Marcus Walton is president and CEO of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO). He specializes in operationalizing conceptual frameworks, racial equity facilitation and training, leadership and management strategy, stakeholder engagement, and program development. He previously served as director of racial equity initiatives for Borealis Philanthropy and as vice president and chief operating officer for the Association of Black Foundation Executives (ABFE). Marcus is a Newfield Network-trained ontological coach, with additional training in the Action Learning systems coaching model. He promotes coaching as a tool for personal mastery, racial equity and systems change, social sector excellence, and transformation within marginalized communities.

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Marcus Walton:

Maybe I can replace rigor with discipline. Maybe even replace discipline with intentionality. All of this is describing steps that we take every time. No shortcuts, no individual left behind, no skipping steps along the way, as a commitment to honoring the experience of every individual inside of community.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Welcome to The Measure. I am your host, Leon Andrews, president and CEO of Equal Measure. We help foundations, nonprofits, and public entities advance social justice through evaluation, strategy, and communication. 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. It is my privilege to welcome Marcus Walton to The Measure today. Marcus is the president and CEO of GEO, which stands for Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. GEO, the community is made up of more than 6,000 grantmakers across the globe that work together to transform philanthropy. And I’m also proud to say that Marcus is a good friend of mine, and so I’m looking forward to our conversation. Welcome, Marcus.

Marcus Walton:

Yeah, welcome. It is, it makes a difference to have history. I appreciate you, and congratulations for all of the success of Equal Measure and this amazing podcast.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Yeah, thank you. I’d be interested if you could share with our audience about how do you think about place? How do you think about history and context and how that influences where you are today?

Marcus Walton:

Yes, thank you. These are such special moments to reflect on place and context and history. Because all of those really undergird the significance of racial equity practice and analysis to me. My history started in Cleveland, Ohio, and I often say that I was born and raised amongst the most loving group of people that I have met to date. So back then, and I’m talking about the 1970s, there was still a vibrant but declining auto and steel mill industry in Cleveland. And, so, most of my relatives who had come up through the Great Migration from down south, Mississippi, Georgia, those kinds of regions, found jobs in auto manufacturing facilities or steel mills. Uncles, aunts. And you could graduate right out of high school and go into those jobs.

My mom used to joke around that there were so many jobs and so many factories inside of the communities that you can quit a job on Friday and start another one on Monday. And they called it “As the crow flies.” So, as the crow flies, you can just live life. And, so, there was a kind of a freedom. Now we might refer to this as a mindset of abundance actually.

To close this part out, which is just a really important part of the story, I had the opportunity to go to school, to go to undergraduate, at Bowling Green State University, in Ohio also. I was close enough to home to see that same place that was magical for me begin to deteriorate. I started to see decisions that were being made around globalization, for example, that were influencing the deterioration of very strong economy, local economy. And, so, the very people who were loving and nurturing to me were now struggling against these forces of disinvestment and deteriorating economic and social fabric. And, so, witnessing this, Leon, in such formative years I think just shapes me to commit the rest of my career, whatever it was I was going to do. And I had no idea what I was going to do. I was going to do something to support the vibrancy, to reinforce and reestablish vibrant communities, especially Black communities in those most marginalized and disaffected communities around the nation.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

One of the things you said, I’m curious if you could reflect on it a little bit further. But you said as you left and went to Bowling Green and you started to look back at the community, that place that was magical for you started to deteriorate. And I wonder if you’d reflect on that further. Was it starting to deteriorate? Was it always there, but from the lens you sat, you had a different appreciation for kind of what it was? And maybe the foundation was always cracking, but at some point you started to see it in different ways.

