Terry George, President & CEO
I am a privileged white male who has faced no racial or gender barriers to success in my life. I lead an amazing, well-endowed private foundation that also enjoys privileges not found in much of the rest of the nonprofit world, since we never have to raise funds or seek grants. Without humility of leadership and respectful, ongoing engagement with all sectors of our staff and community, it is easy for such foundations—and foundation leaders such as myself–to be blind to what’s going on in this world of highly unequal opportunity, racism, and gender bias. And if we’re blind to all that, we can’t be truly effective in our mission to close achievement and attainment gaps in public and higher education statewide, to restore the health of nearshore fisheries in the main Hawaiian islands, or to strengthen the resiliency of communities in Koolauloa and Koolaupoko.
In the second half of 2020, the Harold K.L. Castle Foundation commissioned the S corporation One Shared Future to review the Foundation’s internal policies and practices with regard to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Please find the complete, unedited report here or by clicking on the Who We Are tab on the landing page of our website and clicking on the Our Values dropdown menu. It is important for us to be transparent, even if it means revealing areas where we must improve, because through such transparency, trust can be built.
The scope of the report was forward-looking and inward-looking. All current and several former board members and staff were interviewed. We recognize that the long history of the Harold Castle family and the entities he led matters, as does the long history of the Foundation’s grantmaking to advance social justice and to support Native Hawaiian-led initiatives. But neither topic is emphasized in the report because we wanted to look at our internal organizational culture first, then look outside.
Frankly, One Shared Future’s findings and recommendations were painful but necessary for me to read. We discovered that within the foundation we have tensions of gender, organizational structure, and cultural identity. We learned that not all feel truly included, respected, and listened to, and that we need to do more within our organization and with the communities we serve to address power dynamics. I found that I have unconscious biases that I need to acknowledge and address.
Fortunately, the report’s authors provided 43 specific recommendations to build a more inclusive organization. Over the past year and a half, we’ve made good progress on many of those. For example, we’ve drafted a strong values statement, updated our staff handbook to reflect those values and stamp out bias, and changed how we recruit and onboard new staff. We have started annual board-level reviews of our progress. I’ve rewritten job descriptions, spent more time truly listening to staff, and started conversations on how to address unconscious bias. And we’ve launched two community-designed grant initiatives in Windward Oahu: the Ko’olau Housing Hui and the community-led Pilina Fund.
These moves don’t yet feel sufficient to me. There is more work to do. To guide me, I’ve started reaching out to Native Hawaiian and women leaders to ask what else I should be doing to ensure that we are inclusive and respectful in our work. I have committed to spend more time with people who might not normally walk through our office door or ask for a grant—teachers on the front line, low-income renters and homeowners, single mothers, youth that face barriers to college and career success, grassroots community leaders with deep knowledge of place and culture—so I can understand the world from their perspective.
The report’s authors concluded that “making the commitment to increase awareness of and practice diversity, inclusion, and equity—with an eye on gender, cultural identity, and belonging—can be viewed as the continued evolution and growth of the Foundation. It is about taking more intentional steps in the Foundation’s story and journey.”
Please take that step with us. Read the report. Call or email me at 808-263-7071 (my direct line) or tgeorge@castlefoundation.org to let me know how we can be more respectful, inclusive, diverse, and more attentive to equity. It’s a continuing journey, and we must keep working at this together and keep this a high priority for the Foundation. We can’t hope to be a positive force for good if we don’t first put in the work ourselves.
Mahalo piha for helping us to improve!
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