Episode Nine: Janis Bowdler, President, JPMorgan Chase Foundation

JPMorgan Chase Foundation President Talks Transformative Giving in Times of Crisis

 

At the helm of the JPMorgan Chase Foundation is president Janis Bowdler, a visionary leader who’s transforming how the organization distributes $350 million annually in charitable giving. In fact, it was under her leadership that JPMorgan Chase & Co announced it would make a $30 billion incremental investment in Black and Hispanic communities across a variety of different areas and sectors over a five-year period. In this conversation with Women on the Move’s Sam Saperstein, Janis talks about how the foundation reached that colossal decision and how she’s adjusted her leadership style in the time of COVID-19.

 

Crisis shines a light on need

 

With a mission to help vulnerable communities around the world, the JPMorgan Chase Foundation has spent decades helping low-income communities share in the prosperity of a growing global economy. Janis explains that, for the past seven years she’s been with the firm, her work has been all about inclusive economic growth.

 

Then 2020 came, and things changed almost overnight.

 

“Suddenly we're hit with a double crisis of a global pandemic and an economic recession,” she says. “So we shifted quickly from a growth mindset to a recovery mindset. The needs of our communities and our nonprofit partners shifted significantly.”

 

Long-term infrastructure projects were set aside, and Janis put the foundation’s energies toward core support. She worked to get dollars to nonprofits on the front lines, funding organizations that handled everything from feeding families, to making sure that they could cover household expenses until their stimulus checks arrived. Since many of the foundation’s existing partners were already deeply embedded in vulnerable communities, Janis and her teams were able to get firsthand intelligence on what was actually going on. From there, she could determine the needs of those communities and pivot to respond.

 

How giving is changing in a post-COVID world

 

Although Janis makes loads of decisions about how the foundation’s resources should be allotted, she speaks frankly about the importance of centering decisions on community needs. This has been a trend in philanthropy for some time, but the events of 2020 and the COVID crisis have given it even more weight.

 

“Philanthropy can exist in a bubble. We have dollars, we have prestige, and frankly, we have power compared to vulnerable communities,” she explains. “And so it's easy to sit in our rooms and say, here's what we think the problem is. And here's what we think the solution ought to be. The shift is to do deep listening and say to community members, ‘You know better than we do. What are you seeing? What are the solutions that you really want to put forward?’”

 

Janis also describes how economic, political, and social shifts in 2020 forced her to make certain that funding from the JPMorgan Chase Foundation truly supported and was built around the most vulnerable people. In most cases, that meant Black and Hispanic community members, since they are both more likely to be in frontline jobs and more likely to experience unemployment.

 

“The pandemic has laid bare what we already knew; the deep inequality facing Black and Brown communities around the United States and around the globe,” she says.

 

Keeping up the good work

 

Despite the challenges of 2020, Janis remains hopeful about what the foundation can achieve. She explains how the organization advocates for policies that make real change for communities, puts dollars into non-profits, and sends in teams to support existing organizations with everything from building out back office technology to developing marketing plans. She is excited to steer the JPMorgan Chase Foundation into a bright future.