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- [00:00]
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We are deeply frustrated with the behavior of many of our peers. Not because we don't love them, but we wish they could see the brightness of what a spend down environment provides to not only you as an organization, but to the sector that so desperately needs the assets that are tied up in such harmful stuff. Normally, 95% of a foundation's assets are going to be in horrible stuff. It's the 5% that we spend all of our time talking about.
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Welcome to the PM Podcast brought to you by Evertrue Studios, the show that takes you inside the lives of thought leaders, innovators and change makers in fundraising, philanthropy and civil society. I'm your host, Jay Frost. In this episode we speak with Glenn Galitch, CEO of the Stupsky foundation, host of the Break Fake Rules podcast and author of the new book why Big Giving Falls Short, about his journey through the evolving landscape of modern philanthropy and his mission to challenge the structures that shape it. Glenn shares how his work, from Human Rights Watch to the Global Philanthropy Forum to leading the Stupsky foundation, has been driven by a deep commitment to equity, justice and dignity, particularly for communities historically excluded from power and resources.
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C
We've talked before about some of these issues that you're working on really hard and some of them have a timestamp on them. We'll talk about that, but we haven't talked about you. You just said you're not very interesting, but you have a story. There's a reason why you do this work. Let's start at the beginning. Where are you from? Where did you, where did you grow up?
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Well, I grew up in San Diego. I live in the Bay Area now, San Francisco. For the people that are. I don't know when they're hearing this, but the super bowl just happened in our little town. I was very happy to see something we all know in San Francisco, but the world, apparently the country doesn't know because it's been so heavily marketed as an apocalyptic hell zone by the by the right wing that when people came here for the super bowl, if you saw the New York Times article, but all these people are like, I've been lied to. It's fantastic. We know that it's been an amazing week here of story upon story of people coming out and saying, I'm coming back to San Francisco. It is amazing here. Like we've been telling you all that it's all just been a campaign. But I grew up in the far south part of California, right near the border, and was not interested in much of anything that I'm doing now for 25 years of my life. Somewhere along the way, it's a longer story, but I got very interested in political science and politics. I did. It was during a time when the wall was coming down and there was this. It's hard for people to remember this, but democracy was on the rise.
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C
We talk about this a lot in our house right now. So this is around 1989.
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A
Is that 89 to about 90? Late 90s? Yeah. Even early 2000s, the world was really focused on what Huntington was referred to as the third democratic wave. And he was a huge political scientist in the day. And there were other books of that era. Francis Fukuyama wrote a big book called the End of History, and many people piled on. This was like, this was the time. So that's when I went through grad school. I went to grad school because I was very interested in the dynamics of ethnic conflict and ethnic segmentation in Africa and was hopeful that I could help write constitutions for newly democratizing countries in Africa.
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C
Yeah, that was that idea. Where did that idea come from?
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A
You know, this day, my wife, who we were, we were not married at the time, but she said, the moment you said that to me, I did everything I could to not laugh in your face. And I just find it still funny to this day.
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C
That's a pretty remarkable ambition, though. I mean, it must have come from somebody.
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A
I hear you. I know from the out. Yes, but. But really a lot, A lot. There were really very few players at the time that were advised other than, you know, major governmental institutions. There really weren't many political scientists that were focused on how to resolve these very deep ethnic conflicts in these countries that were now, you know, trying to break free of a patriarchal system which we are now kind of embracing here in the United States. They're very similar systems where you have a big man at the top who demands loyalty, and they tend to be very incompetent in how they deliver services. So we're seeing a touch of that here. When you put loyalty over competence, you. You get the outcomes you get here. And that is definitely happening in Africa. So how do you put a country that has deep, you know, that's built on conflict into one that's now built on conflict, but in a legislative, or almostly legislative setting, these are all going to end up being parliamentary systems. And so that was the goal. There was a lot of theory behind it. Almost all of those models that were big then, big meaning amongst the 10 or 20 of us who paid attention have all Failed. They've all, you know, fallen apart for the most part.
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C
What. Why is that?
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A
It's very hard to get past segment issues. You know, one of the countries that was held up for a long time as a real model for how segmentation of this kind. So segmentation will become clear to you when I describe, when I name the country and that's Lebanon was really seen as, you know, you had the. It was part of what was called back then. You never hear this word. You didn't hear this word back then. You certainly don't hear it now is referred to as a consociational system where you had different ethnic segments. So Lebanon is made up of Christians and two major powerful sects of the Muslim world, and that is Shia and Sunnite. And so you basically divided up the leadership. You pre allocated the leadership to the majority and second and third in power. And then the legislature was divided up according to that. And the minority, whoever that was, was given a veto over all decision making by the others. So the idea was that you had full representation and you gave a little extra to the minority who would get trampled on if you didn't give them something more. Lebanon had that system, the Netherlands had that system and others. And, and they tried, they tried to do something similar in South Africa. None of these places kept it going. There's still like fragments of it left in Lebanon. I think they still predetermine who the leadership is going to be. I think the Maronites still have power there, but it's really, it's really falling apart. And so did my love of it and I kind of moved on. I continued working in Africa, human rights. But my wife was going and down the road of becoming an immigration attorney and she almost immediately got a job in, in Denver and then because we were Colorado for grad school and she immediately got a job in Denver and no sooner did she have that job and she got recruited to San Francisco for a really cool firm out here that was doing really great immigration work, asylum, deportation stuff. She ran to it and I held on and went with her out here and found my way into philanthropy quite accidentally.
