Not Your Typical Family Foundation
A. Sparks, Executive Director, Masto Foundation
In my mid-20s, I learned about my grandfather’s unique journey starting as a farmer, then being interned during WWII as an American citizen of Japanese descent, and eventually growing a successful business and accumulating wealth. I visited the town where he had his farms and heard about how he used his giving to lift up his entire community after internment. Discovering this history and learning how philanthropy can lead to positive social change, particularly for communities that have experienced injustice and discrimination, inspired me and set a foundation for the values that guide our work now at the Masto Foundation.
I worked in philanthropy for 13 years and took on the role of Executive Director at Masto Foundation in 2018 when my grandmother passed away. During this time, I saw how the lack of diversity in philanthropy, particularly at the Trustee level, leads to funding disparities. I experienced, first-hand, how homogeneity and the pervasive white dominant culture in family philanthropy create layers of difference between decision-makers and communities that can utilize that money best. At Masto Foundation, we don’t see ourselves as separate from the communities we serve. Our connection to and affinity with our grantee partners, as community members with different histories but similar experiences of injustice and struggle, has made building trust more possible.
In an effort to move beyond this white dominant framework, as we developed our processes, we knew it would require a whole new way of thinking. Instead of taking the way philanthropy is done and trying to augment it to be more equitable, we built out processes completely around culture - our family history of giving, Japanese-American traditions of giving, and different cultures of giving in Japan. We established guiding principles - appreciation, gratitude, respect, humility, hospitality, and mindfulness - which all relate to trust in their own way. Stepping outside the dominant perspective and grounding our work in culture, rather than made up rules that don’t center the people we’re trying to serve, shifted our grantmaking away from being transactional to more relational.
In April 2020, as philanthropy and the rest of the world started waking up as a response to the Movement for Black Lives, Masto Foundation determined that we needed to be more explicit and committed about how we support Black communities. We created the Trust Black Women Initiative with the goals of investing more resources, more effectively, in the Black community by listening to and fully trusting the advice of Black leaders. We reached out to Black female activists and asked them to recommend organizations that were making an impact on the lives of Black women and girls. We released all control of the decision-making and implemented their recommendations just the same as if they were coming from the Trustee level. Recentering the power dynamic — from community members making an appeal, to the Foundation owning the responsibility of making their recommendations happening — was truly transformative. It not only allowed us to discover great organizations but also highlighted where our processes were inadvertently creating barriers.
When one advisor chose an organization that served Black transmasculine folks, our Trustees didn’t immediately see the connection to supporting Black women and girls. If we followed a traditional grantmaking approach, the organization wouldn’t have made it through the initial screening. Shifting the power dynamic allowed us to have deeper conversations about gender justice and intersectionality in our work, and expanded the reach and impact of this grant program in ways we did not expect. We had to reconcile our own values and assumptions to truly listen to the voice of community experts and follow their lead. That would not have been possible without trusting the wisdom of the advisors and having hard conversations on our Board to support what our partners actually need.