• Search

Performance Scorecard

Use our spending for good

Percent of non-grant payout to businesses owned by people in a priority demographic group *

  • Owned by 1 or more people in priority group 49%
  • Owned by people not in priority group 24%
  • Chose not to respond 27%
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 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 the ownership of the businesses who are our vendors and partners. 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 vendors 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 goes to vendors located in our region. Wherever possible, we want Foundation spending to benefit local business and support local jobs.

How we’re doing

Currently 49% of our non-grant payout went to businesses owned by people who self-identify as Black, Indigenous or people of color (BIPOC); women; LGBTQ+ people; refugees and immigrants; people with disabilities and veterans. We don’t have a specific vendor goal, but given the fact that these groups make up more than half of the people in our region, we would be glad to see this go higher. In addition, 72% of our spending stays in the region.

We do not have quotas for any of our spending and we always want to partner with vendors 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 vendors, and we work to ensure that we have vendor 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 vendors that both meet our needs and help us to meet our aspirations.

What’s next

We want to improve the response rate for completing our vendor demographic form and are exploring different ways of doing that to get the most complete information possible.

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.