Since George Floyd’s murder two years ago this month, and the national racial reckoning that followed, many grant makers have embraced the notion that to be truly transformative they must give up their power and work in partnership with the communities they aim to serve. Few, however, have successfully shifted from good intentions to genuine action.
Three Chicago-area foundations recognized the problem last month when they announced the formation of a program called Abundance that would bring grant makers together to share practices for increasing support to Black-led nonprofits. That struck a chord with us.
For more than two years, our organizations, Open Society Institute-Baltimore and Baltimore’s Promise, have worked together to achieve what should be simple goals: to provide more support for groups whose leaders live and work in the city’s historically underinvested communities while putting funding decisions in the hands of those who understand best what their neighbors need.
We knew a better funding approach was urgently needed. While 65 percent of Baltimore’s population is Black, majority-white neighborhoods consistently receive more philanthropic dollars and nearly four times as much economic investment as neighborhoods where at least 85 percent of residents are Black.
These trends continued during the pandemic. An analysis of grants made as part of the 2021 Baltimore Summer Funding Collaborative found that grant applications from organizations with white leaders were funded 68 percent of the time compared with 48 percent for Black-led nonprofits. For many reasons, including entrenched power dynamics and institutional racism, the traditional top-down grant-making paradigm in Baltimore, as in much of the country, has barely budged.
Baltimore’s Promise had recently witnessed the problem firsthand. The organization, which brings together groups focused on improving outcomes for the city’s youth, had coordinated funding collaboratives that effectively allocated millions of dollars for Covid-19 relief and summer enrichment programs. But Baltimore’s Promise and many of its donors were troubled by the disproportionately smaller amounts of funding that went to organizations led by those who were Black, Indigenous, and people of color. Baltimore’s Promise sought to develop a model in which the voices of community members affected by philanthropic funds could decide how resources were allocated.
At the same time, Open Society Institute-Baltimore, the U.S. field office of Open Society Foundations, was searching for the best way to respond to the divisive debate over “defunding the police” in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and was exploring investments in violence-prevention programs that offered alternatives to policing.
With a shared commitment to expanding community involvement in funding decisions, our organizations decided to join forces and create a new funding collaborative, B’More Invested, with the goal of attracting more local and national investment in solutions conceived and led by the city’s grassroots leaders of color.
At a time when many grant makers are wrestling with how to shift the balance of power to grantees, we believe our experience provides important lessons about both the challenges and the potential of such an approach.
Our first task was to bring together a grant advisory team made up of 23 community leaders and 11 local and national foundations to distribute $1.5 million in grants. For our pilot program, the funds would go to 10 nonprofits led by people of color who were working on policing alternatives that promoted healthy, safe, and thriving neighborhoods.
The composition of the advisory team intentionally put grant-making decisions firmly in the hands of community leaders, including those who had grown understandably skeptical of institutional philanthropy. The team members included leaders of organizations focused on mediating community disputes, youth activists, and the head of a microfinancing group modeled after traditional mutual-aid societies.
It quickly became clear during the first meetings that foundation staff and community advisers held vastly different perspectives. For instance, the two groups disagreed about what constituted a strong track record when it came to determining grant criteria. Grant makers often focused on the size of the organization and its history of receiving and managing grants from other foundations. Community members, on the other hand, spoke from personal knowledge, playing up potential grantees’ roots and work in the community.
A decision was made to delay the grant-making timeline to hold team-building sessions focused on coming up with acceptable shared terminology and building trust. This was not a simple process. It took several months and required bringing in outside consultants to facilitate conversations and develop decision-making strategies.
As discussions advanced, the community members challenged the foundation advisers to examine some of their assumptions about grant making, and together, members pushed each other to think differently about what it means to have genuine impact. They collectively agreed on several guidelines, including the following:
Forgo RFPs. Grant makers often issue requests for proposals, or RFPs, to solicit funding requests. But such tools tend to benefit organizations with administrative expertise, access to grant writers, and existing relationships with white-led foundations and other institutions. The advisory team instead identified organizations they saw doing work in their communities and approached them directly.
Rather than burden these overworked, underresourced organizations with an application process, the advisory team opted to hold virtual interviews to determine if they were a good match. B’more Invested staff also worked with potential grantees to help them document the approaches and strategies that helped them create safer neighborhoods. When the process concluded, all materials were given back to the organizations to use for their own fundraising or other purposes.
Put less emphasis on geographic equality. Some of the foundation representatives were used to distributing grants so that different parts of the city were equally represented, without accounting for the varied needs of local communities and populations. This meant that nonprofits in the most struggling neighborhoods did not get the funds necessary to effectively respond to ongoing challenges. Together, the foundation and community representatives agreed to focus on equitable, rather than equal, distribution of resources, funneling more grants to areas of the city with the greatest need.
Let go of assumptions about experience managing large budgets. Foundations often want to see a history of managing comparably sized grants before approving funding. The community advisers, by contrast, embraced the concept of what’s come to be known as trust-based philanthropy. They assumed that, given appropriate support, organizations with a track record of community trust and strong leadership could effectively manage a large grant, whether or not they had received one in the past. Community advisers also stressed the importance of looking at a leader’s management of nonfinancial resources such as volunteer time, donations, and in-kind contributions as an additional way to understand leaders’ ability to steward resources.
The grantees who were ultimately selected included several highly effective organizations that had previously struggled to draw foundation funding. They were groups such as Fight Blight Bmore, which engages community members to address the problem of abandoned and dilapidated properties, and the Bloom Collective, a group of reproductive-health and wellness practitioners committed to Black and Indigenous traditions of care.
Many of the grantees have limited expertise in areas such as finance, administration, communications, and other skills beneficial to long-term success under more traditional funding criteria. This was predictable. In prioritizing lived experience and the impact of a group’s work in its community, the grant advisory team anticipated that potential grantees might have fewer of the skills typically favored by institutional grant makers.
In response, funding was provided for training and consultation in areas where grantees requested help, including finance and administration, legal and governance issues, data and evaluation, strategic communications, and fundraising. The hope is that such investments will help grantees expand their work and secure future foundation investment.
The grants are already allowing these groups to deepen their efforts in the communities they serve. For example, BYKE, which teaches young people the mechanics of fixing and riding bikes, was able to buy a bus and bring its services to kids throughout the city. And Out for Justice, which is led by and composed of formerly incarcerated people, has hired staff and expanded its advocacy to help returning citizens integrate into the community.
Beyond their specific work, these groups are demonstrating what creative disruption of the status quo looks like when community members call the shots about how philanthropic dollars are invested in their neighborhoods. They are showing what sharing philanthropic power is all about.