Editor's note: This article originally appeared in Inside Philanthropy.
Although funding for communities of color gets a lot of lip service, it has never been a high priority for philanthropy. And even those engaged in this work don’t always allow their grantees to operate unfettered, instead allocating money as restricted project support. Then there’s the Moriah Fund, which was long guided by its first president, Mary Ann Stein.
In her early 20s and fresh out of Wellesley College, Stein headed south and joined Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), working in Calhoun County, South Carolina—bearing the name of the notorious 19th-century politician and slavery defender John C. Calhoun.
In the belly of Jim Crow, Stein recalls being pulled over and arrested outside of the small town of St. Matthews only to secure bail money from the so-called “Jew store” and get a lifeline from a clerk of court who was an “undercover believer” of the cause. This is one of many rich stories that Stein, now in her late 70s, told in our conversation.
A reliable progressive funder
Last year, she handed over the reins of the Moriah Fund, a family foundation, to her son Gideon. Launched in 1985, Moriah was established by brothers Robert and Clarence Efroymson, who tapped Stein, Robert’s daughter, as the philanthropy’s first president.
Still going strong, the relatively low-profile Moriah Fund is a staunch progressive funder, giving away in the neighborhood of $10 million annually in recent years and supporting educational equity, human rights and reproductive rights, as well as work in Israel. Racial equity has always been a centerpiece of its multi-pronged efforts.
Case in point, the foundation recently seeded the new Black Voices for Black Justice Fund to support rising movement leaders. The fund’s co-chairs include prominent Black leaders from a range of sectors, including actress Kerry Washington, Robin Hood Foundation CEO Wes Moore, and the national organizing director of the ACLU, Tenicka Boyd.
“We put a lot into it (the fund), and got a lot out of it. I enjoyed meeting some of the grantees, too, and learning about their work,” Mary Ann Stein explained.
With an initial cohort class chosen, the fund says it aims to support “Black-led efforts to build meaningful economic and political power for their communities in the context of police brutality and the disproportionate impact of the pandemic along racial lines—including disparities in access to healthcare, jobs, education, justice and the right to vote.”
The Moriah Fund’s work with Black Voices for Black Justice Fund is but one example of the kind of bottom-up power building that the foundation prefers to fund. “My mom has had a philosophy of giving… you should trust the activist or social entrepreneur to not only solve the problem, but also identify the problem in the first place,” Gideon Stein told me.
But how did a wealthy Indiana family come to this forward-thinking philanthropic approach?
A Midwestern beginning
Born Mary Ann Efroymson, Stein’s great-grandparents Jacob and Minnie Efroymson arrived in the United States as Jewish immigrants from Europe and settled in Indiana. They were among the first Jews to arrive in Indianapolis in the 1870s and build up the community. Stein herself grew up near Butler University where Robert, a Harvard-educated lawyer, steered hosiery business Real Silk Company and investment company Real Silk, Inc.
As Stein tells it, her prominent family was always socially conscious and civic-minded, rallying Jewish, African American and Catholic civic leaders in efforts to rid Indianapolis of the Klan in the 1920s, and helping bring over Jews trying to get out of Germany.
“My father taught me the basic principles of civic and human rights... He made it very clear to me, and I’ve tried to make it clear to others, that we have an obligation to serve others. We have a responsibility to give our gifts, including our wealth and our access to benefit others. And that has been the rule of my life,” Stein said.
Growing up, Stein also visited a mental hospital with her mother and later became involved with the occupational therapy department, where she learned that some women were not discharged until they agreed to be sterilized.
MLK, Rustin, and civil rights work
Once set on graduate school after Wellesley, Stein is thankful she was rejected from all the schools to which she applied. A college friend connected her to SCLC, so she went down to Atlanta for orientation at the start of the summer, hearing both Martin Luther King Jr. and his top adviser Bayard Rustin.
“He (Rustin) is an amazing inspiration and human being. But he was in the background behind King largely because he was gay, in addition to being a conscientious objector. He was as pure an idealist as can be, and brilliant and eloquent,” Stein told me.
Stein soon moved on to Calhoun County, where she lived in a dilapidated trailer for most of her time. In South Carolina, she got to know leaders not always on page one of civil rights stories, including Hope Williams, the grandson of slaves, and whose father was swept into a chain gang for defending himself against assault by a white man.
With only a sixth-grade education, Williams was one of the first Black Americans who registered to vote in the region and rallied others to do the same. He went on to form the Calhoun County Branch of the NAACP, serving as its president for more than a decade. Williams linked up with State Senator I. DeQuincey Newman, South Carolina’s first Black senator since Reconstruction, focusing on improving voter registration and economic development in African American communities.
“When I went to visit, he’d be waiting in his car reading the dictionary. He was a doer and incredible to work with,” Stein says of Williams.
As Stein became more involved in voter registration efforts, she also made Black churches in Calhoun County a priority, marking all of them on a map. Every Sunday, she drove to as many churches as she could, sometimes speaking at as many as five churches in a morning. And drawing upon her own religious upbringing, she would quote a piece of scripture, adding in a voter registration message.
As she built trust and social capital in the community, students would tell her about the state of their schools —which were anything but “separate but equal.”
“The only textbooks they had were ones that had been discarded by white schools. And one school had a single microscope for the entire student body,” she explains.
