Black Foundation Leaders in the Age of Trump: Still Leading and Dreaming

For the past four years, Chera Reid has tried to divine the innermost hopes and dreams of Black foundation leaders, a task made both more complicated, and some say crucial, as the backlash against racial equity has reached the highest levels of government.

In 2021, Reid, a Kresge Foundation veteran, launched Freedom Dreams in Philanthropy to get a clear sense of what motivates leaders who have risen to the top job. Through a series of interviews, podcasts, and in-person salons attended by foundation leaders of color at grant makers with a mission to promote equity, Reid has probed and cataloged the viewpoints of dozens of Black foundation leaders. She has also provided a space to share encouragement and inspiration as foundation work focused on DEI has come under attack from the White House.

Often, she said, Black leaders “speak the stump,” meaning they relay the party line of the institution, rather than speaking from their hearts. Reid wanted to understand to what extent foundation presidents tapped into their own origin stories and personal visions to do their jobs.

“I wanted to know what people sound like in their own voices,” she said. “I wanted to explore what leaders of color have to say about why they are there and what they are aspiring to. I wanted to understand how they see their roles in a way that was not filtered through their organization.”

The inspiration for the effort — which has drawn more than $2 million in support from several grant makers, including the Geraldine Dodge, Hewlett, McKnight, Robert Wood Johnson, Surdna, and Skillman foundations — is historian Robin D. G. Kelley’s 2002 book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.

In an introduction to his book, Kelley wrote that the catalyst for racial justice leaders has never been misery, poverty, or oppression. Instead, he wrote “people are drawn to social movements because of hope: their dreams of a new world radically different from the one they inherited.”

That is the spirit Reid wants to animate with her work. The initial interviews she conducted with nearly 30 foundation leaders showed her that freedom-dreaming was an “anchor concept” that motivated leaders of color.

“We’re bringing dreams and possibilities back into the room,” she said.

Risk vs. Caution

But those dreams have run directly at odds with the Trump administration’s efforts to excise diversity, equity, and inclusion from American institutions, especially those funded by the federal government. In his first week in office, Trump wrote in an executive order that racial equity proponents “have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ ... that can violate the civil-rights laws of this Nation.”

While the outpouring of support for racial equity efforts after the 2020 murder of George Floyd has triggered backlash in the years since, the executive order signaled challenges of a greater magnitude, said E. Bomani Johnson, senior director of strategic initiatives at ABFE, a group formerly known as the Association of Black Foundation Executives.

A big challenge, Johnson said, is that foundation leaders tend to be willing to take more risks than trustees. While some executives are inclined to act with a more hopeful outlook, which Reid’s group celebrates, Johnson said many boards and general counsels have issued watered-down statements on racial justice during Trump’s second term.

That disconnect, Johnson said, can be repaired. ABFE is in the process of building a program that encourages members of its Leverage the Trust network of Black trustees to talk with other board members about the current challenges.

“We’re in a completely different environment than we were in January,” Johnson said. “Our boards need to have a different understanding of what is necessary to be successful in this work.”

Previously by Alex Daniels

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Nat Chioke Williams, who has been president of the Hill-Snowdon Foundation for more than two decades, said he used to be able to count the number of Black male foundation leaders like him “on one hand with three fingers cut off.”

While still a minority, the share of people of color leading foundations has more than doubled over the past 10 years, to 20 percent in 2024, according to figures compiled by the Council on Foundations.

Some of the people in those top spots, Williams said, were hired because they had direct relationships or experiences with the communities that foundations are attempting to help. But the formidable attempts to squash or silence proponents of racial justice have put some of those leaders — who were often seen as authentic representatives of the social justice movement — in a delicate situation as the administration’s push-back on racial equity efforts gains momentum.

In some cases, their boards are saying: Keep your head low.

“At the moment when those deprivations and those attacks are so clear and so poignant, that leader who has been put in their position to stand up for those communities is being asked institutionally to step back out of caution,” Williams said.

According to a National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy study of 773 foundation websites, nearly 10 percent of grant makers had changed their content, deleting or minimizing references to race and/or gender between November 2024 and March 2025. During that time — which was before some foundations defended their independence in the wake of Trump administration attacks — 73 percent were silent, choosing not to defend their work or their grantees.

Kea Taylor

Ryan Schlegel, the committee’s director of research, said some of the changes foundations made included stripping language that referred to race and ethnicity and replacing it, for instance, with verbiage about providing economic opportunity for all. And several community foundations, he said, began to stress donor needs rather than the dreams of the communities they serve.

The committee did not investigate whether foundations led by people of color were more or less prominent in their support for race-based grant making. It’s also not clear whether changes in how they present themselves online will translate into different grant-making budgets.

“We don’t know yet the extent to which the self-description, self-identification changes are going to impact dollars,” Schlegel said. “We’ll be watching.”

Identity and Experience

In Reid’s view, it can be perfectly acceptable for foundation leaders to take a lower profile, and not wave their flags so high.

“If changing the language on a website is what a leader sees as required to continue their work of funding toward a just and multiracial democracy, when that very thing is under attack, then that is what is required,” she said.

In her interviews with leaders of color, Reid said many of them shared deep connections to place, stories of immigration and class, poverty, and involvement in grassroots efforts. In many cases, foundation presidents that were driven by those experiences and their identities faced resistance within philanthropy when trying to remain dedicated to the cause of racial justice.

One of the things Reid asked in her survey is what foundation presidents wanted to be when they were children.

For Angelique Power, president of the Skillman Foundation, the answer was easy: a writer.

A fan of poetry and the written word, Power starts each staff meeting with a poem. Using Reid’s language, it is a way of keeping in touch with her Freedom Dream. Poetry, she said, evokes things standard greetings cannot, and “can engender empathy, connectivity, and understanding in a deeper way that we’re missing right now.”

That’s especially necessary, she said, to weather the “schoolyard taunt” of the anti-DEI backlash directed toward Black women.

“It puts this noxious gas in the air that ... weighs us down, demeans and belittles us, and takes away from the work we are led to do on behalf of our communities,” Power said.

It is that reality, Reid said, that makes Freedom Dreams in Philanthropy necessary and provides succor to Black leaders. Racism, she said, has always existed in America, but the present moment is a turning point.

Said Reid: “Some things are familiar, but there is a particular hurt right now.”

Temi Bennett, a foundation leader who remains steadfast in her dedication to racial justice, sees her identity as a super power.

“I was raised in a pan-African Black nationalist community on the south side of Chicago,” said Bennett, who is co-CEO of If, a Foundation for Radical Possibility. “I’m not just a funder. I’m a Black woman and an American.”

Bennett said she brings that identity squarely into her work at the foundation, which has evolved from a foundation strictly focused on health care to one working to lessen racial health disparities, which is also pushing for reparations to descendants of enslaved Black people.

Following the November elections, when it became clear that racial justice was being targeted by the incoming president, Bennett said she was disheartened by the lack of urgency among some philanthropy leaders. Now, she said, it is imperative that she bring her full identity into her work.

“I have experience and can talk about things other folks would not be able to talk about,” she said. “It would be a disservice to my community not to do so.”