Eight Questions with Claire Peeps, Outgoing Executive Director of the Durfee Foundation

Claire Peeps is leaving her role at the Durfee Foundation after 28 years. Photo: Nathan Birnbaum

Claire Peeps became the second executive director of L.A.’s Durfee Foundation in 1996. She expected to stay in the job for about two years. Twenty-eight years later, Peeps is preparing to leave her post in June. Carrie Avery, Durfee’s longtime board president, made her own exit in December. 

In addition to her work at Durfee, Peeps, who holds two visual arts degrees, once worked as an assistant to Ansel Adams. A self-described former “psychotic soccer mom” (one of the good ones), published writer, cancer survivor and marathon runner, Peeps served as the associate director of the L.A. Festival and publisher of High Performance magazine prior to her tenure at Durfee. 

I recently had the pleasure of a wide-ranging conversation with Peeps that covered topics including successful leadership transition planning, the history of Durfee’s sabbatical program and Durfee’s evolution from its highly diverse past areas of work to a mission to make L.A. better while improving the philanthrosphere as a whole. 

In particular, the Durfee Foundation has been far ahead of most funders in its efforts to support nonprofit staff in the face of widespread underpayment, overwork and burnout. That includes its sabbatical program as well as offerings like its Lark Awards to support the “collective care and renewal” of small nonprofit teams. Peeps has been an advocate for this work; her efforts include serving on the board of advisors of Fund the People, a nonprofit founded more than 10 years ago to persuade funders to provide living wages and benefits to nonprofit staff.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

In 2018, you told Voyage LA that you “fell into the wonderful but odd world of philanthropy” when you started at Durfee. The job certainly seems to have been something of a sharp turn for you after leading a magazine and a street festival. How did you end up joining Durfee?

I fell into it because a colleague called and recommended that I apply. He was Bill Rauch, the founding director of Cornerstone Theater, who went on to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is now the inaugural director at the Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center. And I had known Bill, and he had been supported by Durfee, as had Peter Sellars, who ran the LA festival. So I knew Durfee peripherally through two people. 

I was sometimes the person who, when Peter was not available, was kind of brought along to talk to funders. So I established some connections with those larger East Coast foundations at the time, and I thought, "Oh, what an interesting place to be in, where you have a 30,000 foot view of the sector. It seems like an interesting marriage of theory and practice."  

At the time that Bill Rauch contacted me, I was not actually looking for work. I was happy doing what I was doing, which was working with organizations to try to help them situate art in community contexts. And I love the family, and that's why I was interested in the job. [Note: Durfee was founded in 1960 by R. Stanton (Stan) Avery, the founder of Avery Dennison. It remains a family foundation today.]

So I asked if it could be part time, and they said no. I asked whether I could take on consulting work on the side, and they said no, and I wasn't sure I'd like it, because there wasn't very much art involved. But I thought, "Oh, I'll take this on.” In my mind, I thought of it as a two-year gig. And here I am, 28 years later. So it was a perfect match.

The day that I interviewed with Carrie [Avery], I thought, this is someone I would love to work with. And that's what's always guided me in my life. Who are the people? Do you want to work with the people, right? So Carrie was the principal lure, and she's been the other half of my brain for this entire journey until December of last year, when she rotated off, too.

So you became Durfee’s second executive director. Now that you’re leaving, has your experience of that changeover informed how you’ve gone about structuring your and Carrie Avery’s departure and the transition to Durfee’s next leadership? 

Durfee is one of the funders of the Nonprofit Executive Transition Fund (a project of L.A.'s Nonprofit Sustainability Initiative). I'm very interested in transitions. There's a tsunami of transition going on right now. Certainly in philanthropy, definitely in the nonprofit sector. It's a living lab that we're living in right now, so I've had a lot of time to observe this.

I think that people are surprised when I tell them that Carrie and I started planning our transition in 2016. This has been in the works for a long time. That was when the board said, at a biannual retreat, "We're a little nervous." We said why? And they said, "Well, you and Carrie have been here a long time — what if one of you were to leave?" That was the beginning. That was the first time we had to say, "Well, here's what would happen. And that was the beginning of having a structural plan, hiring a search firm, putting together a transition committee, understanding that you'll have sticker shock — that you’re gonna have to spend some money — that it's going to take longer than you think.

