Overview
Founded in 1991, the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts serves Franklin, Hampshire, and Hampden Counties, which sit east of Berkshire County in the western part of the state. In recent years, the Foundation has distributed approximately $16M in grants and $1.6M in scholarships annually. The Foundation has been on a concerted journey to advance equity in its work since 2019, when it engaged in a strategic planning process that resulted in a strategic vision with equity and opportunity at its center. This led to the hiring of Briana Wales-Thaxton as the Foundation’s Vice President for People and Culture. Wales-Thaxton brought a background in educational equity and also calls the region home. “I’ve been working towards social justice in Western Massachusetts my whole life,” she said, “and I’ve experienced it as a community with values rooted in equity and justice.”
The Foundation’s equity journey has been a holistic one, involving both internal shifts to hiring and culture, and external shifts to community-facing programs. Internally, the Foundation has overhauled its hiring practices and policies to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion; and has implemented several training sessions designed to establish an equity-centered organizational culture. Externally, the Foundation has executed on its new strategic vision by creating new grant programs for social justice and racial equity, and reshaping its grant and scholarship processes to include broader community input.