Practicing Transparency in Times of Change
2023 has been a year full of transitions and change, both joyful and heartbreaking. As you’ll read about below, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation has also experienced changes that will require us to reduce our grantmaking budget beginning in 2024.
Collective Loss, Collective Futures
It has been one year since I joined Mertz Gilmore as President. That’s one year of near-daily inspiration and deepened relationships with our staff, board, and partners. At the same time, those of us working to strengthen democracy, bring about justice, and build more vibrant, healthy communities are doing so in rapidly changing and increasingly unstable times.
Our grantee partners have been forced to shift the ways they dream and build while simultaneously defending against attacks. At Mertz Gilmore, we are feeling these changes too, albeit with far greater privileges and spaciousness. I believe that part of our role in these trying times is to practice transparency. To embody it. We will not always get it right, but if we see ourselves as true partners to community organizations, leaders, and movements for justice, we must try.
As a society, we have experienced incredible collective loss. It also astounds me how many people have personally lost loved ones over the past several years, myself included. Part of what I’m finding as we grieve, is the strong desire to change — to build community, to heal, to remedy, to liberate. Of course, some things remain out of our control.
Noticing my own response to change, and our collective experience with it, has made me similarly attuned to the things we can change, and the places we are making progress.
This past fall, I attended a convening in Boston when I met someone who reminded me of the generational nature of change. Xiye Bastida is the co-founder of Re-Earth Initiative. At 21, she is a youth climate justice activist from a community in Central Mexico. She stood before us, a room full of funders, and pointed to our collective legacy. The legacy of our inaction. “What are you all leaving us?” she asked.
Her question reminded me of our partners who are demanding bold action while living through increasingly challenging times. She brought me back to my earliest days as a youth organizer in the environmental justice movement. Listening to her, I thought about how her youth organizing work had a 40-year history. Mine had a future. Our efforts had been connected all along.
Moving resources to communities, at a different scale
The Mertz Gilmore Foundation has been a part of this thread for a long time, moving resources directly to field leaders and organizations driving change.
That is not changing. But the scale of our grantmaking is. I wanted to share this important change with you, our partners, as we look ahead.
When the Mertz Gilmore family created the Foundation, they established early trusts in order to provide income to the Foundation. This was a way to ensure they could increase their giving at a greater scale and over time. It’s what has allowed Mertz Gilmore to support a wide range of issues, organizations, and leaders for over 60 years. Beginning in 2023, the Foundation stopped receiving income from these family-based trusts.
We are sharing this change with you because we are committed to being as transparent as we can — even when we don’t yet have all the answers. In the face of fewer resources, our resolve to support bold, necessary change has not wavered. The reality is that we will simply be doing so with fewer dollars. One additional area of change is Mertz Gilmore’s investments. As we look ahead at what we can change, we are pleased to begin transitioning to become fully mission aligned, ensuring all the Foundation’s assets advance equity and justice. Please visit our Frequently Asked Questions to learn more about these changes at the Foundation.
As we manage for these upcoming shifts, my hope is that we will continue to be grounded in our relationships with our aim toward impact — recognizing our long history and commitment to building a more just future.