Key Findings from the Commonwealth Fund’s 2023 Grantee Demographic Survey

To ensure the Commonwealth Fund achieves its mission of advancing affordable, high-quality care for everyone, we must also ensure we are truly partnering with everyone, including grantees. These grantees should be representative of a varied and diverse population, with work that has a broad-ranging impact.

In 2020, the Commonwealth Fund set out to better understand our performance in this area, with an aim to see who we were supporting as a grantmaking organization. We worked with the Center for Effective Philanthropy to collect baseline demographic data from our grantees and found that we were failing to engage a diverse and inclusive population in our philanthropic efforts — something that is critical to our mission of promoting affordable, high-quality health care for everyone.

Informed by these findings, the Fund took two key steps toward partnering with more ethnically diverse grantees, younger grantees, and grantees with disabilities:

1. We released two more requests for proposals (RFPs) in 2022 and 2023 compared to 2018, leveraging our fellowship alumni networks to bring in new partner organizations.
2. In 2022, we began piloting new guidelines for the approval of small grants of up to $50,000, which make up 8 percent of all Fund grant dollars. Where small grants were previously only approved bimonthly by our board chair, program officers can now recommend approval for small grants on a biweekly basis without board approval. The president still approves based on the program officer recommendation. This change has made us nimbler and more responsive to grantees, and it has given program officers more time to work with grantees who may be unfamiliar with our proposal process. Grantees, in turn, experience a much quicker turnaround time for approvals and a less onerous process if they’re applying for the first time.
3.  Since 2022, program teams have developed plans diversify and proactively seek new, diverse grantees.

A follow-up survey of grantees in 2023 allowed us to track our progress.

Findings

By taking a more intentional approach to engaging grantees outside our existing networks, the Commonwealth Fund partnered with 128 new project directors between 2020 and 2023. Comparing demographic data from grantee surveys in 2020 and 2023 offers a clearer picture of how our new RFPs and small-grant approval process have impacted our grantee community.

Since 2020, the percentage of grantees who identify as Black, American Indian and Alaska Native, or Latino and Latina has increased by 3 to 4 percent. Project teams — surveyed for the first time in 2023 — tended to be more racially and ethnically diverse than project directors.

The proportion of project directors who are classified as millennials, meaning those born between 1980 and 1989, increased from 19 percent in 2020 to 35 percent in 2023. In 2023, about two-thirds of project team members were age 43 or younger.

Although the proportion of grantees who self-identified as having a disability was small in both 2020 and 2023, the number of project directors who did so increased in 2023.

Our Next Steps

Our journey is just beginning. In addition to race and ethnicity, age, and disability status, the grantee demographics surveys tracked gender identity and sexual orientation. Unfortunately, these areas remained unchanged between 2020 and 2023, suggesting more targeted outreach is necessary.

While we worked with more project directors who identified as disabled in 2023, our overall rates remain low. The Commonwealth Fund took a step toward rectifying this by signing the Disability and Philanthropy Forum’s Disability Inclusion Pledge, and committing to increase grants to project directors who identify as having a disability and increase support for disability-focused organizations and projects.

Our efforts have also reinforced the importance of data collection to inform strategies to diversify the organizations we fund. Prior to the 2020 Center for Effective Philanthropy survey, we had no way of systematically tracking grantee demographics and collecting baseline data. Based on grantee feedback, we will continue to iterate on the survey. As some of our peer foundations have done, we may consider making grants conditional on the submission of demographic data.

But collecting data isn’t enough. To achieve our mission, we must not only recruit new, diverse grantees, we must retain and support them and invest in their growth and development. To build a bench of partners that will help us better understand and address the health care challenges facing people here and abroad, this effort must be deliberate and sustained over time.