going to wrestle with the truth inside of what you offered as a possibility. That's what I would hope. Let me offer a few things. When I think about the cultural implications of institutional philanthropic giving, first and foremost, institutionalizing a thing that has existed within human relationships since the beginning of humanity. That is philanthropy dehumanizes it by definition. We instantly create structures that limit the fullest expression of love between humans. And so just starting from there, the geo way of being is to go back to the history. Let's start far enough upstream as philanthropy and not obsess over the strategies as if one strategy is going to be able to resolve a thing that's actually a complexity that's connected to overlapping systems of dehumanization. So we're shattering a few myths. One that I'll offer is that we can program our way into and through transformation. We will never be able to create a program that contributes to the full dismantling and reconstruction of our systems, of the structures that organize our activities as human beings. That is an act of our collective genius, and we are demonstrating how that works. Today, the group out here, a part of this podcast is contributing their energy. It's alive. There's a dynamism here.

And so the most effective philanthropy is not about efficiency, it's about effectiveness and efficiency doesn't equal effectiveness, which is another one of those breaking the rules because for so long, traditional philanthropy was about efficiency, but efficiency for whom, and ended up being efficiency for making sure we can get the dollars in, we can accumulate wealth at all of these measurable goals that we set for ourselves. And at no time over that last couple of articulations that I mentioned, the end recipient of those dollars, we weren't making the process easier for the folks that are doing the hard work. We were making it easier for ourselves. And so going upstream, inoculates us from falling into what I would call the equity trap. And the equity trap is about believing certain things that exist in the domain of diversity such as the browner, we make a thing, the more equitable it becomes. That is important. Diversity is necessary and insufficient for producing, for generating, for revealing the disruptive change, the transformative new normal that we all aspire to experience as thriving. That's right. And so our work is about our way of being that allows us to connect meaningfully, affirmatively with those individuals across the spectrum of proximity to bring forth our highest and most honorable expression of philanthropic practice.

Glen Galaich:

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Marcus Walton:

And thank you.

Glen Galaich:

So we usually wrap up the show with one final question. I don't know how you're going to answer this one, but I'm going to give it a shot. What is one final rule that you call on all of us, all us to break?

Marcus Walton:

I'm going to go so the last word is from our esteemed guest. The fake rule that I'll invite us all to consider is to dare to grapple with complexity as the new normal for transformative philanthropy. Maybe in our willingness to move through uncertainty together with care and tenderness and grace. And if it's not, it sounds like a damn good thing to try.

Glen Galaich:

Yeah. You make me think that way all the time. When I hear you speak, I love you. It's a damn good thing to try.

Dr. Ibram Kendi:

Yeah. I think for me, there was a time in my life when I saw myself to Du Bois through the eyes of others double consciousness, in which when I would sort of look at myself, I didn't see myself for myself, I sort of saw myself based on how I imagined other people saw me and sort of shape shifted and changed and improved myself based on sort of standards that other people had created. And so I would offer people to consider sort of breaking the rule of, for the lack of a better expression, sort of keeping on the glasses for us to literally take off those glasses. And those glasses are sort of societal standards, societal sort of conceptions of our particular group and assess ourselves based on standards that we for ourselves.

Marcus Walton:

Yes, sir.

Dr. Ibram Kendi:

And I just think that for each of us, it could just be so liberating. Now, there's a cost to that because if you are seeing yourself for yourself and you're interacting with other people who are seeing themselves from societal norms and they're expecting you to be and do the same, and then when you're not, that's right. There can be sort of tension there. But in a way, we have been taught that freedom is chaotic. So we've sort of ran back into slavery,

Marcus Walton:

Oh! The big lie.

Dr. Ibram Kendi:

And I don't think freedom is chaotic. Freedom is just uncertain.

Marcus Walton:

Yes, sir.

Dr. Ibram Kendi:

And I think it's possible for us to create new norms and standards for ourselves and create a certainty based on that individual conception, and then create a world where we are allowing people to see themselves for themselves. And I think that's when we would be able to create a truly free world.

