Putting Racial Equity Front and Center
By Grace Hou, President
I used to work in a development office; I was the development manager for Chinese American Service League in the mid-1990s. There, I learned under the red pen of Bernie Wong, the president of CASL at the time. Over the two years I was there, I am glad to share that there were fewer and fewer red marks on my grant proposals. She was an amazing teacher and helped me understand this strange world of grant-seeking from grantmakers/foundations - always be concise, be compelling, and be grammatically correct. I went on to serve as the executive director of Chinese Mutual Aid Association and continued to write grants and engage with foundation staff, site visits, etc. It is a humbling experience and one that I carry with me now as a grantmaker. I know that the decisions that grantmakers make -- that we, at Woods Fund Chicago, make - have reverberations beyond our organizations and disturb the work of our grantees. Therefore, we don’t make shifts in our guidelines lightly.
