Our Approach to Racial Justice, Equity, and Inclusion for Critical and Lasting Change

Co-Impact, 9 May 2022.

In 2020, Co-Impact made a public commitment to evaluate and improve our practices to advance equity and inclusion across our work. This summary report shares what we are learning and how we are seeking to improve.

Co-Impact is a philanthropic collaborative that advances inclusive systems change and gender justice through grantmaking and influencing philanthropy. As a global organization, we aim to foster equity and inclusion across our teams and daily practice. To this end, our efforts to track our approaches to equity and inclusion are focused on three areas: our programs, how we influence philanthropy, and how we execute our organizational policies and approaches.

While we have made positive strides in some areas, we realize that there are others we continue to grapple with. We appreciate that this process is a marathon, not a sprint, therefore it requires long-term commitment across our teams and leadership. Below is a summary of the three categories Co-Impact is using to track our commitment toward racial justice, equity, and Inclusion.

Our Programs

Co-Impact aims to develop and apply an intersectional framework to address inequities related to gender, race, class, and other forms of discrimination. In 2021, we revised our Handbook that articulates our core principles and guides our activities, protocols, and decisions. This includes our approach to women’s leadership, gender equality, and intersectionality. These inform how we structure, source, and award our grants; how we assess proposals; how we support partners, strengthen organizations, measure success; and how we share lessons. Applying this framework helps us to directly address inequities related to gender, race, class, and other forms of discrimination.

In our Gender Fund Open call process, we explicitly outlined Co-Impact’s keen interest to collaborate with partners who bring feminist approaches that tackle root-causes of structural injustice, question who holds power and how it is exercised, address restrictive and discriminatory norms, and deepen inclusion.

In addition, we explicitly outlined our approach to inclusivity, which included:

• Clarifying our use of the term ‘gender’ and ‘women and girls’, which is meant to be inclusive of all those who identify as women and girls on the gender spectrum.
• Prioritizing language accessibility and we implemented this throughout our sourcing and review process. For instance, our open call for concept notes was translated into 5 major languages of our focus countries – Bahasa, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Tagalog. We also conducted webinars with live translations and accepted concept notes in all 6 languages (including English).
• Committing to make 100% of our core grants to locally rooted organizations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, with a majority of organizations led by women.

There are some areas across our program work that we still need to improve on. The next year will involve regular monitoring of progress.

• As we continue to grow, we have taken an intersectional approach to our learning. How we measure success and share lessons actively encourages data disaggregation by race, gender, and other markers, including three-level outcomes (systems, organization, and people). We are on track to develop a shared monitoring tool to enable our team to implement this model. Our annual plans are now developed, reviewed, and tracked to reflect inclusion commitments; the data generated will be used to inform decision-making and team development.

• Programmatically we will continue to actively seek to advance women; and those marginalized on the basis of gender, race, caste, ethnicity, class, disability, sexual identity and other contextual factors – historically disadvantaged constituencies. Tackling leadership at all levels and especially with regard to women leaders in senior management and governance.

• Our program partners (PP) reflect our efforts to strengthen and broaden representation within the organizations we support. Many have made progress in the operationalization of their commitments to gender equality, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). As a result of Co-Impact’s organization strengthening support for PPs, we have begun to see considerations around intersectionality reflected in the work and governance of our partners’ organizations. This includes changes in team composition, compensation models, leadership, and board representation, as well as commitments to expanding their monitoring and evaluation framework for empowerment and equity. We will continue to encourage this shift by working closely with our PPs and creating space for continuous conversation and learning.

Our Work to Influence Philanthropy

Co-Impact advocates for increased resources for organizations addressing systemic discrimination and inequality, particularly those that are led and governed by women and other underrepresented groups. This has been formalized through our vetting policy, and several dialogues hosted with existing funders focused on addressing privilege and power in grantmaking. More recently, we published a resource tool to influence approaches aimed at high-impact philanthropy that indicates how systems change philanthropy should center on gender and intersectionality. The publication also includes reflection on some of the challenges in philanthropy and the journey of some funders regarding focusing on systems change (rather than individual projects).