Marcus Walton:

Yeah. You’re onto it, man. And it’s heartbreaking even reliving this memory. Because one of the things that was just apparently clear is that these forces have been in place and operated toward decline for a long time. Long time. Probably my entire lifetime and before that. And, so, there’s, you know, at GEO we talk about not just the importance of an analysis that looks at the history of policy decisions and how it impacts conditions in communities today, but the importance of healing, of the experience of people through these time periods, these generations. Because that’s a demoralizing experience. That hurts. I have mixed emotions when I think back on that. There’s a kind of a, how can I allow that to happen? How. We didn’t even realize that inequity was all around us. It was the water that we were swimming in, if you will.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

And as I think about the work that GEO is going through with its new strategic plan and Equal Measure coming out of our new strategic plan. We both are holding, we know it’s race, but it’s race and this intersectional, all these other issues.

Marcus Walton:

That’s right.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

And, so, you guys talk about intersectional racial equity. And, so, I’d love for you to share with the audience what does that look like, to take action toward intersectional racial equity?

Marcus Walton:

Oh, yeah. I’ll say this is a fascinating topic. First and foremost, it’s really worth saying that race is a social and political construct. And it’s been used historically to separate us, to confer power to certain groups and keep power away from others. Because it is a social and political construct, it still has meaning. And, so, we want to understand how are the different groups situated, even inside of a larger category of gender, of age, of ability, of sexual orientation. And when we do that, we start to have a clearer picture of experience. We start to be able to see patterns differently. And we actually can pinpoint which policies may be discriminatory in nature, to target those with our grantmaking as well as those that were more on its surface neutral. Not discriminatory, but have a disproportionate impact on a particular kind of group. And, so, either way, this is not about egregious versus not egregious. This is about targeted investments and bringing analysis in the most rigorous way, bringing in as many data sets as possible.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

I want to go back to something you said because you were emphasizing the importance of data and the importance of measurements and the importance of rigor. You talk about the importance of data. How do you think about data in a meta sense? In not just talking quantitative data, but stories and narratives. And speak to how important that is, as well, that you talk about the importance of the rigor of that data.

Marcus Walton:

Yeah, I appreciate the question because the response, if you will, includes the emphasis of rigor. Maybe I can replace rigor with discipline, maybe even replace discipline with intentionality. All of this is describing steps that we take every time. No shortcuts, no individual left behind, no skipping steps, no skipping steps along the way, as a commitment to honoring the experience of every individual inside of communities. If that is how we think about rigor, then the way we think about data is very similar. No person left out, no style elevated above the other style. Written word versus spoken word. All of it matters. All of it represents inputs that help us make sense of experiences. Oh, and guess what? Making sense of our experiences is what community is all about. We need to hear from them. They have observations, which is another form of data, another form of critical input that we can include in our institutional inputs.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

You just had your conference this year to exchange ideas, build community, to be empowered to change the philanthropic field. And one of the things you emphasized at this conference was the importance of culture to transform the philanthropic sector. I would love for you to reflect on what shifts you’ve seen in culture in supporting nonprofits and communities.

Marcus Walton:

Yeah. So, in order to talk about the shifts in culture that I’ve observed, I have to define culture. I invite the audience to consider culture as the basic assumptions that we make. The norms, the values, the practices that are just common on a day-to-day basis to us in this nation, the beliefs we hold. These represent the culture. You put it all together. How we express ourselves, how we speak, the language, the rituals, all of these are components of culture. So, if you were to shuffle all of that together or mix it all up in a bowl, you would pour out something that represents, that equals, culture. What does it look and feel like when we engage in this as a sector? And what we found is that it was very formal, traditionally. Like so many things, it was based upon efficiency, not necessarily effectiveness.

And people can say, “Well, what do you mean it was based upon efficiency?” If you think about philanthropic culture, it was shaped by organizing grantmaking structures, mechanisms, techniques, to make it easier to get dollars out into communities. And on its face, there’s nothing wrong with that, right? We want money to efficiently go out into communities. So, yes, it’s dollars. And that’s not it. There’s also influence. Well, folks, grantmakers, have relationships. They’re networks of relationships with powerful individuals, with systems, with municipalities. And you know all about the power of municipalities to influence the activities that are underway in communities. And, so, if communities don’t have a direct link into this, then we are leaving resources off the table. Communities are separated from the processes that influence the quality of lives happening within them. And that’s to our collective detriment. There’s so much more work to do and there’s promise there.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Yeah. Where do you feel like there’s still more work to be done?

