Giving Compass' Take:

• Heather McGhee,  Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos, describes the transformation of the think tank to address and dismantle racism as it perpetuates inequality. 

• As a donor, how are you identifying organizations that are addressing racial inequality in systems? 

• Learn about how social innovation alone won't be able to solve racial inequality.


Heather McGhee, Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos, shares the lessons she learned as the think tank’s former leader and ideas for building effective nonprofits.

Heather McGhee:  When I became president of Demos, I didn't have to change anything. I'd been working there happily since I was 22 years old. I respected our impact and I cared deeply about my colleagues. Like most think tanks my organization was majority white-- the figure at the time was about 75 percent-- and it had been founded by white men.

I was the only person of color in executive leadership. But we'd gotten along just fine with that makeup, and in many ways our mission of addressing solutions to inequality in our democracy, in our economy, was going forward and we could get along with whatever racial analysis people brought into their work. But as I'd done the work over the course of a decade, I'd come to see that it wasn't just that race was a multiplier of inequalities, that people of color fared worse in an unequal system, it was that racism was a driver of the inequality for everyone.

Take our work, supported by Ford for over a decade, to reform the financial system. Now I remember so vividly, standing on the corner in a black middle-class neighborhood in Cleveland, in the mid-2000s and sobbing, because the street was riddled with foreclosures. Because rapacious lenders had experimented on black homeowners with impunity, stripping their wealth and then moving on to take those same tactics across the country, and then bundle them up in the millions of designed-to-fail mortgages and spread them across global markets. We wouldn't have had a financial crisis if it weren't for racism.

Read the full article about racism is the barrier to inequality at Ford Foundation.