Temi F. Bennett is co-CEO of iF, A Foundation for Radical Possibility. She brings years of experience as an attorney and policy expert for the Council of the District of Columbia. Temi has led several bodies of work within iF’s systems change, culture, and reparations pillars. She also co-founded and is a member of Resourcing Radical Justice (RRJ), a funders collective that centers Black liberation as the path to a thriving greater Washington region. Additionally, Temi is a member of the policy table and the reparations working group of Movement 4 Black Lives (M4BL).

Hanh Le is co-CEO of iF, A Foundation for Radical Possibility. Before joining iF in 2021 as vice president of strategic partnerships, Hanh was executive director of the Weissberg Foundation and chief program officer at Exponent Philanthropy. She has also led training and grant programs for KaBOOM!, CTCNet, and Peace Corps. Hanh co-founded DC’s Cherry Blossom Giving Circle, co-chairs the Metro DC chapter of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy, and serves on the boards of AALEAD, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, and Philanthropy DMV.

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Transcript

Hanh Le:

Racial justice is still the most pressing social issue impacting all other issues in this country. We need to be in this mindset of constant innovation and experimentation, but always in service of racial justice.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Welcome to The Measure. I am your host, Leon Andrews, president and CEO of Equal Measure. At Equal Measure, we help foundations, nonprofits, and public entities advance social justice through evaluation, strategy, and communications. On The Measure, you’ll hear conversations with leaders and practitioners about their social change work, and how to support more equitable communities through place-based systems change by centering racial equity.

We’re excited to have Temi Bennett and Hanh Le as today’s guests. Temi and Hanh serve as co-CEOs of iF, A Foundation for Radical Possibility. Temi joined the foundation in 2018, bringing years of experience as an attorney and policy expert for the Counsel of the District of Columbia. Hanh joined iF in 2021. She was previously executive director of the Weissberg Foundation, where she worked with philanthropic and nonprofit leaders to advance racial equity.

Welcome, Temi and Hanh.

Temi F. Bennett:

Thanks, Leon. Thanks for having us.

Hanh Le:

So great to be here. Thanks, Leon.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Well, it’s great to have you. I’m looking forward to our conversation.

I’d like to start, which I typically start with our podcast series, at a personal level. Your history, your context, your place, and how that’s influenced your personal story. And particularly, how it’s shaped the work that you do today.

Temi, do you want to go first?

Temi F. Bennett:

Sure, thank you. And so, for me, I am an attorney by trade, living in Ward 5 in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Northwest DC currently. I was raised in a Black nationalist and Pan-African community on the South Side of Chicago. I claim both DC and Chicago as home, because I spent most of my adult life here. And I identify as a cisgendered woman, using she/her pronouns, and as a Black feminist. I’m a descendant of American enslavement. My folks were enslaved in Northern—North Carolina, Arkansas, and Virginia.

That’s the lens that I bring to the work. It’s very Pan-African and Black feminist lens. Although I want to acknowledge being raised in a Black nationalist community. For me, when I think about the work, one of the questions we always ask ourselves is, “Who are our people?” For me, my people are Black people in America, Black people in the diaspora, and people of the global majority.

I’ll pass it to my co-CEO, Hanh.

Hanh Le:

Thanks, Temi. And thanks, Leon, for this context and framing. I also live in Ward 5 in Northeast, but in Northeast Washington, DC, in the Eckington neighborhood. My family immigrated to the US when I was one years old, with the fall of Saigon in 1975. I grew up in Fredericksburg, Virginia. The first Vietnamese refugee family in Fredericksburg, Virginia. That certainly rooted a lot of my trauma around always feeling like a perpetual foreigner and not quite fitting in.

Fortunately, I was raised by a caring family, and a loving community and teachers and coaches and friends. I learned a lot from them about the values of community service, and having a helper mindset. I think I started my career in the nonprofit sector more as a do-gooder than having a charitable mindset. My politicization around structural racism, racialized capitalism, and gendered capitalism really happened when I started working in philanthropy in 2008, as I realized that most of the funders who I was working with did not look like me and had different backgrounds as me and others that I cared about, namely Black people and people of the global majority.

So, I deepened my understanding of my own personal identity. Historical and structural analysis deepened. My understanding of power and anti-Blackness and their role in American society. And then really decided that I no longer wanted to fit in that mold of being the wedge, as Asian Americans often are in our society. And really focused on intentionally fighting for the Black people and people of the global majority need, deserve, and are owed. That’s what we are all about at iF. I’m so, so happy to have found a home. Both a political home, a professional home, and a very personally-aligned, values-aligned home at iF.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Thank you. I want to talk and pivot, and talk a little bit about iF. For our audience, iF, A Foundation for Radical Possibility. It describes itself as, “Centering the leadership and expertise of Black people and people in the global majority,” as both you named, in the Washington, DC region.

How did this deep commitment to place and community come to fruition for the work that’s happening at iF? Temi, do you want to answer that?