Glen Galaich:

Well, I hate to say what I'm about to say, but we've got to wrap it up. Thank you both so much for what felt like two seconds, and I know it's a lifetime of what we've gotten today, so thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

And thank you for joining us in this great edition of Break Fake Rules. We'll see you again next time. Thank you. Thank you. Next time on Break Fake Rules hear from Ryan Easterly, executive director of the WITH Foundation, who shares why his foundation is joining the spend down movement to advance disability justice.

Ryan Easterly:

I would say to me, as a person with a disability, and especially as a healthcare organization, healthcare matters now, lives matter. Now, there's work that is literally making the difference between life and death, surviving and thriving, that needs to be supported now.

Glen Galaich:

Thank you for tuning in to Break Fake Rules. This show is brought to you by the Stupski Foundation, where we are returning all our resources to the communities we call home in Hawaiʻi and the San Francisco Bay Area by 2029. Our producer extraordinaire is Claire Callahan. The show is mixed and edited by Patrick Childers of Odd Conduit Media. Special thanks to our videographers and visual production team who fly from all over the world to be a part of this. Steve Johnson and Brooke Van Dam of See Boundless. Subscribe to the Stupski Foundation YouTube channel to watch videos of each episode. You can find us on YouTube by searching Stupski Foundation. We hope these conversations don't end here. So join the conversation with me on LinkedIn.

Glen Galaich:

Welcome to another edition of Break Fake Rules. I am delighted to be here with the new recipient of the FCCP Legacy Award. Much deserved, Ludovic Blain, thank you for joining us.

Ludovic Blain:

Thank you so much for having me. Really glad to be here.

Glen Galaich:

And one thing I want to say at the outset is that with Ludovic, this is a masterclass and how to do philanthropy and I wouldn't even call it philanthropy. It's really how you do social change and you do with a racial justice lens. So let's get started.

Ludovic Blain:

I'm psyched.

Glen Galaich:

I wanted to put up a disclaimer that you are a recipient of Stupski Foundation money proudly, in my opinion, I hope you feel the same way.

Ludovic Blain:

And proudly as a recipient.

Glen Galaich:

Yes, he has to say that, which is a fake rule by the way, and I'm so happy to have you here and I have to tell you, having had several deep conversations in my opinion, I think for you it's just your day to day. There's a lot going on in your mind that people I think don't typically think about In this sector, you are seeing outside that small slice that most of us are seeing and whether it comes to systemic racism, whether it comes to philanthropy, and I'm sure so much more policy. And otherwise, when you look at the world of philanthropy, you see things in status, not people status. You see things in tax status. What does that mean and why does that take us right into fake rules right away?

Ludovic Blain:

So I run the California Donor Table and I've worked with donors for decades and it took me a while to realize that c3 nonpartisan funding was not the natural state of money.

Glen Galaich:

Come stop you right there. What is c3 nonpartisan funding is?

Ludovic Blain:

So c3 money, the two biggest pieces of c3 money is first when donors give it, they get a tax deduction. That is the only thing that's guaranteed about c3 money in order to get the tax deduction, the funding, what that money goes to is heavily, heavily restricted. It cannot be used on partisan activities. It only partially can be used on lobbying activities.

And here's a variety of other things that it cannot be used for. So when it's coming from the donor's pocket or more functionally from their bank account where it's completely unrestricted and then it goes to a foundation or some other entity that promises to use it in c3 ways, the beneficiary of that is actually the donor getting a tax deduction. And then the people who receive the money have to pledge to follow those heavy restrictions.

Glen Galaich:

And those are real rules.

Ludovic Blain:

And those are not fake rules. So those are actual rules.

Glen Galaich:

So the fake rule rule established by law of the 501(c)3 code.

Ludovic Blain:

So those are real rules. The fake rule is that a donor has to make that decision in the first place. And so what usually happens, and there's a whole industry both on the foundation side and the nonprofit grantees.

Glen Galaich:

The recipients of the money.

Ludovic Blain:

The final recipients of the money.

Glen Galaich:

The final recipients of the money because of course the foundation is a recipient. It's the first recipient, right? That's right. Which no one ever thinks about that one. That's a much broader conversation.

