Episode 90: Hali Lee
Join Lori and her guest, Hali Lee, in a conversation about the significance of changing the practice of philanthropy. Hali Lee, Founding Partner of Radiant Strategies, shares her insights. It's common for donors to lose sight of why they give in the first place. This underscores the importance of reminding people that philanthropy is about helping others and connecting with the core reasons behind their giving!
Here are the things to expect in this episode:
Radiant Strategies and its primary mission.
How does planned giving hold power in creating a legacy?
Experiences or influences that inspired Hali to work in this field.
When will "The Big We" be released, and what can readers expect from it?
And much more!
Radiants Strategies Website: https://www.radiantstrategies.co/
Freedom School of Philanthropy: https://www.freedomschoolforphilanthropy.org/
Hali Lee’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hali-lee-awgcnyc/
Episode Transcript
00:08
You're listening to the positive impact philanthropy podcast, where we share the journeys of everyday philanthropists as they incorporate philanthropy into their lives. Philanthropy is a personal journey, and through the stories we will share here, we hope that it sparks something in you, how you can make your own philanthropic impact in the world. I'm your host, Lori Kranczer, attorney, philanthropic advisor and legacy giving strategist. Together, we're going to explore what it looks like to be an everyday philanthropist and make a positive impact in the world. Before we get started, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss a new episode posted on Wednesdays. Now today, I'm so excited. Finally, we were able to arrange our schedules that I have Hali Lee. She's the founding partner of radiant strategies. I've been following her for years, and I'm so excited to share her story. Thank you so much for joining us, Hali.
00:57
Thanks for having me. Lori, I'm glad the stars aligned.
01:03
Busy schedule. So why don't you tell us more about who you are and what you do?
01:08
Well, I could go on at length here. Lori, as you know, so my name is Hali. I use she/her pronouns. I live in Brooklyn, not too far from where I think you are. I've had the pleasure and privilege of being in this sector for a long time. But I think, like probably many of us may be listening, I didn't choose to enter up in philanthropy. I started on the nonprofit side of the philanthropic table. I'm Korean American, and there's this thing in Korea called again, which is like a shared savings circle. And I'm actually writing a book about all the ways that we collectivize ourselves in order to do good in the world. It's we. I can talk about it a little more later, but in Korea, it's called, again, my Mexican American friends call them thunders. My West African West Indian friends sometimes call them sus. I work with an Ethiopian habisham woman, and she calls them a haber. And it's just, you know, it's like pulling money sometimes to take home to do something that you need to do with your family, but also it can be to pull money to help out someone in our neighborhood. So that's kind of the cultural roots of giving in my culture. But I was an executive director in a Korean American domestic violence services organization, so that's where I learned about philanthropy. And then I joined the board of the New York Women's Foundation in New York City, where I live, and that's where I really learned and saw firsthand, like mouth agape, the power of women sitting around a table and raising hundreds of 1000s of dollars for women and girls in New York City. And that's sort of what a light went off for me, because I was like, you know, doing government grants and $5,000 foundation grants, and then here were these individuals giving so much power and influence and resources towards the things they cared about. So that was kind of the beginnings for me.
02:53
Okay and so what got you started working in that sector? What inspired you?
02:57
Well, I have a guest, so I started a giving circle with my Asian American girlfriends, and it's been so much fun. And you know, when I first started, I thought the main thing would be moving money into awesome projects in New York City. But actually, the main thing, you know, it's a little selfish, but has been the sisterhood. You know, we've, we're now 17 years old, and you know, when the Atlanta shootings happened, these were the first people we called, you know, we got on a zoom and cried together. We lost someone important during covid, Corky Lee, who photographed, he was like the Asian American civil rights photographer forever. He died during covid, you know. So we got on Zoom and cried, you know, when good things happen, we get on Zoom. We don't always cry. We call each other to celebrate too, and celebrate birthdays. So, so that's been, like an important part of the roots of what I do. And then, of course, like the New York Women's Foundation, I learned a lot donors of color network. I helped build the first network of wealthy folks of color. So in some ways, I guess, I guess maybe the root of it is sort of democratizing our space. Philanthropy is not just about wealthy people or dead people who are trying to move their values in the world. I know you do planned giving, but you know there's a lot of living people who are people of color, who are doing significant philanthropy, and that whole project was about bringing more to the fore those stories.
