Giving Compass' Take:

• Laurene Powell Jobs, Founder of the Emerson Collective, describes how a brief glimpse at the education system in California in 1994 galvanized her to become a social activist.

• How can donors take strides to understand and address funding disparities in the education system? 

• Read some of the other excerpts of interviews from Darren Walker's book, From Generosity to Justice.

Laurene Powell Jobs, Founder of the Emerson Collective, shares what brings her joy as a philanthropist and sheds light on a new class harnessing policy, advocacy and technology to change philanthropy.

DARREN: … From a philanthropist’s perspective, what does justice look like for you?

LAURENE: Actually, justice in philanthropy looks like philanthropy to me—I don’t separate the two.

I was invited, when I was perhaps 29 years old, to speak to a class of seniors at a local high school. Their teacher asked me to talk about college, education, and my experiences—she often tried to have guests come on Fridays.  But in 1978, when Proposition 13 went through, it changed the equation for how often property taxes are assessed, which had the effect of attending funding for public schools. The “smoothing formula” the state gave to low-income communities was totally insufficient—so by the time I was in that classroom at Carlmont High School in 1994, they hadn’t had any escalation in funding for 13 years.

DARREN: It sounds like rather than getting sad, you got enraged.

LAURENE: I was so many things. I was enraged. I was affected. I was, in a way, ashamed that a public education that had served me so well, that was truly my portal to opportunity—an education that I held dear and that I believed was a core value of America and a necessary structure for a well-functioning democracy—was not being delivered to students in an equal and just way. This experience made that absolutely, abundantly clear.

That insight became the cornerstone of my work for the rest of my life.

Read the full article about Laurene Powell Jobs on philanthropy at the Ford Foundation.