Appendix 1. Background on the Endeavor Fund

Walter & Elise Haas Fund

Mission:

The mission of the Walter & Elise Haas Fund (aka Haas Sr. Fund) is to help build a healthy, just, and vibrant society in which people feel connected to and responsible for their community. The Haas Sr. Fund launched the Endeavor Fund in 2023 as part of its Economic Well-Being Program, which aims to help close the racial and gender wealth gaps in the Bay Area of California.

Size:

$252,512,662 in total assets in 2023

To learn more:

• The website
• Blog posts on the creation of the Endeavor Fund: part 1 and part 2.
• Their annual report

Three Voices from the Haas Sr. staff on the Endeavor Fund Origin Story:

1. The Endeavor Fund staff responded to our request for background information:

“The staff and board worked in partnership to shape the design of the Endeavor Fund over 18 months. We were guided by the Fund’s values, input from community members and young people, and conversations with grantees. We worked cross-functionally and cross-programmatically to iterate and refine the model, integrating feedback and recommendations  from staff, board, and past grantees, to strengthen the final design of the Endeavor Fund.”

“The Endeavor Fund has two goals. It aims to close the racial and gender wealth gap and promote nonprofit well-being, including support for quality, empowering jobs in the nonprofit sector.”

 2. Pui Ling Tam, Relationship Manager in charge of the Endeavor Fund, gave an interview:

“Pui Ling told us that when she joined the Haas Sr staff, “we had leadership [that] wasn’t satisfied with being good enough.” ED Jamie Allison had ”been in it for more than a decade, but her leadership, bolstered by a supporting cast, a team of folks in Operations and Program who said, ‘Yeah, we should be doing better’...so we have this inventive, creative team who is, I think, weirdly optimistic, [about] being able to be better. But [at first] nonprofit worker well-being wasn’t a focus.” When she was asked who initiated the shift to staff well-being, she said, “I think it was me.”

She told us that her prior job at a youth empowerment organization motivated her to improve nonprofit jobs in the Bay Area. “We were inviting and encouraging young people into...an educator pathway where the truth was they were not going to be paid enough to sustain a career, or a family, or get a one bedroom apartment in San Francisco. We were developing a solution that really began to look like a trap...encourag[ing] them to go into these fields and there weren’t going to be jobs, especially for this group of young people who are people of color, who are working class… to say, ‘hey, here, I have a future for you, and you can change the world, but you won’t be paid for it’. It’s deeply problematic.”

After the decision was made to offer seven-year grant commitments, “we only interviewed 10 organizations for seven spots in an Endeavor Fund, and we interviewed them for four hours...We did the financial due diligence ourselves, and brought it and said, ‘Hey, we saw this in public documents. Is this right? What else do you want us to know?’... And then seven of them became grantees.”

“And then we met after that, for what we call an annual learning conversation, which is another four-hour long conversation...We said we’re here to fund you to win...With the Endeavor Fund, we’re learning with them.”

3. Jamie Allison, ED of the Haas Sr. Fund, spoke with Rusty Stahl, President and CEO of Fund the People, on the Fund the People Podcast about the founding of the Endeavor Fund:

The creation of the Endeavor Fund model was a collaborative process in which the board and the staff “were on a shared learning journey. Staff did not come to trustees to say, ‘look at this package that we have created for you with a big red bow on top, now say yes or no’...instead, we took a learning posture...we think we should be behaving differently in order to set up our grantee partners to make more impact and to make change in the community. And that’s a conversation trustees wanted to have.”

The board and staff discussions began in 2020 when the pandemic shutdown and the racial justice protests “created opportunities for us to ask ourselves a lot of hard questions...if we are serious about being part of helping to bring about a society that cares about all of us and enables us all to flourish, then we have to be serious about how we support our partners in making that world possible...”

“We ran something called Learning Labs where we asked the community questions that would influence the direction of our work, and brought that information back to the trustees...And once we established how we wanted to do our work, what kind of funder we wanted to be, coming to the conclusion of multiyear grants at seven years in sizable awards each year, made sense to everyone. It was the right conclusion that everyone came to together. And that process took about 18 months...”

“Part of our staff learning process and selection process for the seven organizations is that we interviewed community members that have been served by the organizations or that somehow participate in the organizations, so we checked references for each of the organizations...These are all organizations that include community voice in their decisionmaking about their programs and what they are going to do. These are all organizations that do a combination of direct service related to closing the racial and gender wealth gap and also policy work. All of the organizations are led by Black, indigenous, people of color...a couple are unionized, a couple have co-leadership models.”

“For us it really represents a sea change in our grantmaking approach...We’re a foundation that in its very recent history has had a grant size that’s hovered at less than $50 thousand a year. So this is a really big change for how we have done our work in the past.”

“We got really serious about the role that philanthropy can play in undermining the change we want to see by underfunding it, or the role we can play in bolstering the work of nonprofit partners and ensuring that the people who work in nonprofits are paid fairly, so that they can support their families and direct their attention to the work at hand... Much of the nonprofit community is made up of women and people of color, and so yes, the Endeavor Fund is focused on closing the racial and gender wealth gap, and we think about that broadly, but within the sector there are many women and many people of color who are also struggling to make ends meet...”