“Make the Changes We Espouse.” A Century-Old Foundation's Strategic Realignment
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Craig Drinkard, Executive Officer of the Victoria Foundation
In 1924, insurance executive Hendon Chubb established the Victoria Foundation, which he named after his mother, with the mission of providing assistance to needy individuals. In the 1960s, the foundation began to center more of its efforts on Newark, New Jersey, with a focus on access to education and jobs, as well as civil rights and poverty.
Fast forward to 2020. According to the foundation’s annual report for that year, it had $303 million in net assets without donor restrictions and awarded $12.7 million in grants to over 140 organizations across its core priority areas of education, environment, neighborhood development and urban activities, and youth and family. To the casual observer, the foundation, which has given about $300 million to organizations serving Newark since its launch 98 years ago, checks off all of the boxes for what constitutes a steadfast, place-based funder.
There was, however, one box that wasn’t checked off. “We never had a strategic plan,” said Craig Drinkard, who became the foundation’s executive officer in April. “And we didn’t wake up one day and say, ‘Let’s make one.’”
Instead, the process began about eight years ago when Drinkard’s predecessor, Irene Cooper-Bosch, took a closer look at the foundation’s impact across the city. Over the ensuing years, she and Drinkard consulted with other foundation leaders who were reevaluating their priorities against the backdrop of growing calls for social, racial and economic equity. Their efforts culminated last October when the foundation announced its new strategic framework, which aims to address the “root causes of generational poverty and inequality in Newark.”
The foundation is an instructive case study showing how leaders at an established medium-sized grantmaker navigated the complex work of redefining its mission. But it’s also a reminder that sweeping changes can yield disruptive outcomes — trustees have acknowledged that current grantees may lose out on funding under the new framework. Given this fact, Drinkard believes that the real work is about to begin. The framework is “nice on paper,” he told me, “but once we get into the streets and start working with residents, that’s when our mettle will be tested. We’ll see how willing we are to make the changes that we espouse.”
“A different kind of education”
Drinkard was born in Newark in the mid-1960s. “It was a difficult time for the city, right after the riots,” he said. “I had a great childhood and had a lot of great experiences growing up there. I made a lot of friends, but also lost a lot due to different social ills.”
Drinkard began his career at the Internal Revenue Service, then transitioned to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. After some time in the corporate world — he holds a B.S. in finance and an M.B.A. in management — Drinkard entered the nonprofit field in the late 1990s as a community organizer. He took some leadership training programs to strengthen his skill set, “but it was the residents in the neighborhoods I was working in that helped me understand the community,” he said. “That ended up being a different kind of education for me, and it’s one that I deeply cherish.”
In 2002, Drinkard joined the Community Foundation of New Jersey and worked with parents across the state so they could better advocate for their children. He also partnered with local residents who had received $5,000 grants from the community foundation to implement programs or projects in their respective communities. “That gave me an opportunity to hear about some fantastic work,” Drinkard said. “These were regular folks, working nine to five, with great ideas on how to address things like gang issues and closing the achievement gap.”
Drinkard joined the Victoria Foundation in 2006 as a program officer. About five years later, he participated in a Council on Foundations training program called Career Pathways. It turned out to be a pivotal experience, since the program gave Drinkard the opportunity to meet other leaders and “find out what was happening in places like Milwaukee, Baltimore and California,” he said.
Eventually, Drinkard was promoted to associate director, and then deputy director. In January 2020, he became the foundation’s co-executive officer, serving alongside longtime chief executive Irene Cooper-Bosch. When Cooper-Bosch officially stepped down in April of this year, Drinkard became the foundation’s sole executive officer.
How the new framework came together
Drinkard traced the origins of the foundation’s strategic framework to 2014, when Cooper-Bosch (who was then leading the foundation) completed a Ph.D. at Rutgers University-Newark in urban systems. Her dissertation focused on the history of the Victoria Foundation, which led her to explore the question of impact. Although the foundation had been around for close to 100 years and had made hundreds of grants, “there was no empirical evidence that we had impact,” Drinkard said.
The foundation’s leadership began convening board retreats to explore this issue. Around the same time, Cooper-Bosch participated in an Aspen Institute training program called Philanthropy Forward and rubbed shoulders with leaders from around the country who were “really starting to give into these issues of racial, economic and gender equity,” Drinkard said. “So just as we were starting to … talk about impact, Irene was being exposed to leaders who were, in many cases, a few steps ahead of us.”