Ludovic Blain:

So the question is why are donors making decisions to heavily restrict their money for the final recipients of that money? And the one beneficiary of it is the donor because they're getting a tax deduction.

Glen Galaich:

Which can be as high as it can reduce their tax liability as much as 79%. Right? It's a huge number.

Ludovic Blain:

And many wealthy people actually pay quite low tax rates to begin with to begin with. So the question of whether they need that tax benefit or not, if they're able to give that robust amount of money, they actually don't need that tax write off first of all. Second, it's a little bit like realizing that you get a discount, you want to build a house, you realize you get a discount on wood beams, so you buy as many wood beams as possible because you get a discount on them. The house that you end up building has no windows, but it was a cheaper house.

Glen Galaich:

Much cheaper. Can't see anything outside.

Ludovic Blain:

But the people living in the house do not benefit from it. It was the person who bought the wood beams, probably they decide not to live in that house probably. So when we're trying to make the change that we want by only using the tools that have tax benefits to the donors, if that's what we're doing, we should be very explicit about that. And that dynamic is a fake rule that we need to interrupt.

Glen Galaich:

We can almost stop here and just let everybody go and think about what you just said. That is huge. And I really encourage anyone watching right now to let what he just said sink in, because you're basically saying that with the 100% of available resources we could have for change by merely moving it into a private foundation, you are just containing the power of that resource down to some percentage we can't quantify, but it's a lot less than it could have been.

Ludovic Blain:

It's a lot less impactful. And many groups who have multiple tax status entities would say if the donor's actually paying 10%, 20% tax rate, they would prefer 80 or 90 cents actually unrestricted money

Glen Galaich:

Given to them, given to, returned to them

Ludovic Blain:

Or returned to them, exactly, rather than a dollar of heavily restricted c3 funds. And I'm saying heavily restricted c3 funds because there's no such thing as unrestricted c3 funds.

Glen Galaich:

That line. You hit me with the day and I am trying to learn as I'm going through this and you're turning out to be one of my great teachers right here. You said that to me the other day. You said to me there's no such thing as an unrestricted foundation grant, which I think there are people watching right now who are huge advocates for unrestricted foundation grants. And they would say, of course there are. What are you talking about? So by the time, what are you talking about?

Ludovic Blain:

Right? So again, in this case, I'm talking to the donors that are making their original decision as to where the money

Glen Galaich:

We're pre foundation here.

Ludovic Blain:

Right. Pre foundation. And so for donors and advisors who are pre foundation, they should not presuppose what tax status money is needed for the work. And I can tell you almost every outcome requires more than just c3 activities. There is no issue where the bad guys are only spending c3 money. There is no issue where in fact the bad guys are spending mostly c3 money. But on the left, we have a whole industry of folks who are essentially trying to figure out the most strategic way to play checkers in a chess game. The other side, their bishops and queen, sometimes they have more than one queen because they have lots of money they can spend on every type of piece, their pawns, they're all talking to each other both legally and potentially illegally. On the left, we segregate out the c3 side. We have labor folks who usually don't spend c3 money, they spend more political money, and then we have individual donors spending political money. They each think that they're the only pieces on the side.

Glen Galaich:

They're not communicating.

Ludovic Blain:

They're not communicating,

Glen Galaich:

At least in your experience.

Ludovic Blain:

In my experience, not enough. And we're not actually aligned. The other side rarely seems to disagree with each other. So they seem to have some way of figuring out alignment even though the rich folks think the poor ones are dumb, I think, and the poor ones think the rich folks are going to hell, they actually don't have fundamental agreements.

They each think bad things are going to happen to other parts of their coalition. And despite that, they're able to have a strategy together, a pretty robust multi-task status, multi-decade strategy together.

So on the left, we need to make sure that even though some folks are siloed into foundation, some folks are siloed into labor union, some folks are siloed into working with individual donors who some of whom only want to give political money. Instead of thinking that one of those kinds of money is more important than the other, we need to realize that the soup that we're trying to create requires many ingredients and we actually need to get them all into the same pot in the right balance and the right timing so that when it's time to make all of it work to be building and wielding power, we actually have what we need there.

