Six Questions for Isabelle Leighton, Donors of Color Network's New Executive Director

donor of color network executive director isabelle Leighton

Isabelle Leighton was recently named executive director of Donors of Color Network (DOCN), a community of high-net-worth donors, whose mission is to build systemic racial equity to be more reflective and accountable to communities of color. We previously spoke with former executive director Ashindi Maxton about her long-running work at DOCN, which has identified around 2 million people of color with assets over $1 million, and tens of thousands of people of color with assets greater than $30 million. DOCN also released “Philanthropy Always Sounds Like Someone Else: A Portrait of High Net Worth Donors of Color,” which analyzes the experiences and funding preferences of BIPOC donors across the country, and their work in racial, social and climate justice, as well as other issues like women’s rights.

Leighton steps into the role with two decades of experience growing social justice and movement-oriented organizations, including Political Research Associates, where she focused on supporting communities during the Trump administration. She was also the founding director of Equality Fund, a philanthropic advocacy project, and served as NYC co-chair of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy. I recently chatted with Leighton about her hopes as she steps into this new role at DOCN, as well as about the state of racial justice power-building on the ground. Here are some excerpts from that discussion, which have been edited for clarity.

Can you start by telling me a bit about your background before coming to Donors of Color Network?

It’s such an honor to be able to take on this role. It feels sort of like when a bunch of threads in your work have come together and it turns into one position that you weren’t necessarily expecting. It’s really exciting and feels very aligned.

So I’ll just tell you, before I joined, I was working in a variety of philanthropy-adjacent positions. I’ve always been focused on advocating for getting resources to people of color. I started off at a New York City-based literacy organization, one of the first places where I started to see how nonprofits were a vehicle for change, and how most of the people who were doing the work on the front lines did not reflect the decision makers for where the money was going. Even executive directors who had multiple degrees had to do the same type of performance to talk about impact, and to talk about how communities of color deserve these resources. So for me, I always felt that we needed to actually advocate and grow the pie and change that power dynamic. I did that as a fundraiser for a very long time.

Then I stepped my toe in philanthropy. I worked for North Star Fund, where they were very focused on putting the people who were directly impacted by injustice at the decision-making table. And that was a really interesting model. Because it started with kind of an evolution where we were really thinking about trust-based philanthropy, which is a broader movement now. There were plenty of new-generation donors who came in who were majority white, I would say 95%, who felt very aligned with the mission.

But at some point, I was asked to just start diversifying. And so, when we started to bring those people in, the original mission of “I feel guilty about my money” or “I need to give my power to people of color,” did not resonate with a lot of the donors of color. There’s a different type of relationship for donors of color. It’s not about feeling guilty. It’s about these communities having an opportunity and access the way these donors of color did.

There’s a lot of work to do. Donors of Color Network is still a startup in a lot of ways. And so I’m excited to bring my skills into that work, as well as my values and background within philanthropy.

Can you tell me more about your donor members? What sort of industries do they work in?

So the majority of the members came from relationships with our founders. I would say geographically, we are very focused on some folks on the West Coast, in the Bay Area, and then some folks on the East Coast in New York and Boston, in that ecosystem of funding. A lot of them are business leaders, people who’ve worked in different corporations, in telemarketing or telecommunications, finance or tech, and media and entertainment. I’m not going to say that all of the people that we’ve recruited are self-made, and there are people who are also inheritors of wealth. We are starting to get more visibility in different parts of the country like Texas, and we’re starting to do some efforts to recruit people in Georgia who are a little bit more new to philanthropy. So I think there’s a lot of donor education and trying to figure out what we need to do to get more people engaged in this work.

What do you think it’ll take to start mobilizing more of these donors of color around the country and really activate their philanthropy?

I love this question. So I think it’s actually pretty simple. Because once we get in front of people and have face-to-face conversations, donors are excited and want to participate. There’s the basics of donor organizing — doing the outreach and finding people. The way I see it is that a lot of these donors of color are really just isolated within their own networks. So either they have their community that they spend their time with personally, or through family or their kids’ schools, or other parents and other social connections. But for those who have relationships with philanthropy, who sit on boards or have been routed to a campaign, they’re often the only people of color in the room. So I think our first job is really to make sure that we can find these people and then create a community that feels welcoming and feels like a place for them to connect with others.