The board had an executive session for the first time on the transition in 2023. It was the first time they've ever had a meeting without Carrie and me present, and their task was to figure out how they were going to move forward with the planning. At the end, they were asked to close the executive session with one word about how they were all feeling. And what was reported back to us was that the words were “hope,” “hopeful,” “optimistic,” “excited,” and “can't wait to shake the hand of the next leader.”

One of the things I think that I'm very keen on and recommending to people now is to hire someone to help you write your history, as we did. Memory is elusive, and history is important. We forget very quickly why we did what we did when we did it. And yet, that's what institutional memory is, right? But that's what a new leader needs coming in: to understand the context of, why did you stop doing this, and shift your focus to that? And who was part of that conversation? All kinds of allegory and myth can probably be created about what we think happened.

One thing I’ve never asked about, but learned while researching this piece, is that Durfee’s sabbatical program launched the year after you started. How did that happen?

It was a brilliant invention by Robbie Macfarlane [Durfee’s first executive director]. Robbie had gone to the board with a one-time request for six leaders who he knew in Los Angeles to take a break. And the board said yes because that's who they are. And I think they thought, “Well, OK, that was a little idiosyncratic.” But when I came on, I had been working in the nonprofit sector and I had already been observing burnout in the field for 10 years. I had seen my colleagues who were quitting jobs at the time because it was the only way they could get a break. They couldn't take a vacation, so it was easier to quit and then wait to find a new job. So that was the frame in which I walked into Durfee. And I said, “Oh, there's the germ of a brilliant idea there. There could be some method to the madness. It doesn't have to be a one time, idiosyncratic thing. This could be of great service to the community.”

Carrie and I began to look around the country to see if anyone else was doing anything like this. We found the Vanguard Foundation in San Francisco, on which we modeled our program initially. Their niche was explicitly organizers. It turns out that there was another that preceded us, and that's the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation. We didn't figure that out until some years later. So, you know, the idea's percolating in the world in different places.

But the sabbatical program came from somebody else's idea — and it's kind of great in a humbling way. One of the things I always say at Durfee is that we've never had an original idea. Everything we do has come from someone else’s suggestion, usually one of our fellows or groups of our fellows. So we did the sabbatical. And then those fellows said, “That was fantastic. But nobody ever gives us money just to take time off to think and problem solve.” And that was the beginning of the Stanton Fellowship. Then, it was recognizing that there are a bunch of people who couldn't get a sabbatical, so the Lark Award program was created. So there’s a through line to the logic of it.

That goes to my next question, actually. Looking at Durfee’s history, it seems to have shifted focus from being a foundation that supports particular types of work to one that is trying both to improve the philanthropic sector and make it easier for all kinds of nonprofits to do their work. 

You're absolutely right. It happened for a couple of reasons, and it's a little geeky. We wouldn't put this on our website, but we are place based and issue agnostic. So the first shift was to say, let's focus on L.A., let's stop giving nationally and internationally. That was the first kind of setting the boundaries. 

Then, as the younger generation was in the wings and other trustees were coming on, one interesting catalyst for change was that not everybody had a passion or program area, and that was its own weird pressure. And we talked a lot among ourselves and we said, well, you don't have to create a program to be on the board. And when we had a slow realization that funding so many unrelated programs is not helpful to the community, because they can't see the logic of it, right? It's like, now you're doing music fellowships, you're doing LGBTQ issues, science, and I've got an idea, how about libraries? So we had that conversation about being more responsive to the community. 

Another important juncture along that journey was the whole question of discretionary funding, which is also a norm in philanthropy. The family began to realize that there is, as there is in many families, a kind of spectrum of political opinion. So we worked really, really hard to identify a mission that everyone could sign onto. And that was: Let's focus on making L.A. a better place. 

