With more than 30 years of philanthropic and nonprofit experience, Crystal has a track record of forging innovative partnerships to strengthen social justice movements across the U.S. As executive director of the Libra Foundation, she launched the Democracy Frontlines Fund, a pooled fund of 15 foundations that raised $75 million in unrestricted, multiyear support to strengthen Black communities’ democratic participation. Prior to Libra, Crystal served as CEO of the Blue Shield of California Foundation. She was also part of the founding team at The California Wellness Foundation. Inside Philanthropy named Crystal “2021 Foundation Leader of the Year” and “One of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Philanthropy” in 2023.

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Transcript

Crystal Hayling:

And what I felt was very important in philanthropy is for people who work on democracy. Many times they believe that democracy work is really just about making it easier to register to vote. But there is also a link between activism and democracy.

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 and centering racial equity.

Today we are thrilled to have Crystal Hayling on The Measure. Crystal is the executive director of The Libra Foundation, which funds BIPOC-led movements to build power in communities, support democratic rights, and to center those most impacted in the fight for racial, gender and environmental justice.

Welcome, Crystal.

Crystal Hayling:

I’m delighted to be here. Thank you so much, Leon.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

So I’d like to start with a more personal question. At Equal Measure, we talk a lot about place, about history and context, as we seek to understand how to transform systems. So for example, although you’re based in the Bay Area, along with The Libra Foundation, I know your family has a very strong background in St. Augustine, Florida. So I’d love for you to share with our audience and talk more about your family’s history and how your experience of place has influenced your life’s journey.

Crystal Hayling:

Yes. Well, thank you so much, Leon. As I said, it’s wonderful to be here talking about these really important issues right now. So our family story that I learned growing up and always we talked about is my father was in the Air Force, and was one of the Black men who came back and thought that he was going to be able to have liberty and equality having experienced some of that in the military.

But then really came back to St. Augustine and found that it was incredibly segregated. My father was one of the first people to institute swim-in, which along with the sit-ins, was a major peaceful resistance movement that was about young Black kids going to swim in swimming pools, in public swimming pools, going to swim at the beach. And in fact, in many of the public pools, they were either drained after young Black people swam in them, or they poured tremendous amounts of chemicals and things into them. So it’s a time almost hard for us to imagine, but that really was kind of the climate.

And then of course, as my father’s work advanced as Andrew Young and Martin Luther King Jr. came to St. Augustine to participate in many of these civil disobedience efforts, then the resistance from the KKK and from the powers that be in St. Augustine really increased as well.

And so when my mother was five months pregnant with me, our house was shot up by the Klan. And luckily my mom and my two older sisters were asleep in the back of the house. Unfortunately, our family dog, a beautiful German shepherd, who was devoted to the family, ran to the front of the house because she heard people in front, and she was shot and killed. So that experience of having the family dog basically bleeding out in our bathtub was what my sisters still have to this day.

And it is such an incredibly important thing I think to mention that that actually drove our family out of St. Augustine. So even in the ’60s, our family, not unlike the Black migrations from the south to the north, were refugees from violence, from racial violence in this country, from racial terrorism.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Thank you so much for sharing somewhat of that history. I hope our audience appreciates how important it is.

And I want to pivot a little bit and talk about your work in response to the murder of George Floyd. You started the Democracy Frontlines Fund at The Libra Foundation, which funds organizations that are led, led by and for, Black people. And some might ask about the link between democracy and racial uprisings, police violence, and democracy. I would love for you to share with our audience your perspective on how these issues are related to each other.

Crystal Hayling:

Absolutely. Thank you so much. When George Floyd was murdered, it was a moment in time when we all couldn’t look away. Had to actually confront the reality of a police officer, paid by tax dollars, sworn to serve really with absolutely no contrition, murdering someone while being filmed, and fully believing that there would be no consequence to those actions.

And when we all came forward and began to march about Black Lives Matter, that was such a powerful moment for the country. It is in fact remains the largest civil rights action in the history of this country. And the reason people were out there doing that is because we believe that that is not what this country is. That we believe we can make this a better country.

And so it felt really important to me to help to make that link as time went on and as more calls were made, more demands were made for things like defund the police. We began to see some waning of support for some of the Black activists and some of the marches.

