Seven Questions for Dr. Hanh Cao Yu, Chief Learning Officer at The California Endowment

Dr. Hanh Cao Yu. Photo courtesy of the california endowment

Dr. Hanh Cao Yu is the chief learning officer at The California Endowment (TCE), a leading health equity grantmaker in the Golden State. Since joining TCE in 2016, Yu has led the endowment’s learning and evaluation activities, including around its landmark Building Healthy Communities initiative, a 10-year, place-based effort that ended up moving around $1.75 billion out the door to help transform 14 vulnerable, high-poverty communities.

Prior to joining TCE, Yu served as vice president at Social Policy Research Associates in Oakland, where she set strategic and budget priorities, developed an organizational learning agenda, and provided oversight of external strategic digital communications, staff development and a diversity action plan, among other responsibilities.

We recently caught up with Yu and spoke about her experiences as a refugee of the Vietnam War, what led to her career in philanthropy, and her current work and outlook. Here are some excerpts from that conversation, which have been edited for clarity and length.

To start with, can you tell me a bit about yourself and your background?

A big part of my story and what led me to philanthropy came about when I came to the United States. I came as a refugee. My family fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. We were lucky to be part of the first wave.

My parents were well-educated. My father was the deputy minister of finance. We stayed here in the United States, but he went back to Vietnam to help the southern government protect democracy. Unfortunately, the south side lost, and it led to the exodus of millions of people from Vietnam in very tragic ways. More than 2 million people died. Here in the United States, we call it the Vietnam War, but in Vietnam, we called it the American War. 

When we came to the United States, my parents struggled. They lost everything. My father was working multiple jobs. My mother was a seamstress, but she had a master’s in public administration. It was hard for me as a seven-year-old. I witnessed how my family, my parents, my brothers and I were being treated as less than human for the first time because we were, all of a sudden, not the majority. 

I would say we benefited a lot from charity. There were very kind hearts that reached out to us to help my family be settled. And yet it was done in a way that was around the forces of assimilation and how can we quickly have these people disappear into American society, to really blend. There was this very systematic program of refugee resettlement, where we were dispersed throughout the United States so that we would not congregate in a particular place and have a defined ethnic or racial group identity. That’s why you find Vietnamese in Minnesota, in Texas, Louisiana, as well as in California.

So I saw all of that, and yet I was so glad my family landed in California because at that point in the 1970s, you could begin to see all the demographic changes that were taking place, that California had become the leader for what the nation could be looking like in terms of the changes in demography.

All throughout, as I was growing up, I struggled with a sense of belonging. Do I belong in the culture of Vietnam? Or do I belong in this new culture? And did I feel valued? And so I really do believe that belonging is core to thriving, and feeling that sense of belonging. 

What led to your career in philanthropy?

When I was in my early 20s, I had just finished or was in the process of finishing my doctorate in education, and was trying to figure out where to go next. And I was just so fortunate to be recommended by my mentor to talk to someone at the San Francisco Foundation. They had a multicultural fellowship program. That changed my life because the program was meant to bring fresh new faces and experience, especially lived experiences, into philanthropy, essentially to diversify the philanthropic field, which is very white. And I kept so much of being mentored by this woman named Eleanor Clement Glass. She was half Filipino, half African-American. And she took me under her wing, and just really showed me what philanthropy could be like if you came at it with a very strong sense of understanding of racial equity.

And that sense of belonging came up again. I felt like my perspective mattered and my experience mattered. I talked about the work I did in graduate school about this notion of crossing multiple worlds of family, peers and school, where it’s set up to not reinforce your cultural identity and your lived experience. And so I was able to bring that into the work we did [at the San Francisco Foundation] and just grew in terms of my leadership within that setting.

At the end of the fellowship, I decided at that point very explicitly that I did not want to go to philanthropy right away and look for a job in a foundation. Because it was really important for me to get grounded experience and especially to be as close to communities as possible.

I became an evaluator and researcher at a small research firm, and I thought, maybe I’ll try philanthropy again in about 10 years. And lo and behold, 20 years go by in the blink of an eye. I got to work a lot with major foundations like the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, The California Endowment, and the NoVo Foundation. And I just felt like I was so efficacious from the outside as a partner to philanthropy to give them feedback, to really keep them grounded in what residents and communities of color were saying about the effectiveness of [philanthropic] investments in their communities.

When I was in my 20th year at Social Policy Research Associates, The California Endowment came calling and asked if I might be interested in applying for the chief learning officer role. And I was just delighted because it felt like it was the right time for me.

What does your work at The California Endowment look like?

TCE had this initiative called Building Healthy Communities, which had already had six years of existence at that time. And to me, essentially, what Building Healthy Communities was addressing was: What does it take for society, and more specifically, for philanthropy, to create a full sense of belonging, and in the course of doing that, improve the health status and life expectancy of all Californians? So I thought that was a really important fundamental question that they were asking. And I had a role in evaluating and understanding this work to understand the context in which we live. But most importantly, my experience and work is to think about the legacy and the current practice of structural racism and how it’s shortening lifespans because of the amount of stress that it’s causing. 

I was really intrigued when I came to The California Endowment [that they recognized] that health is not [just] healthcare, and that where you live really matters. Your zip code matters because the opportunity structure is so different. My family first lived in Watts in south L.A., and I could just see as my parents moved upwards of nine times by the time I reached graduate school, that depending on where you live, the access to educational quality, higher education opportunities and public education differed drastically. We ended up in Orange County, where the schools were better. My parents were always trying to look for the best opportunities available for their children, but not everyone has that choice. 

