In 1955, Swedish emigrant Jenny Rasmuson established the Anchorage-based Rasumson Foundation to honor her late husband, E.A. Rasmuson. Forty years later, family members hired its first employee — philanthropy consultant and former Alaska Public Radio Network president Diane Kaplan, who joined a foundation that had $5.8 million in assets and no office, public phone number, website or email address.
In 1999, E.A.’s son Elmer donated $40 million to the foundation, prompting family members to ask Kaplan, who at the time was serving as a “part-time administrator,” to take a more active role in overseeing day-to-day operations. Elmer died the next year, leaving the foundation $400 million. In late 2001, Kaplan was named the foundation’s full-time president and CEO.
Today, as the largest private grantmaker in Alaska, the foundation has about $800 million in assets and has awarded more than $475 million to Alaska-based artists and nonprofits in fields like health, social services and housing.
In March, Kaplan announced she would be stepping down in 2023, capping a 26-year tenure during which she spearheaded a series of innovative initiatives, including a $40 million effort to solve homelessness in Anchorage, the $47 million Alaska Coronavirus Nonprofit Relief Fund, and a program providing dental care across the state’s tribal lands. To get a sense of Kaplan’s enduring impact on Alaskans, I encourage readers to check out the comments on the foundation’s press release announcing her departure.
I recently had the opportunity to chat with Kaplan about her career trajectory, how the pandemic has changed some Alaskan organizations for the better, and the last great book she read. Here are some excerpts from that conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.
What made you decide you wanted to work in the nonprofit sector?
My mother was a teacher and my family was always involved in the community, so it was a very natural move, although I don’t know if I made an intentional decision to do it. I was interested in media and got involved in WXPN, the public radio station at the University of Pennsylvania, when I was a college student. I stayed on after I graduated in a professional position and proceeded from there.
Who are your biggest influences?
When I was a really young kid, there weren’t that many women I knew who worked professionally. Most of my friends’ mothers were homemakers. My mother was a single mother raising three kids and became a teacher, even though she had dreams to be a journalist, because it would get her home at three o’clock when we were done with school.
There was a woman from Barbados who rented an apartment from us who was a computer person. She was the first woman I knew who was working in business, and as time went on, I met lots of different people who inspired me. One of them is Mary Louise Rasmuson. She was the matriarch of the foundation and had been head of the Women’s Army Corps for five years and rose to Lieutenant Colonel. She was a really pretty phenomenal woman. She died in 2012.
I also had the privilege of having Roy M. Huhndorf as a mentor. He served on my board of directors for a while and we also had a consulting company together. Lastly, Ed Rasmuson was my chairman for 25 years until he died in January, and I certainly learned a great deal from him.
What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
When I was president of Alaska Public Radio Network, there was a point of contention with a member of the community, and Roy M. Huhndorf said to me, “If you want everybody to like you, you shouldn’t be a CEO. If you’re doing important work, you’re going to rub some people the wrong way, and that’s a part of the deal. You don’t let the naysayers stop you.” So that was a very important thing I learned early on.
What makes you optimistic about the state of philanthropy? Pessimistic?
I’m optimistic about some of the things that we learned during the pandemic that will become practice. The big area for us involves remote work. In Alaska, full-time work is very rare in rural areas, and remote work can be a source of full-time, well-paying jobs for people who choose to remain here.
Theater companies can now make their productions available virtually, which they didn’t do before the pandemic, and health providers, especially in rural areas, can allow people to remotely speak with specialists, who are much more accessible now. In fact, we’ve found that with treatment facilities, remote casework is actually more successful than in-person in places where transportation is an issue and you have a high degree of cancellations. People are more likely to stick with a program if they can have virtual appointments with their providers. So I think that’s very encouraging.
I’m also very impressed with how some organizations emerged from the pandemic stronger financially and in terms of outreach, programming, and accessibility. Not that it was easy or every experiment was a success, but I am very proud of the resilience of the organizations that I work with.
Something I’m a little pessimistic about involves what we saw emerge during the distribution of the CARES funds to small businesses. In our state, nonprofits were included in the definition of “small business,” so when the money was being disbursed, there was some negative commentary about the sector. For example, I heard someone say that homelessness providers were part of the “nonprofit industrial complex.”
It was almost as if to say that nonprofits were greedy, and that was really hard to take. In fact, I did some speaking around at the time to boost the nonprofit sector and the people who work in it, who are often quite selfless and could have better-paying jobs in the for-profit sector and instead have chosen lives of service. I honor them for that, and I think we all should as a society.
What was the last great book you read?
The book I really loved was brought to my attention by a former board member who is on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals now. It was written by one of her law clerks, Qian Julie Wang, and it’s called “Beautiful Country: A Memoir.”
It’s her recollection of emigrating from China to Manhattan in the 90s, the extreme poverty her family experienced, and how that played out for her as a seven-year-old girl going to public school, not speaking any English, and being worried all the time about the police and being caught because they were here illegally. It’s a very moving story, especially if you work with people in poverty and immigrant populations.
You’ll be stepping down as president next year. I know it’s a ways off, but do you have any plans yet?
I suspect I’ll leave sometime around March and I want to make sure that there’s a smooth transition to my successor. I’m really committed to the Rasmuson Foundation, and I wouldn’t do anything to endanger its momentum or slow it down. We have an excellent leadership team in place and I have every confidence in them.
Beyond that, I haven’t formulated firm plans. I serve on a few boards and I plan to maybe pick up another one or so, something different. And I’m hoping to do a little bit of consulting, but not a full-blown consulting business. I did that before I joined Rasmuson. I love doing it, but I don’t want anything quite as intensive. My original family is on the East Coast, and I’m hoping to spend a little bit more time with them. And I’m a big traveler. There are a lot of places and cultures I have yet to see.
What advice would you give nonprofit leaders at this time?
I think that the most successful relationships that we have had are with organizations with CEOs who have a lot of ideas, the capability of implementation, and are excellent communicators. And when I say “excellent communicators,” I don’t just mean that they tell you about their successes. They also engage you about the difficulties that they’re having.
We really like helping our partners when they run into issues. We know we have certain power with elected officials or can use our voice to speak out, and if they don’t tell us they’re encountering a challenge, we can’t help them. So I think the ones that are successful are not afraid to share when they encounter an obstacle or talk about what they learned from an experience that didn’t work out. Most funders will understand that and not punish leaders who share that kind of information.