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C
So I know that and we're jumping ahead and I do. I don't want to leave your early life too quickly, but I think this is when you were working at Human Rights Watch, was that in Colorado or was that out in San Francisco?
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That's San Francisco. That comes down the road here. Yeah.
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C
Okay. Okay. So before we get too far into that, I know you did a PhD in this subject matter. Which is why you're talking about it with this kind of depth and versatility about things which are not well known to other people. But the experience of it is something we've all. Well, like you pointed out, we're still experiencing now in different ways with different labels. And I do want to ask you why you think that is so, because you just mentioned certain places on the African continent, but certainly this is true around the world, and it's true here today, that there is an attraction to the strongman, to the patriarchal structure. You've studied it now, you've lived it, and you're working in ways we'll describe with the foundation to address that. What is the attraction to it in the first place?
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Yeah, well, I certainly have not written much on it myself, but the people. Ann Applebaum has written volumes on it. We are living it. And I think it mostly comes from. There are two things that stand out to me. One is obviously that segment of society that has benefited, or thinks it has benefited most from the traditions of society, whatever they may be, however they define them, become very frustrated as the country goes through change, goes through democratic change, maybe demographic change. They become desperate. And the big men always speak to that desperation. They speak to the fear. And they tell them, I'm the one that can get us back to where it needs to be. It is a playbook that has been used for millennium. Not just centuries and not just decades. It's. You know, someone was saying to me the other day, it's. It's so sad that we're this. That we could be falling back or that this way of being is losing traction. And I reminded them that actually what we were living in, this is. This is. You know, the concept of an experiment should never be lost on people. In the history of humanity. The time we've lived in, that you and I have so enjoyed, I would imagine you've enjoyed this time is we have lived in a blip of humanity. Humanity is only known patriarchy and violence and deep, deep power. You know, imbalances of power and control. That's all it's ever known. And we really had this time that is spread across the. That we were even talking about a democratic wave for what, a decade maybe, is really an unusual. It's just something to think about like that this is what we take to be life and our environment and our world. And what has been is actually not at all what has been. Humans have a need for that kind of hierarchy, and they really push the edges of cultural, business culture, office culture, and one of the things that people internally wanted to do is to get rid of the hierarchy. And even the most like progressive thinkers are like, you can't. Humans need hierarchy. Think about your own friendships, your own community. You probably can say, I've got, I'm in a, I'm in a community of 150 people and there's just that one couple or a couple couples that kind of are like the, they're like the lead birds in the flock. You know, you know them in your head. Maybe they're you. If you can't figure out who it is, look in the mirror, it might be you. But the, the, that hierarchy is just a natural thing. Now imagine that on steroids. You're needing to have that across a society and it tends to be. So anything you're doing in democracy is really trying to upend that natural order of humanity. And it is, it's not an easy experiment. I mean, we just have to appreciate how far we've come and hope it can continue longer.
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C
Now, this is spoken as a person who's studied it and kind of lived it and tried to, you know, push, push it around a little bit. But when did you begin understanding that that wasn't just when you're doing your PhD? So bring us back to Glenn. When you were really a young person, did you already have an interest in these things? Do you recognize this already? Is that what drove you ultimately?
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You know, no one's ever asked me that. That's a really good question. You know, I think, you know, the thing that people miss in. Well, I don't know if people miss. I don't even know if people think about political science. But what political science really is is the study of power, period. It's a study of human behavior in a power dynamic. How do we distribute it? How do we balance it? How do we dominate it, overwhelm it? It's. That's what it is. And you know, even trying to understand what power is is a complicated thing. But the people have it, countries have it, cities have it, and many others don't. And by, by most history, most don't. And I have just been fascinated by that in some form or fashion my whole life. I think for those of us that live in a more. Well, I think, you know, I don't want to put titles on anything. There is a version of the conservative mindset that is all about trying to find a balance of power, and there's a version of a progressive mindset that's about finding a balance of power. For the most part, I don't think there is anybody out there that professes violent domination over another society unless they're a little off, you know, like Stephen Miller or someone like that. But for the most part, you. You either. No matter where you come from, you're trying to find that balance of power. So I'm part of that group that seeks that a more, you know, peaceful society where people can really live in either. If you're more left wing, you're probably thinking more of a community or a collective. And if you're more on the right side, you're thinking more about individual freedom amongst a collective or in fear of a collective. And though I've always been fascinated by that,
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C
was there a discussion about any of those issues even back at home? Because we often don't have them at school. I mean, maybe you did when we were quite young, but it's often at home in the same way we first experienced philanthropy, even though if we didn't. I don't know about you, but I didn't know the word philanthropy when I was 10 years old. Same, but I might have seen it in practice. So did you see or experience that in that community that you were in, whether it was your house or the 150 people in your community? What was your understanding?
