By Richard Woo
CEO
The Russell Family Foundation

“…a sustainable and peaceful world for people, places and communities.”

That’s the vision of The Russell Family Foundation.  We’re driving toward this goal, with three principles:  1) taking a place-based approach; 2) embracing difference; and 3) being a learning organization.

An example of the interplay among these principles is the Foundation’s newly-launched Puyallup Watershed Initiative, a ten-year funding and civic engagement project to help steward the waters originating on Mt. Rainier and running to the Puget Sound in Washington.  The Puyallup Watershed is a meandering landscape of bio, geo and social diversity.  The watershed takes its name from the Puyallup River, the area’s main waterway, and the Puyallup Tribe of Indians, who have lived along the shores of Puget Sound for thousands of years.  The watershed covers roughly 1,000 square miles; includes over a dozen governing jurisdictions; is home to the Puyallup Tribal government; supports rural, urban and suburban economies; and is host to communities that are growing more diverse by race, ethnicity, class and other social measures.  Local county officials describe the watershed as a place with “nearly every land use imaginable.”

For the Foundation to have a meaningful impact in this area, we need to take equity into consideration. We must ensure that our grantmaking benefits the broad range of stakeholders connected to the watershed because their involvement is critical to success. To set ourselves up to be equitable in the end, we have begun by being inclusive of those diverse stakeholders from the beginning so they can inform our grantmaking decisions throughout.

The watershed initiative offers a confluence of place, difference and learning.  When the Foundation’s program team convened the first dinner meeting of an initial community advisory group, the guest list reflected different and emerging local voices—not simply those historically tied to the watershed as an environmental platform.  The list included farmers, business people, tribal leaders, sport fishers, scientists, educators, young urban artists, youth philanthropists, government officials, a farmworkers union activist, and environmentalists.  People of color were represented across many of these groupings.  There was no one dominant group—much like the coming future of America.

Consequently one of the guests, a prominent water scientist who happens to be Caucasian, later told us his greatest surprise was just how few people he knew upon entering the event when originally he fully expected to know everyone in the room.  He acknowledged that since that convening, he’d been sitting in meetings with professional colleagues wondering to himself how to make the stuff they’re working on more meaningful to the new people he had met over dinner.  In a similar fashion, another guest took me aside before dinner to express his genuine puzzlement at being invited to an “environmental watershed” event when his day job is leading a youth philanthropy board at another local foundation.  This fellow is a twenty-something Asian American working with 18 young philanthropists, 80% of whom are youth of color.  By the end of the evening, the guest said to me and I paraphrase:  “The youth I serve care a lot about health and basic needs, so if this effort is about the environment and its impact on community health, then this is important to our work.”  This tone of mutual curiosity and expansive thinking has permeated the advisory group convenings over the last six months.

These anecdotes represent small steps toward embracing difference and building stronger ties so that ultimately the community’s collective voice helps direct the Foundation’s resources toward a Puyallup Watershed that is environmentally healthy, economically vibrant, and socially equitable.  Over the long term, we expect these stories will lead to a “watershed experience,” eventually gaining momentum and force in downstream thoughts and actions both at the Foundation and in communities all around the Puget Sound.

By Richard Woo
CEO
The Russell Family Foundation

“Storytelling is the human soul made visible.”

-Donald Davis, Storyteller

Recently 16 people from around the country gathered in a quiet Connecticut township for a weeklong storytelling retreat. Each person in her or his own way is working toward the transformation of communities. There were folks present from social change organizations, the private sector, the interfaith community, the healing traditions, organizational development consulting, the performing arts, and philanthropic foundations. The retreat was sponsored by Bill Graustein of the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund in Connecticut and guided by Donald Davis, a skilled storyteller from North Carolina. I count myself lucky to have been among this group of people brought together to practice the art of building community through story. We quickly learned that the path toward helping other people, organizations, and communities to share their stories, requires first embracing your own story—in all its glory and imperfections.

