Beth Foster-Chao
The Autodesk Foundation is pleased to highlight progress made towards embedding the principles of access and inclusion across our work. From portfolio leadership diversity to supporting inclusion in the funding ecosystem to equipping emerging talent from around the world, we are motivated by the potential for access and inclusion principles to advance our entire team’s work addressing the most pressing social and environmental challenges.
Portfolio leadership diversity
For the last four years we have surveyed our portfolio to understand the makeup of their leadership teams, and to gather data to inform our Access & Inclusion initiatives. Year over year, the diversity of our portfolio leadership has grown. FY24’s survey again showed promising results of how our portfolio leadership has expanded to be more representative of the communities we aim to positively impact.
The following results reflect 90% of the active portfolio, including 16 new organizations. Since June 2022, we’ve achieved a 12% increase in women-led organizations, 16% increase in people of color-led organizations, 38% increase in Black- or Latinx-led* organizations, and 32% increase in locally led organizations.
When looking at the data within each of our impact opportunity areas—Energy & Materials, Health & Resilience, and Work & Prosperity—we found that all three portfolios saw improvements in key diversity metrics. This demonstrated how we’ve moved the needle towards more inclusion and representation across geographies, sectors, and impact solutions.
Our sustained focus on this work has led us to build a stronger and more inclusive sourcing infrastructure. While it does take ongoing intentionality and commitment to connect with a more diverse slate of innovators across our three impact opportunity areas, our network of co-funders, innovators, and pipeline partners has grown significantly since 2020. Though this network is only one conduit for sourcing organizations (we review all unsolicited inquiries and proactively reach out to organizations uncovered through our research), it has been instrumental in our ability to reach both our Access & Inclusion and capital deployment targets.
Inclusive Climate Innovation Initiative: Backing ecosystem builders
Our 2020 and 2022 portfolio survey data showed lower levels of leadership diversity in our Energy & Materials portfolio, which focuses on breakthrough climate mitigation technologies, than in our other two portfolios. This data reinforced our understanding that there are numerous barriers that historically underrepresented climate innovators face. Following extensive research, conversations with experts, and a review of our pipeline development approach, we saw an opportunity to launch an initiative to help address these challenges: the Inclusive Climate Innovation Initiative (ICII).
The ICII aims to bolster leading entrepreneur support organizations (ESOs) that play essential roles in supporting emerging climate innovators. By directing resources further upstream, we are advancing our long-term pipeline efforts while also underscoring the value ESOs provide to the innovation ecosystem.
Beyond funding
Through our Access & Inclusion strategy, our efforts have expanded beyond grantmaking and investing to encompass the broader resources and opportunities we offer. For example, as part of our post-investment programs, we partner with Engineering for Change (E4C) to offer five-month fellowships that place global technical talent with Autodesk Foundation portfolio organizations. These fellowships support our portfolio to access much-needed technical talent while providing fellows with paid opportunities to advance their careers.
Of the 29 Autodesk Foundation-supported E4C Fellows in 2023, 96% came from countries outside North America and Europe and 38% identified as female or gender non-binary.
Ongoing commitment
As a foundation, we are committed to impact accountability and aim to bring more data and transparency around access and inclusion in the investment and grantmaking field. We also acknowledge our responsibility to steward resources responsibly, which means diligently monitoring not just the impact outcomes of the solutions we back, but also making Autodesk Foundation capital, in-kind programs, and platforms accessible to innovators around the world.
Each year, we explore new ways to further access and inclusion principles and find areas where we can improve our methods. In sharing our journey in this blog, we hope other funders can benefit from what we’ve tested and learned, and we invite feedback and ideas that would strengthen our endeavors.
Learn more about how our access and inclusion progress in our annual impact report.