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You know, this is the funny part, Jay, really, I. I'm so glad you brought that up. Great questions. These are all really good. First of all, my father, to this day, he's 90 years old. I've been in this business for over two decades. He still, no matter how many times I tell him that there's an H after the T, still calls it philanthropy. I cannot for the life of me get him to see that H. So he. He. He still says, what is it you do? Philanthropy. So that's how little it was in my house. My dad probably will go to his grave not fully understanding what it is or what the name is. And that's why it just wasn't a part of. The irony is that my mother was, for most of her life, kind of like a princess of the Bay Area her father and his brother built. Daly City, California, had the largest construction company in the country at one point. So they are very wealthy. And due to some kind of family dynamic that no one has explained to me, there was a. There was a divide that happened, and my great uncle ran off with everything and. But when I moved back to the. When I moved to the Bay Area 25 years ago and started working in philanthropy, I looked up the old family Name. And there are three foundations in the Bay Area that exist that are managed by people completely different from the family and are pretty much giving to. Well, there's. There is a family member involved now, and one of them. But they primarily give to human. I'm not human. Animal rights and animal care and a couple of other things. And so I off. I asked to be on. I called him and I said, I'd love to be a part of it. I'm a family member and I work in philanthropy. And the phone clicked and they were gone. Wow. So that was my first experience with family philanthropy. And. But the irony is, my mother, in all the years growing up and all the time, she hated. She just. She had a huge animosity toward wealthy people and rich people. Maybe that's where it came from. She really. She just really created. Even though we were not at all part of a class dynamic like you see today, she, in a way, without using the words, kind of fomented a class division in our house, mostly out of spite for having been kicked out of the upper class.
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Wow.
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C
And, you know, these. Again, it's like anything we're just talking about. We don't necessarily recognize or have language for these things that we're experiencing, especially as children or even as young adults. So I wonder how, if at all, some of these conversations, both explicit and implicit, might have impacted your feelings about things like wealth and how people should treat their wealth or whether or not they should be taxed or whether philanthropy, however you understood it, should be mandated somehow. Any sense about whether you had any thoughts on that before you kind of flew the coop and went off to school?
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No. At this point, I'm starting to think I need to pay a fee for therapy. I mean, this is good stuff. I. Yeah, I just. I hadn't. I hadn't really thought about it, except that. All I can say, going back to my original comment, is that I just. I am fascinated by how these dynamics. These dynamics. And I. I'm fascinated by them at the individual level, the group level, and at the broader level, whatever that might be, however you define it.
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C
Well, you. You definitely would have seen the impact sector at work when you were working for Human Rights Watch. So I know that when you were doing a PhD, which is pretty heavy stuff, especially that subject matter at that time, that was a big deal. But then to be working at Human Rights Watch, much of just jumped right into the thick of it. So.
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Yeah. So prior to that, affected things prior to that. So how I got into the business, I was very Lucky. And a woman named Jane Wales, who was heading up the World Affairs Council in San Francisco at the time, had gotten a contract to put on something called a global philanthropy forum. So this is like, this was 2000, 2001. 2002 was the first conference, and there's a lot of wealth growing rapidly in the Bay Area to the new tech boom. At the time, tech guys were seen as fun, jovial rule breakers. It was real fun. There are these boys down in Stanford that had come up with search engines and Steve Jobs was still cool, and Cisco was kind of like the top company in the world. And there's just. There was a lot of. It was very upbeat, exciting, like that dark, foreboding technology AI world was not even in consideration. So we were just. She was just trying to, amongst a number of other partners, trying to encourage giving to go globally as opposed to just restricting it to the United States. So that's how I entered. I had no idea. I didn't know. You know, it's really funny, Jay. I had a talk show for a little while and I found some old mini discs. We thought the future of sound was mini discs back then. And I found some old mini discs. And I was listening to one about 10 years ago. I was listening to an old recording of myself interviewing Wendy Kopp, who was the founder of Teacher America.
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Right?
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This is how I had no idea. So this would have been like a year, maybe a year, year and a half, before I started working at GPF at the Global Philanthropy Forum. And at that time, because I was in the PhD environment, I was only focused on getting National Science foundation grants. I just assumed everybody got grants from the National Science Foundation. I didn't know about philanthropy. And so here I am talking to Wendy Kopp, who I barely knew who she was, and she's on my show, and she had a book, I think, on the Teach for America thing. And I said, so let me understand this. There are individuals who will give you money for what you do. I thought that was the best. I hear myself say it on this recording. Fast forward 10 years, and I'm completely obsessed and enmeshed in people that give money individually. It's amazing. And so, yeah, that's how I entered philanthropy. And I had this incredible benefit of to put this whole thing together. The Hewlett foundation literally donated one of their staff members to help us launch it. And her name is Juliet Gymon, and she was the granddaughter of Bill Hewlett. And I knew nothing, literally nothing about this world. And she was donated. And we Became fast friends. She taught me so much. She grew up her whole life. She was probably 31, 32 at the time. And she had spent 30 years of her life pretty much doing philanthropy as a. As a second, I guess I'd be second generation or a third generation Hewlett. And that's really where it all started for me.