Recounting the story of a storytelling retreat is more than a little challenging, in part because what is shared in the intimacy of the gathered circle is treated as sacred. But I’ll tell you about an impromptu experience that happened one evening around the dining table as an example of the power of story.

Amanda Kemp, founder of the Theatre for Transformation in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was attending the retreat in the midst of finishing a fresh, new script about the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation issued in 1863 by President Abraham Lincoln. This year the Theatre for Transformation is commemorating the sesquicentennial by premiering in May this play entitled: “Emancipation Sweet.” It’s the tale of a 13-year old boy from a biracial family, African American and white, with the memorable name of Emancipation Sweet. The play’s dramatic arc is launched when Emancipation is cajoled and prodded by his white mother into joining a quest to embrace African American history following the recent death of his father.

With the play’s submission deadline looming, Amanda invited members of the retreat to read the script aloud so she could actually hear the words that until then had been shuffling silently between her head and heart. A number of us gathered in the dining room that evening and Amanda dealt the character parts, like cards from a fresh cut deck. When she asked me which character I’d like to read, I chose one with the archetypal name “Old Man.” Old Man was described curtly as being “in his 60s and African American.” From a method acting perspective, I’m hard pressed to emulate the African American experience, but I know something about being “in his 60s.” Assigning me, a Chinese American, to read a role (even casually) in a play populated by African American and white characters may seem like an act of creative casting, but I was not alone. The “one night spontaneous cast” of readers included an Irish American from South Boston, an Indian American Sikh from Chicago, an Afro-Panamanian of West Indies descent, a Swedish American from Chicago, a Lithuanian American from Connecticut and a self-described WASP from Providence. We were a motley crew. And our coach that evening, Amanda, was drawing from her roots as an African American playwright born in Biloxi and raised in the Bronx.

We read our lines and multitasked as we went along—simultaneously listening for stage directions, interpreting the script, and responding to each reader’s emotional contributions to the character development. We did our best to avoid stepping on each other’s lines. Like storytelling, a script reading is as much about listening as it is about speaking.

In the play, Old Man serves as the cultural chaperone to an adolescently resistant Emancipation Sweet, as they time travel back in 50-year increments from contemporary America to the Civil War era. The banter and mounting tension between Old Man and Emancipation establishes a certain dramatic heartbeat. At each stop along the path of African American history, Emancipation encounters common people in uncommon struggles for freedom and dignity. By the end of the story, Emancipation is transformed.

Even as an impromptu reader of the Old Man character, I felt the emotional sway of transformation. By the time I recited my last lines to the Emancipation character, I was undeniably caught up in the history that lay before us—the stories of enslavement, cultural purging, unbending will, and proud victories. Like a sweeping pageant, my fellow script readers breathed life into that history on a stage no more grand than a dining room table. In that brief moment, I disappeared into Old Man. I felt the weight and responsibility of shepherding a young man’s awakening to self, community, and history. I delivered my final lines in a halting whisper, as each word caught for a moment in my chest. Emancipation Sweet, Sweet Emancipation.

This is the deep power of story—be it yours or someone else’s; be you the speaker or the listener.

“Storytelling is the human soul made visible.”

By Sindhu Knotz
Associate Partner, The Giving Practice
Philanthropy Northwest

At Philanthropy Northwest, we recognize that there are many philanthropic leaders committed to building more diverse and inclusive organizations in our region. Yet taking meaningful action to address diversity, equity and inclusion can be challenging work, even for those foundations that have been in the lead for many years.

This is why The Giving Practice, the consulting arm of Philanthropy Northwest, has partnered with the D5 Coalition on a research project to explore how foundations in the Northwest are addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion, and adapting to changing demographics. The D5 Coalition is a five-year, collaborative effort created to encourage and support philanthropists to build a more diverse and inclusive philanthropic sector.

Our research project is designed as a two-part study that includes a peer learning network, as well as a series of interviews with foundation leaders across our region. We’re interested in understanding how organizational culture and leadership practices can promote action towards greater diversity, equity, and inclusion- and to identify any common barriers along the way. Our interviews will begin this spring, and our goal is to have a report to share with our membership and the broader field by the end of this year.