Marcus Walton:

I would say, Leon, that, and I say this lovingly, our colleagues in the philanthropic sector have an opportunity. There’s a moment that we are in, an era that’s characterized by change that we haven’t seen in a lifetime, right? Generational change. Talking about climate, talking about various social dynamics. We’re talking about a shifting demographic in terms of generationally, culturally, ethnicity. So, philanthropy can be a space that’s curated to explore possibilities amongst all of those groups, to respond to the fears, the trepidation. To offer resources to be intentional about transitioning. About describing how power flows. About these conversations such as culture. We can have a different place inside of communities themselves as partners, bringing together different sectors. Private sector partners with municipal actors. To really start to shape conversations that help us be intentional about the types of creating, establishing, cultivating the types of communities that we want to experience in the future.

That requires a particular kind of leadership from our sector, Leon, that is not necessarily required to serve as a grantmaker today. One does not have to see oneself as an institutional leader of change in order to serve as a philanthropic grantmaking officer. And I offer that it serves us as grantmakers to do just that. To move from the expert in getting dollars out of the door and the mechanics of grantmaking, in service of a more efficient process, to a more effective impact of institutional philanthropy. Really getting messages out that operate in support of communities, increased visibility of people doing amazing things in these communities. That the opportunity for individuals to see themselves as catalysts for that change is the opportunity that GEO invites our colleagues into today.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

We could have a … I know we could be speaking for a whole ‘nother hour, Marcus, but I would love to end our conversation with all of the work, you know, when we reflected at the beginning, you talked about early philanthropy in your life and you making this commitment to doing this work in your career. I would love for you to be able to reflect on what continues to give you hope as you continue to do this work.

Marcus Walton:

One of the things that gives me hope is humanity’s capacity for redemption. And by that I mean I hear a lot of folks saying, “Well, no one’s perfect. Human beings aren’t perfect.” That may be true. But what if we’re defining perfection in a way that doesn’t serve us? For example, what if perfection is less about a lack of flaws and more about one’s capacity to change, one’s capacity to redeem oneself?

One, there’s something about the process of transformation, the breaking down and reconfiguring of structures, of mindsets, attitudes, thinking that gives me hope. The new set of possibilities that emerges from that process.

Let me just talk about myself. I grew up in an area, as loving as it was, it was extremely homophobic. There was multiple forms of ignorance that I carried forward in life outside of that experience that I was able to identify and correct. That has made me a better person. It has enriched my relationships in ways that allow me to visualize a society that is significantly generative. And the generative capacity of human beings, I think, is our best gift. One can make an argument that human beings aren’t perfect, but we damn sure are magical.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Love that, Marcus. And very much appreciate you naming that hope as we think about human’s capacity for redemption and defining our capacity to change. And as we think about not perfect, but magical. I love that.

Marcus Walton:

Yes, sir.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

The new set of possibilities that emerge from that process. Thank you. Thank you for joining us today.

Marcus Walton:

You’re welcome, and thank you. What a privilege it is to be in these roles with people actually listening to us, caring what we have to say. It is no obligation at all to represent the interest and well-being of the people who are a part of our collective communities, especially GEO’s. It’s an honor for me to serve in this capacity, and I appreciate being able to share some insights as a part of this conversation.

Leon T. Andrews, Jr.:

Amen.

I’d like to leave you with a quote inspired by my conversation with Marcus. It comes from the late Dick Gregory: “A man without knowledge of himself and his heritage is like a tree without roots.”

Thanks for listening to The Measure. Be sure to rate, comment, and subscribe to the podcast. You can learn more about Equal Measure by visiting our website, equalmeasure.org.

Until next time.