An Interview with Surina Khan, the CEO of Women’s Foundation California

Women’s Foundation California is a publicly supported foundation dedicated to achieving racial, economic, and gender justice by centering the experience and expertise of communities most impacted by systemic injustice.

Sande: What do you know about leadership now that you wish you knew when you started your role as CEO?

Surina Khan: I wish I’d known how to ask the right questions and was more comfortable acknowledging what I don’t know.

I lead now with curiosity and inquiry, whereas, in the past I felt the burden was on me to solve everything. But that is not a good leadership practice because it doesn’t build leadership in others, and it’s not consultative. To be a consultative leader, you really need to know how to step back.

Another part of my evolution has come from preparing for, and taking, a four month sabbatical. The sabbatical was very transformative in affecting how I am as I return to the organization.

I see the value and strategic importance of having spaciousness and moving slow, so I’m holding onto that.

The other thing is clarity on my purpose. Having gone through the Rockwood Leadership Institute training more than 10 years ago now, I thought, “Okay. I worked on that, I know my purpose.”

But the sabbatical actually crystallized this for me and made clear that my purpose is supporting the leadership of our community – period. And that means supporting the leadership of myself, our staff team, our board, our community partners, grant partners, and our Solis Policy Institute alums and fellows.

This clarity about my purpose guides me in making every decision through the lens of supporting community leadership.

For example, when I came back from sabbatical, the team was wrapping up our funders policy Institute and they asked if I could do the closing. I knew I could do it, but I asked the team, what are they going to get from me? Wouldn’t they get more from a community-based advocate?

We have so many community leaders that have much more compelling stories. And I thought, “You know, Eunisses Hernandez is a graduate of our Solis Policy Institute, now serves on our Board and led the successful Measure J Coalition in Los Angeles, she needs to be in front of a group of donors and donors need to hear her story. Let’s get her to be in conversation with me.”

Another example is about Liza, one of our development team members who was building a relationship with someone who came to our event a few years ago and made a $10,000 gift. Liza kept in touch with them and scheduled a meeting after I returned from sabbatical. It was clear that this person was really engaged and interested in our work.

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, we got an email saying, “Would a $900,000 gift be helpful?” Well, I just about fell off my chair. The pre-sabbatical me would’ve sent an email response right away saying, “Oh my goodness, thank you. It’s amazing. You’re just so generous.” But instead I thought, “This isn’t me. This is all Liza. And we’re closed today.”

So in supporting Liza’s leadership, I waited. On Monday when we reopened after the holiday, Liza got back to them and the gift ended up being $1.3 million. Moving slower and supporting Liza’s leadership ended up in a bigger gift!

There’s so much value in leading from behind.

Yes, I have many skills, I can do a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean that the best thing is for me to do those things.

Sande: What does it mean to ask for help in your role and whom do you turn to?

Surina: In my role, I turn to a lot of people, but mainly to people on my leadership team. We have a very supportive board, so I have weekly check-in calls with our chair and I talk to her when I need help.

I turn to my friends and my partner when things are hard or frustrating. I think that it’s important to lead with humility, and that means realizing you don’t know what you don’t know and so you have to ask for help.

Sometimes it’s not about asking for help – it’s about asking people to share their vantage point because we all look at things differently.

I want to know, what do you see?

Maybe I’m thinking this is a great idea, but then somebody else will say, it’s not so great from my point of view because it will put a stumbling block in my pathway. You have to examine things from different points of view, which is why I like to take a very consultative approach.

Before I went on sabbatical, I said to my team, “I have confidence in you. I don’t expect or want things to be the same. This is not about just keeping things going, waiting for my return. It’s about continuing to move things forward and I have the utmost trust that you can do it”.

When I came back, things were different. This gives me such a sense of relief. Before, there was so much I was holding in the day-to-day management of the Foundation. Now the team is continuing to hold the day-to-day management and it allows me to work at a much more thoughtful and strategic level.

Sande: What’s important for you about leading change?

Surina: For me, it ties back to my purpose of supporting the leadership of our community. We’re doing everything we can to elevate and amplify the leadership of our community members because that is what ultimately leads to movement building and the tangible change that we want to see in the world.

To fulfill on that vision, I need to have a healthy approach to leading, and that starts at home.

