Jasmine Sudarkasa and Fay Twersky: A lesson in race, leadership and sharing power

Jasmine Sudarkasa: The weekend that the racial uprising began was actually a personal anniversary for me—the anniversary of my grandmother’s death. And a lot of my work at Hewlett is very motivated by that relationship. My grandmother had always really done a lot of work in and around Black communities. And so I was already kind of in a very emotional place … I remember immediately thinking, well, I have to do something. Because for the first time I felt like I was in a position to do something.

But I think from a feelings perspective … I was very fearful, actually, because it felt like my personal and professional life were converging—in ways that I didn’t necessarily want them to … I feel like I’ve been really guarded about my personal life.

But in this moment, it just felt like everything was aligned and so I remember looking at this opportunity as one that I was uniquely poised to contribute to, and Fay said something almost identical to that to me within a few days of us as a foundation really addressing what this moment called of us.

In terms of the grants themselves … a lot of my work [in the Effective Philanthropy Group] had prepared me to see how we could respond to this quickly and effectively. And I knew that we had unallocated dollars and I knew that that was something that we typically would move towards something that was more responsive in nature. And I also knew that our [internal] culture would probably benefit from something inclusive.

Fay Twersky: When the Board approved the use of $18 million from the unallocated funds to use specifically for anti-racism work, that was a real milestone for the Hewlett Foundation. In the context of the racial uprising, and all the different feelings that people were having around the building, around the country—it was a unique moment, an overdue moment of reckoning. And you know, on the basis of lots of input from staff, Larry [Kramer, the foundation’s president] went to the Board with that as one of our recommendations of how to use the unallocated funds and came out with that approval—enthusiastic approval.

Fay Twersky: There were three core values that really guided our work and we established them really early on. One was that we would make really good grants, and really good meant—and we came to define that more—strong grants that would support anti-racist and anti-Black racist work. The second was that the grants would be inclusive in some way of all of our staff, give all of our staff an opportunity to participate in the grantmaking process. And the third was that it would not be overly burdensome to our administrative staff. We wanted to do this in a way that wouldn’t just have all of the burden and pressure rolling downhill to that group at the end of the year when they have a lot of other pressures on them.

So we were trying to balance all three of those interests, and I think we kept those front and center at every step of the way. Those were touchpoints for us as we went. And I would say before we launched into the doing, the planning for each of those actually was quite important. Coming up with the articulated values and the design before we did anything mattered a lot. It was Jasmine’s idea to have an Advisory Council.

Jasmine Sudarkasa: We were going back and forth about how to do this and, privately, my concern was I don’t want to be the only person who’s speaking on this. I don’t want to be the only Black voice on this. And I don’t know that I totally trusted that Larry and Fay were going to consult everyone.

Meanwhile, they were speaking to everybody! I mean, it was like everybody that I went to, they had got to before I had. But I was a little bit concerned about bearing the weight of it. And so I thought, well, who am I going to ask for advice on these grants, and it was the other Black people at Hewlett. I just thought if the goal is to represent our philanthropy in the way that we do it and lift up solutions to anti-Black racism, why not start in-house? And we use Advisory Councils for almost everything else. And so it just seemed apropos to what we were trying to accomplish, but also a really meaningful way to demonstrate this commitment from the inside out—not just to me, but to other folks at Hewlett.

Fay Twersky: When Jasmine initially shared that idea with me, I thought, “That’s a pretty interesting idea. I think it’s a good idea, but I’m not sure.” There was so much going on at that time where I needed to question my own intuitions about different things—and this was one of them. And so I touched base with a few of our Black colleagues to say, “This is what we’re thinking about. Do you think this is a good idea?” And each of them thought, “Yes, it’s a good idea,” and then they added to it: “If you’re going to do [preparatory anti-racism] education work, make sure that everybody who gets included in the voting and the nomination has to participate in the education work; when you’re talking, here’s how you might name the Council.” It gave me more confidence…

When I was talking to somebody, I was saying, [that] it would be sort of in the frame of “nothing about us without us.” And she said, “Say it that way – because that really conveys that this is really an honor, not a burden.” And that was what we were trying to do. But everything about this, it could have been really positive or could have been very fraught and taking the advice—even early on— from the people who would later become members of the Council turned out to be really important.

Jasmine Sudarkasa:  I think this is one of the things about participatory grantmaking— which was very much the inspiration for the design— that you have to experience before you can explain. I’ve been studying this type of grantmaking for a year now, and there are all these unarticulated benefits that I’ve been trying to get at, and one of them is that the design of the system is really intricate. You have to get all these inputs and different feedback points.

… As we started taking more inputs, the system kind of built itself. And so taking the input of Advisory Council members in the design phase meant that once you’re in the Advisory Council phase a lot of the concerns that people have, like conflict of interest or unarticulated goals, we’d already designed out for because we had talked to them early enough that we knew what this needed to be.

And funnily enough, to Fay’s point, a lot of our Advisory Council members were very quick to articulate where points of conflict of interest could be before we even started. They’re like, well, “Why are you doing this? Are you very clear on what the reasoning is for why staff should be on this Advisory Council?” I think that really pushed us to articulate a design that then, once we got going, it was just about maintaining. It was really interesting to see it in motion.

Creating space to share power

Fay Twersky: Going back to a part of the story where there was some friction that ended up being, I think, really important friction for us to go through, was how we were going to staff and run this Advisory Council. The whole time that we’ve been talking about this Advisory Council, I had an assumption that I was going to co-lead. The design team was going to be involved in running it, but I was going to co-lead the Advisory Council with Jasmine. And Jasmine assumed that she was going to lead this Advisory Council. That it didn’t make sense for me as a white person to be leading this Advisory Council of Black, African American and staff of African descent. So I remember a meeting.

