Fast Forward

"We're going to stay here. But we want to get bigger impact." On this episode of Fast Forward, Tawanna Black talks about what it takes to build a partnership with the public sector like she has done between the Northside Funders Group and the City of Minneapolis. She discusses how to get at changing the way philanthropy works inside public sector institutions beyond policy change but also helping reshape their grantmaking. She shares the four levers of the work of the Northside Funders Group, dives into the very real challenges of sustainability and speaks openly about how to keep fear of failing from preventing risk taking. Tawanna is the executive director for the Northside Funders Group, a collaborative of 19 corporate, community and private foundations and public sector investors committed to aligning investments to catalyze comprehensive, sustainable change in North Minneapolis.

"Trying to put band aids on things will never work," says John Schwartz, director and founder of the Voqal Companies. Here Schwartz talks about the work of Voqal to address the "Homework Gap." He also addresses civic engagement and why political change is vital in making sure everyone has access to good schooling. A public media advocate for 40 years, Schwartz has founded community radio and television stations and brought wireless broadband services to cities throughout the U.S. In 1983, he started what is now called Voqal—five nonprofit organizations that have licenses in the Educational Broadband Service (EBS) band. Using the organizations' spectrum, commercial operator Clearwire (a Sprint subsidiary) delivers 4G wireless broadband to most major U.S. cities. In exchange for use of the spectrum, Clearwire provides Voqal with royalties, which they allocate to their operations and grantmaking efforts. 

"There are aggressive attacks on voting rights that we did not see in the 1990s," says Judith Browne Dianis, executive director of Advancement Project. Dianis has an extensive background in civil rights litigation and advocacy in the areas of voting, education, housing and employment. She has protected the rights of people of color in the midst of some of the greatest civil rights crises of our modern times, including in Florida after the 2000 election and in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. In this episode, she talks about voting rights today and why she believes the trend of making it harder to vote is something that will continue. She discusses her work on the ground in Florida during the 2000 election, what that tells us about today and how she started a voting protection program as a result. She also covers communities' relationships to voter rights laws and shares opinions on potential structural change to voting in the U.S.

Ruy Teixeira is a senior fellow at both The Century Foundation and American Progress. He is also co-director of States of Change: Demographics and Democracy project, a collaboration that brings together American Progress, the American Enterprise Institute and demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution. He is the author or co-author of seven books, including America's New Swing Region: Changing Politics and Demographics in the Mountain West; Red, Blue and Purple America: The Future of Election Demographics; The Emerging Democratic Majority; America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters; and The Disappearing American Voter, as well as hundreds of articles, both scholarly and popular.

"Impact investing is a practice and it's something you get better at or you get more comfortable with," says Elizabeth McGeveran who joined The McKnight Foundation in 2014 as director of impact investing. She is responsible for the foundation's $200 million investment in businesses and funds that are building the low-carbon economy, improving the water quality of the Mississippi River and contributing to a thriving, sustainable Minnesota. This portfolio represents 10 percent of the foundation's $2 billion endowment. McGeveran also provides environmental, social and governance expertise and evaluation across the entire endowment. On this episode, McGeveran talks about how the foundation looked at ways to leverage its assets and came to view its endowment's market earnings as an underused resource. She talks about the process the board went through to assess potential shifts in alignment, describes the Midwest Climate and Energy Program and the Carbon Efficiency Fund.