{"id":132333,"date":"2026-02-13T12:12:13","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T12:12:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/132333\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T12:12:13","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T12:12:13","slug":"dei-activism-could-be-pushing-donors-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/132333\/","title":{"rendered":"DEI Activism Could Be Pushing Donors Away"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nearly 20 years ago, California\u2019s legislature considered a bill<\/a> that would require private foundations with more than $250 million in assets to report the racial, gender, and sexual orientation of their board members, staffs, and grantees. The bill\u2019s sponsors eventually dropped the legislation in large part because those foundations agreed to contribute<\/a> millions of dollars to causes favored by legislators and activist groups. Thus began a campaign to \u201cdiversify\u201d philanthropy, which has now succeeded beyond those activists\u2019 wildest dreams.<\/p>\n

For a good example of the activists\u2019 successful capture of nonprofits, look to a recent story<\/a> in the Chronicle of Philanthropy about the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. With $13 billion in assets, it\u2019s one of the nation\u2019s largest philanthropies. Like many large foundations, it promotes various progressive causes, such as expansion of Medicaid<\/a>, racial equity<\/a>, and, of course, \u201cdiversity, equity, and inclusion<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

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In 2017, the foundation\u2019s CEO, in keeping with this mission, launched a program to prioritize diversity on its board of trustees. Today, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the organization is \u201ca case study of how one mega-foundation aims to make its leadership look more like America.\u201d Trustees from nine years ago are now gone, and \u201cthe board is significantly younger and more racially diverse . . . . Eleven of its 15 trustees are people of color; another is an Iranian-born immigrant.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since the 2024 election of its first black chairman\u2014pastor and civil rights activist Starsky Wilson\u2014the foundation\u2019s board has proved much more willing to criticize the second Trump administration than it was the first. \u201cWe\u2019ve got board members who are raising families, and they\u2019re impacted by the [Trump administration efforts to] shut down the Department of Education,\u201d Wilson explained. \u201cWe\u2019ve got two board members who are working in health care, and they are impacted by the decimation of the public health care infrastructure in America, personally and professionally.\u201d<\/p>\n

In that sense, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is more activist and ideological in its approach than it was a decade ago, when its board members were more likely to be white men with degrees from elite schools and contacts in prominent law firms, businesses, and investment banks. That shift may explain the foundation\u2019s pivot from improving health care (Robert Wood Johnson himself was one of the founders of Johnson & Johnson) to addressing racial equity and eliminating poverty, because (in the current trustees\u2019 judgment) these are the real barriers to fixing health care. The advantage of a rainbow coalition of board members, it seems, is that the trustees have the same political or ideological points of view.<\/p>\n

Just as in higher education, journalism, and Hollywood, the field of philanthropy has undergone a radical shift to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the past decade. Jacob Savage\u2019s essay<\/a> in Compact describes how organizations in these and many other fields have simply stopped hiring white men, regardless of their qualifications.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not enough for philanthropic board members (and staff) to embrace the ideology of DEI; they must also share the racial and sexual identities of the people whom they are meant to serve. Just as white men ideally should not teach university courses in women\u2019s or black studies, they also should not administer programs meant to serve minorities. Clients will not trust a white man, the thinking goes, unless he shares some important credential of membership in an oppressed group.<\/p>\n

The history of philanthropy disproves this line of thinking. Progressive nonprofits frequently receive funds from foundations that don\u2019t have diverse boards (or from wealthy white men). The philanthropists who founded nonprofits appointed trustees in part to keep their organizations from veering off into political directions that would generate public criticism or backlash. Today they are increasingly failing at that task.<\/p>\n

Savage asks whether organizations that have engaged in purges of straight white men are more trusted now than they were a decade ago: \u201cHave these institutions become stronger since they systematically excluded an entire cohort\u2014or did abandoning meritocracy accelerate their decline?\u201d<\/p>\n

We should ask the same question of philanthropy and the organizations it supports. A little more than half of Americans say that they trust nonprofits<\/a>, but fewer than 20 percent think the sector is going in the right direction, and the number of donors has been steadily shrinking since the early 2000s. Maybe embracing DEI and fighting the Trump administration are not the prescription for philanthropy\u2019s success.<\/p>\n

Photo: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation chairman Starsky Wilson (Photo by Jemal Countess\/Getty Images for People’s Rally to Cancel Student Debt)<\/p>\n

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City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the magazine? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nearly 20 years ago, California\u2019s legislature considered a bill that would require private foundations with more than $250…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":132334,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[75,84,83,9,24,63],"class_list":{"0":"post-132333","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-manhattan","8":"tag-manhattan","9":"tag-manhattan-headlines","10":"tag-manhattan-news","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-city","13":"tag-nyc"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132333\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/132334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}