At The Bridgespan Group, we have the privilege of working with a wide range of donors around the world who care about a variety of issues. Whether those donors are institutional foundations with large staffs, re-granting intermediaries, individual donors, or family offices—they all have in common a commitment to impact and a hunger to understand what gets results. In our experience, giving strategies that lead to the kind of ambitious impact that most donors seek also typically have something in common—they examine how outcomes vary across demographics (including race, ethnicity, gender, and more) and craft their approaches to serve those most affected. In other words, they embrace equity.

In fact, philanthropy that embraces equity is synonymous with effective, high-impact philanthropy.  

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What makes us say that? We follow the data. In the United States, some of the largest disparities in life outcomes can still be traced to race. In just one example, consider infant mortality: infants of white women with a high school diploma or a GED have lower mortality rates than those of Black women with MAs, JDs, or PhDs.

Therefore, to say equity and impact are linked is not an ideological statement. Instead, focusing one’s giving strategy on populations most impacted by societal problems is smart practice regardless of the cultural rhetoric of any given moment. It is a strategy that simply follows data that consistently shows that some of the largest disparities in life outcomes can still be traced to race—and are often exacerbated by gender—and recognizes that there are distinct skills that can help leaders to effectively address those disparities, especially when informed by direct personal experience with the problem and solutions that work.

That doesn’t mean that incorporating equity in philanthropic giving will look the same for all donors. But through its own work with clients and our research projects, Bridgespan has seen that when donors address our biggest social problems without equity in mind, they often miss getting at the heart of the issue—and almost always risk not solving the problem for marginalized populations.

Consider the fight against teen smoking in the United States, often considered one of the sector’s biggest “success” stories. There have been impressive declines overall, with philanthropy playing a pivotal role. However, when disaggregated by race, the data tell a different story. The nation’s overall decline in smoking statistics overlooked the fact that Native Americans experienced no significant change and had the highest rates of teen smoking. In addition, while Black teens smoke at much lower rates than white teens, by the time they are adults, the rates are about the same—with tragic results because Black people die at much higher rates from smoking-related illnesses. However, the majority of prevention programs and policies have targeted teens, thus missing the adult window when Black people typically start to smoke.¹ 

Or take the US Surgeon General’s recent warning that being a parent can be bad for your mental health—a problem that has become an urgent public health crisis.²  Missing from much of the discussion is the role demographics play in parental stress. Emily Oster, a professor of economics at Brown University and CEO of Parent Data, looked at the Surgeon General’s warning through that lens and dug into the data. She found that poverty is an enormous stressor: poorer households without children are more stressed than richer households with children. The biggest gap among most stressed parents relates to households with an income of $35,000 to $50,000, where parents are 16 percentage points more likely to be stressed than adults in households without children. Oster also found that stress levels are higher, on average, for households of color.³ This disaggregation of data matters because it changes the understanding of what the problem is and therefore leads to different solutions.

Admittedly, during these polarized times any discussion, especially one touching on race, can become fraught. It has created an environment where it is difficult for donors to know what to say or not say, and what to do or not do. After court rulings that limit the consideration of race in college admissions and ongoing state and local legislation pulling back from diversity, equity, and inclusion commitments, decisions concerning equity can seem harder now than they used to. When things are perceived to be tough, an understandable reaction might be to question whether any of this is worth it. Some leaders of color—especially those focused on serving specific communities of color—report that they are getting more questions and less funding from donors, even if the nature of their work and their ability to get results have not changed. 

Over the past five years, Bridgespan has published extensively on how donors can avoid falling short of their impact goals by taking equity implications into account in their giving. Here is the CliffsNotes version, with sets of further research we’ve conducted for those interested in deeper dives.

Population-level Change, Though Complex, Is Possible

For a peek behind the curtain of what it takes to address racial disparities in ways that will lead to lasting equitable change, we take you to Greensboro, North Carolina, and the work of Greensboro Health Disparities Collaborative (GHDC). At a medical center in Greensboro, racial disparities in health outcomes for Black and white patients with breast and lung cancer have virtually been eliminated. Before GHDC stepped in, white patients were completing their cancer treatment at a rate of 7 percent points higher than Black patients—a gap with deadly consequences.

GHDC managed to close the gap and improve treatment completion rates for everyone by finding specific and actionable ways the Cone Health Cancer Center in Greensboro could improve the experience for Black patients who were having the worst outcomes and then use those solutions as the hospital’s standard cancer care. This included data tracking on care quality disaggregated by patient race in real-time, race-specific feedback for providers regarding treatments, and nurse navigators who worked to improve communication between the medical center and patients.

By systematically examining each of the steps in a patient’s treatment journey and how they might vary for people with different racial identities, GHDC was able to break down an abstract structural inequity into tangible parts that the hospital could address. GHDC’s equity analysis and disaggregation of the data revealed not only disparities in outcomes but disparities in care, redefining the problem from one of how successfully patients embraced treatment to instead how treatment was designed and administered. In essence, GHDC’s approach recognized that the root causes of the disparities were neither a problem with the patients nor deficiencies of practitioners, but something more fundamental about the systems that provide health care.

Leaders of Color Are Critical to Social Change but Are Underfunded

Despite their impact, the data consistently show organizations led by people of color experience disparities in funding, whether from philanthropy, federal funding, or corporate funders. Our research with Echoing Green found that among organizations of a similar stage and caliber, the average revenues of Black-led organizations were 24 percent smaller than their white-led counterparts and the unrestricted assets of Black-led organizations were 76 percent smaller. This persists even when organizations are focused on the same work. For instance, among those focused on improving the life outcomes of Black men and boys in the United States, revenues of the Black-led organizations were 45 percent smaller than their white-led counterparts, and the unrestricted net assets were a whopping 91 percent smaller. Left unaddressed, these funding disparities mean that the sector and the magnitude of challenges ahead does not benefit from the full range of talents and skills honed by these leaders and the opportunities for impact they can bring.

Commitments to fund equity-focused leaders and organizations made in 2020 helped some and did a lot to raise awareness of the funding need. However, such a one-time infusion could not close a funding gap that was many more years in the making. Nor could it sustain organizations for all the work ahead. What these leaders require now are long-view giving strategies and sustained commitment.

Final Thoughts

While the desire of donors to help make the world a better place might be universal, there is no single way to do philanthropy to achieve it. As impact-driven advisors, we seek to provide donors with the best possible information to make decisions about what they give to and how. This information includes a clear-eyed view of the disparities in outcomes by race, gender, and other demographic factors on every major issue of our time—education, health, livelihoods, and beyond—and the effectiveness of different approaches to address them.

In Bridgespan’s experience, incorporating an equity analysis unlocks a level of insight that can lead to greater impact. Pick your issue of interest or your region of focus: How do disparities shape the problem? Now, how might disparity change the effectiveness of the solution? What about whom to fund—are you sure you are really finding all the right actors to address the problem? Or are there valuable leaders out there that you’re overlooking? Where should you look to find them? And those are just a few considerations. There is an equity angle to almost any major question that might guide a donor’s giving.

Ultimately, donors need to weigh a wide variety of factors in making critical decisions about their giving, but without an accurate picture of the problem and the path ahead, donors are likely to fall short of the ambitious goals that motivate generosity in the first place.

1. Cheryl Dorsey, Jeffrey Bradach, and Peter Kim, Racial Equity and Philanthropy: Disparities in Funding for Leaders of Color Leave Impact on the Table, The Bridgespan Group, May 4, 2020.