04:16
Well it's true, and I don't want to talk about myself too much, but I do want to mention that. So with plan giving legacy, I have similar value to that. One of the the really, the inspiration I had when I was starting my own consulting business was to I consider legacy and plan giving the great equalizer of gifts, because it doesn't matter the amount, it's about the value behind it, how donors want to give and stop leaving a legacy, which could be a living legacy. They could do it while they're living and do it after they have passed. So anyone can do it because it doesn't most legacies are not that large. You know that donors want to do so it could be done in so many different ways. So I feel you on that. So let's talk about growing up. When you were growing up, what, were there volunteer opportunities that you participated in? Like, how do you get involved? There's always something.
05:06
Oh, you want to go back there? Yeah. So I grew up in Kansas City. My family immigrated from Korea when I was a bit, like, less than one year old. But we grew up in the Midwest and there were no Korean people there. We were, my brother and I were the only Asian kids actually in our schools until Kim Wong came in fifth grade and were friends to this day. But my parents were not super involved in church. Like a lot of Korean Americans, we did not, we were not that kind of Korean American, but they were pretty involved in their neighborhoods and community civic associations kind of thing. But I don't know if I really learned it directly from them, but they were immigrants, and my whole family is immigrants, and they came to this country largely thanks to scholarship programs at universities and sometimes scholarship programs via the Methodist Church. One by one, every uncle and my one aunt came over one by one, kind of an age order, this is on my mom's side, and they all went into medicine or education or, you know, they went or, no, that's not true. A couple of them went into business, but they had some feeling of gratitude and paying back, in a way, to the organizations that helped them come to this country and make a new life, like blood. And Koreans of that generation also just understand they went through two horrific wars. You know, they went through World War Two, and then they went through the Korean War. And my grandfather was taken prisoner by the Japanese and nearly killed. And then only five years later, the Korean War happened, which was like a civil war in this tiny, little country, and he was taken away by what became North Koreans and never heard from again. And he was in his early 40s, and he was a freedom fighter, so I'm, we've heard these stories. You know, the reason he was tortured and almost murdered by the Japanese and then taken away and probably murdered by the North is because he was a freedom fighter. You know, he fought hard to preserve the Korean cultural legacy and Korean cultural concepts, language. He actually is a philosophy professor. You know, he's kind of a cool dude who, of course, I never met. But I think about him because those of us in my family who have kind of gotten into this work of social change, different ways that that manifests, but I have to believe that there's a little germ of Han Chi Jin, that's his name, in all of us. And since I've been doing this work, and I've been writing this book, and I've been building this curricula that, you know, a little bit about freedom school for philanthropy, also the donors of color network and the giving circle work, for sure, about democratizing and diversifying the space and inserting kind of a fairness, you know, it's called equity and justice now, but it's those words get so overused and then sort of abused by, you know, by some folks in the field. So what are the other ways we can say it? You know, it's fairness about just sort of investigating how the playing fields have never been level, ever in this country. As much as I love this country and this country has done so much for my family, I know how we have benefited and how we have not, by being Korean American and being immigrants. And there are folks you know, we know this stuff, right? So let the playing fields have just never been fair. I'm a football fan because I grew up in Kansas City. Go Kansas City Chiefs, but we know that the field is longer for some people in this country than it is for others. So that's just history. And those of us who are working in this sector, whether it's via philanthropy or legacy being or social change on the ground, and I've done that too, you know, we understand the importance of knowing that history and talking about that history and figuring out what we can learn from that history in order to create a world that is more free and Fair for our children.