Glen Galaich:

So that went exactly where I thought it would go very quickly into a huge ecosystem that you're working in. So I'm going to just kind of summarize this back a little bit here. We were at a point where you were talking about the restricted nature of c3 and appropriately, you went to a wider zone and you said, okay, so here's what it looks like when you're only in c3 and you're only working with c3 actors, which are nonprofits that take these funds and then by taking them are restricted in how they can act in a political and social environment. I hope that made sense to people. I think. I hope so. That's where we are. So then we get to these other actors. You started throwing some other actors onto the table, which you called the chess board, right? The checkerboard, I guess would be metaphorically the c3 world or any single slice, any single slice, any single tax status, not working the whole board, right? Alright, so let's go to another tax status for a second. You've already taken this, so I'm just going to bring you back into the tax status piece, which is c4.

Ludovic Blain:

So I'll go. So c3, tax deduction for the donor heavily, heavily restricted. c4 has two components. First of all, no tax deduction for the donor, so there's no tax benefit to the donor. Some foundations can fund a limited set of c4 activities. Basically the non-partisan ones, they can fund things that are not for or against candidates. Lobbying and initiatives are examples of that. That's what's called c4. Primary purpose c4 secondary purposes are partisan work, which are work for and against candidates. Only individual donors can give to that. Okay? Again, all c4 giving does not have tax benefits to the donor and therefore there are far fewer restrictions on the final recipient upon receiving the money. So that's c4 work. The next piece would be direct political activities, whether it's direct candidate contributions or what's called independent expenditures, political expenditures for against candidates, but that are not aligned with the candidate campaign. Foundations can't give any of that. Individual donors have to give that. That's a fuller spectrum of tax status activities. And we do have a family of entities getting different kinds of money for different kinds of activities and aligning the various activities towards goals, short, medium, and long term.

And knowing that different people have to pay for different parts. For example, in a foundation rich state like California, there's far less of a reason for individual donors who don't need tax benefits to actually give C3 because foundations should fully fund the C3 activities. We have enough of them here in California. That's not true in most other states. But here we have enough foundations that if they spent it strategically, donors could focus on the type of expenditures that foundations cannot fund.

Glen Galaich:

Okay. Let me just work in my own mind what you're saying. You're kind of getting it into an area that is really important to me and that is this moment when a liquidity event happens. You're a tech billionaire now or you're about to be, and you go to your estate planner and you said something even earlier in the conversation about who's there to advise a person when they're about to become a donor or could become a donor. And you typically don't. It's not you Ludovic, it's sitting there. Is it it's an estate planner, it's an accountant, it's an investment advisor or some version of all three and where's their interest? Is it in social change?

Ludovic Blain:

No, I've not seen any evidence of that. The evidence that I see is that those financial advisors and usually the person about to be very wealthy, are pursuing essentially to have the most amount of money without understanding the multiplier or divider of how restricted is that amount of money when you decide to take a tax benefit. And that's what's going to drive your strategy as a donor is post tax benefit. That's handcuffing yourself. And this is before you have any grantees. This is before any of those pieces. So it's hard for the field to engage with those folks. We have actually begun to start to engage with some financial advisors just to have them understand this. I don't think that they make money from setting up the foundations, but I think because donors, the foundation industrial complex and the C threes, valorize C3 funding over other tax status funding, people get a shine for making a foundation.

Glen Galaich:

I'm going to stop you right there because you just defined perhaps the most fundamental fake rule of the field you and I work in. You don't know what incentivizes them. There's no law that says people have to put their money into a C3, but there is this force of a fake rule that you need to do it, and everybody is moving in that direction. And as a result, whether they want it or not, the donor is restricting him or herself and everyone they're going to work with going forward, right? Wow.

Ludovic Blain:

And that fake rule is based on thinking that c3 money is more values aligned, more progressive, more impactful, conflating all those things. Whether your commitment is to racial justice, anti-white supremacy, whatever the value piece, you can express that across every tax status. And in fact, I would argue again, these are for foundations are post money getting locked up. I'm talking about donors. When donors on their first decision lock up the money that lowers the ceiling of their ability to pursue their goals. So actually putting money just into c3 activities is in and of itself less just,

Glen Galaich:

I hear you.

