Arrows From the Heart: Dr. Carmen Rojas on the Real Work of Philanthropy
The work is recommitment. Every single day.
This is the first installment of Builders of Justice, a profile series celebrating nonprofit and philanthropic leaders who are challenging the status quo and reimagining what’s possible for our communities.
When Dr. Carmen Rojas talks about her parents, two immigrants who “shot an arrow from their heart into an unknown possible world,” she places her leadership within a larger fight for belonging and the promises we make to each other across generations.
Her mother, the second oldest of 17 children, was the first to leave Nicaragua for the United States. Her father, the youngest of 10 from Venezuela, did the same. They arrived in the Bay Area during the post-Civil Rights era, at the height of the labor movement during a time when the country was grappling with questions about gender, economic opportunity, and our responsibilities to one another.
“Because of my parents and the way that they came here and the things that they came here for, I’ve always believed that I am the product of the work of generations of people in this country who worked to deliver on the dreams and aspirations of freedom fighters, of community organizers, of moms and dads who wanted more for their kids,” Dr. Rojas tells me.
In our conversation, she often returns to one word: recommitment. Each day, she says, we must “recommit to the promises we’ve made to each other” about who we can become at our best when we love each other the most. It’s a practice that feels both urgent and radical in a sector built on the very inequality it purports to address.
Love and honesty in the same breath. This is the work.
The Door Closing
By the time Dr. Rojas finished graduate school in 2008, she saw the promise her parents had chased begin to fade sharply. This was the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the moment when the gap between the 1% and everyone else became impossible to ignore. The opportunities that had shaped her life—those provided by freedom fighters, labor organizers, and parents who believed in more—were slipping away.
“Those promises that we had made to each other were just disappearing,” she reflects. “And social movements were critical to contesting for them to stay in place or to actually deliver more.”
Dr. Rojas is an academic by training, and all her research focuses on Latin America—specifically, the relationship between social movements and government, and the dangerous openings that economic suffering creates for fascism. Her father is from Venezuela. Her mother is from Nicaragua. She knows intimately what happens when people’s desire for a better life clashes with a lack of opportunity and the cynical exploitation of that desperation.
When she became president and CEO of the Marguerite Casey Foundation (MCF) in 2020, she brought this knowledge as a blueprint.
“We as an institution and I as a leader have been tracking since before 2016 the ways in which the surveillance state post-9/11, the explosion of the prison industrial complex, a desire to both police people and police opportunity in this country, has really led me in this moment to commit to making the boldest moves as possible.”
As a Latina leader in a sector still dominated by whiteness, Dr. Rojas refuses to look away from what she sees consolidating: authoritarianism, economic repression, and the normalization of cruelty. This understanding shapes the very culture she has built at MCF, one committed, in her words, to being “simple, direct, and truthful.”
In a sector saturated with obfuscation, these three words feel revolutionary.
What Love Really Looks Like
When I ask her what she loves most about leading the foundation, Dr. Rojas doesn’t mention the usual platitudes about “impact” or “transformation.” She shows in her work that she’s designing new power structures and building alternatives to extractive philanthropy.
First, there’s the staff. “Our team is really clear about what our job is,” she says. “It’s our job to move the most money possible to organizations that best align with our mission, vision, and values.”
This might seem transactional at first, but it becomes clearer when you understand what she means by it. The foundation has a strong culture of giving each other feedback—both critical and positive—in a way that doesn’t damage relationships. They view feedback as an exercise, something that makes them stronger. They’re committed not to wasting people’s time. They’re genuinely dedicated to having each other’s backs.
“We want to model with each other at Marguerite Casey the world that we want for everyone outside of Marguerite Casey,” Dr. Rojas explains.
This is love in action, demonstrating the daily practices of how a justice-centered institution should function.
Then, there are the grant recipients. In a moment when it’s easy to drown under what Dr. Rojas calls “an anvil of despair,” when everything is designed to feel bleak and impossible, organizations are winning. Firelands Workers United in Washington state kept rent affordable this year. The Kansas City Tenants Union won one of the largest tenant strikes in the city’s history. The Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition played a key role in a statewide coalition that kept public education available to undocumented students.
“I’m so proud of our grant recipients,” Dr. Rojas says, and I could hear it in her voice. “At our very best, we’re creating a more even terrain in this fight for the future that we know is possible.”
The third, and arguably the most critical, thing she loves is defining the proper role of philanthropy.
“I don’t delude myself and think that philanthropy is going to be able to step in and solve huge problems,” she says plainly. “At our best, we are experimentation money for people and organizations to try new things, to start to plant seeds for a possible future that we want.”
At the same time, she recognizes that organizations will continue their work regardless of philanthropic support. Everywhere, people organize and fight for what they deserve, regardless of their access to philanthropic dollars. Still, Dr. Rojas takes seriously the responsibility of those dollars when they do flow. “We are lucky here that we get to do our small part in that.”