09:01
Yeah. So tell us a bit about the work that you're doing currently, and you mentioned your program. So I do want to talk a little more about Dubuque, but share a bit about your program.
09:12
Yeah. So I started so donors of color build was super fun. I mean, that's sort of where it starts. I got to work with Urvashi bad rest in peace and power. Urvashi, an amazing badass, legend, organizer, activist, rebel rouser, howler for freedom, you know, so we, I got to work with her to help build the the research and the network and the research that became the donors of color network, and I got to lead the qualitative research, I guess, project, which is called the report philanthropy, always sounds like someone else, and that's a direct quote from a wealthy person of color who we interviewed. I've interviewed like 150 wealthy people of color across the country at this point to do that project and others. So after that, I started radiant strategies with a couple of other women from the donors of color days. And we're having is, we've just turned two and a half, I guess, or worth maybe I forget, we're pretty young, Lori. And a major project we've done is build Freedom School for philanthropy, inspired by Danny lou Hamer, and none of us is free until all of us is free. Civil rights icon. I mean, she's just amazing. She grew up on a pig farm. She was, she had a mutual lots of mutual aid, community aid, helping people in her community, but also a civil rights icon. The premise behind it is that in 2020 a lot of bad things happen, right? It's not a premise. The context of that bill, 2020, covid, the murder of George Floyd, because the work that I and my team have been doing, we have access and conversations with some very wealthy people who are trying to move their money in different ways. So the other piece of context is, in the United States, we have a huge wealth gap. Most of the wealth is held by very, very few people, by the disproportionate amount of our wealth is held by the top 1% or more, or even smaller, of the US population. It's kind of funny, because I do a lot of giving circle work, which is like everyday givers. But then with this project, it's really focused on very wealthy people who want to practice their philanthropy differently. You know, they want to center equity and justice and fairness and equal opportunity more in their giving, but they need a little help, and they want to do it in community. So we built this beautiful curriculum. It's a fat, it's like 250 pages. It's really beautiful. I just think it is. And we take people through it. We've done it five times now with different cohorts of wealthy folks, or people who work with wealthy folks, and we take them through an arc, you know. It starts with a me, my family, my values, on whose shoulders do I stand to do this work. Then it goes to the we, which is, which could be my workplace, my adult sports team, my book group, you know, the community, my giving circle, in my case, like the communities that I'm in and part of and then it ends. The last third is the big we, which, in America is our democracy, the systems in which we navigate, the systems in which it could be taxation, right? The systems that we're trying to change. And it's not a coincidence that my book is called “The Big We”, because ultimately, though, it's told in lots of stories of individuals coming together with other individuals, parents, moms, PTA groups, adult sports leagues, book clubs, mutual aid groups, giving circles, right? Like all the different ways we come together to do good. Ultimately, if I can, if I can write it well enough, this book is kind of a key into civic engagement, you know, like, get involved, give a shit, figure out how you can be, do something to move your use in the world, and then get together with other people and do it. And Freedom School for philanthropy is a little bit like that. Less stories, more how to, lots of you know, we who wrote it care about beauty and poetry and the power of narrative and culture. So this is not a boring workbook, you know? It's a beautiful workbook with poetry and hopefully some inspiration. I'll stop there.
13:13
Okay, well, yeah, I mean, I'm fascinated about this, but the, what are the trends that you're seeing with the individuals that you're working with.