Ludovic Blain:

Once you put into c3 money, you can't fund other things. Every other kind of money, you can turn that money into c3 money because the other tax statuses of money are still more flexible and can eventually be spent on c3 activities. Then I believe that a c3 only strategy for racial justice is not a hundred percent c3 racial justice strategy because a big part of the strategy was actually pursuing a tax benefit for the original donor. And then the remaining part is for racial justice. Now, the tax benefit is squeezing out. You can only do one thing at a time. So if the priority is a tax benefit and they're guaranteed to get the tax benefit, the pursuit of racial equity is a maybe, right?

Glen Galaich:

Right. And as we were talking about earlier, once you are locked in to that slice, if you will, that's status c3. The next fake rule that comes is the world around you that ecosystem the water, you're not going to be able to see it now. And then once you've done that, you can't get out of the grip of it to work in a more coordinated fashion across all these different ways that change gets made using financial resource.

Ludovic Blain:

And so what is crucial for philanthropy is not just to see what I think some of the best foundations and other philanthropists try to do, which is to see what's the water around them and what's in the water around them, but actually what is outside of the water.

Glen Galaich:

So pulling out a metaphor and into reality here, that means you've got all these different players. I'm coming back to what you said earlier, politicians and politics, labor unions and their activities, corporations and their activities, these are all going on. And in a 501(c)3 environment, you may not even notice that around you and you see yourself as, which I think is such an important fake rule we follow as the center of all things and how they change. It's almost like a, I don't want to keep going metaphorically here, but it's like being on a treadmill that doesn't seem to ever go anywhere. People talk all the time about how I work in the foundation sector. I've been observing the foundation sector. And as it gets larger, less seems to get done and you're kind of bringing something to everybody here to say that's because you're working inside one little piece here.

Ludovic Blain:

And it's once the donor has decided to get the tax deduction, and again, I keep saying that because no sane person would say, I would like to pursue my idea change, but only with a limited set of strategies. So there's no donor who that's the pitch of why they give it to c3. So then we cannot allow that to limit the strategic decisions of the whole movement space.

Glen Galaich:

Exactly. That's where it starts.

Ludovic Blain:

For folks within foundations, they're already in that restricted space. And what they need to realize is that there's these other spaces that they may not be able to live in, they can visit but need to understand the alignment. So to give a concrete example, usually the story that grantees tell to foundations is we worked in this community for 30 or 40 years.

We fought really hard. We organized, we talked to communities and our elected officials were really bad and we held all kind of actions on them and everything. And then all of a sudden stuff changed and our elected officials started carrying our bills and now we're relatively successful. The stuff is passing, it's going good. That's the C3 story. Wow. I've heard foundations say, great, you organized so much that your thing started to pass and that was great. And I want to hear from the community leaders who did it. And then they tell the tactics of the story.

And then what I've had to interrupt with some of our grantees and other folks is, oh, so when you said things suddenly started to change six years ago, you started to do partisan work eight years ago, and after a couple of years of doing that, you beat the bad guy who was representing your district who was killing all your bills. You replaced him with this progressive woman who is carrying all your bills, and then your bill started to pass. So the c3 part identified the problem, identified some of the solutions, built a constituency for it, educated the community and the voters, and then at some point you got to the end of your c3 accountability work because you found all that stuff out and they basically said no. And you did all strategies. You used academic strategies, you did reports

Glen Galaich:

To try to influence the players.

Ludovic Blain:

Right, rallies to try to influence them. You had people crying, you showed the babies, you did all the things, and sometimes even they were crying, but they did not change their policy. So in that case, see through accountability only goes so far because it does not include replacement. And some people will change with hearing facts or emotions or examples, and some people are not. For those folks, we actually have to replace them. That is still accountability, but obviously accountability always has to include replacement. And so that's where the C3 change strategies falter because you cannot change the politician through C3 activities. So reminding those groups to say, and then we need a different tax status money, so we beat the bad guy.

Glen Galaich:

So I want to stop you here because I think you're getting into some really interesting strategic questions. I'm wondering, is there a fake rule out there that says in the progressive side of things that this idea of organizing and movement building, which we do celebrate and it has had its wins, has limits that we don't really talk about?

