Seven Questions for Tonia Wellons, President and CEO of Greater Washington Community Foundation

Tonia Wellons

Tonia Wellons is the president and CEO of the Greater Washington Community Foundation (GWCF), the largest public foundation in the greater Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. The foundation has $335 million in assets under management and disburses $60 million in grants annually.

Wellons joined the foundation in 2016 and began serving as the interim CEO in October 2019. She officially took the helm of the foundation on March 31, 2020. Over the next three months, the GWCF raised $7.5 million for COVID-19 relief from over 700 donors, foundations and companies like PepsiCo, Amazon and Melinda Gates’ Pivotal Ventures. The foundation went on to raise $11.5 million for its pooled response fund and over $30 million in parallel response funds established by businesses, government partnerships, and jurisdictionally focused efforts.

Previously, Wellons served as a political appointee for the Obama administration as head of global partnerships at the Peace Corps and as fund manager of an initiative focused on financial access and inclusion at the World Bank Group.

We recently spoke with Wellons about her formative life experiences, the advice she’d give her younger self, and why she’s optimistic about the future of philanthropy.

What made you decide you wanted to work in the nonprofit sector?

I have always known that I would work in a public service career. I thought I would be a civil rights attorney. When I was in college, my major was political science and the plan was to go to law school, but a professor of mine said, “There are a lot of lawyers out there, but there are not enough Black Americans in international affairs and international development.” That took me in a different direction—a public service field that was global in nature.

While I was at the World Bank, I started a fund at the Greater Washington Community Foundation 10 years ago called the Prince George’s County Social Innovation Fund. [The fund’s mission is to “build social capital and invest in new approaches to solving social challenges” in Prince George’s County, Maryland.] I’d lived in the county for 15 years at the time, ever since I left graduate school, but I had no affiliation with the foundation before I started the fund. The fund came about because a friend introduced me to the former VP of programs and the head of the local office.

So in a roundabout way, my career started with community development internationally, but then I really was pulled to do something more locally, which made me start the innovation fund and then eventually leave international development.

What was a formative experience that helped to set you on your career path?

When I was a junior in college at North Carolina A&T State University, I became very active in the Model United Nations program and immersed myself in the global development world. The State Department started a partnership with an organization focused on building the pipeline of African Americans in international development, and there was an internship that took three HBCU students to a developing country to focus on democracy and governance. 

I won one of those internships, and my first trip out of the country—and on an airplane—had me going to Colombo, Sri Lanka to work for an international development agency, looking at human rights and the relationship between government and NGOs. That was a pivotal point in my life trajectory.

What advice would you give your younger self stepping on that plane to Sri Lanka?

I would have pushed my younger self to get more immersed in language. I got lucky, because I entered into international development early on, as a junior in college. So by the time I was a graduate student, I had experience, but language could have made for an even more impactful and effective network in that space. (Wellons received her master’s degree in public administration and international development policy from the University of Delaware.)

And I would have spent more time living abroad. I lived in South Africa for a year and a half and worked in that region for about five years. But I wish I had spent more time living there when I was free of responsibility (laughs). Because in community development, to be fully immersed in a place is really the best way to really move the needle.

What keeps you up at night?

At the moment, unfortunately, there are many challenges, and I stay up at night wondering if we’re focusing on the right things at the right time. As a community foundation, we are tasked with doing a little bit of everything and with driving an agenda. We just approved a new strategic framework addressing the racial wealth gap. So the challenge is getting the balance right between focusing on immediate needs and long-term systemic opportunities.

It has me thinking about what the future can look like, where we’re being focused and deliberate as opposed to responsive and reactive. I care about everything, and a community foundation job is great for a generalist, but you often have to choose which priorities to lean into.

The last couple of years, politically and economically, really wore people out, and I just care about people’s exhaustion as the pandemic continues to shift. People haven’t had the chance to recover and rebuild their lives, and I want our community to hang in there and stay the course.

What makes you optimistic about the future of philanthropy?

I’m optimistic that the field is shifting. We are addressing some of the most important issues around racism and systems change. We’re confronting our own challenges as a sector and leaning into root causes in a way that I don’t know that we have before. That’s what gives me hope and optimism.

We went from just three years ago, where Black Lives Matter was politically divisive, but then things were presented front and center—and I’m talking about the murder of George Floyd—to people who never experienced them before, and that has led to an awakening.

Now, I am also mindful that our memory in this country is often short. But the period we’re in is allowing us to lean into change systems, to address root causes—and I say that in the most optimistic way.

What are some of the most important changes you’ve seen in philanthropy in the last two years?

I think at the highest level, the sector’s move to general operating support and multi-year funding is amazing. It’s happening at the MacKenzie Scott level and it’s also happening at the local philanthropic level. Philanthropy, in my view, changed more in the first four months of the pandemic than it had in the prior four years.

I’ve seen it first-hand, where we went from program grants to general operating support grants, from single-year to multi-year funding, from having answers to really listening to what is needed. Those shifts benefit organizations led by people of color, grassroots organizations, and they’re still with us, from big philanthropy to community donors, but we have to bake it in. Figuring out how to make these reforms and changes stick is going to be an important priority.

All that said, I’d still prefer that Amazon and the like pay their workers—hourly workers—industry-setting high wages, offer stock options to lower-waged workers, and compelling benefits plans, and pathways for mobility, in lieu of any philanthropic gifts. My favorite quote in philanthropy is from Martin Luther King Jr.: “Philanthropy is commendable but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.”

Any parting thoughts?

I wanted to say something that is not related to the field, it’s more about me sharing my vulnerability as a leader, because I think it can apply to people in our profession that have experienced loss and trauma during this period.

My husband suffered an aneurysm and lived through it, and my father passed in September, and so I’ve been reading a lot about how we move through grief and trauma as people who are expected to show up as leaders. People in this space need some grace, and I think it’s given me another window of access to humanity and loss and the challenge it can have on your personal life.

We have to push ahead, but we also ought to have some grace for ourselves and for members of our community who suffered loss during this time. It’s holding both of those things—the need to be a forward-leaning leader and manage your own personal loss and movement through it.