Use our spending for good

Why it’s important to us

Our commitment to do the most possible good with the resources left by Archie Bush goes beyond our grantmaking. We regularly rely on the services of a variety of businesses, from independent contractors to larger companies, to help us get things done. We believe all the money we spend should benefit the region as much as possible.

The indicator we have included to show this commitment focuses on who owns these businesses. Based on research and data, we have identified six groups of people that face unique barriers and/or have lower success rates in starting and growing businesses: people who identify as Black, Indigenous or people of color (BIPOC); women; LGBTQ+ people; refugees and immigrants; people with disabilities and veterans. We want to make sure we are finding and considering qualified businesses from these groups as we seek to reduce disparities in business growth and wealth creation.

In addition to considering business ownership, we track how much of our spending stays in the region. Wherever possible, we want Foundation spending to benefit local business and support local jobs.

How we’re doing

In 2023, we know that at least 48% of our non-grant payout went to businesses owned by people who self-identify as Black, Indigenous or people of color (BIPOC); women; LGBTQ+, refugees and immigrants; people with disabilities and veterans. We don’t have a specific goal but given the fact that these groups make up more than half of the people in our region, we would like to see this go higher. In addition, 84% of our spending stays in the region.

We do not have quotas for any of our spending and we always want to partner with businesses that are qualified, good to work with and cost-effective. We re-evaluate all our contracts at set intervals and put out an open call for all interested businesses, and we work to ensure that we have candidates that meet our objectives around diversity in business ownership and also local businesses in the pool for consideration. We have found that by being intentional in our sourcing, we can identify businesses that both meet our needs and help us to meet our aspirations.

What’s next

In 2023, 12 of the 57 businesses we worked with did not or declined to respond to our vendor demographic form. We want to be more intentional about requesting this information from every business and hope to reach a 100% response rate in 2024.

We are also going to spend more time on our current vendor data to prioritize our outreach efforts.

*Source for chart: Self-identified information from vendor demographics forms. Includes all non-grant and non-PRI expenditures included in our IRS payout calculation. Excludes payments to nonprofits, government agencies, and publicly traded companies, where “ownership” is difficult to define.