Ludovic Blain:

I would unpack it in a few ways. First, c3 organizing is limited not because of the organizing, but because of the c3 part. And so if we conflate organizing with just c3 organizing, then it is extremely limited. No actual community member, after lobbying their city council member and their city council member saying no over five years, no local community resident would say, I would rather just keep trying to change his mind over electing somebody better than him. That's actually regular people. They would say at some point, Hey, I don't think this guy's going to change his mind. So is there somebody better than him? Can we get somebody? So actually regular people come up with those ideas. But the c3 restrictions from that, again, derived purely from the funders. Nobody on the recipient side was like, yes, I would like to just have the most limited type of money possible

Glen Galaich:

And potentially lose as a result of that.

Ludovic Blain:

and then lose.

Glen Galaich:

Yeah.

Ludovic Blain:

So that's one piece is that too many of us envision functional activities like organizing as being limited by the tax status. So then we have this industry around c3 folks, both the givers and the recipients, but you can do c4 organizing because at the point when people are fed up with their politician, the next thing to do is not to say, well, let's talk to him one more time. It's to say, well, which one of us can beat him? And that is the actual natural next stage. If there weren't the c3 limitations, once you start doing c4 and political activities, you now have created a possibility of electing somebody who you like and who likes you. Maybe it's even you.

Glen Galaich:

So you're sitting in a c3 space right now, and people sometimes are in this space and they work here, and many of them are programmatic officers, as we call them at the foundation for any program officer watching this, and I think we have a few, what do they need to start learning about to get to some wins?

Ludovic Blain:

So I want to say first of all, some c3 program officers are my best friends. Well, this, and I have some of my, you said today that they wouldn't be right. That's not their fault, right? Right. So the previous piece was around the donor decision,

Glen Galaich:

Right. Of course.

Ludovic Blain:

For c3 funds, they're crucial for two parts of the work. The first is in the oppositionality part, turning problems into things that can be dealt with community buy-in to figure out what the solutions are, community education to build, to scale towards accountability.

Glen Galaich:

Accountability for?

Ludovic Blain:

For the decision makers, whether they're elected officials or appointed or corporations, whoever are the decision makers. And then sometimes that will work in and of itself, sometimes it won't, and then there will require another step of different tax status, political money intervention to change the elected officials

Glen Galaich:

And the political money to review is c4 money?

Ludovic Blain:

Or actually direct candidate contributions. It's a mix of different things from a donor, but then foundations have a crucial second part, which is when the power building worked, that was c3 through c3 and political money, we got the community to be able to hold power. So the power building, the goal of power building is power holding, right? Power building. You didn't have it. Now you have at least some of it. Once people get their hands on some of the power, whether it's electoral or you pass your bill, there is power wielding and the power wielding, the post-election power wielding work is entirely c3. The election already happened. Now there's somebody better. Maybe that person is from the community from even one of the groups and they are aligned. And now the meeting is about, so how do we get there? Because now you only have the opportunity to have good outcomes.

Glen Galaich:

I'm going to just interject here and say I think we're entering a world that I would guess based, I'm going to go off of your experience here. A lot of program officers are not thinking about

Ludovic Blain:

Power wielding is crucial and it requires different tools and power building because when you have elected officials that are aligned with the groups, you're really not going to do any rallies. You're not going to do protests. What they're actually asking you is, so I'm the mayor and I'm going to put in a budget. I don't want your budget items. I want what the community wants to be the whole budget. Now that's harder. All of you give me a budget. Items that cost a trillion dollars. I can already tell you we don't have a trillion dollars in the budget.

Glen Galaich:

Right.

Ludovic Blain:

So that's not really helpful.

Glen Galaich:

So we've got to make some decisions together.

Ludovic Blain:

Right, so we have to make decisions together. Right now that is extremely challenging because before that, the community was not making decisions at scale because they did not have power. They were building power.