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C
And that was an interesting group of people because I think that the heir to the Packard foundation, of course, was involved with that as the chair for a time who was also at a tech company. Lots of different people in the Global Philanthropy Forum.
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Yeah, a lot of different players have kind of took it on and invested in it.
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C
Right.
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A
Humanity United, which is Omidyar, very much involved for a while. Gates got very involved with it for a while. But most, it's all under new management now. And in fact I'm launching my upcoming book at the 25th anniversary of it. I can't believe it. I can't believe I'm saying that. But yeah, so it was a tremendous place to learn and Jane was a powerhouse, always has been. And it was, you know, just learned a lot. And then I went to Human Rights Watch who happened to be in the building where we were located. So the fellow I was, I struck up a conversation with the fellow running and I was always curious about it. And he said, hey, I'm leaving. And I run the department, I run the development team out here. And would you want to continue your human rights work, but through the lens of Human Rights Watch, raising some money. And I was like, I'm fascinated by all that stuff. I'll do it. And it turned out to be a great marriage.
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C
You must have had a sense about who they were very much for academic work at least.
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A
Yeah. You know, it's funny, there is a big divide there really is, between academia and the nonprofit sector that even the activists, I think lesser. So now back then and back then it's almost hard to believe this how things have played out. But Amnesty International was the dominant human rights organization organization at the time. I think they had about 100 million annual budget at the time. HRW when I started, had a 26 million dollar annual budget. That's almost. I don't think it's. I don't think it's going opposite directions. But now hrw, at least until a couple years ago, was making. Was bringing in over 100 million a year, grown substantially. It's just a huge force, really important almost on the level of states, you know, that was the idea was to get it to the place where they could sit at the table and really push states around as best we could. And I loved being a part of that. It was incredible. So great.
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C
People talk about that experience. What was, what was happening at the time? What kinds of issues were you and your colleagues working on?
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A
The time that I was there. So I was there twice. I was there for a year and a half just running the San Francisco office. I left and went to a donor education program that today is called Forward Global. But after, when I went back, I was overseeing North American fundraising. And obviously the big issues at the time were there were some big treaties that were underway. We were trying to get a cluster munitions treaty. Darfur and Sudan were a huge focus at that time. But you know, so many countries, sadly, like I said from the outset, the orientation toward humanity is not balance of power. The orientation is dominance of power. And that's ultimately what you're trying to deal with in a human rights setting. You're trying to ensure that people have access to the rights they deserve. And that in many cases countries have signed on to and agreed to. And it's under that framework that Human Rights Watch and other human rights groups work. They base everything they say and do on the frameworks of human rights that have been agreed to globally and basically investigate where those rights have been infringed because most governments won't do it. We're seeing it here in the United States, right? There's a whole bunch of rights that are being infringed right in front of our eyes and no one's investigating them. You know, Minneapolis had just a couple big ones. Boats are being blown off, off the coast. No one's really asking. So a Human Rights Watch should really be in position to come in. That's happening globally. Those incidents are happening all over the place. They come in, they research it, they come up with their objective assessment. And then if it's something that looks to be not a one off, but a state sponsored pattern, they bring it wherever they can to address it. And that was. So we were raising money for it. And I was, I saw a lot of really great philanthropy in that environment.
- [25:40]
C
You know, one thing you, you said a minute ago really hit me about that, which is to get to a place where they had the influence. And I guess that was by virtue of the budget, among other things, but the budget being one to have a seat at the table. So I'm wondering about a couple of your thoughts on that. And first is whether or not they did or could in the future, if they didn't get there. And also how much was the corpus or how much money they had. A factor in whether or not they would ever get a seat at the table to discuss these issues, do more than research them, which is very important, but actually have an influence on policy.