Foundation leaders and staff involved in this work have started to share interesting articles and resources with us. For example, Doug Stamm of the Meyer Memorial Trust recently shared More Than Words by George Penick, a report detailing one leader’s journey with his board and staff to create a more equitable and inclusive foundation. Richard Woo of The Russell Family Foundation shared a diversity-related blog post written following a site visit in rural Colorado. We encourage you to read these resources to get a better sense of the challenges faced by leaders today, and some of the approaches being utilized to increase diversity.

Stay tuned to the Philanthropy Northwest blog for updates on this project, and to be the first to hear about the report when it is released later in the year.

By Chris Rurik
Historian/Storyteller
The Russell Family Foundation

The Russell Family Foundation (Gig Harbor, WA) held a session dedicated to values at last fall’s board meeting. My parents’ generation and the elder cohort of my generation were supposed to talk openly about the family’s guiding principles, about why we do the work we do. Coming in, this formalized discussion of values seemed a little silly to me. After all, this was my life, my heritage. We knew my grandparents’ values – non-negotiable integrity, trust, decisiveness, and so on – and had learned them from a lifetime of familial interplay, not hour-and-a-half meetings. We are a close-knit family, full of stories; I couldn’t not pick up the values.

Richard Woo, our CEO, likes to make references to our “moral DNA”. To me, the metaphor is perfect. I said my family is close-knit. By no means does that mean we are all alike. Biologically speaking, my grandparents’ genetic material has been recombined and re-expressed fifteen times now. We’re short and tall, introverted and extroverted, emotional and logical. The building blocks are the same, but they have been shuffled differently in each of us. More importantly, layered on our individual genotypic cores are widely varying life experiences that have sculpted the physical and moral expression of our DNA. Our lifestyles vary, and with them our beliefs. No family is heterogeneous; no individual is static. As years pass, families evolve.

If we’re all constantly learning and growing, our dynamics shifting, then how does our moral heritage express itself in a collective endeavor like a foundation? How do you balance the foundation’s founding ideals with the realities of a changing world and a changing group of trustees?

During our meeting on values, my parents’ generation got to talking about how they invented the foundation. They told of their shock at the amount for which my grandfather’s company sold, of my grandparents’ strong and stabilizing belief that the whole family should be involved in managing the windfall. To them, that meant philanthropy. My aunts and uncles laughed as they told us about early meetings held in my grandparents’ basement. After all, they were in way over their heads. Should they establish a foundation? How do you do that? They had no idea. As they learned, hashing things out, the most difficult and crucial element was the decision about what they would fund – how their variously expressed values would translate into a vision for social change. Siblings aren’t known for their willingness to agree, and my parents’ generation spans the full ideological spectrum. By all accounts, emotional back-and-forth was in no short supply. Before long, they made a simple rule: their foundation would only tackle causes that everyone believed in. To develop its mission, they would strip away all appurtenances until only their shared moral DNA remained.

For me, this creation story was a revelation. Here I was in the foundation’s building, in a smoothly run board meeting, accustomed to thinking of the foundation as a sturdy, physical, established presence. There were set ways of doing things, I thought. But hearing my aunts and uncles talk about the emotional nature of its invention, I came to see that they had once known as little as me. The foundation was not purely logical; it was as based on chance and personality as any expression of DNA. It was moldable. I would mold it, just by joining.

Too many people, when talking about the next generation’s role in philanthropy, make each generation seem a cohesive unit. But there is as much heterogeneity within generations as between them. My parents’ generation had to strip their values down to the basics when inventing the foundation. Now, as my equally diverse generation becomes actively involved, the process is repeating. As my family’s viewpoints again diverge, we have naturally returned to sequencing our collective moral genome. This is the kind of inflection point when evolution proceeds most rapidly. We are questioning our foundation’s accomplishments. We are re-imagining and recalibrating our hopes for the future. After all, our foundation’s mission is an outgrowth of our innate and diverse values, not the other way around.