Temi F. Bennett:

Yeah. We’re constantly evolving. We’re constantly learning and unlearning. There have been multiple iterations of the foundation to get us to where we are today. We started as an HMO conversion in the 1990s. The assets, the HMO, was sold to Humana, and we became Consumer Health Foundation. The original grants were really focused on direct access to healthcare. That was a lot of HMO conversion foundations start out doing.

Then under our predecessor, Dr. Yanique Redwood, who was a phenomenal leader, Black woman, writer, organizer, activist, everything. She shifted the portfolio from direct services to advocacy. And, also, shifting and broadening our definition of health. We started interrogating white dominant culture as an institution. Even though again, acknowledging we were led by a Black woman, the white dominant culture is everywhere. That was at 2018 staff retreat.

The other thing we talked about was governance. How could we get community members on our board? And actually pay them a stipend to serve on our board. Not just an advisory role, but they had power of their vote, and they were paid for their subject matter expertise. We did also a series called Foundation Learning Days that we did in 2019, where we invited community members to learn about the sector. Learn about philanthropy, the history of philanthropy. What does it mean to serve on a board? What is fiduciary duty? What does governance look like? Hanh was leading Weissberg Foundation at the time and participated with our Foundation Learning Days. Hanh was a part of our community and a thought partner long before she even joined the foundation.

Then, after that community centering and that community-centered transformation, COVID happened. This really led the transformation from a health equity and racial equity foundation to a racial justice foundation that centered Black people and people of the global majority.

After that 2020 staff retreat, we did this new 10-year strategic plan. We felt like we were no longer Consumer Health Foundation. We went through this rebrand. One of my colleagues that had put on a list as a list for us was Innovation Foundation, with the acronym IF. We felt like Innovation Foundation sounded very tech. But we loved IF as an acronym or a name. For us, “if” just meant possibility. Our board went back and forth around, “Well, it needs to stand for something.” But the staff really just wanted “if.” We reconciled and decided iF with a tagline, A Foundation for Radical Possibility.

Under the organization, we have five pillars of work. We have community power pillar, which is our grant making portfolio. That, again, is participatory. Then there’s the healing justice pillar. And the culture pillar, which is about our narrative change. Then, for assistance in institutions. We believe in dismantling and disruption. Disrupting institutional structural racism. We believe that government needs to be disrupted. And we believe that the sector needs to be disruptive. Then our fifth pillar is reparations and economic justice. This is the first time that we had an organizational stance where we said Black people were owed reparations. That, and our guaranteed income, which is a part of our economic justice pillar, is under that pillar.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

As I think about our listening audience, there could be mixed feelings about, “Wow, there’s so much that went into the journey that iF has been on.” It seems amazing. For some people, it might seem overwhelming as they think about, “Could we, given where we sit in the philanthropic world, do something like this?”

I’m curious if you field questions like that, as people are hearing your story, hearing the journey. And how you respond to people being like, wow, this seems like, is this doable for them. Or what it would take to be doable for them to take on something like this?

Temi F. Bennett:

Yeah. For me … and Hanh, jump in, too, after I say this. For us, it again goes back to iteration and evolution. We are committed to learning and unlearning together. We kept evolving. When Yanique left the foundation, she’s like, “I don’t think it should be a one-person role.” The work is hard, grueling, and lonely, and it leads to burnout. She did a memo to our board recommending shared leadership.

Hanh Le:

I love that, Temi. I want to underline the ongoing learning and unlearning. And the very public learning and unlearning, so that we can show other funders and others in our space that clearly, none of us have figured it out. Racial justice is still the most pressing social issue impacting all other issues in this country. We need to be in this mindset of constant innovation and experimentation, but always in service of racial justice and our bigger vision. I think some of our critique of our own sector is, oftentimes, we’re learning for the sake of learning. Or think that we can’t do until we’ve learned. But at iF, we really believe we can walk and chew gum, as Temi will say, at the same time.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, both, for just sharing.

I want to lean in a little bit about the journey iF has been on, because it’s a bold vision for how to think about transformation of systems. Whether government, philanthropy. But for those that understand the history of philanthropy and how philanthropy existed, it’s centered in a white dominant history and lens. If I think about iF’s evolution, how do you hold those contradictions about philanthropy itself?

Hanh Le:

We believe in truth telling at iF. Truth telling about racialized and gendered capitalism. Truth telling about the racial atrocities, anti-Blackness in this country that have caused historical and contemporary harms to Black people and people of the global majority. We also work to shift really harmful, or unproductive, or untrue narratives.

One of the narratives we believe in philanthropy that we perpetuate is the scarcity mindset. Philanthropy of all sectors needs to realize and live into the abundance of assets at our disposal to be able to do what we want to do, in terms of the change we’re trying to advance.

Some ways that we as a foundation work to disrupt the paradigm of philanthropy. Temi named the five pillars from our strategic framework that we advanced. We can talk about the multitude of programs and initiatives we have under those pillars. But what’s common across all of them is how we do the work and how we approach the work. First and foremost is by centering Blackness and centering community—namely those living at the sharpest intersections of systems of oppression, particularly race, class, and gender identity.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Yeah. Thank you for that, Hanh. The other thing that iF makes a very clear distinction, which was a distinction between racial equity and racial justice. There are definitely folks in the field, as we know, that think of these as intertwined. Equity is fairness and justice. But there’s a clear distinction between equity and justice that it means to you as you do the work. I’d love for you to share that lens with our audiences so they understand the distinction of where you’re drawing the lines.