- [26:23]
A
Well, I'm going to go back to academics a little bit here and if I learned anything in my time, it's really interesting that most of how you can look at humanity and why a person decides or an organization or individual decides to do what it does, it's driven by three forces. It's either culturally, there's meaning behind different things. Symbols that drive us, meaning that drives us, past histories that drive us. Self interest is the second one that's very powerful. People do a cost benefit analysis as to how they're going to move and then structures, things we don't even see or can taste, but we can feel them. We move in certain directions based on structures that are pushing us around us could be structures of people. Power is a structure. So all three of those dynamics are in play. When you think about how anyone gets pushed, anything gets moved. So I'd say an effective international organization, yes, the checkbook matters because you need to be able to hire high quality people all over the world that have access. And it wasn't just access to the highest places of power. You also needed access to people on the ground. And that's what's really fascinating to me was that, you know, the best researchers knew all the organizations that were working on behalf of a country that we probably would never know or see or even be aware of, but they were able to take those voices and really raise the volume. Handing off a report or handing off data they had to someone who had access to the highest places of power. And it was a really interesting, almost like a relay race that went on inside Human Rights Watch as the information would come out and get handed off and out it would go to UN agency or even, you know, foreign governments would directly advocate at each other. I mean, that's what's so discouraging is the way I'll put it right now about what's happened to the alliances of our country. Because while many people, certainly our president looks at those alliances in terms of like transactional or militaristic or whatever it might be, there's a lot of day to day work that goes on where they're negotiating with each other and pushing each other in different ways to take actions against other countries in different ways for infringing upon different agreed upon frameworks. None of that Works where the president is not wrong. And I'm sure I would get a lot of pushback on this if people hear me say it. But it is, there really isn't an international legal order. There's a hope for one. There are frameworks, there are things we sign, but power is the structure of power. So there's structure coming up. The structure of power is such that those with the most power are ultimately going to determine what laws, rights and otherwise get picked up and followed. And if those that are most powerful don't give anything about those rights, then that so called international human rights legal order collapses. That though, is a day to day thing. It's not just one great gathering and everyone leaves. It's that those nonprofits that are out there, international organizations, individual countries, people that work in those individual countries are constantly working at, you know, building the fine fibers that create a legal order around something like human rights. And so, yeah, you're at a table, they're at a table. There are a lot of organizations that sit at the table. But in some ways it's all of that engaged. It's self interest of certain leaders, the structures that we're working with and how power is distributed. And then of course, the cultures and how meaning shows up in different places. What's important to them. Even last night's super bowl halftime show, right there was a whole bunch of symbolic, cultural meaning going on there. For half of the US may not even understood what it was about. But the other staff, the other side said, hey, this is a statement of independence that we're celebrating here. And how do we bring all that together and how does one story overtake another? And that's all in play in this environment.
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C
There's a lot to unpack in there. But one part that hits me is that of course this is very, it's a very big picture. What you're describing is not just something happening within the Bay Area, it's happening across the country and around the world. And it's also always in flux as these power dynamics change. And part of those power dynamics are the dynamics of money. I mean, I know the two influence one another, but which direction the money flows and the power flows. But you found your way from working on these issues in that way and now working in the foundation world where you are, you have been, or at least the foundation has been primarily focused on very specific kinds of areas. I mean, the way you treat them has broad impact, but the geographic distribution might be a little more narrow than the way you were just thinking about. The world. So I don't want to get ahead of myself here, but I would love to hear your thoughts on that because as you think about philanthropy, there are many issues that you work on here, but among them spending down, which is a big part of. I know what we can take this conversation next. But another element is where so talk about that for a minute. How you, how you make sure that the impact you want to see happens, even if you're looking locally. Does this boil down to a John Lennon kind of quote or is there more to it than that?
- [32:13]
A
Well, so this I don't want to go all the way over there to come back over here, but I, I will say that again. You know, as I said from the start, and you've done an incredible job of opening up here in the conversation to me, this is all still a analysis and a practice of power, period. And donors have enormous power in the philanthropic sector. And I worked for someone who had that same power. She just had different views on how to use it. And many donors do. So for people who may not know this, I work at the Stupsky foundation, which is based in San Francisco. Jay was more than hinting at is that we work primarily in two counties in the Bay Area and across the state of Hawaii. All of that is because of the donor. All of it. So there's a much longer history of the Stupsky foundation that primarily operated as it did because the Larry Stupsky was alive and Larry was the primary architect of Schwab. So Chuck Schwab's little boutique investment firm became an international superpower because of Larry Stupsky. And Larry passed away in 2013. The foundation had already been up and running for well over a decade at that point. And they closed it. And I jump ahead because a for time and also because I come into the picture around here. Joyce, now a widow, decided to turn the foundation from what had been an operating foundation. So you can go on Wikipedia and find out what that is to a grant making spend down foundation. And she did about a year and a half with another CEO. And then I came in and she had a lot of ideas about what she wanted to do. And when I look back on it, I'm really grateful because she I'm grateful and I'm sad because she had a couple really great ideas that it took me 10 years to realize, wow, those are really great ideas. I wish I'd done them her way. But she was flexible enough with me to let me run with my own, which were pretty traditional, honestly. I came from a time of where strategic philanthropy, as it was called, was the way you did everything. It's pretty much how everybody does it today. You know, you set your goals, you put strategies behind it, you do your landscape analyses, you launch your strategies, you evaluate, you learn, and you come back and do it again. And what I Learned within about 4 years of having an opportunity to run it myself is it's all a bunch of folly. There's really nothing I just said actually, in my opinion works. But. And there. And what's really clear to me is there is just no such thing as foundation impact, nor the ability to evaluate it or track it. It's just annoying waste of time stuff. It just is. But we will still, like, no matter how many times I say it, no matter how many times someone looks at me and goes, you know, I think you're right about that, it's not going to stop the fact that we're still going to dump hundreds of millions of dollars of time and effort and waste into trying to get there. So that's where I go on the answer of impact. I don't worry about it. But what I will say is to your question about concentrating in one area and why there and how it really is because Joyce wanted to to give back to a part of the world that she grew up in, for the most part, not all her life, but an important part of her life. And she loved San Francisco. She also spent a lot of time in Hawaii. She and Larry had a house over there and a couple houses over there. And she was really, really frustrated by the fact that all of her very wealthy friends were hanging out in Hawaii and not getting to know the islands and not getting to know the state and certainly not giving philanthropically to it. So she wanted to use us as a signal, as a symbol that continental philanthropy could exist in Hawaii. So that's why we've done what we've done in those places. I will invite people to go onto our website, which is stupsky.org to see the issue areas we're in. But there are four of them. We focus primarily through a racial justice and racial equity lens very proudly, unfearingly, and will always be that until we're gone as a spend down, which will be functionally around the end of 27. And will there'll still be paperwork and other things going on for another couple years because when you're spending down, any entity, wherever your LLC is, your corporate paperwork they have, the state has to approve your closing down. So we're going to be waiting for that to come through. Technical. I know, but people always ask me, well, if you're going to be done in 27, why are you hanging out till 30? Well, that's because there's a lot that has to be done. There'll be some things to shut down, but for most part, our grant making will come to full stop at the end of 27.
