Together, We Prosper

A 10-Year Framework to Pursue Economic Justice in the Greater Washington Region

The Greater Washington Community Foundation’s mission and work has always been centered on creating a just, equitable, and thriving community.

But recent events have added an urgency to our mission.

In the face of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, persistent structural racism, and stark economic injustice, Greater Washington is facing a set of multifaceted and complex challenges. And the time is past due to address them in ways that are both intentional and aspirational.

Our New North Star

For five decades, the Greater Washington Community Foundation has ignited the power of philanthropy, catalyzed community impact, and responded to critical community needs. We are uniquely positioned at the intersection of racialized wealth and racialized poverty. From that vantage point, we recognize that our region’s biggest challenges stem from economic injustice, the root cause of persistent inequities which have been exacerbated by the pandemic and economic crisis.

Greater Washington is home to nine of the 20 wealthiest counties in the United States — but families in our community are not equally sharing in this wealth. By almost every measure — education, income, housing, health, and wealth — our community’s Black, Brown, and other communities of color are significantly lagging behind their White neighbors.

Greater Washington isn’t unique in facing this challenge. Yet, what sets us apart is the stark inequities that have led to some of the nation’s wealthiest zip codes being just a short drive from some of its poorest. 

As home to the nation’s capital — and all the prestige, influence, wealth, and power it provides — we can and must do better. And that is what we intend to do by making closing the racial wealth gap our priority.

We believe that by changing the prospects for how our Black and Brown neighbors generate, sustain, and share wealth, we will ultimately improve the quality of life for everyone who lives, works, and raises a family in this region.  

Together, we can achieve this Vision. Together, our entire region will prosper.

Our Commitments

Lead with racial equity and inclusion

We are centering equity at the heart of everything we do at The Community Foundation. This equity lens guides our internal operations, our investment strategy, our partnerships, our grantmaking, and our community leadership approach as we work with a spirit of shared humanity and in bold possibility.

Align our business with our vision

In order to achieve our vision for a more just and equitable Greater Washington region, we are reimagining how The Community Foundation invests in, partners with, and supports our community.

• We are committed to nearly doubling The Community Foundation’s assets over the next ten years so that we can respond to the challenges and opportunities in front of us, at scale.

• Our bold and aspirational vision for this region demands that we establish a legacy for lasting change through building an endowment to support our community now and for the future.

• We will offer a broader range of investment products, including funds that are specific to fields of interest and geography, and opportunities for donors to align their philanthropy with our vision for a thriving and prosperous region.

• We have updated our investment policy to reflect our commitment to racial equity, including retaining a diverse pool of women and people of color investment managers and exercising competent and socially responsible stewardship in how we manage the financial resources entrusted to us.

Close the racial wealth gap

We will provide strong leadership to do the difficult but essential work of identifying the most promising ways to make progress toward closing the gap, and then mobilizing the resources and support to make it happen.

At The Community Foundation, we have framed our community leadership approach around the following goals:

• Pursue economic justice by investing in strategies to increase economic mobility and close the racial wealth gap.

• Address Critical Community Needs, including responding to crises, to stabilize and improve the quality of life for our neighbors and communities.

• Strengthen Neighborhoods and Community Institutions by using data to direct resources toward neighborhoods with the greatest needs and the BIPOC-led community organizations that serve them. 

• Connect Philanthropy to Impact by leveraging our unique value and expertise to mobilize resources for this community.

Our Levers for Change

We will leverage our leadership, relationships, voice, and resources to focus on creating change at the neighborhood level.

• Research: Commission and disseminate cutting-edge research that grows our understanding of the racial wealth gap and racially equitable, reparative strategies to close it.

• Community Engagement: Center the lived experiences, leadership, and aspirations of our Black and Brown neighbors who have been most negatively impacted by the racial wealth gap.

• Policy Advocacy: Disrupt policies and systems that perpetuate the racial wealth gap, and advocate for and advance economic interventions that will produce more racially equitable and reparative outcomes.

• Neighborhood Investment: Organize and deploy innovative capital strategies for racially equitable and reparative grantmaking to close the racial wealth gap at the level of neighborhoods.

Our Focus on Neighborhoods

Using data compiled by the Brookings Institution’s Race, Prosperity, and Inclusion Initiative and the Metropolitan Washington Council on Government, we have identified places in our region where Black and Brown people are experiencing the deepest disparities in homeownership and income. As we begin the work of closing the racial wealth gap in the region, these places will serve as priority areas where we will focus our grantmaking and broader community leadership capacity over the next decade. This will include directing more resources toward historically underinvested communities and partnering with the community-based organizations led by People of Color with deep roots serving these communities.

Our vision requires that we approach our work fiercely focused on the people and places in our region that are struggling the most. This focus will help us understand the needs and nuances of these communities, so we know how our work can make a real measurable difference and how our interventions can potentially be applied at scale.

Moving Forward, Together

We spent a lot of time listening — and we’ve heard loud and clear the voices of our donors, partners, and community members who have grown impatient for meaningful change. Ultimately, we believe this energized commitment to advancing racial equity and inclusion in our most underinvested neighborhoods can ignite a powerful ripple effect to make our entire region stronger and more prosperous.

We believe the opportunity to close the racial wealth gap is within our grasp. But this is a massive task, and we can’t do this alone.

We invite you to join us on this journey toward creating a just, equitable, and thriving community — one in which everyone has the opportunity to prosper from economic stability and opportunity; thrive through greater access to quality education, health care, and housing; and heal by fully exercising their talents, creativity in ways that benefit themselves, their families and neighborhoods, and our entire community.

Together, we can make it happen. Together, we prosper.

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