You’ll never hear anyone at MCF say “we won this thing,” Dr. Rojas explains. “We just move money. We’re a financial institution at our best, and at our best as a financial institution, we create the least amount of friction between people who are painting, building, creating, planting seeds for the world that we want and the world we are in today.”
I reflect on how rare this clarity is. How often foundation leaders center narratives on themselves, as if movements depend on their strategic vision. Dr. Rojas rejects that illusion. She understands what the work truly involves.
The Contradictions We Can’t Afford
Philanthropy exists because of wealth inequality, yet it funds movements that fight against that same inequality. This contradiction sits at the heart of the work, and Dr. Rojas doesn’t pretend otherwise.
“Everybody in philanthropy needs to interrogate our work and our institutions and be honest about the ways that we have, in the genesis of our [foundation’s] existence, created harm, how we perpetuate harm,” she tells me.
But she distinguishes between recognizing contradiction and accepting contradictory behavior. This distinction is important.
For MCF, one of the biggest risks is what scholar Megan Ming Francis—an MCF board member—refers to as “movement capture”: the way foundations, based on what they believe communities need, disrupt social movements that are organizing around what people truly want and care about.
To resist this, the foundation operates differently. MCF funds organizations at 25% of their budget for five years, with 70% of the funding front-loaded in the first year. Program staff prioritize helping grant recipients raise more money over demanding endless reports. “If we are trying things, we have to be more curious and less certain as an institution,” Dr. Rojas explains.
This philosophy comes from lived experience. Before leading MCF, Dr. Rojas co-founded The Workers Lab and had to fundraise. Her biggest frustration was being told her work was brilliant and vital, only to receive $5,000—or nothing at all.
“Who am I to show up in Kansas City and be like, ‘Well, this is what you should aspire to in order to make sure people get housing in ways that are dignified and affordable?’” she asks. “I don’t know.”
She adds, “And so I delight in the learning, and I am coming to realize that some people have feelings about having a job where it is your main objective to move resources and not be the smartest person in the room.”
This is so honest. The sector is full of individuals who want to be seen as visionaries, who seek recognition, and who crave being the center of attention. Dr. Rojas is highlighting something we don’t discuss enough as a sector: ego is often the enemy of better grantmaking.
The Question of Complicity
If Dr. Rojas could give every CEO in the sector one lesson, it would be to align your endowment with your mission.
Foundations are required by law to give away 5% of their resources. The other 95% oftentimes sits in endowments that could be invested anywhere, including in direct opposition to stated values. An anti-gun violence foundation could have its endowment in gun manufacturing. A racial justice foundation could be funding private prisons through its investment portfolio.
In her first two years at MCF, Dr. Rojas made the foundation 100% mission-aligned.
“I don’t think that people who are afraid for our democracy but still invested in companies like Tesla, still invested in companies like Meta, still invested in companies like Palantir or the funds that hold the investment capital for those companies—I just don’t think you are that serious,” she says. “I don’t think your concern is that serious because what you are saying is that you are alright funding marginal good and subsidizing extreme harm.”
Let that sink in. Funding marginal good while subsidizing extreme harm.
This is a contradiction that can’t be reconciled with a land acknowledgment or a DEI statement. It’s about where the money truly sits, grows, and what it actually funds.
The foundation spent eighteen months actively divesting from and investing in funds, partners, entrepreneurs, and approaches that align with the world it wants to create. The best part? They didn’t sacrifice outcomes. Every dollar invested in conflict with the foundation’s values was undermining trust and exposing the institution to reputational, legal, and systemic risk. Financial performance couldn’t be the only metric.
“We have billions and billions of dollars in our institutions that are working at cross and contradictory purposes to our missions, to our values, to our vision of the world that we want,” Dr. Rojas says. “That doesn’t have to be this way.”
Having observed foundations commit while protecting their wealth, I understand this burden. Dr. Rojas is correct. If you’re unwilling to divest from the companies and systems causing the harm you claim to want to end, then what are you truly doing? Who are you genuinely serving?
Naming What We’re Up Against
When Dr. Rojas thinks about what an accountable, liberated philanthropic sector looks like, she starts by naming what we’re facing.
“We’re up against a well-funded strategic effort to consolidate and normalize white supremacy and economic repression and exploitation in this country,” she tells me. “And we have to keep saying that over and over and over again. There’s nothing about this that is normal.”
She cites recent legislation as the clearest example of the largest transfer of wealth from the poorest to the wealthiest people in the country.
“The biggest picture right now for me is this massive transfer of our money, of the people’s money, from the poorest people—people who work sixty hours a week, people who are making trade-offs between filling their cars with gas and seeing a doctor, people who are stretching out coupons to go to the supermarket. We are transferring money from those people to people who fly on private jets and own yachts.”
This is also a part of the fight. Not just the internal power dynamics between foundations and nonprofits—though those matter—but the systematic extraction of resources from those with the least to those with the most.
“There are like fifty people who are making millions of dollars every day because people are kept poor, people are kept unhoused, people are kept in jails and prisons,” Dr. Rojas says. “I’m more focused on shifting that power and being in alignment with our grant recipients around that than on anything else.”
