We Updated the Demographic Questions on our Grant Applications
Accountability is one of Northwest Health Foundation’s Guiding Principles. We regularly assess ourselves to make sure our funding, investments, leadership and organizational practices reflect our commitment to equity. Collecting and reporting the demographics of our grantees is one of the primary ways we practice accountability.
In 2019, the NWHF Board adopted a BIPOC framework as a way to reinforce and center our commitment to racial equity. We also updated our Commitment to Equity and Guiding Principles, choosing to center race with the intersecting factors of geography and disability. It only made sense to update our demographics questions too.
Here’s what we changed:
Updated the categories/terms used for racial/ethnic communities (e.g. adding Middle-Eastern/Arab, specifying Asian communities, etc.)
Added questions explicitly asking whether organizations were founded by BIPOC, and if they’re led by and serve BIPOC communities.
Removed “All Demographic Communities” as an option. Funding a group that serves “all demographic communities” is simply not something we prioritize, and the category didn’t give us any useful information.
We now ask whether applicants are made up of and serve 51% or more of immigrants, refugees and people with disabilities as separate questions, rather than including these demographics in questions regarding ethnicity. Previously, we also had separate categories for people with mental disabilities and people with physical disabilities. Moving forward, we have chosen to combine them under “people with disabilities.”
Removed questions about whether organizations are culturally specific, cross-racial and/or disability-led. These questions were developed as a way to help us learn about the qualities and practices of organizations, but collecting and reporting on this data has been challenging since we first introduced it. These questions could still be relevant to future grant programs, in which case we may add them to the narrative section of a grant application.
Added an option to reference past demographics on new funding requests to alleviate the administrative burden on applicants.
The full list of updated questions can be found here. The updated questions appeared for the first time on our 2021 application for Advancing Disability Justice Grants.
We’ve accepted that we can’t always collect demographic data for all of our grantmaking. Sometimes crises and short time frames call for us to make grants more quickly than a thorough application process allows, and that’s okay.
We know these demographics questions aren’t perfect, but we need to start somewhere. These will likely change as we learn and grow.