Co-Impact continues to advocate for increased resources for women and minority-led organizations and address the power dynamics in philanthropy. We have also had conversations with our funding community regarding power and privilege through more than 100 external engagements in the last three years, and advocated alongside others, helping to shape conversations around the future of philanthropy. Furthermore, we have focused our speaking engagements on those where we directly address philanthropists, foundation leaders, or in some cases high-level professionals and advisors to philanthropy. We acknowledge that there is still a need for continuous dialogue to influence change, we will make every effort to facilitate transparency and accountability in our advocacy and influencing efforts.

We aim to advance the representation and participation of women and leaders from Africa, Asia, and Latin America in philanthropy. In terms of Co-Impact’s funder diversity, we have representation from 16 countries. Our work with regional cohorts seeks to leverage new funding opportunities. Collaborating with Tsitsi Masiyiwa and the African Philanthropy Forum to bring together a group of philanthropists from across Africa, and with Vidya Shah and EdelGive Foundation on a similar model to support this work in India. We are in the early stages of building a similar model in Latin America

Overall, our ongoing work to influence the philanthropic sector intends to:

• Continue to advocate for better funding practices, where funding is more significant, supportive, flexible, and longer-term. We support our program partners in this way and hope to influence other funders to do the same.
• Be more vocal about only accepting speaking engagements that have balanced representation, including women, participants from diverse nationalities and orientations, and especially experts from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
• Create awareness of the need to shift power dynamics in philanthropy during all speaking engagements. Actively promote anti-racism and gender inclusion, and grantmaking that addresses discrimination in all its forms.
• Build deep partnerships with philanthropic organizations to foster mutual learnings among a global group of funders. We are working to develop regional country-level partnerships targeting philanthropy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
• Increase funding for locally rooted, women-led organizations. Organizations led by persons that have lived experience possess a deep contextual understanding of the political, economic, and social landscape of their countries and thus, are best placed to have an impact.

Our Organizational Approach

In our recently launched Gender Fund, we established a governance board and advisory board with significant representation from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Our Boards are intentionally diverse and inclusive, with 50% non-funder representation.

As we build out our organization’s systems, we are committed to transparent, consistent, efficient processes, as well as the removal of barriers for ourselves and the diverse cohort of organizations we support. We also seek to provide a space for all voices to be heard and respected; to unearth unconscious bias and challenge prejudice within ourselves and others.

Below are some of our specific actions in this area:

• Our grants management process is grounded in the core principle of transparency. Our granting model commits to providing core grants to organizations rooted in our 13 focus countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. We are keen to explore how our grantmaking model (and the underlying concepts) can be more inclusive. We are also building out our processes and systems so that they are clear and transparent, revising our documents and agreements to make them accessible to our partners around the world, and revamping our due diligence approach so that it is respectful of local contexts. This work should be completed later this year.

• To be effective, we expanded our team to include staff in key g, where our work is focused. Our global team reflects a diversity of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. Recruitment at Co-Impact is focused on growing our staff to be much more proximate to our work, with significant lived experience in our key geographies. We are committed to increasing the representation of women, people from the Global South, and historically disadvantaged constituencies at all levels among our staff. We are working actively to foster a work environment that ensures all our staff are respected, heard, and given opportunities to thrive.

• We have developed a clear approach to pay equity and transparency, and recently published a compensation philosophy for our internal team that includes key features around equity in recruitment (including a commitment to publishing salary information in our job postings). We plan to share our philosophy publicly in the near future.

• We will work to ensure DEI is truly embedded in our culture. We will enhance our policies and tools to codify and promote these commitments within our Handbook and website. This includes engaging external facilitators on racial equity and updating our grantmaking and procurement to ensure that we are developing policies and criteria that benefit globally diverse firms/ organizations.

As a global organization, Co-Impact is taking measures to deepen our individual and collective learning and growth. In doing so, we aim to make clear that to be part of Co-Impact means to actively advance gender equality and to strive to be anti-racist and against all forms of discrimination.

Over the coming years, we endeavor to publicly share our progress. Co-Impact will continue to monitor progress against our goals. This will help to inform how we can better work to strengthen our commitments. By sharing this update, we hope to signal the importance of the purposeful dedication of time and resources toward racial justice, equity, and inclusion. We do this in solidarity with individuals and organizations around the world that are advocating for the same.