By Richard Woo
Board Member, Philanthropy Northwest
CEO, The Russell Family Foundation

At my house in the Pacific Northwest, winter gardening amounts to gathering up the brittle fallen leaves that lingered on branches longer than expected and missed being raked up into autumn piles. I’d spent the late fall procrastinating over the task of raking leaves lodged among the bumpy stones of our rock garden. Once the seasonal rains arrived, the soggy leaves stuck to the stones like stubborn abalones. Neither rake nor leaf blower could dislodge them from their rocky crevices. This coincidence of nature only served to embolden my procrastination: “It’s impossible, I cannot get those leaves out!”

However, on the dawn of a new year, my wife’s insistence overcame my resistance and so it was I spent the frigid morning on hands and knees. By this time, the once soggy leaves had frozen hard with the overnight frost and now adhered even more permanently leaf to stone. What to do? After muttering my mantra several times: “It’s impossible, I cannot get those leaves out!” it slowly dawned on me that the task was not insurmountable, but simply inconvenient, harder than expected, and requiring more effort than I was willing to commit. That’s when I kneeled down and began prying one by one, each frozen leaf from its rock-bound foothold. The garden did not surrender its leafy ground cover willingly.

Initially, I felt silly doing a task with my naked hands that could have easily been accomplished with a rake or blower…under drier conditions. “Is this any way to start the new year?”—I sighed to myself. After a time I started to drift from a feeling of futility toward the notion that there might be a lesson hidden among these stones. I tried considering this singular task as a Zen-like exercise in simplicity, perseverance, and right effort. Gradually calm settled in and I began noticing more about the immediate experience:  leaf patterns, stone shapes, frost crystals, light and shade. Looking back at my handiwork midway down the path, I realized progress was underway—subtle though it was.

As I continued this moving meditation, my mind wandered to the practice of philanthropy and the relevance of this gardening exercise. When faced with a seemingly overwhelming social, environmental or civic problem, how often have I muttered to myself:  “That’s impossible!” Perhaps, it was not a matter of impossibility but rather the professional procrastination over a task that was inconvenient, harder than expected, and requiring more effort than I was willing to commit. Now of course, there are “big, hairy and audacious problems” in the world—we’re seeing their flashpoints daily from gun violence to climate change and civil wars. And solving these problems cannot be accomplished as simply as winter gardening. But what if foundations, individual philanthropists, and community partners made a greater effort to work together while taking on singular tasks with more simplicity, perseverance, and right effort?  If we took off the (garden) gloves and wrestled the elements with our naked hands, might we see more progress in this new year—subtle though it may be?

By Richard Woo
CEO
The Russell Family Foundation

As part of our Foundation’s increasing focus on place-based strategies, I’m spending more time getting to know the community in which I live and work. Last fall our Foundation made a ten-year commitment to work in the Puyallup River Watershed to strengthen the stewardship of the lands, waters and communities of this special place of the south Puget Sound. In May, Scott Miller of our Foundation’s environmental sustainability program and I attended the Puyallup Tribe’s ceremony of the First Fish of the season.  This special annual ceremony was led by Connie McCloud, the Cultural & Youth Director of the Puyallup Tribe. According to the legends, the Salmon People once walked among the People of the First Nations. In a game of chance, the Salmon People lost and were sent to live in the seas, returning each year up the rivers and streams to provide food for the People of the First Nations.

Honoring the first fish of the season is a way of showing respect for the food; as well as the waters and lands from which it comes. After the first fish is prepared and filleted by a fisherman on cedar boughs and plank, the fish remains and plank are ceremoniously set adrift in the Puyallup River where the currents carry them back towards the sea. The deep resonant voices of the singers, the drums and rattles followed the drifting salmon remains as they disappeared around the river bend. The drums and voices competed with the low roar of traffic along I-5 and the Pacific Highway bridge. The drums, voices, and traditions prevailed.