We’re doing a road show of our most recent report (“Philanthropy Always Sounds Like Someone Else”), and using that as an organizing tool to start the conversation on this ecosystem of people of color of wealth who we know have shared values and want to work together. And so doing this sort of basic donor organizing and recruitment I think is a big part of the work, for sure. That’ll be a priority of mine in the next year, and then setting some goals for the next two to three years.

I would also say we need to have more infrastructure that gets resources from these donors to the communities that need them. When donors are giving to large nonprofits that already have the resources to do more traditional fundraising and find people with wealth, that’s one thing. But for smaller-scale groups that are working locally but still doing very impactful work, we need to be able to create some infrastructure for our donors to find those groups and develop relationships with them.

The third thing is work around narrative and messaging that taps into the broader culture work that needs to happen. There’s a lot of trauma and pain within and across communities of color. A lot of what I hear from our members is that they want to do something new and different, and find their power and be able to leverage it. So we really want to lift up the leadership and experiences of these individuals and help them find a voice within mainstream philanthropy. So far, we’ve done a good job of getting stories out about us as an institution, which I think is a great thing. But as we do that, I would also like to be highlighting the stories of these individuals. For instance, an Asian American tech leader who has challenged gender discrimination within her field doesn’t necessarily only live in that space. We can also tell the story of the philanthropy that she’s done from that work.

What sort of giving interests do you find these donors are drawn to?

So when DOCN was first convened, we did this research report that included 113 individuals. When you look at that, there are some trends. Everybody cares about power and systems. But it’s a little bit different than how we usually think about philanthropy, which might be issue-focused. I would say that the majority of our members care about change and they want to bring about deeper systemic change. They might not have the language to say it that way. But that seems like a throughline.

But to answer your question, when we first gathered in 2018, our co-founders narrowed down our mission to four top priority areas. Climate is a top one and that’s how we ended up with the Climate Funders Justice Pledge. Another one was politics and democracy, making sure we have a reflective democracy, where our elected officials are actually invested in improving the communities that we are from and that we care about. The third is around culture and arts, which speaks to the idea around narrative and representation and what stories are told. And then the fourth one, which is a personal interest of mine, is around impact investing, which includes regenerative economy or liberation economy work. But the idea is, how do we address the race-class narrative and the racial wealth divide? We need to be talking about money. As people of color with wealth, we need to be talking about money.

What are your biggest hopes as you close out the year?

Let’s see. I would love for us to be able to at least in a broader way announce that Donors of Color Network is here and a home for people of color who want to give and learn together. I’d also like people to think more long-term and not just try and check a box and say, “Oh, I got my board member who is a person of color.” But what does it actually truly mean to listen to people? For me, especially in leading staff, the second we listen and ask questions of people who aren’t usually seen as the leaders, we are in a better place. We are going to need a lot of collaboration to turn around a lot of the problems that we’re seeing right now. Finally, in this particular moment, we are in a really critical place with our democracy. And I’d love for more people of color, who have already been engaged in philanthropy, to really look at how they can invest in democracy work right now. That’s something that I will be working on in the next couple of months.

I see you’re doing an event at Morehouse soon. Why are you bringing your road show there?

Yes, so we’re partnering with them to launch an intimate conversation around our portrait report. We’ve been wanting to figure out how to partner with HBCUs. It seems like a no-brainer, right? But this is the first time we’re doing a partnership with a university. From our early conversations with them, there’s a lot of interest in alumni organizing, so that they can explore opportunities to make an impact. What do these members need? And what infrastructure is in place to connect donors to communities that need money? We’re going to try to recruit Spelman, as well. Overall, I think helping and working with them to organize impact strategies is probably going to be something we can contribute to their already amazing programming.

Georgia is so interesting right now. It’s one of the fastest-growing multiracial states in the country. There’s a huge Asian American population that hardly anyone talks about. There’s a lot of Latinx people. There’s obviously a deep history of Native Americans. There’s just a lot to work with. Stacey Abrams created so much infrastructure.