- [37:24]
C
And that's, I think you told me in the last conversation we had that it's around, if you put it all together, $600 million.
- [37:30]
A
$600 million, yeah. So if we had not been a spend down, we would have been $160 million over that time and there'd still
- [37:37]
C
be the same amount in the, in the corpus. I mean, you still have what, $250 million or something sitting there in the bank account.
- [37:43]
A
We would probably more. You know, this year has been an extraordinary year. This year has been for the foundation sector, I think one of the wildest I've seen in the sense that the need is the greatest. It's been, there's been what, hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars pulled out of the social finance system by the government. International giving is zero for the US Government. For the most part. The amount of suffering that will go on will be extreme. We're seeing new reports are coming out now every day. Center for Effective Philanthropy. Nonprofits are saying we're on the edge, we're going out, our clients are suffering, communities are crashing. Foundations have been kind of like, well, same reports are showing. Yeah, well, it's been stressful, but it's good. We fought off the excise tax and we, you know, we aren't terrorists and that's cool. So for them it's, you know, that's all good. But the reality is that the divide between what foundations are experiencing and what the rest of the world is experiencing is extreme. And so, you know, we gave away, we moved 70% of our grant making assets last year because we see it's a terrible time and foundations need to react accordingly. And so they're not, they're not. There's a lot of talk, but there's not a lot to do.
- [39:03]
C
You mentioned the technical aspect of it taking a little longer to shut down just because you have state requirements. I'm wondering, is there any other kind of technical dimension to this spend down, in other words, that you need to put the money into just these specific areas, geographic areas, but also grant making areas within this amount of time? And are we talking about how much money are we talking about that you'll need to disperse by the end of 27.
- [39:38]
A
So by the end of 27 we have about, I think we still have about 20 million left. Most of the program directors have moved, you know, I think the lowest one is in the 70 million category over the last 10 years. So they're all looking at this as like the last of the last of the last. There will be some money that will. We have some, don't get too technical here, but we have some program related investments out there where we have made no interest loans to community lending agencies. So really fun. I have loved this program. We basically projected all the money we would need for operations out. We went to cash very early on. It's another story for another day. Very proud of getting out of all this harmful toxic investments that foundations are in. We got out of all of it, put it into cash and then realized, well, that cash is just going to sit there for like eight years in preparation for salaries we pay way out. So this was like, you know, four or five years ago. We made this decision and so we moved all of it and it backed out to community lenders with no interest on it so they could make all the money off the interest. We didn't need it, we didn't want it.
- [40:51]
C
Interesting.
- [40:51]
B
Yeah.
- [40:52]
A
So they use the principal. All we ask is that we get the principal back. So they were able to have it and we'll have it, some of them for two or three years longer where they're earning interest on their investments and then the principal will come back to us and we'll pay out our operational needs. So we were able to put our operational capital into play and almost like grant making and while doing grants so that money now will come back. We earn a little more than we had anticipated on not on cash. We learned, earned it on cash. Nothing on investment, not, you know, not like a lot of foundations are in depressed economies and hedge funds and speculation, Grand Cayman Islands tax, tax dodging, they're all in that stuff. All the worst corporations in America, they're all invested in that. We're not in any of that stuff. And so it's a small amount relatively, but it's money. So we still will have a little bit that we will be moving. However, it will be committed in 27 and the rest of us sticking around in 28 and 29 will just pay it out.
- [41:52]
C
It must be both thrilling for you, but also there must be, I don't know, a little bit of melancholy isn't the right word. But you must have some feelings because when this whole thing ends, it will be. It will be over. And while it is exactly what you're trying to do, I'm wondering if you can tell me what it feels like to be you, but also the other people who are working with you on the team who are watching this spend down occur, and they know that when you hit that finish line, it's the end of this. It's the end of this, this marathon, and that's. That's that.
