Should philanthropy be doing more for men? Even as longstanding disparities favoring men persist, especially those from privileged backgrounds, recent studies have found that many boys and young men are falling behind in numerous areas, including education, mental health and entering the workforce. But there’s little philanthropic funding allocated for boys and men in the U.S., and even less specifically for boys and men of color.
So while it is critical to not only fund but increasing funding for women and girls, it is also important to understand the challenges boys and men of color face, especially around overcriminalization, education inequity and the limited opportunities available to them.
There are several funders working in this space, or at least showing an interest, including some of the nation’s biggest billionaire funders like Melinda French Gates and the Ballmers. Another top name to know is California Funders for Boys and Men of Color (CFBMoC), a network of 18 foundations that collectively aim to tackle systemic barriers facing boys and men of color in the state, and in turn, the nation as a whole. CFBMoC provides grants through a pooled fund, with member funders also providing additional grants through their own institutions. It’s also a community for collective learning for funders and community partners.
Network members include some of California’s largest institutional grantmakers as well as bastions of progressive funding in the state: Akonadi Foundation, California Community Foundation, California Wellness Foundation, The California Endowment, Liberty Hill Foundation, Rosenberg Foundation, Sierra Health Foundation, San Francisco Foundation, Sobrato Philanthropies, Zellerbach Family Foundation and Weingart Foundation.
According to Matt Cervantes, associate vice president of programs at the Sierra Health Foundation, CFBMoC was launched in 2014, at a time when the issues confronting boys and men of color were taking center stage in conversations around policy, the economy and the future of the country. That year, President Barack Obama launched the My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, which sought to address opportunity gaps for boys and young men of color. CFBMoC also built on the work of the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, a coalition of more than 200 grassroots and community organizations.
“CFBMoC was born out of a desire to both contribute to a national conversation about what was happening with boys and men of color while unleashing fully the potential to improve the life and life chances of that population here in California,” said Chet Hewitt, president and CEO of the Sierra Health Foundation. “We were really trying to build off what was a national sentiment with the intention of making California a leader in addressing the disparities that this population was experiencing.”
It also works alongside the California Assembly Select Committee on the Status of Boys and Men of Color, which looks at state laws and policies that support boys and men of color, and the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, on policy changes and on shifting the negative narratives around boys and men of color. Its Here to Lead campaign is a storytelling initiative that highlights the leadership and voices of young men of color in communities.
CFBMoC takes a place-based approach to its work, focusing on three regions in California, with each region focusing on a specific issue: educational equity in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valley region, youth criminal justice reform in Los Angeles, and economic opportunities in Oakland and San Francisco Bay Area.
Advancing educational equity in the Sacramento region and the San Joaquin Valley
Around the state’s capital and throughout the largely agricultural San Joaquin Valley, CFBMoC aims to help young boys and men of color graduate high school college, face fewer arrests and violence, and launch into meaningful and stable careers.
To do that, it’s focusing on ending the school-to-prison pipeline. For instance, CFMBoC and its partners helped advocate for the state to end suspension of students from high school for things like “willful defiance.”
The reality is that Black and brown students are disproportionately more likely to be punished in schools. One study found that young people suspended during school were less likely than students who were never suspended to earn a bachelor’s degree or a high school diploma, and were more likely to be arrested or on probation. Even students who attended middle schools with higher suspension rates were “substantially more likely to be arrested and jailed as adults.”
Earlier this year, CFBMoC awarded $300,000 to 12 nonprofit organizations to develop a five-year regional blueprint for creating “a healthy and effective school-to-career pipeline” for young men of color. The goal is to increase the number of boys and men of color pursuing higher education — either a post-secondary degree or career technical certificate program — by 2030.
“Getting kids in high school and through high school is a really important contribution to their long-term health and wellbeing,” Hewitt said. CFBMoC will be investing in grassroots organizations and advocacy groups as well as training and technical assistance for the cohort of organizations.
Reducing youth criminal justice involvement in Los Angeles
Beginning in 2017, the Liberty Hill Foundation, which is one of the Southern California anchors for CFBMoC’s work, partnered with the Weingart Foundation, the California Wellness Foundation and The California Endowment to take a place-based approach to addressing youth criminal justice in Los Angeles. At the time, Los Angeles County was arresting, incarcerating and prosecuting more boys and men of color than any other jurisdiction, not just in California, but the entire country.
“Through the California Funders for Boys and Men of Color, we were able to bring the foundation CEOs together to agree that this is something that we wanted to take on collectively,” said Julio Marcial, senior vice president of programs at Liberty Hill. “And so what that meant was raising money from the foundations and providing planning grants to what we consider anchor community-based organizations in Los Angeles that we felt were doing amazing work individually.”
CFBMoC awarded $250,000 in planning grants to nine organizations and two coalitions to create a blueprint outlining which policies, systems and narratives needed to change. Among the organizations funded were the Youth Justice Coalition, the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, Children’s Defense Fund, InnerCity Struggle and the Urban Peace Institute.
L.A. County was once home to 16 youth prisons. CFBMoC’s goal was to reduce that by half over a three-year period. According to Marcial, the county was also incarcerating around 1,500 young people a day, 85% of whom were boys and men of color. The blueprint’s goal was to reduce that number by half over three years. In total, over a five year period, the organizations CFBMoC funded accomplished 95% of what they had set out to do in the blueprint, Marcial said.
“We were learning from advocates who are part of the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color what was needed in a thoughtful closure of that system so we’re not just recreating local correctional models at the county level, but really investing in the potential and the healing of young men of color and those who have been formerly incarcerated at the local level,” Cervantes said.
