Susan Sandler—a dedicated social justice philanthropist, long-time national leader in education reform, and all around catalyst for change, has passed away at the age of 58 from complications from brain cancer. Susan’s activism, leadership, and strategic philanthropy over the past three decades in the areas of education reform, educational equity, and racial justice bolstered and shaped the progressive movement across this nation, leading to some of the most significant public policy advances in the past few decades.
Susan was the co-chair of the Sandler Foundation and founder of the Susan Sandler Fund, which annually makes $10 million in grants focused on racial justice. Her leadership and impact in U.S. politics include having been the largest and earliest individual funder of the independent expenditure efforts to support Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential bid, as well as an early investor in the political careers of Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Stacey Abrams.
The daughter of business leaders Herb and Marion Sandler, Susan came from a philanthropic family, and carried on the tradition with great care and responsibility. Susan once described in a Medium article in 2020 that the core of that tradition was “a methodological approach marked by analytical rigor, extensive due diligence, and adherence to the highest standards of excellence. Some have referred to this as ‘The Sandler Way’.”
When Susan was diagnosed with glioblastoma in 2016, an aggressive form of brain cancer with a median survival rate of 18 months, she accelerated and intensified her efforts to create social change, namely disrupting and dismantling systemic racism, through philanthropy. In 2019, working with her father and brother Jim, the Sandler Foundation created the Susan Sandler Fund (SSF). The Fund, led by Vivian Chang, makes $10 million in grants each year to organizations and leaders working on racial, economic, and social justice. In an interview with Giving Compass, she described how her strategy diverged from mainstream philanthropy, saying, “Philanthropic culture so often revolves around writing white papers and reports, with the hope that decision-makers will be influenced by them. In reality, community organizing by people of color is the way long-term, transformational change truly happens. I think of my strategy as power, not persuasion.”
In describing her stance on leadership in U.S. philanthropy, she has said, “Foundations have long been white institutions, and if we as a sector are going to meet the demands of our time, we need to be led by people of color.” In setting up the Fund, Susan acted on her convictions by selecting Vivian Chang to serve as the Fund’s executive director.
In its first three years of operation, SSF has funded organizations such as New Virginia Majority; the Arizona Center for Empowerment (ACE) (sister organization of the advocacy group Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA); Texas Organizing Project, and Florida Rising Together, among other organizations. Within just a few years, SSF’s funding has led to historic progress impacting the lives of millions of people, including:
In Virgina: SSF funded groups such as New Virginia Majority, which turns out voters to push for progressive policies that have tangible positive impacts on real people's lives. For example, as a result of NVM’s work, in 2018, Virginia’s state legislature voted to accept federal dollars to expand Medicaid, resulting in providing more than 670,000 Virginians access to affordable, life-saving healthcare to date.
In Arizona: Arizona Center for Empowerment pushed for the passage of a ballot proposition that allows students living in the state, regardless of immigration status, to be eligible for in-state college tuition. The proposition was passed in November 2022 and will drastically ease the financial burden of college costs for thousands of undocumented students.
In Florida: Florida Rising Together worked to raise the minimum wage. In 2020, voters approved an amendment to increase the state's hourly minimum wage from $8.56 per hour to $15 incrementally by 2026.
Susan was born on September 19, 1964 in Berkeley, CA. She grew up in Lafayette, CA and attended the Seven Hills School and Head-Royce School, where she was involved in drama, including musicals. She has described herself as someone born with “a concern for poverty, a concern about unfairness and people suffering unfairly.” She attended Stanford University where she majored in English literature. At Stanford, Susan was an activist against global poverty among other issues, a tutor, and volunteered for many causes. She went on to attend graduate school at San Francisco State University where she earned her master’s in social work and subsequently became a licensed clinical social worker.
As part of her post-graduate work she focused on providing mental health support to young people in schools and their families. This experience deepened her understanding of and interest in racial dynamics in schools and school communities. As a result, in the early 1990s, she started Project Respect, the first of several organizations she would go on to create focused on racial social justice, education, and policy. Project Respect’s mission was to push schools to rethink punitive discipline policies. In the second half of the 1990s, she served as head of Justice Matters, an organization focused on promoting racial justice education policy solutions.
All of this led her to co-creating a leading national education think tank, the Learning Policy Institute (LPI), in 2015 with national education leader and Stanford professor Linda Darling Hammond. Over the past seven years, LPI has become a major and trusted voice on education reform and has attracted the support of other major philanthropists including Mackenzie Scott who gave the think tank a $16 million gift in 2022 to advance evidence-based policies for equitable and empowering learning. Also in 2022, Darling-Hammond received the Yidan Prize, the world’s highest accolade in education.
In 2015, Susan worked with several other national philanthropists to create The Partnership for the Future of Learning, a large and diverse network that represents community voices and collective action with over 700 partners from 300 organizations and 20 foundations.
In the words of the education leader Jeannie Oakes, Susan’s philosophy regarding education was that parents and other caregivers of children of marginalized communities “have a right and deserve to be respected as major players and influencers over education, and we need to support the power building among those groups.”
In addition, Jeannie said Susan believed that the way to improve education in this country was through emphasizing learning experiences and opportunities rather than focusing primarily on outcomes, and that education reform should be reframed along these lines.
While philanthropy was a core mission for Susan, she also understood that power building in communities sometimes required more than philanthropy. In her individual capacity, she was the first and largest donor to the independent efforts supporting Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008 and Stacey Abrams’ 2018 gubernatorial race. In 2018, she and Steve launched the Sandler Phillips Center to conduct rigorous research and analysis and engage in collaborative opportunities to make strategic investments to improve the effectiveness of progressive politics and enhance the return on investment of political giving.
Susan has served on the board of several organizations including the Center for American Progress, Community Change Action, Democracy Alliance, and Learning Policy Institute.
Although Glioblastoma’s median survival is 18 months, Susan beat the odds for more than six years because of the world-class medical team at the UCSF Brain Tumor Center and her neuro-oncologist Dr. Jennifer Clarke.
In 2020, while grappling with cancer, Susan still wanted to help others. She wanted to share her lessons and insights with others who were going through similar health challenges. She published her essays in a book, When I First Found Out I Had Cancer: Reflections on Living and Learning With a Serious Illness. In the introduction she explains, “I offer up my story with the intention of helping others feel less alone.” She also created a companion website to the book.
During the Covid pandemic, Susan grew deeply concerned about children who were losing their parents to the virus. In response, she started her own YouTube channel called “Storytime with Susan,” a storybook reading series aimed at providing those children with some comfort.
In addition to her ongoing work and effort to make a difference in the lives of others, Susan loved books, animals (especially cats and otters), and watching television shows with strong female lead characters (“Judging Amy” and “The Good Wife,” to name a few). One of her more recent delights was watching hummingbirds visit a feeder in the garden in her backyard of her home in Potrero Hill, San Francisco, overlooking the bay.
She is survived by her loving husband, author and political leader Steve Phillips, to whom she was married for 30 years. She is also survived by her brother Jim and his wife Gretchen, and her niece Leah and nephew Elijah.
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