Meanwhile, on the voter registration front, she recalls seeing the Black names on the rolls branded with a “C” indicating “colored,” barring their ability to register. But when Stein saw the determination of these communities, and people waiting on long lines, it was clear to her that seeking justice was to be her life’s work.
On to the nation’s capital
Poverty/Rights Action Center (P/RAC) opened its offices in Washington, D.C., in the Spring of 1966 as an organizing base for grassroots activists across the country—mostly poor, black women determined to ensure that they had a voice in LBJ’s War on Poverty. The organization was founded by former CORE leader George T. Wiley.
Stein, having felt that she did all she could in South Carolina, decided to move to a city and set her sights on Washington, D.C. She joined P/RAC and worked there for about a year, helping welfare recipients. In this space, she met women who shared intimate stories about their lives. Stein became so close to one of them that she was invited to give the eulogy at the woman’s funeral.
After getting her law degree from George Washington University, Stein doubled down on her interest fighting for working-class women. She recalls representing a woman who needed an abortion but who was still unable to get one in the early days after Roe v. Wade in the early 1970s.
“In D.C., a woman could not get an abortion without her husband’s consent. Often, the husband wasn’t even the father, but it didn’t make a difference to the court,” Stein tells me. On the ground, Stein became well-versed on the many problems in the reproductive health system, including its impact on foster care girls, who not only needed a husband’s consent for an abortion, but also their parents’.
She worked with the Department of Human Services of D.C. to reorganize protective services so that it would work better for kids and their families. “It showed me that we really had a lot backward. Supposedly, our children were the most important people, but our society didn’t give them the best,” Stein tells me.
The transition to philanthropy
After a time, Stein describes hitting a brick wall. Her older brother passed away. And while she felt that she had accomplished a lot, she was looking for her next chapter. In the mid-1980s, her father decided to create a family foundation, and Stein put her hat in the ring.
“If I could run it, I figured I could get a lot of things done that I would like to see, and if I don’t, God knows what they’ll do,” Stein said with a laugh.
Much to her amazement, her father agreed, and so began her long-running work leading the Moriah Fund, digging into key issues that drove her during the 1960s and 1970s—now, with major philanthropic cash she could leverage.
From the start, a key theme in Moriah’s grantmaking was putting more power into the hands of its grantees and the communities they serve. With her son Gideon at the helm, this remains a guiding principle. “A lot of big foundations like to fund using project or program support. They define what the project is going to look like, send out an RFP... But we prefer to fund general support,” Gideon told me.
For a progressive, wealthy white family working in marginalized spaces, Moriah’s unique operation reflects her trajectory and the deeply personal convictions she holds as a result. “Because of my family and our economic standing, I had freedom to do the things that I believed in. I’m very conscious of that at this point, particularly. I’ve had more privileges than 90% or more human beings on this Earth,” she tells me.
In recent years, the Moriah Fund has supported organizations like Community Change, a progressive community organizing group founded in 1968 in response to civil rights concerns; D.C. Alliance of Youth Advocates; Funders for Reproductive Equity; Human Rights First; and National Coalition on Black Civic Participation.
And the young Moriah-backed Black Voices for Black Justice Fund supports the work of young leaders like Natasha Alford, whose writing and reporting focuses on the Afro-Latino experience, and Michael “Zaki” Smith, who works to dismantle laws and barriers that affect the lives of formerly incarcerated Americans through Fair Chance Project and the Next100.
Thinking globally
Stein’s philanthropic work has extended beyond the U.S. In 2002, she became the founding chair of the Fund for Global Human Rights, which has made more than $85 million in grants to more than 680 organizations around the world. Similar to the Black Voices for Black Justice Fund, the Fund for Global Human Rights aims to provide resources, money, connections and other services to organizations created by people in communities. She emphasizes that she doesn’t want to tell anyone what to do, but rather listen to them, learn their needs and support them.
Stein also mentions her work establishing the Israel Center for Educational Innovation (ICEI) aimed at dramatically improving literacy outcomes among Israel’s Ethiopian immigrants. By 2019, ICEI now serves more than 7,500 students per year across 27 schools in 14 municipalities in Israel.
Ethiopian Jews were first brought to Israel from refugee camps in Sudan in a series of secret operations in the early 1980s. More operations followed, peaking with a mass airlift from Ethiopia in 1991. Still, Ethiopian Jews’ integration has not been seamless, with the population suffering disproportionately high levels of unemployment and poverty as well as discrimination.
ICEI aims to empower this community and focuses particularly on education. “One of the things we did was getting some of the best teachers we could who understood the importance of individualized education. Ethiopian kids who come in with major deficits have been able to move in and move up rather rapidly. It’s been quite a success,” Stein says.
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When Stein met with a judge to whom she was introduced by Gideon, he remarked that Stein was even more progressive than her son. “I think I’m more progressive than almost anyone I know,” Stein replied without missing a beat.
In the past decade and a half or so, she’s also taken in asylum seekers, learning once again about what marginalized communities experience firsthand. And as far as her philanthropic legacy, she’s not too worried about that. Mostly, she’s proud that time and again, activists and organizations have told Moriah that they were the first ones to take a chance on them.
“I really believe that if you give people the basics they need, they will achieve... You just need to give people support and they’ll follow what they know. You’ll monitor, obviously. But I think you’ll be much more successful taking chances on people who you think will have what it takes,” she says, adding, “I think my life has been very exciting since 1965.”