Following the ceremony, about 100 people gathered in Tacoma at the Portland Avenue Community Center for a feast that included the first fish, other salmon, nettle soup, and Puget Sound shrimp caught fresh that morning. With open hospitality, Connie McCloud invited me to sit at her table which included several elders whom I got to know better over the lunch. I now have a much deeper appreciation for this place called the Puyallup and the people after whom it is named.

By Mandi Moshay
Communications Manager
Philanthropy Northwest

Philanthropy Northwest Board Member Richard Woo recently completed a 500 mile bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles for the 2012 AIDS LifeCycle event. Richard was one of over 2,200 riders and 500 volunteers that participated in the event, which raised over $12.6 million to fight HIV/AIDS.

Richard shared his struggles and triumphs via an email to friends and supporters late last week. Particularly inspiring was his ability to shift perspectives when times got tough. Richard writes:

“For the first three days of the ride I kept repeating a silent mantra, ‘Why am I doing this? as I struggled to climb the steep hills or keep pace with riders along endless stretches of flat freeways. By Wednesday I stopped repeating that mental question because it was not soothing, nor inspiring – it was, in fact, anxiety provoking. Asking the question of myself meant that I might eventually answer with the thoughts: “I don’t want to do this. Stop now. Get off this bike and go home.” I realized that sometimes it’s better not to ask that question any longer but simply accept my original decision and move on towards the goal.”

He also shared a photo featuring a motivational message from a fellow rider:

“The attached photo is from Saturday, the final day. The photo shows the plastic egg I found on my bicycle seat early Saturday morning. The egg contained a lifesaver candy and the message: ‘May the reason you committed to ride this week be a song of hope for all the world to sing forever. Love, Chicken Lady, ALC11.’ Chicken Lady is a longtime ALC rider whose tradition it is to place one such egg on every bicycle seat (2,225 bicycles) the night before the final day so each rider is greeted the next morning with an inspirational message.”

Congratulations to Richard for finishing such a challenging event. To learn more about AIDS LifeCycle and how you can get involved next year, click here.

Richard Woo
CEO
The Russell Family Foundation

In May, I experienced a week-long storytelling retreat near New Haven, Connecticut attended by 13 people from nonprofits and foundations around the country. The retreat was taught by Donald Davis, a master teller of stories born and raised in the Appalachian town of Waynesville, North Carolina. The attached photo is the newly-published book of stories from his youth—Tales from a Free Range Childhood. That’s Donald pictured on the cover at age three with his favorite teddy bear.

The retreat was generously hosted by Bill Graustein, trustee of the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund in New Haven, which focuses on education and community building—using storytelling as an organizing tool.

Here are some nuggets from Donald Davis about the art of storytelling. I found many lessons and metaphors during the week directly related to my work at The Russell Family Foundation and philanthropy in general.

• “Stories are what happen when you have a picture in your mind and you want to share it. We watch stories as much as we hear them.”

• “What do you need to say about that picture in your mind to successfully transfer that image to the listener? In the listener’s mind there are two basic questions: 1) Where are we? 2) Who is there?”

• “Often the listener hears the story before the teller realizes she is telling a story.”

• “Storytelling is different from journal writing because vocalizing your thoughts to listeners creates an interpersonal exchange that informs you, the teller, and your story—so it can evolve over time.”

• “As you listen to a teller’s story and if you’re invited to offer feedback, keep in mind: everything that gets labeled gets bigger. If you label the mistake that is what will grow. Imagine now pointing out what works—that is what grows.”

Imagine applying Donald’s remarks to the efforts of your foundation, that of your grant partners or colleagues, and the stories we all yearn to hear.

For more information about Donald Davis or the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund see:

http://www.ddavisstoryteller.com/

http://www.wcgmf.org/

By Richard Woo
“CRO”
The Russell Family Foundation

Framing is powerful. Consider this:

The Russell Family Foundation (TRFF) mission is to “invest resources and relationships in grassroots leaders, environmental sustainability and global peace.” Nowhere is there any mention of “grants, programs or initiatives.” Grants, programs and initiatives are the shorthand we use to label the products and activities of our foundation’s work.

