A year into her new job as president and CEO of the Heising-Simons Foundation, Sushma Raman is turning her attention — and some of the foundation’s resources — to the potential risks and benefits of technology, particularly artificial intelligence.
Raman chose Technology and Society as the focus of the foundation’s CEO Fund, a pot of money that Heising-Simons makes available to its leaders to address a specific issue they care about. Not long after she came to the foundation, the board asked her to consider what topic she wanted to prioritize.
“I thought that technology and society would be an area that connected the dots between the various aspects of the foundation’s programs, but also allowed us to look to the future, to the ways in which technological advancements affect everything — from human life and flourishing, to ways in which our rights are preserved and secured, to how people who are most vulnerable are treated through public services and the criminal justice system,” she said.
Heising-Simons was founded in 2007 by billionaire couple Mark Heising, a tech entrepreneur and founder of investment firm Medley Partners, and Liz Simons, an educator and the daughter of Jim Simons, mathematician and founder of legendary quantitative hedge fund Renaissance Partners. It’s a family foundation, and by all accounts, the family remains closely involved with its direction. Liz Simons is board chair, Mark Heising and their daughter, Caitlin, are both vice chairs.
The foundation’s giving has grown steadily, totaling $1.13 billion since it was created. Programs include Climate and Clean Energy, Education, Human Rights, and Science; it also has a Journalism program, and Technology and Society now joins the list via the CEO Fund.
As Raman told Inside Philanthropy soon after she started at Heising-Simons, she intended to spend her first months listening and learning, and to do so, she sat down with every staffer in the organization. Ideas from Heising-Simons staff also helped Raman chart the direction of the CEO Fund. “Part of my listening and learning was understanding, who are the groups working on this issue?” she said. “Where are the opportunities for connection and impact? What role can the foundation play in this landscape — both in partnership with other philanthropies, but also in service to the field at large, which is evolving very, very rapidly.”
Geography had some influence on Raman’s decision. Tech and AI loom particularly large in the Bay Area, where Heising-Simons is based. Silicon Valley is a global technology hub, and San Francisco has been dubbed the “AI Capital of the World” because of the many AI entrepreneurs located there. “It makes sense, since the developments that occur in San Francisco and Silicon Valley affect not only the region, but really, the globe,” Raman said.
Several funders have supported both development and oversight of artificial intelligence over the years, as my colleague Paul Karon pointed out recently. And other funders, including the McGovern Foundation, have focused on AI’s potential to leave many behind. This concern is one Raman shares and hopes the CEO Fund’s work will address by exploring questions like these: “How do these developments that are happening at a breakneck speed benefit the most vulnerable in society? How do we set up guardrails, but also harness the promise for people in society who often have been left behind in the past by major technological advancements?”
Technology and its impacts, particularly on underrepresented groups, is a topic Raman was interested in before she came to Heising-Simons. It was a theme in “The Coming Good Society: How New Realities Demand New Rights,” which she co-authored with William F. Shultz in 2020. She has also written about the implications of surveillance and monitoring technologies in policing for Foreign Policy.
Technology and society
Last November, Raman had already settled on Technology and Society as the focus of the CEO Fund and the foundation had started making grants when they received an invitation from the Biden administration. The administration asked Heising-Simons to join a coalition of funders to support efforts to mitigate AI risks and promote responsible use and innovation. Other coalition members include the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Democracy Fund, the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Kapor Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Omidyar Network, Open Society Foundations, and the Wallace Global Fund.
The funders will together provide more than $200 million “to align their investments and scale civil society’s efforts to ensure that AI advances the public interest across five critical areas of need,” according to the announcement.
Raman described the five areas of need identified by Vice President Kamala Harris. “One is around the protection of democracy and the rights of freedoms of all people,” she said. “The fact that this is an election year, not only in the United States but in many countries around the world, has highlighted the role that AI might play, both in terms of the opportunities presented by the use of technologies to engage citizens and voters, but also some of the possible harms.” Other areas include how AI can be leveraged to innovate in the public interest, how to empower workers to thrive amid AI-driven changes, how to improve transparency and accountability and how to support the development of international AI rules and norms.
Creating effective guardrails to oversee a complex, fast-moving technology that has powerful backers is a daunting task, and the last several decades have demonstrated that tech entrepreneurs seldom let social concerns stand in the way of profits. Still, Raman believes philanthropy has to try.
“I think this is an area where philanthropy and civil society, as well as journalism, can play a really important role: to foster innovation and expand opportunity, but also to ensure public and private accountability,” she said. “That means ensuring that workers have a voice, ensuring that the benefits of AI are distributed more equitably, ensuring that government policies are designed in ways that make sense for the current landscape. Our role is identifying the promise and trying to accomplish or actualize that, but also looking at the perils, the historical inequities and trying to mitigate that, as well.”
The CEO Fund is “in the exploratory phase of grantmaking this year,” according to the website. Grantees supported in its initial round use different strategies to mitigate technology’s potential harms. WITNESS, for example, provides tech tools and skills to activists, journalists, lawyers and others defending human rights. The $300,000 grant from Heising-Simons will provide general support for the organization.
The Markup, another CEO Fund grantee, “challenges technology to serve the public good,” according to its website. The nonprofit, data-driven investigative journalism organization examines how technology is being used by institutions and those in power. Heising-Simons provided $400,000 to the organization for general operations.
The CEO Fund also provided a $400,000 grant to Algorithmic Justice League to educate the public about the impacts of AI, support advocates for impacted communities, and “galvanize researchers, policymakers and industry practitioners to prevent AI harms,” according to the grant summary. AJL was founded by AI researcher and digital activist Joy Buolamwini, who wrote the book “Unmasking AI,” and is featured in the documentary “Coded Bias.”
Humility and speed
The CEO Fund is only one of Raman’s areas of responsibility, of course. “I want to clarify that my primary role is really day-to-day CEO work,” she said. “That means thinking through the vision and values of the board, how they get translated into our programs and our impact, and how to connect the dots and advance the mission.”
Raman pointed to climate as an area that will continue to be a priority for the foundation going forward. “We’ve been thinking a lot about climate change and its impact on human suffering around the world and in the United States, and ways in which we can move our money to address climate change as much and as fast as possible,” she said. “We believe that climate change is a defining issue of global equity, because the people who are most affected by this are in many cases the ones least responsible.” (See IP’s report on Heising-Simons’ funding for climate and energy.)
Last year, Heising-Simons also provided a $1 million grant through the CEO Fund to the Democracy Frontlines Fund, a collaborative of funders supporting Black-led organizations and social movements. (See IP’s recent report on the Democracy Frontlines Fund’s decision to extend its work).
Raman has a background in philanthropy (she worked at Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, and led the Southern California Grantmakers Association), but her new position has nevertheless included a learning process.
“I learned that giving away money is much harder than folks think,” she said. “To do it with humility, to do it with speed, to think about impact but to also think about the trust one builds with grantees. To be thoughtful about it. I always knew that, but it has been reinforced in the past year.”
