EGA President and CEO
On Thursday, June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court of the United States under the leadership of Justice John Roberts delivered a stunning decision of the Court finding that race may no longer legally be considered as a plus factor in determinations of college admissions. This effectively delegitimizes the landscape of education without discrimination set by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, followed by the setting of litmus and threshold tests in Regents of University of California v. Bakke, in 1978 and Grutter v. Bollinger, and, Fisher v. University of Tex. at Austin.
This week's holding in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, rolls back twenty years of jurisprudence set in motion for the adaptation work of a degraded civil society that had only begun to mitigate the harm of racialized dispossession, loss of bodily autonomy and the economic violence of slavery, and post-Reconstruction regression in code, word, and deed. The Roberts Court has rejected the continuing necessity of affirmative action as the bare minimum response for redressing systemic inequities affecting marginalized communities’ past, present and future. Further, the opinion sets forth a critique of race-based supports to combat racialized harm as oppositional to the rule of law, and the tenets of equal protection. The Court’s majority has articulated its opinion that racial discrimination is no longer a cognizable harm and that enough has been done to address upwards of (404) four hundred and four years of colonialism, racialized capitalism and extraction.
EGA is a community bound together by our belief that the planet requires tending and mending. Our community’s understanding of the reality of racialized harm has been memorialized in our mandate, the Racial Equity Point of View. We each have our own experiences to combat any assertion that movements for peace, justice, and environment have arrived at any material certainty or safety.
In fact, our daily work supporting endangered places, threatened people and vulnerable species provides real time data about the precarity of this moment. EGA member efforts give us our raison d'etre and in so doing have identified opportunities to bolster the impact of Black, Indigenous, and all People of Color as paramount to our capacity to respond to a planet in crisis. From our affinity groups to our fellowships we have long been focused on supporting you to define adequate representation of excluded voices, values, and experience in elite institutions (including higher education) before this moment.
Together we act, daily, to change the trajectory of institutionalized power and habitually enable the talent, creativity, and drive of BIPOC leaders who contribute to our collective vision for an equitable, liveable planet. As stewards of a network of communities, we reject every attempt to exacerbate division, to abandon progress that reflects the vast mosaic of leaderful solutions embedded in the environmental sector’s support of movements. The branches of governance depend on the roots of community and the rootstock of our intentions.
As a community for environmental grantmakers, we remain committed to racial equity and reject measures that make a false equivalency of equality that results in making things less equal. We align with our members whose very missions act as a cornerstone of commitment to people and planet. EGA condemns the Supreme Court’s decisions to undermine reparative programs and restorative practices. This week's SCOTUS decisions run the gamut of LGBTQIA+ protections, to economic futures in education and access to quality educational environments.
This moment of curtailment was foreshadowed last year in the opinion of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. At that time, I reflected that we are alive in the stark reality that the social contract is being negotiated in ways that could compromise our future. Each of us is called upon to take stock of our opportunity to strategically align as a resource for racialized, marginalized and vulnerable communities for the next phase of repair.
To support you in navigating the direct and forthcoming impacts of this decision, EGA has compiled resources from the EGA membership.
Learn more about the legal implications of this decision on your organization and its impacts on higher education.
- Check out this resource guide from Hewlett Foundation preparing for this forewarned SCOTUS decision on affirmative action. The guide also includes narrative tools for responding to this decision.
- Lumina Foundation shares “Three things to remember about the Supreme Court’s unjust decision on college admissions.”
Look to existing local solutions and organizations working on innovative policies. The Joyce Foundation shares solutions from states and institutions in the Great Lakes region supporting college access, as well as national advocacy organizations working on innovative policies.
Reaffirm and refine your commitment to resourcing racial equity. MacArthur Foundation, San Francisco Foundation, and The Boston Foundation share statements reaffirming their commitments to advance racial justice in their grantmaking and partnerships.
Connect to share strategies and actions. Multiple EGA members joined philanthropic leaders in a joint statement in response to the SCOTUS decision.
EGA remains your unwavering partner and resource for convening funders to advance racial equity for people and planet. We invite funders to join us at our next in-person convening where we will do more to deepen our practice of impactful philanthropy which includes an examination of the value of race equity for solutions in the environment. Alongside you, we will think through resourcing for repair, truth and reconciliation, and positioning human rights as an essential component of a healthy planet.
In solidarity and care,
Tamara Toles O’Laughlin
CEO & President
Environmental Grantmakers Association