Michelle McMurray originally majored in neuropsychology, in pursuit of her dream of being on a team to develop a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. On a weekend visit home during college, she talked with her mother about her abnormal psychology class and what she was learning about mental health issues and the challenges they pose. Michelle’s mother shared a long-guarded family secret: Her grandma had bipolar disorder. Finding out that someone she cherished struggled with mental illness catalyzed Michelle’s passion to address barriers to mental health care, especially for underserved populations. As she started learning more about access and stigma in mental health care, she decided that she wanted to switch her major to social work. She completed a degree in sociology and then earned a Master of Social Work (MSW). Michelle’s social work career has unfolded across several institutions. Her core motivation, however, has never wavered. From the moment of her mother’s revelation, she has been committed to changing systems and improving outcomes for those most failed by the status quo, especially people of color living in poverty.
While still an MSW student, Michelle worked as a research assistant at the university hospital. That job exposed her to the various aspects of social work. She worked alongside medical social workers and saw how they interacted with people in need. She met community outreach workers and learned about their efforts to reduce barriers to care. These experiences made her coursework come to life and helped her make decisions about the trajectory of her career.
After graduating with her MSW, Michelle started doing clinical social work. While she found working directly with people in need satisfying, she also saw how systems needed to change. She then directed a mental health advocacy organization and worked on policies like mental health parity. That work gave her a venue through which to push for broader changes, but she still chafed against the limitations of the nonprofit industry. Specifically, it was hard to get the necessary resources. She saw injustices in the distribution of funding to nonprofits—both those working to meet basic needs and those seeking policy and community change. As budgets are statements of institutional values, Michelle started thinking about ways to influence a different system—philanthropy.
Michelle’s organization received grants from The Pittsburgh Foundation. Her program officer was also a social worker, and they talked about the foundation’s capital—relational, institutional, and reputational, as well as financial—and how those resources could be leveraged to change lives and counter institutional barriers. When the program officer was promoted to the foundation’s policy department, he encouraged Michelle to apply for his old job. She did, making the transition from the grant-seeking side of the philanthropy/nonprofit relationship to the grant-making.
As a program officer, Michelle works with nonprofits that meet the basic needs of individuals living in poverty throughout the county. She conducts site visits to talk with staff and the clients they serve, asking what they are experiencing, how the services are helping, and what they still need. She describes these conversations as somewhat analogous to a psychosocial assessment, using the same skills, at the institutional level. Her grant portfolio includes domestic violence shelters, food pantries, diaper banks, and federally qualified health centers. The Pittsburgh Foundation also has a focus on racial equity, so she applies a specific racial justice lens to her work, considering the disproportionate effects of poverty on people of color. Recently, Michelle’s work evolved to also include a Social Justice Fund. With this investment in the work of activists and organizers engaged in struggles around reproductive, racial, and environmental justice, she takes a two-pronged approach. Seen through this lens, rather than investing in systems change or responding to urgent needs, philanthropy can and must do both.
Michelle is acutely aware of the power imbalance between funders and grant-seekers. She stays grounded through established relationships, which she honed during her years of outreach and advocacy. She also identifies self-determination as the social work value that resonates most strongly with her way of seeing her work. This causes her to approach challenges from a belief that people have the answers to their own problems but often lack the resources to act on them. Self-determination also fuels Michelle’s efforts to influence the philanthropic sector. The Social Justice Fund not only funds a part of the community organizing and activism that did not receive much investment before; it also does so through a collaborative process. Michelle and her team codesigned the fund with grassroots activists. She used her social work skills to assess what they need, what’s working for them, and how healthy their organizations are. Together, they built something to meet their needs: $250,000 in new investment in social change. A similar initiative makes funds available to the small nonprofits Michelle considers “the safety net after the safety net.” These agencies would otherwise be less likely to successfully compete for grants, but they are crucial to vulnerable neighborhoods.
Michelle draws on her social work skills daily. She is particularly grateful that she paid close attention in her research methods courses. Research is an explicit part of her responsibilities, one of the foundation’s four “buckets,” alongside grant-making, convening, and public policy. All of her work requires advanced assessment, evaluation, and analysis skills. Currently, Michelle is conducting qualitative research with single women rearing children. This requires facilitating focus groups, coding data, and writing a report, which, in addition to informing the foundation’s grant-making, may also influence nonprofit service delivery.
To make informed decisions, Michelle has to know how to find and synthesize reputable information. Her assessment skills also help her to look at systems and how they interconnect. Somewhat parallel to the family system assessments many social workers conduct, this systems thinking points Michelle in the direction of potential intervention points in a system-level problem. Perhaps the most essential skills in Michelle’s repertoire are the interpersonal competencies that help her work effectively with diversity. Her daily work may require collaborating with residents of a Latinx neighborhood, refugees from Congo, African American leaders in a suburban community, and affluent donors. To succeed, she has to navigate these relationships, meet people where they are, and work from a foundation of mutual trust. That is a challenge not unlike the kind social workers face when meeting a client for the first time and having to ask fairly personal questions for an intake. As she moves through the community, Michelle relies on the social work competency of deep relationship-building.
Michelle is clear-eyed about the challenges of philanthropy. Yes, as a program officer, she gets to give money away. That is as rewarding as it sounds, especially for someone who has seen firsthand the difficulties nonprofit organizations face due to scarce resources. However, giving money away responsibly and ethically is difficult. The role comes with power and influence and it requires a high degree of humility and willingness to be accountable. Michelle calls hers “one of the best jobs” and feels privileged to do it; but, at the same time, it is not easy. She also sometimes finds her distance from the work challenging. Social workers thrive on seeing the difference they are making, and she cannot always track the impact of her work that directly. Some days, she gets to connect with staff and clients during site visits, but her primary responsibility is to get her grantees the resources to do their work. This means that she does not have as much of the ongoing engagement that has been so meaningful throughout her earlier career, although she does experience the reward of being part of tangible community change, on a broad scale.
Michelle sees a promising landscape for social workers in philanthropy. Many foundations are hiring people who have experience in social services and/or community development. Job descriptions increasingly seek applicants with graduate degrees in social work or other human services fields. From her perspective, this makes sense; if one looks at the mission statements across different foundations, they often reflect what social workers get into the field to do—make people’s lives better today, and transform communities and systems, for stronger tomorrows.