On sabbatical I realized I’ve spent my entire professional life working for the health, safety, and economic security of others, but I didn’t prioritize my own health. That has changed for me and prioritizing my health and wellness is a non-negotiable now.

We need to make sure that we’re practicing internally the values we hold and want to see in the world.

We’re centering gender and race and socioeconomic class in everything we do. We are questioning and rethinking all of our assumptions. We are challenging the status quo and making sure we’re grounded in feminist values.

Changing the status quo shouldn’t be up to the individual – the system is flawed and that needs to be corrected.

For example, we work in structures that are designed by patriarchy and white supremacy, including the practice of going to the office, which hadn’t occurred to me until the pandemic.

We were among the first organizations to start listing salary ranges before it became the norm. The status quo response about salaries is “women need to learn to negotiate better.” But we felt that it should not be the individual’s burden, the system is perpetuating inequity.

There’s also the requirement for Bachelor’s degrees—most job postings still say, “BA required, graduate degree preferred.” We don’t have that requirement. I don’t have a BA.

We believe that the people who are closest to the problems are closest to the solutions.

That means we might want to hire somebody who’s been formerly incarcerated to work on criminal justice issues. And maybe they couldn’t get a BA, because of issues to do with poverty or addiction, or any number of things, but they would know how to solve this problem.

We know that leading change requires being changed.

I remember years ago talking with Maya Thornell-Sandifor, a former WFC staff member, about social change. And she said something like “we need to be eating change for breakfast” and I just love that because we are in the business of change, so we can’t fear it.

We need to constantly be evolving — sometimes being comfortable, sometimes uncomfortable with change. That’s how we learn.

Sande: How does racial justice play into your leadership practices?

Surina: Gender and race are at the center of our work. They go together. You can’t have racial justice without gender justice and you can’t have gender justice without racial justice.

Racial justice is at the core of everything that we do.

We are committed to having a diverse team. We take great care when recruiting for a board member, the policy institute, grant partners, our staff.

Right now we are 80 to 90% people of color at every level – staff, Board, Policy Institute fellows, grant partners – and at the same time, we’re making sure to uplift the leadership of Black women. We are rigorous about unpacking the idea of people of color too – we make sure that we have representation from different experiences, races and ethnicities, as well as LGBTQ, non-binary and trans people.

I’m leading an institution that was founded in 1979 by a group that was predominantly white women, so that’s part of our culture too.

We have team trainings where we examine white supremacy culture and talk about the fact that white people are not the only people who perpetuate white supremacy culture. We’re subject to other aspects of white supremacy culture too, like urgency and perfection.

When I came here, I was very attracted to the foundation because of its participatory grant making approach. But then somewhere along the line, I realized participation is not leadership – it’s not enough.

We remain centered on our founding principal that the people closest to the problems are the ones with the solution.

We didn’t want community activists just recommending grants to our board – we wanted them to be the ones approving the grants.

Now we have community activists on our board. Kim Carter who founded Time For Change Foundation, Eunisses Hernandez who led the Measure J Coalition and Aria Sa’id is co-founder of the Transgender District —all of whom are Institute alums. Fabiola DeCaratachea, who used to be on staff, is now at Dolores Huerta Foundation and Jen Chou is at the ACLU Northern California.

These community leaders are my boss, which is how it should be. We have a powerful mix of people on the board representing a range of experiences and financial holdings. It makes for an incredible experience.

The last thing I would add, is what has gotten me through the rough times – the hardest, scariest moments of when I first started as CEO and learned within the first few weeks that we did not have enough money in the bank to make payroll, a depleted $500K line of credit, a significant operating deficit, and accounts payable that were in arrears – was believing that we have to lead from abundance.

It’s important to imagine, and really let yourself dream big.

Even though we had little in the way of money, when I first started in this role, I believed we had to lead from abundance, visualizing what we needed and what we wanted to create.

We thought big and now we are financially healthy, we are making close to $10M in grants per year which is more than we have done anytime in the foundation’s history.

And we can do that because we have aspirational goals, we are community-centric in everything we do, and that is compelling donors to be generous whether with a $100 gift or million dollar gifts, including some that have been unsolicited. Sometimes I can hardly believe it, but I visualized our success and it has come to fruition.

Sande: Thank you Surina. It was such a joy to speak with you.

This interview is part of my Defining Leadership: Conversations with Women Leaders series.