The endowment was in the process of trying to help people understand that they should have a say in building their agency — that sense of power that we feel to shape our environment and define not only the problems in our lives, but the solutions. It’s important to not only help people beat the odds so that they can lead their communities to do better, but to change the odds in the communities so that they have those opportunities to thrive, to find jobs, to live, love and play, and to start their families and to raise their children in safe, loving, vibrant home environments that are also supported by communities. And so part of that is understanding that we need better policies, not the ones that have historically been enacted, that have caused redlining, housing segregation and suppression of voters — all of these things that were very deliberate — to eliminate the haves and have nots, and to think about affirming policies that create safety nets, and to rework the social contract about who we care about — which is everyone, not just the few who are deserving. 

So that was my job, to bring my full set of skills around and do what is now called equitable evaluation, where we really use a ground-up approach to answer the question about what it takes to really build that sense of belonging, to build power in communities and to improve people’s overall health status or health outcomes so that they can live longer. 

You’ve touched on this already, but how have your experiences influenced your work?

First and foremost, it made me humble because I know what my experience was like and what my family’s experiences were like. I had very early academic success — and I’m not sad about that part because my parents wanted this so much — but I always felt like I was held up as a model minority. So, “Look at this group. They came here. They were able to succeed.” And that’s not true, because it’s all kind of on the surface. We do what it takes to survive, but there’s long-standing trauma that comes from being products of war, of oppression. And now as my parents are aging, I’m seeing that, just in terms of how much of a toll these traumas have taken on their lives, their psyche, their financial wellbeing, their ability to even retire after a lifetime of working hard to rest and be at peace. So it’s an ongoing struggle. But I think what they did is they tried to make the best they could for the next generation, and I think I really learned that from that. 

When I think about how my experience has affected my work, I never forgot about my origins in terms of how much my parents have sacrificed for us and what they do. In terms of everyone who comes to the United States, so many of us never forget that experience. You never pull up the ladder, you always create the pathways for others to come, to make it a little bit easier for them. Because we need to create that sense of belonging, that everyone matters here in the United States. And they don’t have to come from Europe, they don’t have to come from Canada, that you can come from a country where what is seen as the minority here in the United States is really a global majority.

So I don’t forget that in the sense that we need to work harder in our work, whether it’s evaluation of ongoing work or the grantmaking work, that it’s about equitable distribution of public and private resources, and that we need to understand how can we do that even better, and what works and what doesn’t. And there’s no one cookie-cutter approach. Different communities have different needs and different histories. 

So I feel like my work has really contributed that just in terms of setting conditions in philanthropy and in policymaking to recognize that historically, we’ve done things to harm people. And that now, we have this chance to set things right by building people’s power and doing it with humility because no one group or person or organization has all the answers that we need to figure that out. 

At IP, we’ve written about the Building Healthy Communities initiative. What kind of impact did the initiative have, and how did the work change over time?

In terms of the impact, it is profound. Just to give you some real highlights, we’ve contributed with other foundations to more than 4 million Californians [having] healthcare coverage — and that includes those who are undocumented because they contribute so much to the economy. We believe that every person deserves the right to good healthcare and healthcare coverage. So that’s one example. The other one is to listen to young people and what they thought was important for their health. They talked a lot about the school pushout problem, so that we really focus on school discipline policies, especially at the state level, and that then trickles down to the school level. So over the 10-year period, we’ve documented that school suspension has been reduced half over the decade of our work. That’s a second example. The third one is that youth incarceration rates and arrests have dropped sharply because of local and statewide campaigns to improve school climate, to raise awareness about the school-to-prison pipeline, and to advance legislation that really prioritizes development over punitive school discipline policies.

We think it’s really important to continue to fully realize our commitment to support community power-building so that they have that sense of agency and voice to effect the kinds of changes that they think are needed and to advocate for their priorities. So we’re continuing to invest in that. We are continuing to think about trust-based philanthropy, meaning we need to do more flexible, multi-year grants. Over time, we’ve gone from under 10% general operating support grants to now almost a third of our grants being general operating support grants.

And then the other thing is that we have a role to play beyond the checks that we [write], that it’s really important to continue to say, how are we engaging our partners early on in deciding our strategic priorities and providing [support] when communities face tremendous backlash, when they are out there addressing Black Lives Matter, around the COVID pandemic disparities, protecting essential workers, all of these things. We’re there to be supportive of their messages, and we also help withstand the backlash because we believe in their work. We believe in their values. 

What, if anything, keeps you up at night?

It doesn’t necessarily keep me up at night, but I do think about how philanthropy can shift from funding one individual program, one intervention at a time, to something broader, to think more holistically. I think that’s going to benefit communities because we often work too much in silos or we go it alone in philanthropy, that we have our niche. I think we need to think bigger, and bolder and more expansively. And so I really hope that we can really partner with each other in ways that we can then be more vulnerable about what we don’t know versus what we think we know.

What about philanthropy excites you right now?

I’m excited about the trust-based work. I think my colleagues have done such an amazing job of talking about the power shifts that need to happen between philanthropy and our communities and our grantee partners. So we want to center racial equity. We have to do that. And that’s the other thing — that racial equity is not just lip-service anymore, because of what’s happened the last several years with the pandemic and Black Lives Matter. 

We’re going to see how people are willing to break down some of those boundaries around what it takes to to come at it from a personal level — like how we started this interview with how my personal experience really affected how I view and approach my work, and that the pain and lived experience I’ve experienced also shaped that. And so I think doing racial equity well means that we need to put in our whole selves. I guess what I’m saying is the professional boundaries are beginning to dissolve in some ways because we recognize how intertwined the personal is with the professional.