And what I felt was very important in philanthropy is for people who work on democracy, many times they believe that democracy work is really just about making it easier to register to vote, or making sure that there are election administrators in every county, et cetera, that are trained and all those things. Incredibly important, I’m not dismissing that. But there is also a link between activism and democracy. And many times people want to deny that link. They want to say that activists and people who are marching are troublemakers and causing problems. And in fact, they’re creating the good trouble. They’re creating the good trouble that is actually the energy that moves this country forward in terms of our advancement and progress.

So it felt really important to name the link between the front lines of activism and that being an action that is designed to further and secure our democracy.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

And in addition to the Democracy Frontline Funds, I do also want to acknowledge that The Libra Foundation has other focus areas in environmental and climate justice. So what do you think is needed to be successful in these movements as you look at environmental and climate justice?

Crystal Hayling:

Frankly, one of the things that philanthropy is currently learning and needs to really dig much more deeply into is when we listen to frontline communities, we actually accelerate the pace of progress in the work that we want to address. So communities of color, poor communities, communities in coastal areas, particularly the Gulf Coast, are areas that are experiencing climate change problems first and foremost. So had we been listening to those communities over the last few decades, we would be farther along in our solutions than we currently are.

Instead, philanthropy overinvested in top down strategies led by large, largely white, public policy kind of organizations. And many of those organizations have failed to create the fundamental thing that we need to see us addressing and winning on climate change, which is the political will for change.

We have lots of science. We have lots of policy papers. But what we have not done is really tap into the energy of people who want to see change happen in their communities. And who more than moms whose kids are suffering from a pandemic of allergies and asthma wants to see climate addressed in their communities, by the closing of coal-fired power plants, by the closing of oil refineries that are really impacting all kinds of parts of their lives, health, culture, everything. So communities in Cancer Alley and the Gulf South, where there are so many oil refineries, in coalition with communities that are coal mining communities in Appalachia, and saying, “We actually have common ground and common work to do.”

So that’s the kind of work that Libra has been funding is building that grassroots power and the voice of communities to really show up. And we think that that’s going to continue to be a really important area for climate and environment funders. It’s been very underfunded. We are hopeful that we will see more and more of that.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Yeah. Thanks for taking time to unpack that Crystal. A term that I know both of you and I know and want to just name for our audiences, created by Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw, called intersectionality, back in the 1980s. And I know both The Libra Foundation and Equal Measure, as we talk about this work, important to really understand intersectionality in movements that you’re naming.

So how do you see the issues of racial injustice, police violence, environmental and climate justice intersecting with each other?

Crystal Hayling:

When you have systems that are designed to other one specific group of people or multiple groups of people, and create an us who is deserving and them who is undeserving, then that creates a structure that allows that inequality to continue and to really grow. And we see Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work so importantly identified, that some of us are not just a Black person. I’m a Black woman. And being at the intersection of both gender and racial affronts is really kind of an important part of understanding things.

I also want to just give the example of where we are right now with the recent Supreme Court decision around abortion. The beginning of that fight was not the beginning of that case. The beginning of that fight was actually in the South, when there was so much voter suppression happening across Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, states in which Black people were being prevented from voting by really sort of modernized laws that were preventing them from actually being able to participate in their voting. And this is the kind of thing that was actually suppressing Black vote, and meaning that many of the representatives at the state legislature were not actually representatives of the people in those communities and in those districts. That is actually how we got cases like this that came forward and actions that led to increasing the laws legislating against abortion at the state levels, which then allowed that to be taken to the Supreme Court.

So that was an actual long-term strategy of the far right, was to first disenfranchise Black voters so that their representatives did not express their votes. Because remember, a majority of Americans across this country support a woman’s right to choose, her right to abortion. And those folks then were able to push forward laws that allowed for the cases that then went to the Supreme Court.

And years ago when those laws and those things were happening in southern states, Black women were the first ones to sound the alarm. They said, “We actually need Planned Parenthood, NARAL, all these other groups, to be funding not just abortion rights, but also funding voting rights work.” And many of those organizations said, “We do gender. We do abortion rights. We’re going to stay in our lane. We’re not getting in that.”

But if you really understand the concept of intersectionality, then you understand that you can’t just choose one thing. That all of these issues are related. And it’s incredibly important to listen to the folks on the front line who told us before we saw what happened, “This is what is going to happen if we continue to be disenfranchised.”

