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Foundation Board Diversity Report 2009
This report presents data on the diversity of the boards of directors of the 46 largest independent foundations in the United States.
We found that a while quarter of all board directors in the sample were African American, Latino, or Asian American, 28% of the sample did not have people of color on their boards at all. Among people of color, Latinos are the most underrepresented on foundation boards, with only 8% of all board members of the sample foundations identifying as Latino.
We also found that diversity of the board of directors of the foundations has a generally positive correlation to their giving to organizations led by people of color. Comparing this sample with the sample of the top 25 foundations and their giving to organizations led by people of color in our previous reports, we found that the top ten foundations with the most diverse boards of directors (among those 25) gave 47.1% of all grants given by that sample to organizations led by POC. In contrast, foundations with no people of color on their boards gave 10.4% of their grants to such organizations, once the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, an outlier in the dataset, is removed.