Jasmine Sudarkasa: It was a really funny conversation.

Fay Twersky: But it was a deep conversation with Amy. … And we had to really peel back the layers of our assumptions and go deep into what would that mean and what would that look like, and I don’t think we even resolved it in the first meeting. I think we might have slept on it. And then, from where I stood, I remember thinking, Jasmine can do this. I wanted to be there with her, but partly because I just assumed I would, and then partly because I wanted her to succeed. There are a lot of strong personalities in this group. And so I was invested in Jasmine succeeding. And that was part of me wanting to have your back in this.

And what I took away from that deep conversation that we had about your interest, readiness, willingness to do this—it forced me to think differently about my own leadership in this design process. And it was out of that conversation that we were able to get really clear about roles and how I could support you, but from behind and not from in front. And to place my confidence in you, and to be there to talk through things, to help when you hit—if you hit—any challenging moments. To make sure that you were asking for help in the meetings if you needed it. And to just be able to support you without being there with you. And to me, that was a really important breakthrough. And we were then able to get to, okay, your role is going to be [leading] the Advisory Council, and then my role is going to be communicating about the design and engaging with Larry and our board, and Amy’s role is going to be about the voting and the nomination process with all staff.

Jasmine Sudarkasa: I agree, and I just want to spend a moment on this because, I think you know, I’m obsessed with the nitty-gritty of power sharing—the boring, ugly bits of it—because those are the moments where I feel like change happens. And I think, in this particular instance, what I would lift up is the space that was required in a lot of the design process.

So I found there were a lot of times when if you proposed something to me that maybe I didn’t like—for example, in this case, us co-facilitating this group—I was like,  I feel like I should do this on my own. But having the space to kind of sit and think, can I do this on my own? Do I feel prepared enough? Do I feel like I have all the tools that I need?  Can I manage this group of personalities? And getting the reassurance, I think, was also really important, because I definitely did second guess it at different points. But then the trust also, Fay. The trust is what compelled … not to be trite, but that’s what compels greatness. For me, it was, “Larry and Fay trust me in this closed room to come up with 15 groups. I better come up with some damn fantastic groups.”

And to just tie this into our work on anti-racism, you know, Dr. Kendi writes about this idea of racist space, and I believe that to be true. All-Black spaces are policed often and always and I think they are viewed with suspicion both structurally and otherwise. And so to be resourced to create one with my co-workers who are going through this moment in time with me. And a space that is safe and to know that it is protected institutionally and structurally, I mean that’s revolutionary work right there. I think that spurred a certain type of commitment to the process that meant that everybody showed up with their A-game.

Moving at the speed of trust

Jasmine Sudarkasa The feeling of this process is so meaningful that I knew that would compel people to take on the tasks that maybe were less desirable. But also very early and often, recognizing people’s expertise—so designing this, at the very beginning, with our colleagues in operations. Putting them at the center of the design, which I don’t know is necessarily always the case in this sort of philanthropic practice. [Asking] “What are our guardrails? You tell us where our barriers are and we’ll use that to frame how this process can work,” just allowed for a different kind of buy-in.

I think what I did notice is that everyone was all in. And this was a very fast, very intense cramming process. And so to the extent that everyone I think showed up with the best of their work. We had our legal team really trying to make this something that could be both anti-racist and in line with our grantmaking practice and legal—that’s at the cutting edge of this work. I just think that level of workmanship and that level of commitment speaks to people’s feelings of inclusion.

Fay Twersky:  I agree with you on the operations piece. I think involving our operations colleagues really early on and saying, “We’ll abide by your guard rails because we don’t want to burden you,” allowed them to express their guardrails—and a lot of feelings about how their guardrails had been transgressed in earlier times. But they felt respected and as a result, I think that they were actually really more invested and were willing to make exceptions. So I do think that moving at the speed of trust was operating here.

Lessons in leadership

Jasmine Sudarkasa: I feel gratitude at a number of levels.

I think that the scale of this investment didn’t really hit me until we were letting people know the dollars. Looking at how the landscape continues to move, these investments are going to be meaningful for a long time, and that really means a lot to me. So just gratitude to Larry and to Fay for being truly catalytic because this is a catalytic thing that we did. I feel a lot of gratitude to our culture. I come from social justice nonprofit. That’s like my bread and butter and it has never been as holistic of a working experience as this is. And so I’m just grateful that this was also a personally nourishing event.

And then I think I’m grateful to the grantees, to be honest, because we came out of nowhere and were like, “We want to give you all this unrestricted money!” And that takes trust, too. That takes an enormous amount of trust. They don’t know what our motives might be. They don’t know what our culture is. They don’t know if this is all some kind of weird moral reckoning. They don’t know anything. And I appreciate that everyone met us with the intent that we proposed. They were willing to meet us, giving everyone the spiel about anti-racism and … they listened and they were encouraging. And so I just have gratitude to them for agreeing to go along with this as we learned with them. How do you feel, Fay?

Fay Twersky: I feel so proud of you, Jasmine. That is my overwhelming feeling right at this moment. It kind of makes me want to cry. I do. I just feel so proud of you. We were peers, but you really were the leader of this effort and I just want to acknowledge that. And I remember you really came in [to Hewlett] on the sails of the spirit of your grandmother. I remember you talking about her in the interview and it moved me when you talked about her. And I think you brought her spirit into this work and I felt that. I feel like I learned a lot, personally, and I’ve been in this field a long time, but I feel like I learned a lot from this process about different ways to lead—[ways] that were better.

Jasmine Sudarkasa: Can I ask what? Not to put you on the spot, but I’m just really curious because I think you know everything…