13:23
They have a lot of money. They have a hard time giving it away. There's a certain, I mean, you know, I jokingly call it constipation. There's definitely kind of a let it flow, kind of metaphor that runs through the curriculum and also my book, there's, like, really good people who want to do really good things, but a little stuck somewhere along the process, either they honestly, I think sometimes we make it too complicated, which is one reason why I ask people to remember how their grandparents did it. You know, how did their grandparents often who were not wealthy, right? Like a lot of the folks, many are not inherited wealth people. They've made their own wealth. So they didn't grow up doing philanthropy at this scale, at their grandfather's knee. Some of them did, but, you know, not all of them. So how did your grandma and grandpa do it? You know? How did the, or even the generation before that? You know? What can we learn, or what can be instructive about that? There's, I mean, I don't know if it's a trend, Lori so much as the people we're working with. So it's a segment. The trend is like, more big donors giving, more of the individual giving, high you know, like the US giving report came out, people freaked out about it, because individual giving has gone down. But my critique of that report is, well, it only counts charitable giving, and I know it's important to count something, but if you look at all the ways in which people are generous, it's not going down. There isn't a charitable giving crisis. If you count giving to political causes, giving to mutual aid, giving to cash to individuals like GoFundMe and sending money back home in the form of remittances, if you have a recent immigration story in your family, right? There's a crisis in terrible giving, only if you look at c3 giving. And the alarming trend within that is that more of that individual giving is coming from those with the very, very, very richest among us. And that's just a factor of the wealth gap, you know. So ultimately, I think, you know, it gets to the big we a systemic response is something like taxes, or what's the systemic response that can just be a bigger lever to move, rather than, you know, begging, cajoling, strategizing beyond any level of strategy, logic, modification, eyeing, convincing wealthy people to move their money philanthropically. And then, as you know, the use of donor advised funds has totally exploded for good and for bad. You know, like the impulse to give money and park it for philanthropic, charitable purposes is often a good impulse. You know, I want to do good with this money. Of course, in many cases, there's an immediate need to park money because of a wealth event for tax, for tax purposes, but then it just sits there. And when it just sits there for 5, 10, 15 years, it's really not doing the charitable purpose for which it received all of that tax advantage to do, right? So there's some disconnect there between intent and wish and good out the door, and I think that's something that the sector needs to address as well.
16:39
Yes. So, so we brought up a lot of really interesting issues. Tell us what? Tell us more about the book. What can expect to see it, and what's new after your book, what else are you working on within radiant strategies?
16:54
But anyways, my book is called “The Big We”, it's going to come out in 2025 with Zando press, which is a relatively new press started by Molly Stern, who left Penguin Random House after um editing Michelle Obama's book becoming, and I've never written a book before. I've done a lot of writing, and I love to write, but this is my first book, and I had the miracle good fortune of getting an agent, Maggie Cooper at AV tuss. And there was a bidding war that lasted about a half a day. But it was very thrilling. I happened to be working at the Gates Foundation. We're doing a project with them, and it was all kind of coming down that day that I was over there. So it was like, oh my God. You know, they were all part of it with me as we went through it. And the imprint underneath Sanda who bought it is sweet July, and that's Aisha Curry's, I don't know what you call it, brand thing she's building. And within sweet July, she's gonna, she has titles, and I'm gonna be in her 2025 class, and it's called “The Big We”, I have enjoyed writing it a lot. I, you know, I'm pretty busy with work, so I mostly write on the weekends. I've heard from my writer friends that editing sucks, so these few months might be terrible. We'll see.
18:09
Hali. I wrote, I wrote a book years ago. It is sitting. I have to do the final edits.The editing.
18:17
Maybe we can have every other week, like Lori, write your get back to your dang book. So I'm meeting with my editor in a week, and then I'll know a lot more about where I'm sitting. I've turned in. I've got, like, a I'm at the shitty rough draft stage.
18:33
Well, that's, it's incredibly exciting. I'm excited for you. So, um, so there's a lot going on. You've created a lot of, I would say, programs and certainly this book as well, that are moving philanthropy in a certain direction, which I think, it has been needed for a long time. So it's really incredible. I really would love to talk about that, like, how you, how you consider the body of work that you've created and these programs that you've created, and how that will affect your legacy.
