CASE STUDY
Meyer Memorial Trust
In 2016, Meyer began to strategically reassess its grantmaking, economics, and internal operations to better reflect an organizational commitment to a “flourishing and equitable Oregon”.
Program & activities, Operations
Background
Founded in 1982, Meyer Memorial Trust (Meyer) has granted $940 million to over 3,500 organizations in Oregon and Southwest Washington. Meyer engages in strategic grantmaking, commissions research, and supports policy advocacy across issues including education, housing, and the environment.
The equity journey
Over the past ten years, Meyer has transformed itself across several dimensions to reflect a deeper organizational commitment to racial justice and a vision for a “flourishing and equitable Oregon.” The most recent chapters of the organization’s equity journey have been led by President and CEO Michelle J. DePass, who left this role in 2022. Reflecting on the organization’s equity journey, DePass said, “it has encompassed everything from programs to personnel to finance to performance.”
Mission
In 2012, under the leadership of then-CEO Doug Stamm, Meyer strategically assessed its impact and decided to apply an equity lens to its work. This began a multi-year process of self-examination among staff and board members, diversification of the board, and increasing commitments to equity-focused programming. But the organization lacked an explicit commitment to racial equity in its mission statement. Under the leadership of CEO Michelle DePass and with the participation of staff and board, the organization has revamped its mission statement to firmly center principles of racial justice. The organization’s mission statement now reads: “Meyer accelerates racial, social and economic justice for the collective well-being of Oregon’s lands and peoples.”
The shift from “equity” to “justice” was a critical one for the organization; as DePass wrote, “I entered an organization focused on equity. I leave it focused on justice. This shift is essential. We don’t have to wallow in the past but we ignore it at our peril… We must understand the legacy of white supremacy, colonization and racial exclusion. We must learn from our shared past in order to know what we need to correct from the long-lasting harms and injustices that live on today.”
According to Chief Impact Officer Kaberi Banerjee Murthy: “When Meyer made a commitment to equity, it felt like it was at the cutting edge; but at this point, everyone talks about equity. For us, deepening our focus on ‘justice’ felt like the right space to move into. It is filled with more action and agency for communities of color.”
Program & activities
Meyer has reshaped its programs in recent years to make good on its commitment to racial justice. This process involved extensive work, including analysis of racial inequities in Oregon, collecting community input, and situating Meyer within the landscape of the region’s major funders.
Even before doubling down on racial justice as its north star, Meyer was making significant progress towards greater equity in its core issue areas. For example, Meyer’s programming was instrumental in expanding access to housing, supporting BIPOC teacher retention, and creating academic success programs for students of color.
In recent years, Meyer has created new grant programs that focus explicitly on racial equity by serving communities of color in the Portland region and across Oregon. In 2019, Meyer’s Building Community portfolio began to more explicitly center people of color, Indigenous communities and tribes, and immigrants and refugees. The grantmaking focused on “only consider funding requests from organizations that have implemented strategies designed specifically to benefit at least one of these populations.” In 2020, Meyer also established Justice Oregon for Black Lives, a 5-year, $25 million initiative focused on supporting Black-led and Black-serving nonprofits. The length and scale of this commitment was important to Meyer; according to Chief Impact Officer Kaberi Banerjee Murthy: “We didn’t want it to be token grantmaking, we wanted it to be a longer-term commitment.” The participatory nature of the process was also fundamental. Meyer’s goal was to center the lived experiences of Black Oregonians, and to ensure that the grant program met community needs. As Banerjee Murthy said, “Justice Oregon is where we learned what it takes… It allowed us to become comfortable by saying [to the community], ‘we don’t know yet, because we want to build it with you.’”
Community engagement also was a key part of establishing programming dedicated to Native communities across Oregon. Visiting tribal communities in person, Meyer leadership gathered insight about key community needs and how best to provide support. This led to the creation of a dedicated budget line for Native and tribal communities in Meyer’s grantmaking, including a focus on restoring lands to their natural states and historic uses. Meyer has conducted this grantmaking in a way that respects the sovereignty and autonomy of tribal communities, allowing them to decide how to deploy the grant money they receive.
As part of a strategy engagement with Public Equity Group, Meyer restructured its programming to remove barriers between issue areas. The organization established a new strategic framework with three pillars: “changing systems, supporting communities, and strengthening movements.” Prior to this reframing, Meyer separated its programmatic work by issue area (e.g. housing, education, environment). But, community feedback suggested that this issue-specific organization was stifling opportunities for collaboration, especially in the context of racial justice and equity work. One community member said, “In the context of racial justice and equity, community organizations are not organized that way [by issue].” According to Kaberi Banerjee Murthy, “we realized that some of our most exciting projects were happening in those interdisciplinary, cross-portfolio spaces. And community told us they did not live single issue lives, therefore, our portfolio structure was limiting.”
