Committing to Equity Means Repairing Our Past
Transparency and accountability about RWJF’s historical legacy are key to the Foundation’s equity journey.
Three Black patients lean on a Black healthcare worker, finding comfort in representation. Silhouettes of healthcare settings appear in the background. Photo credit: Ameya Okamoto
We all want to live in a country that values and recognizes the dreams we have for our families. But for too long, our nation has placed value on some lives more than others based on race, class, gender, disability, sexual orientation, country of origin, among other factors. While the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has been committed to advancing health equity for more than 50 years, the barriers to opportunities for health are also a part of our mixed legacy as an organization. Our accomplishments as a philanthropy to dismantle those barriers alongside our partners are tied up in actions and inactions that have also perpetuated the very inequities we seek to address.
Poet and activist Audre Lorde wrote: “Through examining the combination of our triumphs and errors, we can examine the dangers of an incomplete vision. Not to condemn that vision but to alter it, construct templates for possible futures.” Inspired by these words, and working with our colleagues across the Foundation, RWJF’s new Equity & Culture team is charting a path for the Foundation by embarking on a process of truth, repair, and transformation to hold ourselves accountable to the commitment we have made: to dismantle structural racism and other barriers to health so that everyone has the opportunity to live the healthiest life possible.
RWJF’s Truth, Repair and Transformation (TRT) process builds on our work over the years to more deeply address the root causes of health disparities by more explicitly focusing on truth-telling, repair, and accountability as necessary conditions for sustaining change that leads to health equity and justice. Our TRT process is also part of a broader philanthropic shift over the past decade that includes philanthropy’s efforts to reckon with and repair the sector’s role in historical disinvestment in communities most impacted by structural inequities, and to root funder-grantee relationships more deeply in mutual learning and trust.
As part of this effort, we are looking closely at RWJF’s past so that we can continue to make corrections and meet our mission on today’s terms. This includes doubling down on positive steps the Foundation has already taken that rectify historical injustices and advance health equity while divesting from those that don’t.
Where We Are Now: Truth, Repair and Transformation
Since our inception, RWJF has made a positive impact on health in America through research, leadership development, signature programming, and cross-sector partnerships. But like many philanthropies, and as noted by groups like Liberation Ventures and The Bridgespan Group, we also have work to do to address our role in perpetuating inequities, like structural racism.
In the two generations that we have been working with our partners across the nation, very little has changed in terms of the unfair and unequal treatment of people of color and other marginalized groups in health and healthcare; racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination continue to be barriers to everyone in America having access to health as a right and not a privilege.
This past spring, RWJF convened a health equity summit where we announced we would begin our TRT process—an essential step on our journey to health equity and justice. The official process recently began through the creation of a taskforce I co-chair with Maisha Simmons, Assistant Vice President, Equity & Culture. The RWJF Truth, Repair and Transformation taskforce will engage staff, trustees, and partners to understand the Foundation’s legacy as a health philanthropy, including learning from and accelerating practices that have advanced our mission while rectifying those that haven’t.
Over the next three years, working groups will explore six areas to anchor this process in collective accountability to communities closest to health inequities, with a focus on engaging internal and external constituents in research, learning and dialogue on RWJF’s legacy and impact in 2024.
These include:
- RWJF’s Origin Story: Examine and broaden the narratives that have been central to the Foundation’s formation and early work, including the origins of our wealth.
- Signature Programs and Grantmaking: Understand and redress how our grantmaking and decision making have impacted marginalized communities.
- Healthcare: Understand and redress our role and impact on trends and practices in healthcare, particularly those that perpetuate structural racism.
- Endowment Investments: Analyze how past and current investments and decision making have affected marginalized communities.
- New Jersey: Examine the Foundation’s legacy and ongoing impact in our home state.
- Internal Culture: Align our internal culture and operations with our deepening approach to driving health equity and serving communities at the heart of our mission.
Where We Are Going: RWJF’s Evolving Equity Transformation
Amidst a noticeable retreat of support for equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) efforts in powerful legacy institutions and the challenge of attempting to shift our own philanthropy, our work is to maintain momentum for transformation so that we acknowledge, learn from, and do not repeat past missteps. The racial reckoning of 2020 and the disparate impacts of COVID-19 on marginalized communities accelerated our focus to address structural racism, but our work will not and should not stop there.
Our team will continue to deepen its focus on EDI goals across all areas of RWJF’s work as meeting our mission requires both an external focus and turning the lens inward on our own practices. In 2024, we will share more about other aspects of our equity transformation work as well as the TRT process, along with the partners collaborating with us.
I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to lead this talented team and to work with wonderful colleagues and partners across and beyond RWJF as we double down on our work to advance equity and justice. We know our efforts will continue to evolve, but I am excited about the possibilities for even deeper impact that Truth, Repair and Transformation offer as we move forward.
About the Author
Fiona Kanagasingam is Vice President, Equity and Culture, at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and co-chair of the RWJF Truth, Repair and Transformation Taskforce.