More than 700 foundation leaders have preemptively coordinated to call out state overreach and unprecedented political assault. This solidarity makes Dr. Rojas feel safer, prouder. But she’s clear that solidarity requires more than statements. It requires clarity about who benefits from this moment and what we’re willing to risk to stop them.
The Editors and the Freedom Fighters
Dr. Rojas keeps a photograph of Toni Morrison on the wall beside her desk. Not Morrison the novelist, but Morrison the editor.
“She was clear as an editor about her job,” Dr. Rojas explains, “It’s about how you support people who have great ideas to make those ideas stories, how you take those visions of a possible world, how you take experience and history, and make sure that millions and millions of people have an opportunity to understand and metabolize those stories in service of a better future.”
Morrison edited Angela Davis’s autobiography. She helped establish a canon of Black power writing that changed how a generation saw themselves. She collaborated with visionaries to help bring their visions to life.
Dr. Rojas sees herself in this lineage. “We’re not writing books, we’re not organizing people, we’re not in movement. I don’t have confusion around that, but we can do our part to be of service and to help people realize the world that we all want to be possible.”
The story Dr. Rojas returns to most often is about Ramsey Kassem, a movement lawyer and MCF Freedom Scholar who became legal counsel for Mahmoud Khalil when federal agents in New York City kidnapped him.
While other institutions hesitated about how to respond and the risks, MCF continued to support Kassem’s work, keeping those targeted by the regime free and continuing the fight.
“We could all be supporting that,” Dr. Rojas says. “And right now, I feel like it’s critical that we make it our jobs to do that, to fund the endeavor and practice the promise of a free nation. That has to be front of mind.”
This relates to Dr. Rojas’s perspective on Angela Davis and her assertion that freedom is a constant struggle.
“There’s this orientation in our sector that wins are permanent and that our wins are not contestable, that once we win something, it becomes untakeable,” Dr. Rojas reflects. “And what we’ve learned in the last nine months is that’s just not true.”
She grew up thinking access to healthcare was permanent. Voting rights were permanent. The wins of the civil rights movement were permanent.
“We thought we’ve got this. And we don’t got it. We have to constantly fight to defend the wins.”
This requires a shift in focus. “Our orientation should be one of assessing the places where we have victories, fighting to protect and expand those victories so that they benefit absolutely everybody in this country.”
We’re not starting from scratch. We’re defending and building upon the achievements of past generations. As a sector, we must be willing to recommit to promises made, doors opened, and arrows shot from hearts into unknown futures.
Recommitment as Praxis
Early in our conversation, Dr. Rojas asked me why I do this work, why I write about philanthropy and the nonprofit industrial complex, why I create space for these conversations, why I push for honesty in a sector that often feels performative.
It felt like an invitation to mutual recommitment.
“I feel like every day we have to recommit,” she told me. “We at Marguerite Casey are really, as an organization, and I as a leader at Marguerite Casey, are in the work of recommitting to the promises that we’ve made to each other over a long time about who we can be at our best when we love each other the most.”
This is the work.
The work moves money with minimal friction to those planting seeds. It is simple, direct, and honest about what we’re facing and what we’re willing to risk. The work aligns every dollar, not just the 5% given away, but the 95% being invested, with the world we claim to want. It secures victories, defends organizers, funds bold leaders, and calls out white supremacy without hesitation.
The work is recommitment. Every single day.
When I think about what makes Dr. Carmen Rojas’s leadership so essential right now, it’s her refusal to put herself at the center of narratives of liberation she knows she doesn’t own.
She understands that her parents shot arrows from their hearts into an unknown world, and that she is the result of generations of people fighting for freedom. She recognizes that freedom is a constant struggle, that promises remain fragile, and that every victory must be defended.
She also recognizes that philanthropy’s role, although small, is necessary by moving more resources and getting out of the way.
And every day, she recommits by being honest about what the moment demands and is clear about what she’s willing to do about it.
Dr. Carmen Rojas is President and CEO of the Marguerite Casey Foundation, which she has led since 2020. An academic by training with a focus on the intersection of social movements and government in Latin America, she has spent her career moving resources to leaders and organizations at the forefront of racial, economic, and environmental justice. She is the daughter of Nicaraguan and Venezuelan immigrants and lives with the daily practice of recommitting to the promises we’ve made to each other about who we can be at our best.
Learn more about the Marguerite Casey Foundation at caseygrants.org.
I have so much respect for Dr. Rojas and MCF. Thank you for this window into her philosophy and praxis. It only deepens my admiration. This is the kind of leadership we need most right now!
Dr. Rojas’s approach is inspiring and her clarity, honesty, and love for the work shine through. Their viewpoint especially resonated with me as someone who works in philanthropy and often feels frustrated by the “standard” practices in our sector. Greatly appreciate her calling out the importance of aligning endowment investments with values. That kind of accountability is rare and VERY necessary.