Eight Questions for Don Howard, President and CEO of the James Irvine Foundation

Don Howard, president and ceo of the James irvine Foundation

Don Howard is the president and chief executive officer of the James Irvine Foundation, the San Francisco-based grantmaker focused on ensuring all low-income workers in California have the power to advance economically. The foundation has a $3.8 billion endowment and expects to award $129 million in grants in 2021.

Prior to joining Irvine, Howard was a partner at the Bridgespan Group, where he served as a strategic advisor to nonprofit and foundation leaders, and led Bridgespan’s San Francisco office for more than a decade. Don has also been an activist around HIV and other health-related issues, previously serving on advisory boards at the San Francisco Department of Public Health; University of California, San Francisco; and the National Institutes of Health.

We recently spoke with Howard about his non-linear career trajectory, the advice he would give to his younger self, and the need for philanthropy to ensure that the billions in public funds about to pour into California are used to create a more equitable, inclusive and resilient economy.

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

The journey was not a linear one. As a gay kid who was very effeminate, I grew up feeling like an outsider. I was in Catholic school for close to 12 years and my parents divorced when I was 11, and as a single-parent family in a Catholic environment, that was sort of another strike against me. We struggled financially—single mom, two kids—and it made me want to study really hard, get into a good school and be financially self-sufficient. 

I remember my mom telling me, “At the end of the day, you have to be able to take care of yourself, and your first priority is to make sure you set yourself up in a decent career.” So I studied engineering and business and went into management consulting because that was the path toward financial independence—and it worked! For the first several years, it allowed me to pay off my student loans, but there came a point where I lifted my head up and asked if this is really what I wanted to do in my life. 

In the early ’90s, HIV hit my community really hard. I found out I was infected, and I became a passionate activist around HIV issues with ACT UP, and really saw first-hand what a committed activist can accomplish in terms of changing public opinion and systems. I still think about the HIV work when I think about systems change; I think about changes that happened at the FDA. You can draw a straight line from the emergency use authorization and expedited approval that we’re seeing around coronavirus right now back to those activists. And I just realized that I wasn’t going to be able to stay in the corporate sector. 

At that point, the Bridgespan Group was just being set up. It was the perfect place for a refugee from consulting like myself. I was there for 11 years and got to work with a tremendous group of people and learned about nonprofit management, foundation leadership, and philanthropic strategy. I came into Irvine in 2013 as a number two overseeing grantmaking, and then with the departure of our previous CEO Jim Canales, I came into the CEO role.

Who are the people who have had the greatest influence on you as a professional?

I have to credit my mom. It may be a bit trite, but she displayed such a sense of service and tenacity in her lifetime—she passed away back in 2019. She worked, as I said, supporting two kids to go to college, and she did that working as a civil servant for the city of Long Beach for 40 years in public safety, consumer affairs and community development.

Things I heard around her dinner table—trying to help communities thrive, helping folks who are struggling financially, the challenges of moving public sector bureaucracies to do the right thing—were the lessons of my childhood.

I think Stanford was also a big influence for a host of reasons. [Howard earned his bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering at Stanford, where he also received an MBA from the Graduate School of Business.] There was a real cultural theme of “to whom much is given, much is expected,” and there was this precious experience where you get to learn from folks of that caliber, such that it was incumbent on us to make the world a better place, and I think that reinforced the service instinct I got from my mom.

Another person is Jeff Bradach. He’s one of the co-founders of the Bridgespan Group and I learned from him how to build an organization. He encouraged servant leadership and leading from behind to strengthen the organization, as opposed to being out front and in the spotlight, and that’s something I’ve really tried to bring to Irvine.

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

Worry less. Be in the moment. Experience your life as it’s happening and less on what’s in the past or what might be coming in the future. I’m such a planner, and tend toward the anxious, and it’s been an asset in terms of being prepared and anticipating what’s coming next, but the trade-off there is that it makes it harder to enjoy moments as they come at you. It’s been the work of my adulthood to quiet my mind and be more present for every day in my life.

What makes you pessimistic about the future of philanthropy? Optimistic?