Our founder was here, the money came from here, it's a community that has need, it's under-resourced, and God knows there's more than enough that needs help. And it’s life-sized. We can go and meet all these people. So it's much more relational. It's not just imagining we're going to solve water in Africa. Somebody needs to do that. That's incredibly important. But for a family foundation, whose mode of being engaged in philanthropy is feeling like you're being helpful and making a difference, getting to actually meet the people was transformative. That's how we got to Los Angeles and largely to fellowships, and then rest, renewal and inquiry kind of became the two avenues for people who need to be rejuvenated, because burnout continues to be an issue in the sector. 

As a result, you’re having an impact far wider than L.A. because you publish the results of everything you do and because you’ve been an evangelist for this work.

We try. Thank you.

If you could give one piece of advice to other foundation leaders about a specific way they could improve on their mission, what would it be?

I think that the single hardest task in philanthropy is writing a mission and guidelines for what you will support. It's very easy to describe a wide net. You can't do everything, you can't be everything to everybody, when you've got a limited pot of money. I think the hardest, but most important and most valuable task for us all these years is revisiting the guidelines every year and the mission statement every two years.

I've always felt – you don't hear it so much now – but in my early days in philanthropy, there was a lot of, “We got 3,000 applications, and we could only make 10 grants.” And I think, “Well, you didn't do a good job writing your guidelines, because that was not a good use of anyone's time. That was a waste of time and money.” And the reality is, you actually know what you're looking for. It's just really hard to articulate it. So articulate it — save the nonprofit sector’s time, because being so vague causes enormous disillusionment and disappointment. And I've always thought that fostering optimism is the responsibility of philanthropy. 

I'm also personally very committed to the idea that programs should be open-application. People in the nonprofit sector are changemakers. Invitation-only closes the door to equity; it closes the door to access. It's deeply frustrating for people who make change. Figure it out! 

You’ve talked to a fair number of journalists in your career, including me. Is there something you’ve always wished someone would ask you but they never have?

I always ask people, “How much fun are you having on a scale of one to 10 today?”and I've always found it to be the quickest read of whether they are working within an environment that is conducive to what they are hoping to accomplish or not. So if I were to say to you today, “Dawn, how much fun are you having in your work on a scale of one to 10?” If you were to say “four,” then I would say, “Whoa, what would get you over five?” 

I think that as a field we tend to be very metrics driven, and I respect very much the people who are using data to drive an effort to make a change. But I've also subscribed very much to that quote — it’s wrongly attributed to Einstein — that not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. A lot of what we do in our field, particularly trying to give people a space for rest and rejuvenation, is fundamentally [about] a sense of security, a sense of purpose, and a sense of capacity. Those things are hard to measure. How do you measure optimism? How do you measure self esteem? How do you measure drive? 

I think that's the purview of philanthropy, actually, because at the end of the day, we have fallen for the myth that we have the money to change big problems. I believe very strongly that our role is to work in partnership with nonprofit leaders in the trenches who already have strategies that are trying to make change, and we can work with government or other entities that might be working at a bigger scale. But not to try to engineer all the results ourselves or to design everything. 

What’s next for you? Your degrees are in the visual arts and you’re a published writer. Is more writing, or more art, in your future?

Yes, there's a little chunk of writing, I think. After 28 years in the sector, and as I leave and take the blinders off, I realized that I have a little bit of pent-up frustration about philanthropy. That's fine; that’s normal. There's just some things I want to write, and I want to make sure that it's kind and amusing and not finger pointing. But that's something I'll do sooner than later.

On the art front, I don't know what form it will take, but I am imagining some kind of passion project that will probably be a hybrid of storytelling, writing and maybe some visuals, about some of our favorite people in the nonprofit sector. The questions that we always ask in our fellowship are: “Why do you do what you do, and what have you learned along the way?” The “why would you do what you do” stories are so profound and so deeply personal. I’m also really interested in who people are when they’re not working, and how surprising that sometimes is — like the East L.A. Latina environmental activist who is also a Jane Austen fan and cosplays in Jane Austin period clothing, things like that.

Well, this conversation has definitely made my day a “10!” 

That’s how I feel about my entire life at Durfee. It's been an enormous privilege. And that was the thing we didn’t say, is that to get to do this kind of work is just such a rarity and an enormous privilege.