“Breaking down barriers, building up solutions.” The Raikes Foundation’s tagline sums up the organization’s mission — and its direct, unflashy approach to its work. This is unlikely to change under the foundation’s new executive director, Zoë Stemm-Calderon, who has been at the foundation for a decade.
The Raikes Foundation dates back to 2002, when it was created by Jeff and Tricia Raikes. The couple met at Microsoft, where Tricia led Creative Services and Jeff was president of Microsoft’s Business Division and served in senior leadership. He went on to head the then-Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for five years.
The foundation is smaller than other philanthropies started by notable Microsoft alumni, including Steve Ballmer and Gates himself, but it spends money at a high rate: It has given away nearly $264 million since it was created, and its assets stand at around $95 million. As Jeff Raikes wrote in an Inside Philanthropy guest post last year, he is an advocate of “giving in time” — that is, spending down dollars rather than building a “forever” institution. “My wife Tricia and I have long been advocates for this approach, and our own foundation is planning to spend down its funds over the next 15 years,” he wrote. “… From political polarization to climate change to widening inequality, we face serious challenges that catalytic philanthropy can help address. There’s no better time than now for philanthropy to act with urgency, focus and creativity.”
From the start, the couple wanted their foundation to promote the wellbeing of young people and to strengthen the institutions that are meant to support and protect them. As Tricia Raikes said in an interview with Washington State Magazine, “In developing the focus of our foundation, Jeff and I drew not only on our values but also on our experience as parents of adolescents dealing with challenges like bullying. As a mother, I was troubled by a looming question: If our children, who had every resource and advantage in the world, were struggling, what about the millions of other less-privileged kids? … Children don’t fail us. We — and the systems that are supposed to keep them safe—fail them.”
Education is the foundation’s largest funding area (others include Housing Stability for Youth, Impact-Driven Philanthropy and Resourcing Equity & Democracy). In her previous role as senior director of youth-serving systems at Raikes, Stemm-Calderon has led much of that work. Formerly an educator with Teach for America and a fellow at the Gates Foundation, Stemm-Calderon shares the Raikes’ commitment to young people, and it animates her vision for the foundation.
“We really want to be thinking about the future,” she said. “How can we support a public education system that’s fair and future-ready for all of our young people? How can we empower communities to build a democracy that works for everyone? And how can we work together to ensure that we’re addressing the complex causes of youth homelessness so our young people have a safe and stable place to call home?”
We caught up with Stemm-Calderon just a couple of weeks into her new position and asked her about her background, her new role, the foundation’s current priorities, and education in the era of President Trump.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You just started your new position as executive director on January 1. How does it feel?
You know, people keep asking me that. I think the best way I can describe it is that it feels responsible. This is a moment in our country when I think we should all feel a great responsibility for future generations, for our democracy. I feel very responsible for the things we need to do to support our young people and our country and our partners right now, and this amazing team that I get to work with.
Jeff and Tricia conducted a national search for this role, and I was grateful to be selected. I think one of the reasons they made that choice was that they are making a bet on the continuity of the work we’re doing. I’ve been at the foundation for 10 years, so what’s wonderful is that I have good relationships with our team and with our partners in the field. And what will stay the same is our commitment to the fundamentals of protecting our democracy and building a future for young people.
Can you tell us a little about your background, and how you made the transition from education to philanthropy?
I grew up in Washington State and I went to the University of Washington. I had a mentor in my International Studies program who always asked this question: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” That question has stayed with me because it isn’t just asking how you spend your life, but whether you’re truly paying attention to the world and whether you feel responsible for what you notice.
I had experience studying countries around the globe, and how those countries take care of everyone inside their borders and make sure everybody has opportunity. I started to feel uncomfortable asking that question about other places when there was so much we needed to do here to provide opportunity for everyone. That’s why I applied to Teach for America.
I was sent to teach in Houston, which was a different world in so many ways from the place I’d grown up. I was teaching in an all-Latino community, one where folks had lived for generations, probably before it was even part of the United States. I saw the stark difference between the opportunity structures that were available to me growing up as a little suburban kid outside of Seattle and what was available to my students. There was barbed wire around the school. There were stories I heard from parents about the experiences they’d had in that school building. They didn’t have caring teachers like I had, teachers who saw me and made me feel like I belonged and breathed all this life into my potential and my dreams. There were stories about not having teachers for a year, for example.
It was an amazing formative experience for me. It shaped how I saw opportunity structures in the country. I realized that they are based on class and race and a long history of where we’ve built structure and opportunity into the fabric of our country.