There’s a risk of thinking of philanthropy as monolithic. There’s that old adage—if you’ve seen one foundation, you’ve seen one foundation. Endowed foundations often put ourselves into silos in the way we approach our grantmaking. We can see the world through these categorical lenses and divvy the work into individual programmatic areas, and that sub-optimizes what can get accomplished. I would often see this when I worked with clients at Bridgespan.

And then you look at the problems we’re trying to address and the magnitude of the resources that are required—it outstrips all of us. When was the last time you heard about a merger and acquisition in the philanthropic field? There’s just very little motive or ways to prompt folks to consider consolidating or even partnering—which brings me to why I’m optimistic about philanthropy.

The coming influx of public resources gives us the opportunity to reset and rebuild the economy for climate resilience and racial justice, and allows us to partner with public- and private-sector actors, organizers and labor leaders to make sure those resources lead to equitable outcomes. Here in California, the $100 billion recovery budget included about $45 billion in infrastructure investments. There’s a ton of potential for philanthropy to have real leverage for helping communities prepare for and navigate the deployment of these resources.

And then there’s the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which provides another $45 billion for California. Between approved state and federal funding, something like $90 billion is coming into California communities over the next five to eight years to rebuild infrastructure. But is that going to be the infrastructure that leads to low-quality jobs? Or is it going to lead to an inclusive economy that works for everyone and creates jobs that help us build climate resilience and hopefully restore California’s middle class?

So we’ve been spending a lot of our time thinking about how to help communities prepare for those resources, making sure that low-income workers know about the careers in infrastructure and have the chance to prepare for those opportunities. And we want to see that the jobs that are created are good jobs, with sustaining wages that help folks succeed and rebuild the underclass.

I grew up in Long Beach and have seen the state change so dramatically in my lifetime. The opportunity for folks to do better than their parents has significantly diminished over the years, and I think this is the chance to rebuild the economy and the middle class in a way that’s racially inclusive. I think we’re up to the challenge and I hope philanthropy plays a big role.

What advice would you give nonprofit leaders and fundraisers looking for support?

Stay true to yourself. Know what you’re trying to accomplish and what you’re about, and take the right money. Seek the right money, get the right money, and take the right money. I saw this a lot with our clients at Bridgespan. Grantees would jump at funding opportunities, but in the process, divert themselves from their core mission or strategy and create a whole set of dynamics that undermine their ability to succeed. Sometimes saying no is the most powerful way to be strategic, and it’s really hard to do when money is scarce.

The second related item is, I would encourage folks who find a way to get money to ask for more, and do it with a solid plan and ask for general operating support. I’ve seen a number of organizations in my consulting career and at Irvine that became hamstrung by too many small, project-specific grants. They can’t really build the core infrastructure for their organization to succeed.

I’ve also seen growth capital campaigns in which folks unleash their potential in the process of raising $5, $10 million of growth capital that they can use over the course of several years to really scale their organization from point A to point B. But you have to go about it really intentionally and be bold with the asks you put out. 

What was the last good book you’ve read?

“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” I have twin boys who are eight, and we are just finishing up the entire Harry Potter series, but I’m not sure that’s what you’re looking for, so I’ll talk about a book I just started reading called “Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993.” It’s interesting to read about your own life experience in a book—it certainly makes one feel a little old, and I’m looking forward to comparing my experience with how it’s captured in the book. 

There’s also a podcast I’d recommend called “What is California?” where notable Californians talk about this singular question. A recent episode features one of our former board members, David “Mas” Masumoto, a third-generation Japanese farmer in Fresno, poet, and author of books on organic produce. It’s illuminating to hear folks who are part of California’s recent history talk about their experiences and hopes. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to understand this inscrutable state.

Any parting thoughts?

I would urge our philanthropic leaders to think about how we can come together to work across sectors to ensure this tremendous flow of public funding addresses the crises that we’re dealing with, builds resilience, and hopefully restores a sense of common purpose. This is an opportunity to advance our mission, and I think it cuts across all those silos in different ways, and we need these investments to succeed. So that’s my hope—that others have this same sense of excitement and urgency to partner with folks across sectors to make it happen.