In addition to reducing the number of boys and young men of color in the justice system, CFBMoC has also been successful in helping to create a youth development system in Los Angeles. Since 2017, CFBMoC has raised more than $15 million to help organizations implement their visions and transform L.A. County into “one of the biggest investors [in] young people in the district,” Marcial said. For instance, twenty different funders as well as several individual donors contributed for the Our Kids, Our Future Fund.
CFBMoC’s support also helped lead to the creation of L.A. County’s first Youth Development Department, which has a budget of $100 million and focuses on moving the county from punitive systems that harm and incarcerate young people of color to systems that focus on education, jobs and healthy neighborhoods.
“We’re really proud of the work,” Marcial said, “and I do believe that it couldn’t have been done without this type of relationship.”
One of the groups CFBMoC has supported over the years is the Youth Justice Coalition (YJC), which is dedicated to building a youth-led movement to end mass incarceration, police terror and the criminalization of young people in Los Angeles.
YJC operates the Chuco’s Justice Center, a law-enforcement-free youth center, a legal clinic that offers free resources and expungements, a program that provides substance abuse education and Narcan trainings, and a youth organizing team that works to reverse the school-to-prison pipeline.
The coalition also operates FREE L.A. High School, a two-year program where young people aged 16 to 24 can earn a high school diploma through project-based learning. Most of the students are system impacted and/or have been pushed out of traditional LAUSD schools.
“There was such a need that wasn’t being filled by traditional LAUSD schools, where young people were looking for a place to go and they would come to Chuco’s because it was a sanctuary space for them,” said Emilio Zapién, director of media and communications at YJC.
Over the years, YJC has advocated for and been involved in the development of dozens of bills, ranging from the use of police force and youth sentencing to access to gang databases and surveillance. It is currently working on a bill that would allow the county probation department to share some of its duties with the Department of Youth Development.
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Ensuring young men of color can access economic opportunity in the Bay Area
Another critical part of CFBMoC’s work is ensuring that boys and men of color can be part of thriving regional economies, which is the focus of funders in Oakland and the San Francisco Bay Area.
CFBMoC’s systems-based approach to its work highlights the need to address all three strategies — education, youth criminal justice reform, and the economic aspect. “If you get caught up in incarceration, you’re almost guaranteed that you’re not going to have a prosperous economic life,” said Ray Colmenar, president and CEO of the Akonadi Foundation.
In its recently published framework on how to shift away from punishment and marginalization and toward a pathway of education and opportunity, CFBMoC notes three strategies funders can use: dismantling punishment pathways and building recovery-oriented ones, creating effective postsecondary pathways, and connecting boys and men of color to well-paying jobs.
These strategies build on CFBMoC’s earlier work in the Bay Area. In 2016, for example, CFBMoC supported the Bay Area Young Men of Color Employment Partnership (BAYEP). BAYEP helps create career pathways for young men of color while simultaneously helping young men to take advantage of these opportunities. Between 2018 and 2019, CFBMoC awarded $200,000 in additional support for BAYEP’s work.
CFBMoC’s funders understand that the issues the network collectively addresses intersect with one another. “Being involved in the criminal justice system is probably one of the most important factors in the wellbeing of families and communities over time, right? If you get caught up in incarceration, you’re almost guaranteed that you’re not going to have a prosperous economic life,” Colmenar said.
CFBMoC was inspired by and has partnered with the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, whose work on policy and systems change centers on five issue areas, including education, economic security and youth justice.
Eric Morrison-Smith, executive director of the alliance, said that CFBMoC has helped fund some of the alliance’s infrastructure work so that it can build deep relationships with its local partners. It has also helped fund some of the alliance’s events, including its Day of Advocacy, in which young people go to the state capitol to speak with legislators.
“When you’re seeing funding cuts and all these different tough political challenges, it’s actually the relationships that hold things together and allow us to continue to advance a strong agenda, and CFBMoC has played a critical role in allowing us to be able to do that,” Morrison-Smith said.
CFBMoC is staying the course amid Trump-era setbacks
For all the progress CFBMoC has helped create in its state, it’s facing a number of difficulties and setbacks, including the Trump administration’s attacks on DEI and other efforts to advance racial equity, significant cuts to education funding, the dismantling of the Department of Education, an order to reinstate punitive discipline practices in schools, and the impacts that immigration raids are having on the lives of countless boys and men of color.
There’s also the rise of the so-called “manosphere,” which has had a profound and negative impact on boys and young men, leading to their radicalization in online spaces.
Despite these issues, CFBMoC remains firmly committed to its mission. Alongside the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color and the Black Freedom Fund, CFBMoC issued a letter calling for philanthropy, policymakers and school officials to continue their work and not let Trump policies derail progress for boys and men of color.
“Oftentimes, when there’s some success, there’s pullback. The need is greater than ever before, and I think this is an opportunity to really think about a 50-year strategy, and that is something that we don’t talk about in philanthropy. So I think the moment itself requires us to get past our comfort zone,” Marcial said.
Hewitt notes that despite the often ephemeral nature of philanthropic funding, where funders give for a time and then move on to another issue, CFBMoC continues to support its partners.
He added, “Retrenchment or going back on those investments will take us back to the place that we recovered from… The job is not done. We’ve learned a lot about what can be helpful and effective in these spaces. We need to continue to double down on those investments, as well. So defending and protecting, [and] fighting for equity and justice and investments and types of support and services that boys and young men of color actually need… This is more than feel-good work. This is impact work.”