Grants, programs and initiatives define the source (TRFF) and the boundaries (our stuff) of what the foundation offers the communities we serve. In other words, we develop grants, programs and initiatives and deliver them to the community. That’s why philanthropy as a transaction is called the “giving profession.” Embedded in these gifts are the “resources and relationships” mentioned in our mission statement.

This is noble. It is also seductive. Operating from inside the foundation, it is easy to begin believing our own public relations. Therein lies the true occupational hazard of this profession. The best antidote to a swelled head is checking our egos at the door. If only it were so easy. If we aren’t careful, we may begin to believe the world revolves around our grants, programs & initiatives. That frame of mind is sometimes reinforced subtly with words like “ mission, focus or strategic.” From there, it is but a few short steps to assuming undue ownership, feeling territorial or neglecting to build more expansive community connections.

An important element of making grants, programs and initiatives for community consumption is the relevance of those offerings and the nature of our relationship with the community. What if we offered a grant and no one wanted it?

It is important to set the right frame on the foundation’s community engagement. We must emphasize our relationships even as we deliver grants, programs and initiatives. When we pay as much attention to authentic relationship development as we do to program development, there is a greater chance of becoming relevant. Relationships are boundless, programs are finite.

Imagine if I changed my title to “Chief Relationship Officer” or CRO. Increasingly, my attention is spent on relations with the board, staff, peers and the community/field-at-large. The other day, I asked one of our foundation colleagues: “What if your title was changed to Relationship Manager?” That leads to other questions:

• How might these shifts in language and perspective transform our approach to the work?
• How would we reallocate our time, budgets or skills development to build stronger relationships?
• What’s the difference between managing “people & relationships” versus “programs & things”?

As often as not, the best grants, programs and projects are born from deep relationships with our communities and partners.

By Richard Woo
CEO
The Russell Family Foundation

I recently attended a two-day seminar for CEOs & Trustees entitled: Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis. The presenter was Marty Linsky, of the Harvard Kennedy School faculty and co-author, with Ron Heifetz, of Leadership on the Line.

Linsky was calling us all to be the transformative “flame” of leadership without regard to whether we might be reborn as the Phoenix on the other side. We might not. This was an appeal to facing perceived danger and finding courage.

Here are some memorable though stark comments from the session:

Stand in your purpose. If not, then certainly you will be standing in the purpose of someone else.

In organizational life, when you meet resistance then you are on the right track. It’s a sign of addressing really important work. Often we think that resistance is a sign of being on the wrong track – and we ease off to avoid conflict and keep the peace.

Leadership is disappointing your own people at a rate that they can absorb. When you are pushing against what people expect, they can only absorb so much.

If it’s a win-win situation, it’s a sign that nothing important is at stake. Leadership is about the distribution of losses. The push-back comes not because people don’t get it, it’s because they DO get it and they don’t like it.

The comfort of the status quo lives in people’s hearts and guts, not in their heads. You’re not appealing to their logic, you’re not trying to change their minds. You’re trying to find what matters to them, place it in some order of importance and begin to negotiate the wins, losses and trade-offs with the matters of importance to others. This is particularly true in a crisis or the “new normal” wherein the status quo has proven to be irrelevant, unjust or non-existent.

The word “leadership” is derived from the Greek or Latin root “leit” which means “to go forth and die.” It referred to the advancing army’s flag bearer who was out ahead of the troops and would eventually be killed. The location of the flag indicated where the enemy was and the kinds of weapons they had. Although a bleak metaphor, it does capture the notions of foresight, courage, sacrifice  and service inherent in “leadership in a permanent crisis.”

When you push people out of their comfort zone, make sure you’ve built enough social and political capital so that it is more difficult for people to fire you than it is to listen to you.

Originally published on Philanthropy 411.