- [42:23]
A
Well, I'll speak for myself mostly, but I'll pull from some of the things I've heard from the people around me, and that is that it's a lot better to know the flight path than to wake up one morning and find out that your program's been eliminated and you're on, you're out. So we've had that great luxury. You know, we are, we are, we are landing the plane to the best of our ability and walking away. I think a lot more about the good stuff than I do the sad stuff. I love the people I work with, and I know a lot of people say that, but it takes a really special group to do this. So it not only just to do a spend down, but we're an unusual foundation. We are deeply frustrated with the pers. With the behavior of many of our peers. Not because we don't love them, but we wish they could see the brightness of what a spend down environment provides to not only you as an organization, but to the sector that so desperately needs the assets that are tied in. Up in such harmful stuff. Normally, 95% of a foundation's assets are going to be in horrible stuff. It's the 5% that we spend all of our time talking about. We would love to see more of our peers look beyond the 5% from a social good perspective. So it takes a different kind of crowd to both want to spend down and have that kind of passion and energy to drive our peers to do more of not. It's not the stupsky way. It is just the way we think philanthropy was intended, you know, so it's sad to think about the day when I won't be working with them. You know, I have a very close relationship with the producer of our podcast, Break Fake Rules. Her name is Claire Callahan. For people that have listened to the show, you hear her voice pop on every now and then. She goes by communications Claire, and she's already told me, you know, I'm out of here on, you know, December 31, 2027, I'm getting a plane ticket to France and I'm gone. And that is like, oh, I've worked by that time. I'll work with Claire for 15 years. It's going to be a real hammer to the heart. But that's, that's, that's the sad part, the exciting part is that I firmly believe that most everybody at the foundation is going to go on and will carry this mindset into wherever they go, provided they go to it in philanthropy, and maybe even not. Jen Nguyen, who's got a newsletter that's becoming more and more popular called Philanthropy Confidential. Read anything Gen Nguyen writes and you will be both touched and laughing your ass off. She's incredibly. She's got the best sense of humor. Just working with her, I've come to appreciate how much humor I've gotten out of just hanging out with Jen. But she's incredibly sharp and witty, and I have no doubt that she's going to go on to do something tremendous. And so I'm really, you know, really pleased to know that the flock, if you will, will go out and do that's. That's going to be our legacy in many ways. So I just look around me and say, but I just, I hope this all continues for myself. I just have no idea where this is going to go. Jay and coming up on 60, but when it's done. And I kind of have these dreams of, like, going off into the woods like Ralph Waldo Emerson or something, and just sitting around and riding, but I know that won't happen. I would miss. You know, I've gotten to know hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people in this sector, and I'm so grateful for it. Even if I don't, even if we don't agree, we do agree on one thing, and that's we want the world to be a better place. And it's, it's a blessing to be able to hang out with people that want people to talk on a microphone with you for an hour is like, I know where your heart is. And I just. Every day, every day since I can remember, I've met another person that wants the world to be a better place. That's a pretty great place to be. And I don't see myself leaving it unless someone tells me to get the hell out. I might have. Maybe that'll happen. That could happen. Every now and then, people get pretty. Their feathers get ruffled over something. I say, it could happen.
- [46:38]
C
Whether you're writing the next Walden in the woods or having another podcast or whatever you're going to do after December 31st of 2027, you are clearly pushing really hard to get people to see the opportunity in spending down at a time when there's a lot of need and when they can have a big impact and maybe get out of some of these investments. You're also just about to release a book on this subject. So as you think about everything in the interim between now and when you do help turn off the lights for this extraordinary foundation, the work that you've done, what do you imagine those few, those number of months look like? Whatever number of months that is, and particularly with the writing, just as with the speaking, what role will that play like with the book?