And so I became really passionate about public education. I worked as an instructional coach. I was an assistant district superintendent. I worked at the state level for state education departments. Then, when I did my grad school work, I started to ask the question: Where do the ideas about how we’re going to improve public education and opportunity in our country come from? Of course, philanthropy is part of that. I did my fellowship at the Gates Foundation, where I had the opportunity to think about what we can do with our civic infrastructure to try to drive change.
So I’ve always tried to stay grounded in what started me on this journey, which is: How do we make opportunity available to everyone in our country and how do we support the communities who want to drive that kind of change? And I think that’s what we do best at the Raikes Foundation.
How are you spending your first weeks on the job?
I’m spending a lot of time with our team in these first 45 days, really listening and thinking about, what do we want to sustain and what do we want to focus on to build for the next chapter together? I’m also going to be meeting with our partners to ask some of those same questions, you know: How are we showing up? How can we keep doing the work that our partners count on us to do, and where are there new opportunities? I’ve also been excited to be connecting with other philanthropy leaders.
We’ve talked in the past about Raikes’ work with other funders. Is that something you intend to continue in your new role?
Definitely. That’s one of the things I’ve loved about working at the Raikes Foundation: Collaboration with other funders is not just encouraged, it’s expected. We work in some broad funder collaboratives — and we’ve seen these places becoming more and more vibrant spaces for people to collaborate.
Right now we see philanthropy coming together to defend the right to give and to support the civic infrastructure of our country. Jeff and Tricia were among the earliest signers of the Unite In Advance statement, for example. I think there’s a recognition that we have really important things to protect right now.
Any initiatives coming up that you’d like to talk about?
Our Housing Stability for Youth work — that is one of the oldest portfolios at the foundation, and something we’re really, really proud of. Between 2016 and 2022, we’ve seen a 40% decrease in the number of young people experiencing homelessness in Washington State. Now, we’re thinking about how to support other states to take on the kinds of systems change and policies that drove that improvement. In the next two to three months, we’re also launching a fund to try to accelerate the progress in Washington state, so we can be the first state to irreversibly prevent youth homelessness.
Do you foresee any changes in the foundation’s approach to education?
We’re going to sustain our commitment to protecting what matters in our public education system. There’s been a deeply funded and organized effort to undermine who gets to learn, and it’s had detrimental impacts. At the same time, I think we can’t just defend a system that wasn’t fully working to begin with; we also can’t just dismantle it. Our young people are too important, our economic competitiveness and our security — all those things are too important to not build the education system we need.
So we’re working with partners to think about how we redesign our system for the age of AI, to build both the policy and the practice examples that would bring that to life. We’re in a moment where AI is either going to support us to be more connected, or could exacerbate a trend we’ve seen where young people aren’t finding real human connection. I think this is a design moment for all of us, and we shouldn’t miss it by trying to protect what we once had. We have to look forward and think about how we create the fair and future-ready public education system that we need.
Related Inside Philanthropy Resources:
For Subscribers Only
Can you talk about the Trump administration’s efforts to shutter the Department of Education and its support for education vouchers?
I think attacks on public education, including the dismantling of the Department of Ed — they just push us further away from making sure our young people can thrive in an ever-changing world. So while I’m for building a new vision for our public education system, we need to sustain the commitments we’ve made to an education system that works for everyone. And the Department of Education, our public education system, those are huge anchors of opportunity in our country. And frankly, a lot of the steps the administration is taking are unpopular with Americans. Two-thirds of adults say that they oppose closing the Department of Education. Every time education vouchers are on the ballot, they are defeated because parents want great public schools for their kids and they want them for their neighbors’ kids.
We don’t want to go back to the world before the Department of Education, for example, when students with disabilities could be turned away from schools: Only 1 in 5 students with disabilities had access to public schools. Many Black students across the South didn’t have access to what we now think of as just the basics, like access to a high school diploma, and English language learners had little to no support.
And by the way, this is also happening as we expand voucher programs, because private schools can turn students away. Voucher programs are framed as giving parents a choice, but actually it’s the school that chooses if they are going to teach your child. This is not the direction that a strong America needs to go. If we want opportunity structures for all, we’re going to have to hold on to public schools and improve them. That is going to stay at the heart of the work we do.
What do you do when you’re not working?
That’s a great question. I really love my work, so I do spend a lot of time on that. My husband is a public school principal. We met as first grade teachers, and we’ve spent our careers in education. I love that part of my life, that I get to keep connected to schools and his experience. And I have two daughters who are in high school in our public schools here in West Seattle. I spend a lot of time with them and their friends and their youth groups, hearing about the things that are on the minds of our young people, including all the opportunity and potential they see — even in challenging times. And I like to cook and work out. I’m a middle-aged woman, so building muscles is my new obsession.
