FROM THE PRESIDENT AND CEO
SEPTEMBER 2025
As a child – at home and in school – I learned the basic rule: if I promised something, I was expected to follow through. By the same token, I could rely upon those who made promises to me. For the most part, that worked.
As I grew older and learned the moral lessons of my religion, gained agency in society, developed maturity, and learned sociological constructs in college, I realized that our culture and civic society rely upon the same principle. To do otherwise was to embrace anarchy.
Legal and Professional Promises
In law school, I learned that the “meeting of the minds” in agreement is the basis of enforceable contracts. It is also a foundational principle of constitutional law. Indeed, a great deal of law school teaches lawyers to avoid breaking an agreement and how to achieve a reliable cure—injunctive or monetary—when breaches occur. In my practice as a litigator, that practice was more often successfully realized than not.
Later, in community leadership and state government, I learned that the currency of resilient and responsive action is the bond of one’s word—whether as an organizer, advocate, bureaucrat, legislator, or any other stakeholder regardless of political party. That behavioral glue helps develop legislation, influence implementation, and underlie corrective actions, systemic policy reforms, and, of course, professional reputation.
Societal Promises
At the societal level, the promise of our government is also fundamental to how we engage with one another. These promises include the civil rights movement and its legislation; the economic vision of the American dream; the commitment to mobility through broader access to post-secondary education, tax incentives, Social Security, an affordable ACA; and the elimination of gender based discrimination. Many other evolving – if imperfect – promises also form the foundation of a prosperous, inclusive economy.
This underlying lesson—that promises kept are the basis of how we function together—is a strength of progress, not, as some would suggest, a weakness.
Yet, those promises are being severely tested. Increasingly, economic opportunity in an inclusive and just economy is being derailed. Job growth is flattening. The promise of shared prosperity for all is being rejected. Reparative actions and inclusive rights are giving way to overt discrimination. And a raft of government commitments upon which many households relied upon to secure economic stability are being arbitrarily upended.
A Call to Action
Each of us—and the institutions we are a part of—must find ways forward to document the violation of the commitment to justice in the economy and to restore and strengthen future promises.
Consider your role in advocacy. Are the adverse impacts being documented? Are alternatives being tested? Are you or your board members and grantees advocating on the record to reverse proposals that break promises, such as the promise of affordable ACA healthcare, of retirement with robust Medicare and fully-funded Social Security, or of student loan forgiveness after 10 years in public service?
Silence in the face of broken promises merely engenders more breaches.
By documenting the unjust breaches, philanthropy and the private and public sectors can frame new approaches that create a set of commitments fundamental to a just economy. We need to work together, guided by our values, to achieve a better future of a just economy rooted in promises made and kept.