- [47:31]
A
So we did plan this out. So we, meaning the communications team, a number of the program directors, we planned it out. We said, all right, there's going to be a wind down to our grant making. We did not expect 2025 to be as intense as it was. We thought we were going to move about 30% of our available grant making assets. We made it 70, 60 to 70, depending on what spreadsheet you're looking at. But we knew that when we got to 2026, we would be in a heavy influence approach. Everyone knew it, from my board to my staff. So as we now are moving into the early part of February of 2026, I am not surprised that I am overwhelmed with trying to stay up on all the people I want to talk to and all the people that want to talk to us as we are. In addition to a pretty active lifestyle on LinkedIn social media, a newsletter called who Gives? That comes out every week in partnership with a writer named Ari Allen, who does amazing work. Their work has been much more, more better received than when I was writing it on my own. It's really the newsletter. I enjoy reading it as much as anyone. So we have that and Break Fake Rules, which is a podcast that comes out every week. You can get it on any of your podcasting platforms, all of which have been very, very well received by a lot of people in the sector. On top of it, we now have a book coming out called why Big Giving Falls Short. And that is coming out on St Patrick's Day, although you can pre order it now from all your favorite books, distributors, retailers, I should say. And, and so, yeah, it's, it's a, it's, it's going to be a really fast burn to the end of 27. And I may continue, probably will continue doing whatever we need to continue doing in influence work in 2829. I wrote this book with the Significant support of a woman named Heidi Taboni who's written number of books with people in philanthropy. And we're at the end of our time together and I, she said to me, do you think you'll ever want to write another book? And I said, no way, man. I am done. This thing was really hard work. I had no idea. So many people said it's really a lot of work to write a book. And I, and I wrote it. I really wrote the book really quickly in its first iteration. And when I and I but I knew it was really bad and I, that's when I brought on Heidi and she was like, I can confirm firm, it's really bad, but there's some really good stuff in here and I'm going to help you make it a good book. And I do think together we've written a really great book. Although she tells me not to say that she was involved, but I'm going to, I cannot help it. She was so good and such a great partner. So I'm really, really, really pleased with the book. I really am. And I think gets at everything we wanted to say about reflection in the sector, about looking, trying to see beyond this mindset of control that is so pervasive in our sector. The fact that we can't see beyond the minimum of our giving, the fact that we can't look into our investments and see the harm we're doing, the fact that we can't hear the communities that need so much more money than we give, but we can give. We don't give it, but we can. There's nothing stopping it other than the hedge fund managers are not going to want to give that money back when we ask for it. I have experience with that. So all of that, that's the only barriers that we've gotten into. These Ponzi schemes that are so nasty that if you try to get out of them, they really resist. But all of that said the book really I believe makes a really strong case for at the very least stopping and reflecting and looking in the mirror and asking where are you? On a spectrum from the one end being excessive donor control to the other end being community engagement. And the first question to ask any donor needs to ask this of themselves. If they have made a grant to a community foundation or a Schwab or Fidelity to create a donor advised fund. If you've made it, done that or you put a money into a private foundation where you are the only donor, if you can say to yourself that that is not your money anymore, then you are, you are ready to start approaching community engagement. Most donors, when you ask them about the foundation they govern, they will refer to it as their foundation and their money. And neither of those things are true. But that's what they've told themselves and that's what their staff has been told, and that's what they believe. And that's why this thing that is really a public entity is governed in a private way, governed with the donor's interests in mind, not the community's interests in mind. So the book, I think, does a good job going through my own story to some degree, a lot of stories of other people that have experienced this place. We really take you behind the scenes and underneath the hood of what it's like to be be in one of these places. So I think there will be some very enlightening moments for people in this book. I have had people who have worked in the foundation sector for years read it as we had a lot of early readers to give us feedback. And they said, you know, you hit on so many topics that I knew were there, but I can't explain why I never said anything about them before. And you say something about all of them. And I was like, I know, isn't that crazy how that happens? But you live in a mindset where this is all legitimate. And for that reason, I have a lot of empathy for donors and I have a lot of empathy for my friends and peers who continue to practice this stuff in such, in my mind, irresponsible ways, honestly. But I don't. It's a system. We're playing a role in it. And it's the way power distributes. And so I really believe that if people just give themselves a chance, take down their guard, pull down their defenses, read the book, go through the journey with me in the book and what I experienced. And it won't be their experience, but it'll be they'll have theirs. That on the other side of that will be an opening to things like trust based philanthropy and the new era of philanthropy that Dimple Apachandani just posted in Voule's latest book on reimagining philanthropy and so on. It's all there, but it's really hard to embrace it if your control is what's holding, holding you more than anything else. So this isn't a book. At times people are going to be like, hey man, easy, easy. Because I write that way, I get very worked up. There are times where I might be a little tongue lashy, but for the most part I think it is an invitation and it is an encouragement to just reflect and ask yourself, is this the way you want it to go? And I think I'm hoping that many people have it. And if you along the way, because we're distributing a lot of these copies, if you get one or two copies of the book beyond the one you've read, please give that book to the richest person in your life or the person you know advising the richest person in their life. Because we want everyone to get this book. We want people to read this book. I don't care. We're not making any money on this book. We're a foundation that's trying to get rid of all its money, but all the assets, all the proceeds will go to the foundation and we will move them right back out again. But mostly we just want people to read, reflect and embrace another way of giving. And not my way, ways that I've been as I already said, there are so many people have shown you the way. I'm just trying to help people see it. That's all I'm trying to do.
- [55:20]
B
Well, that's it for this episode of the PM podcast. You can learn more about the Stupsky Foundation, Glenn's new book and the Breakfast Fake Rules podcast@stupsky.org Our thanks to our sponsor, Evertrue, the leader in donor engagement and fundraising intelligence, helping nonprofits find, engage and inspire their supporters. Our producer is Jack Frost, and our theme music is Moving Out, Moving in by Jay Taylor, provided courtesy of Epidemic Sound. If you enjoy this conversation, be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And don't forget to check out our sister shows, Front Lines of Social Good and How to Raise, all part of the Philanthropy Mastermind series. Until next time. I'm Jay Frost.
- [56:05]
C
Thanks for joining me.