When we last caught up with the Deaconess Foundation three years ago, the funder — a ministry of the United Church of Christ serving eastern Missouri and southern Illinois — had just announced a desire to sustain the St. Louis Racial Healing + Justice Fund from its originally planned three years to a perpetual program.
Deaconess has been busy in the intervening years. The funder has inaugurated a new framework for its internal and external operations; launched four new grantmaking programs; moved more than $300,000 in funding in response to the May 16 tornado in St. Louis; and created the Institute for Black Liberation, a program designed to help participants “develop a liberatory consciousness through healing the hurts of internalized racism.” And Deaconess remains the host of the St. Louis fund after originally joining with other contributors to launch the program in 2021.
Deaconess, founded after the 1998 sale of the former Deaconess Incarnate Word Health System, has been out front as a signatory to April’s Unite In Advance public statement by funders. And while it hasn’t signed the stronger statement issued by a subset of those foundations earlier this month, a glance at Deaconess’ website reveals that a commitment to racial and economic justice remains key to the foundation’s mission even as the government turns against or seeks to outlaw racially specific programs.
While foundations have spoken up repeatedly in defense of the right to give as they see fit, they have been more muted in response to the administration’s attacks on diversity and racial justice. “In a streak of silence, it’s hard to interpret what silence means,” Deaconess Foundation President and CEO Bethany Johnson-Javois told IP. “So we have been one of a few that has gathered to say that we are not holding back, that we are what we are.”
As an explicitly Christian funder that continues to stand publicly behind its commitment to equality and justice for all people, Deaconess is a stark contrast to a right-wing movement that claims the same faith while simultaneously working diligently to crush any hint of support for racial justice in the public, private and philanthropic sectors. As the Trump administration attacks philanthropy and nonprofits while also decrying what it calls “anti-Christian bias,” the fate of Deaconess and other Christianity-based social justice funders, along with their grantees, may be put to a difficult test.
For her part, Johnson-Javois said that she’s proud of the work that went into the funder’s new strategic framework because, while it happened before the last presidential election, “what we were setting up was exactly for this moment.”
At the same time, Johnson-Javois acknowledged the pressing needs facing her staff and the communities they serve. Upon taking the top spot at Deaconess in Oct. 2021, she said that she quickly learned that both her new team and the people in the communities the foundation serves “are just flat-out exhausted. … It’s still the truth that we started running fast after the pandemic — as if there’s an ‘after the pandemic’ — and here we find ourselves,” without having had any space to rest and breathe from one crisis to the next.
In response, Deaconess’ strategic framework has both an internal and external focus. Externally, the foundation has committed to work across sectors, engage in a “community member-led redistribution of wealth,” and “coordinated year-round base- and coalition-building,” with a goal of achieving “liberation in seven generations.” Internally, the funder has taken steps including creating a Racial Equity Committee within its board of trustees, changing the schedule for paying employees and providing more flexibility in its paid leave policies.
In addition to the Institute for Black Liberation, Johnson-Javois said that Deaconess has also supported community-convened retreats for an array of area nonprofit leaders. “We’re not just investing in the work, but investing in the people leading the work,” she said.
And the foundation continues to fund that work. Early last month, Deaconess announced “NextGen Grantmakers,” a partnership with Vision for Children at Risk (VCR) to put funding decisions “directly in the hands of young changemakers,” according to a press release provided to Inside Philanthropy by Deaconess. As part of the NextGen initiative, young people from VCR’s Youth Advisory Council will receive training in equitable grantmaking, then decide how to distribute $100,000 in funds.
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In addition, last year, Deaconess partnered with the Community Health Commission of Missouri to create the Seniors Community Revitalization & Development Fund. The partners are accepting applications for this initiative until Oct. 17 for up to $30,000 in funding to help support people aged 55 and up with transportation, safety, and health navigation. Seeding the Future, which was launched in 2023 and provides one-year, $20,000 general operating grants to organizations aligned with Deaconess’ goals, is accepting RFPs through Oct. 30.
Asked about her foundation’s continued programming and language centering racial and social justice despite extremist attacks on those causes, Johnson-Javois said that “our interpretation about what’s happening is [that] it’s about invisibility. It’s about erasure. It’s about confinement, and understanding that that’s the playbook. … Since the tactic here is confinement and separation, we’ve just been really intentional” about community-building efforts including retreats, the Institute for Black Liberation, and making the Deaconess campus available for community events.
Johnson-Javois advised her peer funders to do the same. “Make sure you network, make sure you cohort, make sure that you’re connecting. And philanthropy really has not done well on that front,” she said.
Perhaps foundations can take nonprofits’ lead. On Oct. 2, NBC News reported that U.S. nonprofits are forming their own “NATO” alliance, banding together in an agreement to support each other if any one of them is targeted by the administration. Moderate and progressive funders and individual ultra-wealthy donors — who, by definition, have far more resources than most nonprofits — would do well to, at the very least, go beyond issuing open letters and start taking some collective action. Deaconess and other faith-based funders have the collective weight of religious institutions behind them in the event of a lawfare attack. It would still be a significant strategic error were secular foundations to leave them standing on their own.