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Yeah. Thanks for taking the time to unpack that. And I wonder your thoughts about what you think needs to change to make… How do we get to a place where people see the morales and seeing their connections to voting rights? From your perspective, what needs to change to make these intersectional movements possible?

Crystal Hayling:

First and foremost, we have to find ways to identify leaders who philanthropy in particular is willing to listen to, and that we have to transform our mindset about who an expert is. Expertise doesn’t just live in PhDs and in academic institutions. And too often, that’s really the source of expertise in ideas that philanthropy over relies upon. There is tremendous expertise in lived experience. And the more we can open up places for those conversations, the better our decisions and the better our ideas will be.

When we started listening to young people, we found out that we didn’t have a dropout problem, we had a push out problem. That’s a fundamentally different thing when young people are actually being suspended, disciplined, and pushed out of school. That requires a different solution than kids getting disinterested and dropping out.

So when we listen to the expertise of the people experiencing it, our solutions are actually better because we’ve actually identified what the real issues are.

So I think that that is what is really hard. And too often, I do find that when we’re talking about race, many foundations are willing to listen to people of color as experts. But when we’re talking about climate, they’re just going to keep going back to white guys. When we’re talking about safety, they’re going to keep going back to the big think tanks and academic institutions.

So I think that’s really the work that we have to consistently deploy in our thinking. Who’s not at the table? How do we get them at the table? And how do we change our own mindset so they’re listening to what they have to say, and using that knowledge to really drive change?

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

I love that. I’d like to end with more of a reflective question about hope. I usually love to hear from my guests about how you think about hope in the midst of all of the work that we are talking about that needs to happen. And as we’re having this conversation, I know this comes at a bittersweet time, your a retirement from The Libra Foundation.

So I’d love to hear, if you would like to share with our audience, how you sit with hope, as you consider your years and decades of experience in social change and social justice? What gives you hope as you think about the next journey in your life?

Crystal Hayling:

I am by nature a very hopeful person. I’ll just give two quick examples. I’ve certainly been working in philanthropy now for over 30 years. And when I started in this field, there really were not very many Black people or people of color working in this field. And while our numbers are not where they need to be, and while our representation, particularly on boards, is not where it needs to be, it has changed a lot.

When I started in this field, there weren’t very many women working in philanthropy. Basically, it was just completely a field of the lawyers and finance people that wealthy people had as friends and advisors, and that’s pretty much what it was. And so that has changed a lot.

Your listeners won’t be able to see the poster behind me, but it is a flyer that I found when we were going through my father’s things. It’s one of the original flyers for the March on Washington. And it was a March on Washington for racial justice and jobs. And I think that that is a very important reminder to me that civil rights has always been connected to voting rights and has always been connected to economic rights. And I think that we’re beginning to pull many of those issues in together again.

I think that the great abolitionist thinker, Mariame Kaba, says, “Hope is a discipline.” And I believe that to be very true. Hope is the actions that we take on a day-to-day basis to exhibit the values that we bring to the table. So that is really for me what I consider to be hope in action. So I’m very hopeful.

I think also movement groups are getting more networked, working closely together, and building longer term strategies. The more we lean into sort of post-Covid, many foundations are considering whether they’re going to keep on giving their general operating support, long-term funding, kind of funding that they did during Covid. And I hope and pray that more of them will stick with it. Because the more we do that, the more we will see that we’re giving nonprofits and movement organizations the ability to not just address what has to happen today in front of us, but to dream about the world and begin building the world we want to see in the future.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

I love that. Hope is a discipline. Actions we take on a day-to-day basis to exhibit the values we live by. Thank you so much for joining us today, Crystal.

Crystal Hayling:

Thank you so much. This has been a rich conversation, and I so appreciate your podcast for highlighting these important issues in our field. Thank you.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

And thanks to our listening audience for tuning in. Be sure to rate, comment, and subscribe to The Measure. You can also learn more about Equal Measure by visiting our website, equalmeasure.org.

Until next time, thank you.

I’d like to leave you with a quote inspired by my conversation with Crystal. It’s from Dr. Mae Jemison, the first Black female astronaut. “Never be limited by other people’s limited imaginations.”