Temi F. Bennett:

Yeah. When we were Consumer Health Foundation and focused on racial equity, we always talked about racial equity being both a process and an outcome. We believe that racial justice is the same, it’s both a process and an outcome.

Some of the changes that we’ve done. We used to have these five elements to a racial equity approach. Now we added this, when we shifted to racial justice, we talked about what is justice and what does that mean, versus racial equity. One, equity is based on needs. Justice is based on healing and repairing harm. It’s also about not necessarily … A lot of times, people think equality and equity is the barometer is white people, so getting Black people to a place where white people are. Getting all the other races, and addressing the gaps, to get them to whiteness.

We don’t think that’s true. We think that there are other opportunities. We think that there are other aspirations. We think that there are other ways to liberation. The sixth step that we’ve added … It’s six steps, our approach to racial justice. The first one is history. Grounding your work in history. Then disaggregated data by race and place. We believe that yes, we believe in qualitative and quantitative data. If you’re looking at data, and disaggregating data by race and place, you’ll learn where interventions will be most impactful and for who those interventions will benefit.

Then we support racial equity tools. Racial equity tools, that’s REIS, racial equity impact statements. That’s REAPs, for racial equity action plans. Those are really just to help people get to the question of who benefits from this policy, decision, approach? Whatever it is that you’re looking at, who’s going to benefit and who’s going to be burdened? The role of racial equity tools is when you see that people of the global majority will be burdened, then you shift.

Then community leadership. We believe that lived experience is subject matter expertise. Those most impacted by the issues have ideas that for those solutions, too. They should be at the table in thought partnership, with the traditional subject matter experts.

Then, the policy and systems change. Yes, programs are great. We believe in programs, yes. But we also believe that systems change happens at the policy level. We didn’t get here because of programs, we got here because of policies. Focusing on the policy is really important for us.

Then five, this additional element and approach that we added was around justice. For us, it’s righting the wrong in proportion to its harm. For us, that requires the acknowledgement and repair, which can lead to the closure of real gaps, and to ultimately healing. That’s the place where we’re trying to get to.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Thank you for laying that out. I imagine when you do this work, there’s some highs and lows. There’s some days where you question can you really see the transformation that you want to see at the systems level, as you were saying, Temi, not just at the program level. I do wonder, when you find your way back to still being hopeful to keep doing the work, what keeps you going? What are those things that give you hope? Hanh, you want to go first?

Hanh Le:

As Temi talked about, our co-leadership structure is something that our board put in place because we understand how isolating the job of a sole executive director or a sole CEO can be. I have a partner in Temi, who is a thought partner, offers mutual peer support, critical feedback, all of those things. That relationship and that partnership keeps me going and gives me hope more than I imagined it would. We’re building a board that is deeply committed to our values, and to continue to deepen our historical and structural analysis as we are. Making sure that we continue to nurture that board for that ongoing learning and unlearning, and doing as we learn, and constant evolution that we know we need to do.

Then at the center of all this is our community. They serve as both our incentive and our inspiration, our touchstone, our purpose for doing what we do. That is at the center of everything that we are about. We are part of that community. Just being aligned. Being with thoughtful, values-aligned, generous, radical, beautiful people is what, for me, keeps me going. I think, as an institution, helps us keep going, and being mindful to the collective care and the fight and the joy that we need to prioritize as we do all of this work together.

Temi F. Bennett:

Yeah. I don’t want to gloss over that it’s hard work. A real-life example is our reparations project, where we are studying the endowment of our foundation and the endowment of seven other foundations. We partnered with NCRP to study the wealth creation of our endowment, and that of, they chose seven other foundations to study. We’re the only volunteer participant. But what that means is that they’re studying these other foundations without their permission. People feel a way and are upset about this project. When white people get upset and scared, Black people get hurt. It’s helpful to have Hanh to either step in, or even debrief with and figure out supports that I need in that moment. That gives me hope.

One of the biggest things is the reason why I do the work. I do it for my ancestors, I stand on their shoulders. I was somewhere and somebody asked, “Well, how would you measure that?” They said, “What’s your life goal?” I was like, “I want to have a positive impact on Black people.” It was like, “How would you measure that?” I said, “I guess when I die, one of my ancestors just pats me on my back and says good job.” That’s how I measure it. That’s what gives me hope.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Really appreciate this conversation. Thank you, Hanh and Temi, for joining us today on the conversation. And thanks to our listeners, for tuning into another episode of The Measure.

I’d like to leave you with a quote inspired by my conversation with Hanh and Temi. It comes from the writer Ijeoma Oluo: “The beauty of anti-racism is that you don’t have to pretend to be free of racism to be anti-racist. Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself. And it’s the only way forward.”

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