Dear Colleagues,
After the U.S. Supreme Court gutted race-conscious admissions last summer and American Alliance for Equal Rights filed a lawsuit against the Fearless Fund, some worried that demographic data had become a potential liability.
And yet despite this environment of fear mongering and repressive legalism, we are excited to announce the formation of a new partnership with Candid. Our shared goal is to reveal the impact of race and gender on the funding landscape through an open-access online tool.
Amazingly, a publicly available tool like this does not currently exist. That matters because local and state policy is informed by race or gender indexes drawn from sources like Candid. When users cannot run comparative analysis on executive leadership trends by race and gender within meaningful contexts such as location, organization size, and operating budget—unequal concentrations of power are made invisible.
What’s next? Grounded in a participatory approach we will ask you—our local members who understand the compounding barriers that come with representing multiple identities—to help design what we build. Thank you in advance for joining us.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Barajas-Román
Women’s Funding Network
President & CEO