The trust-based philanthropy movement has arisen over the past decade with a crucial vision of empowering nonprofit and community-based organizations as collaborators with grant makers, not simply as beneficiaries of their support.
This movement invites us to ask a profound question: Do we understand what philanthropy is? And can philanthropy have the impact it seeks without this shared understanding?
The trust-based philanthropy movement initially focused on the groundbreaking idea of multiyear, unrestricted operating grants. This form of support can be crucial for nonprofits, especially start-ups, those serving marginalized communities, and those led by people of color. But few foundations have felt comfortable making these kinds of grants. Other beliefs and practices may offer different but still effective ways to get at the problem. For example:
● Developing new strategies for giving and implementation
● Reframing sourcing, due diligence, and grantee selection
● Reshaping evaluations and impact
● Perhaps most fundamentally, rethinking how learning happens and is shared
Of these steps, we — as representatives of a nonprofit and a foundation — have seen powerful outcomes when collective, collaborative learning is central to the relationship between the grant maker and the grantee. Here are some ways foundations can adopt this approach and increase their impact.
Involve Potential Grantees in Learning — Early
Creating these kinds of opportunities for learning calls for a different approach to strategy development at the outset. A great many grant makers still get information about trends, structures, and movements not from community leaders but from consulting firms and other philanthropy-serving organizations they trust.
These resource organizations are essential to philanthropy, but potential grantees, especially those from marginalized groups, rarely have relationships or track records with the funding community and so are not at the table with grant makers as they learn about trends and approaches.
This hard work of connecting with these groups is the only way forward. When there are opportunities along the way for grant makers to sit with, learn from, and engage as partners the people and organizations that will be helping realize their vision, they build genuine relationships with potential grantees that could shape their thinking.
The Ford Foundation learned the power of working this way by co-developing with disability advocates the President’s Council of the Disability & Philanthropy Forum. Informed by the mantra “Nothing about us without us,” this effort has become a thoughtful, innovative coalition of grant makers dedicated to inclusion.
But such collaboration still rarely happens. Instead, in most instances, grantees become simply vehicles for enacting grant makers’ visions. They may not understand the foundations’ questions, concerns, or uncertainties or have access to the resources they are using to make decisions. Without this mutual understanding, grant-making relationships quickly become self-limiting.
Consider again the example of multiyear support. Suppose a grant maker has a three-year vision informed by historical impact data, while a grantee’s ideal three-year project plan encompasses implementation, evaluation, and refinement. The two entities will always be at cross-purposes. The foundation’s timeline does not allow for pivots; the grantee, feeling pressed to report impact, stops short of important and needed innovations.
This situation could be avoided by being clearer at the outset about everyone’s assumptions and expectations. For example, how open are both parties to failure, how willing are they to make course corrections, and what does success look like? When grant makers and potential grantees have these conversations, they create learning relationships that advance not just their individual and mutual interests but the field as a whole.
More important, without these relationships, there is little opportunity to develop the trust to say, “I understand your thinking, I’m aligned with your purpose, and I believe this will be a good outcome.”
There are exceptions. Sometimes robust learning relationships do occur in philanthropy. For example, several years ago, as the S.D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation prepared to end its practice, it made five-year final grants to a group of youth-serving organizations including Girls Inc. The foundation required the grantees to form a community of practice. Bechtel met with and learned from each nonprofit but also organized meetings that its staff explicitly did not join so that the grantees could learn from each other.
This community of practice created a habit of candor and reflectiveness that continues to inform these organizations’ work. Unfortunately, such opportunities more often exist when grantees are already a part of a network the foundation trusts — not typically the case for the leaders of color and others from marginalized communities whom trust-based philanthropy most seeks to support. This remains one of the great roadblocks to equity.
The Path Forward: Three Key Steps
Positioning philanthropy — as an ecosystem of grant makers, grantees, and shared objectives — to do more collective learning is the trust-based movement’s next frontier. To achieve that, foundations and their nonprofit and community-based partners need to engage in at least three ways:
- Share information and learn alongside each other so that both organizations achieve mutual objectives. For example, build in an explicit expectation that some of what the grantee attempts will fail, or at least lead to a very different understanding. For grantees, this allows for bold action and creativity, while for foundations, it leads to faster, better learning, which translates to greater impact.
- Grantees should coach funders, just as funders should coach grantees. With the clear expectation that both organizations will be candid, foundations are free to help grantees sharpen their approach to the work, and grantees are not afraid to help foundations ask more nuanced or probing questions.
- Evaluate together the changes that result and the possibilities that remain. With a mutually trusting approach, it is possible to see pivots not as failures but as unexpected and helpful data points — or perhaps even directions for future efforts.
Taking these steps depends on a genuine willingness of grant makers, and the consultants and other resource organizations they work with, to involve potential grantees early, as interlocutors. It also requires a willingness of potential grantees to see these conversations truly as learning opportunities, not just occasions to court support.
Given its defining commitment to equity, power-sharing, and true partnership between foundations and grantees, trust-based philanthropy has the potential to truly shift the ecosystem and create more inherently equitable and powerful solutions. For grant makers who share that vision, the movement’s progress may depend first on taking a step back to create these new kinds of collaborative learning opportunities, alongside grantees.
