Seven Questions for Deanna Gomby, President and CEO of the Heising-Simons Foundation

Deanna Gomby

Deanna Gomby is president and CEO of the Heising-Simons Foundation, the California-based family foundation established in 2007 by Mark Heising, a computer chip design engineer, and his wife, Liz Simons, an educator. Simons’ father, Renaissance Technologies co-founder Jim Simons, made billions as a hedge fund manager. The Heising-Simons Foundation’s five grantmaking programs are climate and clean energy, community and opportunity, education, human rights and science. It awarded more than $127 million in grants in 2020.

Prior to joining Heising-Simons in 2012, Gomby worked at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, where she served as the acting director of its Children, Families, and Communities program. She has a Ph.D. in psychology and a master’s in health services research, both from Stanford University.

We recently chatted with Gomby about her “circuitous” path to the world of philanthropy, the advice she would give to her younger self, and the importance of embracing “wild patience” when tackling society’s most vexing challenges.

What made you decide you wanted to work in the nonprofit sector?

I always knew that I wanted to do something that was helpful to the world, although I’ve never been one of those people who had a life plan. My parents gave to charity when we were growing up, so that was in my background, but the path itself was a little circuitous.

I had a friend in my undergraduate years who was having some personal problems and she asked me to go to a counseling session with her. I did, and it made a huge difference for her, and that’s why I started to study psychology. I thought I’d be a professor, but when I was in graduate school I discovered that academic life really wasn’t for me, and so I entered a health services research program on a parallel track.

One day, my advisor there said, “Maybe you would like to work for this foundation called the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.” It was a modest-sized foundation at the time and they were looking for someone to staff their new Child Health Advisory Committee. That was the first time I had ever really thought about the nonprofit world.

I have always been immensely grateful for that introduction. I worked at the Packard Foundation for 17 years and was fortunate to meet both Mr. and Mrs. Packard. When I started, I think there were seven employees and its grantmaking was mostly focused on four counties in the Bay Area. I saw the power of philanthropy and the nonprofit sector in generating ideas and seeing those ideas put into policy and practice.

That’s what I think is so wonderful about the nonprofit world. It’s like the R&D for society. But it’s also more than that. You’re testing and advocating for all those things, but at the same time, you’re providing support for people who are in need today.

Who are your biggest influences?

The people I worked with in those early days at the Packard Foundation were most influential for me professionally—people like Cole Wilbur, who was the executive director at that time, program officers like Edith Eddy and Dolly Sacks, and the Packards themselves.

All of them had been in philanthropy for many years, and they showed me ways in which philanthropy can be helpful in terms of listening to grantees to tell us what they need and what they think the field needs. That’s what I learned, and I hope that’s what we’re doing at Heising-Simons, too.

What has been one of the biggest challenges you’re currently facing?

We’re thinking about how to return to work after COVID. We closed our offices on March 10, 2020, and we worked very hard during that year to figure out how to get the grants out. Now we’re trying to figure out the new rules of the road. We won’t go back to everybody being in the office every day.

There are so many pluses for not being in the office—the flexibility that comes with being with your family, and, for the Bay Area, not spending a couple of hours every day on the road. But there are also pluses for being in-person, for us and for our work with grantees, so we have to figure out how to be 3D again instead of 2D. We’re working on some pilot ideas this coming year, so we’ll see how it works out.

I also think about new staff coming in. The benefit that you get in an in-person environment is that you can have the kind of learning experience that I had at Packard. You can do that over Zoom, but it’s a lot harder.

If you could give advice to your younger self what would it be?

I would say keep at it. Have confidence that things will change for the better. I spent my early career working on early childhood issues. And the changes there have really been substantial.

There’s a dedicated funding stream for early childhood home visiting programs—I never would have imagined that would be true 30 years ago. There is more state and federal money going into child care and early childhood education programs, and that is due to the dedicated work of grantees and people in the field. I think that’s true for many of the issues in the fields that we’re working in. 

The nature of the work reminds me of a phrase I came across called “wild patience.” It’s taken from the title of a book by the poet Adrienne Rich, which is “A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far,” but that is not how I heard about it.

I heard about it from a colleague of mine named Lisa Klein, who used to run an organization called the Alliance for Early Success. She advocated for “wild patience” in the early childhood world, which is what the alliance is focusing on—this notion that we have to act with urgency, because we can’t afford to have one more child not succeed or miss out on opportunities, but that we also have to be in it for the long haul, because it takes time to change the trajectory of a child’s life. So I would tell my younger self not to give up. Keep working on change, because it will come.

What makes you optimistic about the future of philanthropy? Pessimistic?

The topic I have in mind applies to both sentiments, and it’s the work that we and many others in the field are doing around attacking and recognizing systemic racism, both its history and its pervasive and continuing effects. 

The pessimistic piece of this is that we in the foundation world are part of that same system, and to the extent that we do not change our practices, then we are maintaining that system. If change in this context means philanthropy relinquishes power, then that is especially challenging for all of us. It’s ultimately a good change, but any change requires shifts in thinking and attitudes, and that is hard. I’m not pessimistic that it won’t happen; I am sure that it will. But it’ll take time to make it happen.

So that’s the pessimistic piece. But the flip side of it is we’re paying attention to it, and chipping away. For us, it means thinking about hiring more people with a broader range of experiences, considering how best to reach grantee partners that we haven’t reached before, and including those who can give us a better sense of understanding the issues that we’re trying to address. It’s what we’re trying to do, and it’s what many in philanthropy are trying to do, and that’s what makes me optimistic. 

I would add one other thing about philanthropy generally. And that is over the years, there has been an increase in growth in philanthropy, in terms of giving to institutions and people in the field. That in itself makes me optimistic because it means that there is greater capacity and more opportunities to fund those who haven’t always been funded, and more opportunities for joining efforts among foundations to work together on a meaningful goal.

What was the last great book you read?

I’m in the middle of Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” which is an eye-opening and painful book to absorb. But we should reckon with history, and we should be clear-eyed about where we are today, and then we should work for change.

Any parting thoughts?

I feel we’re at a pivotal moment in so many issues. The crises around us demand action. We can’t wait. While we must stay with these issues for the long haul, we must act now and with urgency.