19:04
Well, God, that's, you know, you told me you were going to ask me that, and I don't even, I feel like, you know, I'm not, I'm old, you know, but I feel like I'm 29 so it's funny to even be thinking about legacy. But this is exactly what we do in our work, right? We think about what's on whose shoulders do you stand to do this work. And then, what kind of ancestor do you want to be for the generations about whom you can only imagine, you know, and I have three kids. I know you have a couple kids, and it's, it's not dissimilar, actually, you know, since they were really small, we've always at, you know, every bedtime, you know, like, how can you make this world a better, more beautiful place, you know. And that's really at the root of it, you know. How can you make this world a better, more beautiful place? And when you're a little it might be Miss Rumphius, who's planting fireweed all across the eastern seaboard of the United States. Or it might be, you know, somewhat, you know, there's a plethora of children's books, characters who are doing that in some way. But as we grow up, and especially as we're working with people with a lot of resources, that same prompt or question, which becomes more of a challenge, you know, how do you make this world a better, more beautiful place? And in order to do that, I think you have to start within me, you know, like, Where do I come from? What did I learn? What do I not want to pass on? Like in my family, there's a lot to be proud of, but there's a lot of hoarding, actually, to be frank about resources, they went through two wars, so I understand it from the point of view of my mom's generation, you know, dad's generation, they had to hoard, but they also managed to share incredibly profoundly with the little bits that they had. And one by one, send a kid and a relative and a cousin, someone who's not even relative, over to try to find a better world somewhere else, you know. So there's just a lot to be learned from my own family there, and I try to pass that on to my kids and my niece and the kids that are going to be the next generation in my circle. And then I think in terms of our work, we're interested, we're trying to do work that is, that is like 10,000 feet up, you know, like, not so much like one organization's strategic plan, but more like, what can move or push or get people thinking in our sector a little bit higher up, you know, like we're writing a report now about proximity. You know, there's this whole thing about funding proximate organizations and people is better. And I think I believe that, and I would I do that, but there's actually very little proof, you know, so we're writing this report, and then no one's ever had to prove that white middle men are better leaders for all of the organizations in our sector that they have led and mostly currently lead. That's never been proven either. But yet, there's this burden of proof when the leadership model and leadership goals, or organizational leadership goals, are changing. Like, there's, that's not fair, you know, but so there's, there's a tension between that just proof and also, but we also kind of want to prove it, because we're also trying to make the case to some, you know, very wealthy donors that they're giving ought to change, to support proximate leaders and orgs, and they want proof. So we exist in this tension, right? You're, we're in philanthropy to get kind of, we're really trying to change the practice of philanthropy. And if we can provide sort of the inner, the guts of the research, the data, the conversations, the interviews, the qualitative, if we can provide that for the sector, then that's kind of what that's exactly the space that we want to be.
22:49
Well, it's incredibly exciting and some wonderful legacy that you are creating for not only yourself and your family, but for the community and for the sector, for the entire sector. So we have to wrap it up, Hali, but I know we'll continue our conversations. But why don't you share with our listeners where they can find out more information about you?
23:09
Sure. Well, I think you're gonna put them in your notes. But you know, radiance website, radiancetrategies.co, I get, all of our reports are on there. Freedom School has a website now too, though it's nascent, and we're building at freedomschoolforphilanthropy.org and tons of resources on there, like so many resources that we put into the build. So every sort of chapter has podcasts, articles, books, you know, just a ton of stuff to look at. So I would check that out when it comes out, I'll let you know.
23:43
Great. Okay, so we're going to add everything to the show notes, so everyone has all the links available to them. I want to thank you again for joining us. This has been a great conversation. I know about your work. I've known about it, and I know other people have as well, a lot of our listeners, and I'm really excited to be able to share it today that people learn more about the work that you're doing and your journey, your philanthropic journey, that you, yourself talk and what you're leaving the community and and what your legacy will look like. So thanks again for joining us and for everyone else listening, check out Hali’s links. Check out the Freedom School and stay tuned for her book that'll be coming out soon. and you can listen to new episodes that are posted on Wednesdays. Speak to you soon.