Asian-American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) and Native American nonprofits and communities are underfunded despite the challenges they face and nonprofit leaders report less positive experiences with funders, a pair of reports from the Center for Effective Philanthropy finds.

Funded by the Long Family Foundation and Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, the reports, OVERLOOKED (Part 1): Foundation Support for Asian American and Pacific Islander Leaders and Communities (23 pages, PDF) and OVERLOOKED (Part Two): Foundation Support for Native American Leaders and Communities (23 pages, PDF), found that, in grantee perception reports conducted over the past decade, AAPI and Native American nonprofit leaders rated their foundation funders lower than those of other races/ethnicities on the strength of the funder-grantee relationship, funders’ understanding of their organizations and the contexts in which they operate, and/or funders’ impact on their fields. The nonprofit leaders interviewed for the studies recounted interactions characterized by a lack of understanding of their communities and the challenges they faced and described misconceptions and harmful stereotypes about their communities that made it more difficult for them to obtain funding.

“The AAPI community is incredibly diverse, so we have quite a few different organizations that represent our various ethnic communities and populations,” said one nonprofit leader in OVERLOOKED (Part 1). “Funders get frustrated that there are so many AAPI nonprofits. A lot of times it’s easier for foundations to give one large grant to an organization as opposed to taking the time and effort to reach more organizations.”

“We submitted a proposal to a local foundation, and we never heard anything back from them,” said a Native American nonprofit leader in OVERLOOKED (Part 2). “Word filtered back to me that they did not understand the proposal at all. It wasn’t parallel to what their approach would be, so they really didn’t give us a read or a listen. They didn’t really get what we were doing or why we were doing it that way. We couldn’t even get a meeting with them to talk about it.” Both AAPI and Native American nonprofit leaders urged grantmakers to better understand the broad diversity present in their communities.

The reports also found that despite the significant challenges facing AAPI and Native American communities, most foundations continue to overlook nonprofits that serve them. Over the past two years, Pacific Islanders have suffered one of the highest death tolls in the United States, Asian American-owned small businesses have lost business as a result of discrimination, and crimes targeting people of AAPI descent have risen significantly. Yet only 10 percent of foundation leaders said they provided a large or moderate percentage of their grant dollars to organizations serving Asian-American communities, and just 4 percent provided a large or moderate percentage of their grant dollars in support of Pacific Islander communities. In 2020, 71 percent of AAPI nonprofits reported receiving no new foundation funding.

Similarly, Native American communities, despite having been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic — suffering the highest rates of hospitalization and deaths from COVID-19 and a devastating blow to their economies — have largely been overlooked by funders. Only 11 percent of foundation leaders reported providing a large or moderate percentage of their grant dollars to Native American communities, and 67 percent of nonprofit leaders reported receiving no new foundation funding in 2020.

To address the gaps in funders’ understanding of and the shortage of funding for their communities, both AAPI and Native American nonprofit leaders urged grantmakers to do their homework, recognize the diversity of the communities and the unique inequities various groups face, conduct site visits, hire more AAPI and Native American staff, recruit AAPI and Native American board members, provide flexible multiyear support, fund more organizations led by and serving those communities, and be more communicative.

“There’s a big difference between listening to understand or listening to reply,” one Native American nonprofit leader said in the report. “I think a lot of times in America, people listen to reply. They listen to win. They listen to be right. They don’t listen with an open heart about what people are saying. That’s a big problem. Listening is a process....It’s taking in what people say and reflecting on it and accepting it as their truth.”

(Photo credit: GettyImages/William87)