But when you go from power building to power wielding, you actually have to take that power because if the community groups don't take that power, someone else will because the mayor is putting in a budget. And so one turns out institutional racism and other forms of oppression are real. So merely exchanging one bad person for a better person doesn't change the whole system

Glen Galaich:

Doesn't change the whole thing.

Ludovic Blain:

So actually turns out that now what you really did is broaden the team of the do-gooders from just the organizations to a couple of elected officials, maybe a couple of appointed officials. And now the groups need to both listen to what the elected officials need and also plan with them collaboratively of, well, how much power can we wield when you're trying to do things and it's not happening? Why is that? Previously when it was other folks, we thought it was because we were not values aligned. So we didn't even think they were trying. We are assuming you're trying and we are noticing it's not happening. Why is that? So concrete examples of that are many good folks get elected and tell their staff to do stuff, and their staff tell them, no protesting the elected official for the things not happening doesn't fix the insubordination. That's actually happening because they are doing what we want them to do, which is to tell their staff what to do. And that's all they can do is tell their staff what to do. The next thing they can do is fire their staff. Again, you're going back to the accountability piece of, well, you don't want to have it, that they're just continually telling their staff to do stuff and their staff is not doing it. And so your responses, well tell them again, eventually you need to fire those staff and get better staff. So all these incremental changes require a type of infrastructure that is parallel to, but different than the community organizing infrastructure.

Glen Galaich:

So this is the critical moment where we talk about CDT and when we met, this is the type of conversation we had. We were just interested in investing in democracy. And honestly, Ludovic, we had a zoom call at the time. I think we were still in Covid. You absolutely blew my mind. I came off of that and I went, oh my gosh, I know nothing yet. The good news is CDT is here, California donor table. So can you just give us a sense, I think you've given us a sense of your work. This has been a big buildup in a way to obviously where you've centered CDT. When do you come in here? How are you helpful to this whole picture?

Ludovic Blain:

Sure. So we've been around almost 20 years. We center building power in progressive communities of color by investing across tax status in various power building

Glen Galaich:

And we all know what that means now.

Ludovic Blain:

And power wielding activities. We work with individual donors, foundations, both with living donors and ones without living donors, as well as some labor unions and other institutions to have them help them figure out where their lanes are, who they can align with, and how we build the necessary infrastructure for huge nation state like California to move forward both for the benefits of our state and the nation since we're a significant part of the nation. And so for individual donors, we help them figure out how to allocate their different kinds of funds and how to do that collaboratively. So we're not donor advisors, we're donor organizers. So we don't ask the donors, well, what do you want to do? Let me help you do that. We say, well, here's what we're doing. You should help us do that. And then we help foundations understand their lanes, how they can invest most strategically, how amongst other things they can invest in more than just oppositionality strategies that they're responsible for some wins that their tax status didn't directly cause and they're responsible for having the best return on investment of those outcomes. As well as helping donors understand that when C3 funders have made something possible, you need to jump in at that moment to make the next thing possible. So everybody has their lane.

Glen Galaich:

You're like a conductor.

Ludovic Blain:

So we are a conductor. California's a dense state both in terms of population but also wealth and it's very concentrated on the coast and much of the work happens inland.

So we also help donors understand, in addition to flying over the whole country and giving to Stacey Abrams and other folks in Georgia, Florida, Texas, et cetera, they need to invest in the first two or 300 miles of the flight, right of the flight, including in California. Don't wait until you get out of California to invest, to invest slightly eastward of here. So helping in a partisan way, red and purple areas of the state move towards blue, and then helping the blue areas of the state move towards progressive. In a c3 context, we help funders understand, for example, when San Diego moved from being one of the most conservative places in the country in terms of elected leadership, which was larger due to our aligned funding across tax statuses, to having one of the most progressive boards of supervisors in the state, that requires a much more robust think tank infrastructure. Because when you have three out of five board of supervisor members who are progressive, they actually, like I said before, don't want budget items. They want the whole budget. And actually they don't just want an operating budget, which is where most of the nonprofits operate. But they want a capital budget,

Glen Galaich:

Right. Because they want to build stuff.