Operations
In addition to its programmatic commitments to racial justice, Meyer has looked inward and sought to reflect racial justice in its internal operations.
Racial equity and inclusion were key aspects of the design and development of Meyer’s new headquarters in Portland, Oregon. Opened in 2020 and located in Portland’s historically Black South Albina neighborhood, the project was intentionally inclusive of minority and women-owned businesses, with 47% of the total construction budget going to these subcontractors. Principles of equity were also incorporated into the building’s design, prioritizing collaborative space, and providing every employee with workspaces with access to natural light. The prominence of the project added to the growing profile of Black professionals and businesses in the area, including architect Chandra Robinson, who has become one of the most lauded and sought after architects in Portland, and developer, Anyeley Hallová, a leader in producing affordable housing in Oregon, who has started her own firm, with a focus on real estate projects that seek to create wealth for the Black community and for other underrepresented groups that traditionally lack access to real estate ownership and investment.
Furthermore, Meyer’s investment strategy began to shift towards principles of equity with the hiring of Chief Investment Officer Rukaiyah Adams in 2014. Adams is seen as a leader in the field for her commitment to using Meyer’s investment portfolio as an opportunity to drive social change and wealth equity, prioritizing investments with a social return, and hiring more female and BIPOC fund managers. Between 2014-2019, Meyer increased the share of women and people of color managing its money from 2% to 40%. Strategically, Adams sought to invest in vehicles that could drive more equitable economic growth, including water desalination and universal broadband access. The financial returns have been remarkable: in 2019, Meyer’s endowment achieved a 25% return, well ahead of the typical return achieved by foundations.
Governance
The board committed firmly to a racial justice focus through its hiring of Michelle DePass as President and CEO in 2018. Bringing extensive experience in government, philanthropy, and environmental justice, DePass knew that her hiring represented a mandate for the organization: “I knew it was going to become a racial justice organization, and I relished that, I relished taking the job.” DePass and Chief Impact Officer Kaberi Banerjee Murthy proceeded to lead Meyer’s transformation into a racial justice organization, bringing the board along every step of the way. Banerjee Murthy created a cross-departmental group of staff that would connect with the board and present the vision for Meyer’s future work. As a result of the cross-departmental group, “the board respected and appreciated the staff’s wisdom. It allowed us to secure unanimous board approval of our new strategy: an anti-racist, feminist lens to strengthen movements, change systems, and support communities to build an Oregon that works for all,” Banerjee Murthy noted.
Under Meyer’s new mission, the board is less regularly involved in directly approving grants and monitoring programs. According to DePass, “the board approves 10-15% of the grants now,” compared to approving almost all grants in the recent past. DePass continued, “we’re moving towards a system where we have our North Star, and we update the board more sporadically on what’s happening beneath that. For example, Justice Oregon will come back to the board midway, instead of updating them every year. It should have always been that way, but it was a big deal to make that change.” This shift reflects a significant level of trust between board and staff, and is part of a broader effort to empower staff (described in more detail in the “Culture” section of this case study).
As Michelle DePass moved on from Meyer in 2022, the board made clear that it was looking for a new CEO who would embrace the racial justice mission and continue to push Meyer forward along this journey. In April 2022, Toya Fick was hired as Meyer’s CEO, having previously served as a trustee on the Meyer board. Fick brings an extensive background in education and policy advocacy, including as the Oregon Executive Director of Stand for Children.
Culture
Meyer has taken several steps to create an internal culture that mirrors its orientation towards racial justice. Meyer conceives of this journey as a constant, ongoing process: “What we’ve learned is that equity is not the end goal, but rather a continuous process and practice — an ongoing shift.” This concept led Meyer to create the S.H.I.F.T. framework in guiding its internal change: storytelling, healing, imagination, freedom and transformation. Through the S.H.I.F.T. framework, Meyer hoped to recognize and heal from its collective past, imagine the organization it wanted to be, and then concretely manifest that change through its actions. There are several examples of how this “shift” has played out.
Meyer focused on creating opportunities for learning. Within the strategy work, Banerjee Murthy created a Learning Arc, bringing in Alicia Garza (a civil rights activist and writer known for co-founding the Black Lives Matter movement) for an all-staff conversation on how philanthropy can truly drive anti-racist change. Additional speakers included Angela Glover Blackwell, john a. powell and others, who were key to building a collective anti-racist, feminist commitment within the organization.
President and CEO Michelle DePass also spoke about how important it was to create a “culture of empowerment.” DePass characterized Meyer’s culture before her arrival as “more patriarchal,” an environment in which staff felt like they always needed to ask for permission. DePass wanted to shift this culture to one in which staff felt empowered to act on their intuition and lived expertise. DePass embraced this approach in her own leadership, telling her teams to act on their ideas and “go do it.” This shift has also been structural, with Meyer staff now needing board approval for grant decisions less frequently than in the past (described in more detail in the “Governance” section of this case study).
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