Overview
While some organizations take time to grow into their equity commitments, the Greater Washington Community Foundation had celebrated civil rights leaders among its founders in 1973. Terri Lee Freeman was the Community Foundation’s longest-serving and first Black female President and CEO, from 1996 to 2014, and helped advance equity with a lecture series focused on racial equity.
More recently, in 2021, the Foundation developed a new ten-year strategic framework that outlines solutions to problems of segregation, race, and class in the Washington, D.C. area, targeting the closure of the racial wealth gap. The strategic framework led to programs such as the Health Equity Fund, designed to improve the health outcomes and health equity of D.C. residents; the Partnership to End Homelessness, which confronts the causes of homelessness in the region; and Together, We Prosper, which funds strategies like children’s trust accounts, guaranteed income pilots, and community wealth building.