How the Joyce Foundation Is Going Long With a New Five-Year Plan
/
New grants include “moment in time” support for vaccine access in the Chicago area. Photo: On The Run Photo/shutterstock
When the Joyce Foundation announced its new, five-year grantmaking strategy in early May, the news might have seemed like more of the same old thing: Yet another foundation switching directions, leaving current and prospective grantees wondering what new hoops they’ll have to jump through this time. Joyce, after all, announced its last new strategy in 2018. Debuting another one three years later could easily be interpreted by grantees and others as a worrying sign of volatility.
That assumption would be understandable. It would also be misleading. First, because the new strategy will last longer this time—for five years, not three—and because, in addition to the longer time span, the plan also includes additional provisions to make grantees’ lives easier. And rather than changing course, the strategy instead signals the Chicago-based foundation’s commitment to attack its current work from additional angles—or, in other words, to do what it’s already doing more thoroughly. Beyond grants, Joyce’s new strategy will also involve a welcome change in how it invests at least part of its endowment.
The longer timeframe was the result of listening to grantseekers, according to Vice President of Programs and Strategy Darren Reisberg, and it responds to the frustrations they have when foundations continually announce new plans.
“We decided to go for a five-year plan and have some stability in terms of how grantees or applicants view us and view our strategies,” Reisberg said, while adding that the plan includes specific two- and five-year benchmarks and check-in processes covering each of Joyce’s program areas.
Joyce is also making other moves to make life easier for its grantees. Those include “substantially” reducing reporting requirements and making both general operating and multi-year grants, Reisberg said, “so that smaller organizations and midsize organizations aren’t required each year to be reapplying and submitting new material.”
Joyce is also taking new approaches to its longtime commitment to racial equity. Staffers in each of the funder’s program areas explicitly incorporated racial equity as they developed their funding strategies.
And unlike many foundations that have shied away from incorporating social impact investments into their endowment management strategies, Joyce has elected to direct $100 million of its roughly $1 billion in assets to “early-stage founders of racially and gender-diverse firms” over the next five years.
“[We’re] just really looking at the operation in its entirety and thinking about how we can walk the talk,” Reisberg said.
“A refresh, not an overhaul”
Joyce may not have publicly announced its racial equity commitment until 2018, but it has long been quietly focused at least in part on that work, for example, through a $200,000 grant in 2017 to Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice.
That focus will remain. Reisberg called the new plan a “refresh, not an overhaul, of our 2018-2020 strategies,” and agreed that it represents a chance for Joyce to do what it already does more thoroughly by finding new, additional ways to approach its goals.
Another aspect of Joyce’s work that isn’t changing is its focus on policy—from research and development to state and federal implementation in each of the foundation’s funding areas: culture, democracy, education, environment, gun violence and journalism. This is one grantmaker that sees government as part of the solution, not the problem. Overall, Reisberg said, the Joyce Foundation seeks both to directly and indirectly expand the capacity of government on all levels to do important work.
“We play the long game, more so than other foundations do,” Reisberg said.
Expanding and responding to “moments in time”
Over the next five years, though, there will be some change on the individual grantmaking level to reflect shifting needs. After the Flint water crisis, Reisberg said that Joyce expanded its water-related environmental work beyond protecting the Great Lakes to encompass a “lake-to-tap” strategy. Under the new plan, that focus is going to expand again into groundwater through a partnership with Freshwater Society in Minnesota “to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the status of groundwater governance in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan.”
Another set of new grants speaks to what Reisberg called “moment in time” needs. These include grants to Northeastern University’s Bouvé College of Health Sciences and UC Davis to research the recent surge in gun purchases and the short-term effects of the pandemic on gun violence. There’s also a grant to the Sustain Equity Group, a new organization to support Black women’s leadership in violence prevention, as well as funding for work to overcome vaccine access issues and vaccine hesitancy in the Chicago area.
This “moment in time” goes beyond the money that Joyce is moving, and includes plans for the foundation to help local governments benefit from the current wave of available federal funds. Reisberg said that Joyce hopes to assist local governments with plans to strategically access, and spend, the money that’s already available through the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan. The foundation is also “crossing our fingers” in the hope of repeating that process with Biden’s proposed American Jobs Plan and American Family Plan.
Reisberg called the present moment “a sweet spot” for Joyce, a chance for the foundation to help governmental entities discover the most effective ways to make investments that will improve their communities.
Turning back to Joyce’s other grantmaking, Reisberg said that it will evolve with the times. This includes a focus on redistricting policy and implementation. For instance, Joyce has funded organizations that educate the public about and support effective implementation of Michigan’s new Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission, as it works to create “fair and impartial” district maps in the heavily gerrymandered state.
“Big picture-wise, [the democracy program’s] focus remains on improving democracy and engaging communities of color in the democratic process in new and important ways,” Reisberg said. “But, we will have some opportunities that we will want to capitalize on just given some of the issues that might emerge over the course of the new cycle.”
Willing to fail
Another thing that’s not changing at Joyce is the foundation’s willingness to take risks. “Our orientation is not about playing it safe,” Reisberg said, adding that Joyce is working with “seemingly intractable” societal problems and pushing for policy changes “that will really make a big difference.”
If something Joyce supports doesn’t end up working despite early evidence of its potential, “that’s OK,” Reisberg said. “We still feel good about it, and we learn from what we weren’t able to accomplish. We’re proud of being willing to [fail].”
This post has been updated to clarify that Joyce funded organizations working in support of the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission. It does not directly fund the commission.
