Systemic Transformation: People Power and Listening for Impact

Deep listening with young people became the spark to transform conditions across our Healthy Community sites – a ten-year campaign to advance health equity in economically distressed communities. In the fall of 2011, one year after the launch of the campaign, we held a Board of Directors meeting in the Fresno site. We arranged a visit with young activist leaders and asked, “What is most important to improve the health of your community?”

Their answer surprised us. They wanted our support to transform harsh school discipline policies. In preparation for the campaign, we had commissioned expert “environmental landscape” assessments on health matters facing young people. We heard about health insurance coverage, asthma, childhood obesity, mental health, and youth violence - but nothing about school discipline.      

The Fresno young leaders revealed how school suspensions and expulsions sent a message that young people’s behavior - particularly young people of color - was being stigmatized and criminalized, instead of being understood as a plea for support. Harsh school discipline and “zero tolerance” policies supported the school-to-prison pipeline. Instead of cops in schools, young people called for restorative justice for accountability and healing, peer counseling, and mental health counselors.      

As a result, The Endowment commissioned research that affirmed California and the nation experienced exponential levels of school suspensions and expulsions following “zero tolerance” practices in schools – which mirrored the 300 to 400 percent increase in incarceration rates nationally between the 1990s and 2010. The young leaders in Fresno revealed a hidden nationwide phenomenon. Black and brown students were disproportionately impacted by school discipline practices; further, research showed that each suspension event in a student’s life placed them at greater risk for academic failure, dropout and juvenile system involvement.

After the conversation with our board, our staff followed up with the Fresno youth and invested in plans to engage young people and community leaders to change school discipline policies. We soon learned that young leaders in other Building Healthy Communities sites – Los Angeles, Long Beach, Richmond, and Oakland – held similar concerns. We helped connect them, and a statewide “Schools Not Prisons” grassroots advocacy campaign – with a new narrative -- was born.

Eventually, as many as eight anti-school discipline bills were sent to the Governor, and five were signed into law. School suspension and expulsion rates dropped by more than 50 percent in the ensuing years. The problem is not solved, but the promise of a new narrative and alternative approaches is being realized. Young people, activists, and organizers were the architects of this transformative change. 

Other grassroots-led “wins” include:

• Fresno - Community leaders delivered a massive win with their “Parks for All” campaign. 
• San Diego - Young people led an effort to make healthier and culturally appropriate school meals available to immigrant children, and secured funding to build a new skate park. 
• Coachella Valley - Clean water was made more available to thousands of farmworker families and more equitable political control of local water system decision making was won. 
• Richmond - A successful community violence prevention strategy utilized former gang members as peacemakers and measurably dropped shootings and homicides.
• Los Angeles - Undocumented young people (“Dreamers”) catalyzed a statewide Health for All campaign resulting in expanded insurance coverage in the Medicaid program. 
• Del Norte County - Tribal communities and rural whites collaborated in a series of strategies to advance health and educational equity in the region, and tribal communities re-established their centuries-old practices of “cultural burns” to reduce wildfire risk and nurture traditional plants.
• Statewide - A grassroots-designed voter engagement investment resulted in the VOTA! Campaign and the Million Voters Project, centering young people of color to reimagine civic participation. Between the 2014 and 2018 election cycles, youth voter turnout increased significantly in California, from 8 percent to 27 percent. 

All told, there were more than 1,200 policy changes and systems change “wins” from the 14 Building Healthy Communities sites.  We learned the importance of storytelling and narrative change: in pursuing policy change, “no numbers without stories and no stories without numbers.” 

Entrusting community leaders and young people to lead, and providing funding support became an “ABC” mantra for us: “A” for Agency, “B” for Belonging, and “C” for Changed Conditions. Through this grant-making framework, funding would advance three objectives: strategic, moral and spiritual.

For example, a grant to “Dreamers” for health insurance coverage or a grant to an advocacy group fighting for trans health access -  the strategic purpose is expanded health coverage, which is part of our mission as a health foundation. The moral statement is to indicate dissatisfaction with how present-day systems and structures marginalize immigrant and/or queer communities. The spiritual element is our positive messaging: We see you; we see your dreams; you have worth and value; and you belong. 

The Way Forward: Our Field, Our Nation, Our Role

The field of philanthropy has been hesitant about matters of race and community power. The legacy of our top-down, colonialist, corporatist beginnings is a great deal to overcome in culture and practice.

As Angela Glover Blackwell stated beautifully in “Achieving a Multiracial Democracy,” “The United States has yet to witness a robust, just, vibrant democracy that equitably functions amid profound difference.” For the field of philanthropy, this is our nation’s most pressing work. 

On July 4, 2026, our nation will celebrate its 250^th anniversary as a Republic since the Declaration of Independence. During that time, questions about who we are as Americans, and what an American or America means, will be debated. Do we have a shared narrative and story as a people? Today’s civic and political landscape offers nothing to sow optimism regarding a shared narrative; it is as politically divisive and as gloomy as it was during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

In the 1830s, Tocqueville gave us his epic work, Democracy in America.  He offers enduring insights about our lofty aspirations of equality and democracy as a country, inclusive of the unresolved matters of racism and slavery. He also describes a phenomenon that captures the role that communities, volunteers, and faith institutions play in democracy; what he describes as “associations” – the birth of what will eventually become the nonprofit sector. He observes that this mobilized citizen dynamic addresses issues at the level of community. 

The surest path to life/liberty/pursuit of happiness FOR ALL is through a vibrant, highly participatory democracy. That is why meaningful investment by philanthropy in those most proximate to fighting injustice, oppression, and structural racism represents our single most impactful and patriotic set of actions. Given the state of our nation – where democracy is under threat under the shroud of racial divisiveness – there is no job more vital to our future than that of community organizer.  We must aggressively fund community and grassroots organizing, and be unafraid to center the matter of race.

Unbridled capitalism will routinely tilt the scales of democracy in favor of the super-wealthy. Some force must be counted upon to place its thumbs on the scales in the direction of the economically marginalized and excluded. It is not about charity. It has to be about change. 

At The Endowment, we are funding “People Power” – community organizing and mobilizing – hand over fist, because community organizers see pain, trauma, hope, transformation, and possibility in people’s life stories. Additionally, young people must be centered and anchor this energized civic endeavor. We just approved bringing two young people onto the Board. I believe the new generation will solve these big “unsolvable” problems: climate change, racism, economic exclusion, and guns. Many leading organizers and activists in the Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, LGBTQ, and Black Lives Matter Movements were in their 20s.                         

In the decade ahead, I invite philanthropic leaders – Boards & Executives – to emphasize transformation over the transaction, support ecosystems of community power, contribute to replacing rapacious capitalism with inclusive capitalism, and recognize that being neutral on matters of race is the equivalent of complicity with racial injustice. Leaders must position their work with grantees as being proximate to injustice, emphasize the civic empowerment of young people, and recognize that injustice in our nation is structurally mediated and manufactured. Awakening to the threat of climate change, and the threats and opportunities of “A.I.,” are critical for our field; philanthropic “overspending” and spend-down funding on climate change should be explored at this time. 

Finally, leaders must see that the oppressed implementing agency and democratic participation constitutes the surest – and most joyful – path to the spiritual ethos embodied in The Beloved Community. For those of us blessed enough to endeavor in the field of philanthropy, this is the way. And let us please recognize that we are, indeed, blessed. 

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