Ludovic Blain:

Because they want to build stuff. If it is a predominantly people of color county, then the people of color 30 years from now are going to own the water pipes now. And if they're going to be mad that we did not change the water pipes now, then we did not pursue racial justice, you cannot pursue racial justice. I get it. Merely from operating expenses.

Glen Galaich:

Absolutely. That is, that's the definition and the action.

Ludovic Blain:

So we help the funders and the groups try to understand, well, what are the new types of infrastructure that we need as regions are moving across an ideological spectrum, and how do we learn lessons across the region so that we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time a region actually has success?

Glen Galaich:

I think what I'm going to say right now is that every season, if we have another season of this show, I'm bringing you back for each one because I just think there's layers and levels. I feel like we maybe did the 101 today, we may have gotten a 101, but this is like a 201, 301. This is very complicated stuff. And what I want to say in closing today is that having myself broken a few fake rules, I'm like in awe of you Ludovic, because you've looked at a world where we thought, we saw where people see barriers. You see the permeability of these barriers as completely transparent. We can move through this,

But I also know from working with you and knowing some of the extraordinary wins you have participated in that once those barriers are broken, new problems arose, and that's the nature of change. It's really messy. So I just kind of want to close on this topic just really quickly of what is it? What is the work of breaking a fake rule and how does someone do it and do it with the kind of grace that, well, you're not going to say this about yourself. I'll say the grace that you do to keep it all going, to not give up to see it as just part of the process and keep rolling. What does it take?

Ludovic Blain:

So I've been the head of CDT for 15 years. I've learned a lot from a whole village, and we've learned collectively, it takes being focused on the goal and agnostic as to what it takes to get there and to be focused on the goal, and then figuring out what needs to be assembled to get to that goal, and then constantly learning along the way. And then lastly, realizing that the goal, like you described, the goal is just one of the steps we need to do. And sometimes you arrive at your goal and you realize, oh, we have these other problems. We did not realize, I thought that we could elect progressives and then we would get progressive governance.

Now when the glass ceiling folks remarked to me, oh, you elected a bunch of women of color as executives and now they're having problems governing because their staff don't want to listen to them. Have you heard of the glass ceiling? And I'm like, well, yeah, I did, but I thought we would just elect. I thought that was for companies. I mean, but now that you said that,

gotcha. Yes, that is exactly what's happening. So each time you have a success, you get to a new set of problems that you couldn't see because you actually never had that power before. So you didn't know what it took to do that next step. So we're constantly learning along the way and we work with, and the broader our coalition is, the more members we have, the more allies we have, the more we can all learn and teach each other so that we can quicken the pace of learning, quicken the pace of failures and successes so that we can show the state what a real multiracial democracy looks like and show the country that it's possible. And at this point, California is one of the most diverse states with the least amount of apartheid, really. And so it is our responsibility in the state to show the rest of the country who is deciding whether we should continue our experiment on multiracial democracy or not. And all program officers, donor advisors, label leaders here, we need to work together to make it work because how much longer we have is partially contingent on whether we can make this work here.

Glen Galaich:

I want to just thank you so much for joining us today. You, there's so much here, and I'm glad to hear that you keep learning because that's why we'll have you back. We want to know what you've learned. So thank you so much for joining us, and thank you so much for joining us on another edition of Break Fake Rules.

Next time on Break Fake Rules. We are with a full studio audience. That's right, and we're joined by not one, but two outstanding rule breakers leading anti-racist scholar and bestselling author, Dr. Ibram Kendi and CEO of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, Marcus Walton. Tune into the discussion to uncover the fake rules about race and how to become an anti-racist funder.

Thank you for tuning into Break Fake Rules. This show is brought to you by the Stupski Foundation, where we are returning all our resources to the communities we call home in Hawaiʻi and the San Francisco Bay Area by 2029. Our producer extraordinaire is Claire Callahan. The show is mixed and edited by Patrick Childers of Odd Conduit Media. Special thanks to our videographers and visual production team who fly from all over the world to be a part of this. Steve Johnson and Brooke Van Dam of See Boundless. Subscribe to the Stupski Foundation YouTube channel to watch videos of each episode. You can find us on YouTube by searching Stupski Foundation. We hope these conversations don't end here. So join the conversation with me on LinkedIn.