Humboldt Area Foundation

Winner of the 2009 Effies Social Justice Philanthropy Award for effectively using the resources of philanthropy to make society's systems and markets work more fairly and effectively for all.

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Humboldt Area Foundation

Contact: Peter Pennekamp, Executive Director

peterp@hafoundation.org

Although it has the largest population of American Indians indigenous to California , the Redwood Coast shares the same history of Euro-American barbarism as the rest of the United States . Massacre, rape, expropriation and forced assimilation mark the region’s history within relatively recent memory and the lives of elder grandparents. As late as the early 1990s Native people in the region were rigidly marginalized and subject to barely concealed racism. In the same spirit, the Humboldt Area Foundation (HAF), founded in 1972, funded no grant requests from Native Californians in its first twenty years, believing the common myth that American Indians are undeserving because they receive lavish support from the US Government.

Beginning fifteen years ago, HAF abandoned this myth and began working to reverse the local marginalization of American Indians by adding Native cultural leaders and activists to its board, hiring Native staff, and prioritizing Native communities and projects in its grant-making. HAF has also used all of the leverage at its disposal to create equity and bring Native representation to the table in a range of regional policy, planning, resource distribution, and leadership support contexts. According to researchers at Chapin Hall at University of Chicago who have been studying the community change efforts of place-based foundations across the country and who conducted a case study of HAF’s work in economic development and Native American engagement, “the foundation has contributed significantly to making possible a level of Native participation in local civic and cultural life that would have been hard to imagine fifteen years ago.” Chapin Hall describes HAF’s general approach as “[focusing] strategically on those groups and actors that, because of their previous disengagement, the foundation deemed crucial to effecting the most urgently needed changes…”

The process of establishing the principle of equity began internally and has found broad expression externally though effective partnerships. HAF provided what Chapin Hall describes as “early and pivotal support” for the development of an integrated health facility for the region’s tribes; a $19 million project that has doubled the number of American Indians served and brought the community considerable public notice and pride. HAF also developed and funded a “Living Biographies” series on local public television that featured the life histories of Native residents in a way that helped change mainstream perceptions. This in turn helped motivate a public apology from the City of Eureka and the return of an island inhabited by the Wiyot people until it was taken from them in a sweeping tribal massacre in 1864. Over the past fifteen years, HAF has partnered with the Irvine , Ford and Hewlett foundations to give over $1 million in grants to save sacred sites, promote Native languages, and support other American Indian priorities. All decisions are made by Native people at both the staff and advisory committee levels. Currently HAF is working to make sure that Tribes own the broadband infrastructure that crosses their lands.

At the core of HAF ’s internal principles of equity is the policy, never violated, that HAF will never over-turn a decision made by Native people engaged in decisions about the use of foundation resources, unless it is out right illegal.