Cooper-Bosch became convinced that the foundation needed to formalize its strategy. The board agreed, and in 2019, leadership set aside the entirety of 2020 for strategic planning work. “It was very clear that we had a lot of work to do,” Drinkard said. Nonetheless, leadership believed they could wrap up the process by the end of the year.
The events of 2020 threw a wrench in those plans. The pandemic, coupled with the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among others, forced the foundation’s leadership to acknowledge they needed additional support. After an extensive search, they partnered with Frontline Solutions, a D.C.-based consulting firm, to guide them through the strategic planning process.
According to the foundation, the new strategic plan “is framed around our growing understanding that the systems and structures that reproduce inequality can be shifted if resources are moved to support those most directly impacted — in our case, Newark residents and deeply rooted community organizations — in growing their own power to create change.” To that end, its new mission statement reads: “Victoria Foundation partners with Black and brown residents and other marginalized communities in Newark and nonprofit organizations to champion bold strategies that strengthen community power, foster economic justice, promote youth self-determination, and respond to pressing needs.”
“Do we have the strength to stay focused?”
In my conversations with funding leaders over the past few months, a recurring theme seems to be emerging, and it’s not a good one. It’s the idea that funders are slowly regressing back to the pre-pandemic status quo.
Tracie Powell, whose Pivot Fund looks to support BIPOC-led news outlets, expressed concerns about the “rollback” of support for BIPOC-led organizations all over the spectrum. “Some of it is due to economic conditions,” she said, “but it’s also funders falling back on previous habits, and that, to me, is very concerning.”
Drinkard had a similar take. “I’ve been in philanthropy for about 20 years,” he said, “and I’m afraid the pendulum will start swinging and we’ll lose the focus of this reckoning and start focusing our attention on something else.” Compounding this concern is the familiar fact that “philanthropy doesn’t have a whole lot of accountability.” In many cases, all we philanthropy watchers can do is wait a few years, review funders’ Form 990s, and then decide if leaders’ actions matched their rhetoric. “Philanthropy is a system, and systems are slow to change,” Drinkard said. “Do we have the strength to stay focused?”
Drinkard envisions some potentially challenging scenarios as he and his team begin to operationalize the foundation’s new strategic framework. For example, the foundation may face a steep learning curve when it begins working with the kinds of “deep-rooted community organizations” that weren’t in its portfolio before. In addition, Drinkard said leaders may feel uncomfortable “getting behind some of the policy and advocacy work” that may ruffle some feathers across the broader community.
Difficult choices ahead
Most critically, funding for some grantees will dry up once the framework has been fully implemented. The foundation’s FAQ page currently states that three-year transition grants available for all current grantees mark the end of the foundation’s current grantee relationships. “While we recognize that it introduces a challenging uncertainty for our partners, we will not know which organizations we will be funding following this period,” the page reads.
As an example of how this may play out, take Victoria’s shifting approach to environmental giving. According to the foundation, leaders plan to “use an environmental justice lens” in their efforts to “support the environmental priorities of communities in Newark.” This means that the foundation “will be moving away from our grants and efforts that support statewide land conservation and direct land acquisition.”
Drinkard said that the three-year transition grants will give grantees time to prepare for a potential cessation of funding. Trustees have also allocated an additional $1.8 million in capacity-building grants for groups that may need extra assistance as Victoria’s new framework goes into effect. “We recognize there is a dearth of philanthropic dollars in Newark, so one of our principles has to be to do as little harm as we can,” he said.
Other components remain a work in progress. Trustees have yet to formulate new grants guidelines and deadlines, nor do they know if the sizes of grants will change. “Our priorities are going to be based on the concerns that we’re hearing from community stakeholders on the ground,” the FAQ page reads.
In spite of his justified concerns that some funders are backing away from their 2020-era pledges, Drinkard continues to draw inspiration from his interactions with Newark residents, nonprofit leaders and his peers across the broader grantmaking ecosystem. “Other small- and medium-sized funders are undergoing the kinds of strategic reevaluation that the Victoria Foundation went through,” he said. “They’re examining the areas that are most critical to the community, and how they can lift up the organizations they support. That’s what makes me optimistic.”
