Instead of giving their grantees marching orders, John Esterle and Pia Infante rely on the nonprofits they support to measure progress and define success.
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The San Francisco grant makers are on a mission to share their trust-based approach to philanthropy with the foundation world. Esterle and Infante jointly run the Whitman Institute, a foundation that plans to spend down its assets by 2022. They’re using the institute’s last few years in business to demonstrate how foundations can move away from a command-and-control-style relationship with the nonprofits they support and give grantees more decision-making power.
Organizations that receive grants from the Whitman Institute don’t have to file year-end reports chronicling their progress. If they’ve written updates and evaluations for other foundations, Infante and Esterle will take a look. But groups don’t have to adhere to a strategy cooked up in the San Francisco grant maker’s offices, and they won’t be hectored about missing the mark on their goals.
Instead, grantees — at a time of their choosing — sit down with Esterle and Infante for an in-depth conversation.
During the talks, they ask grantees basic questions: What does success mean for you? How are you incorporating what you’re learning into your work? What are you excited about? How’s it going?
“Our approach to dialogue is that it’s grounded in curiosity and empathy,” Esterle says. “There’s not a specific protocol.”
In some ways, Esterle and Infante are opposites. He’s a white, male boomer; she’s a queer, Philippine-born Gen-Xer. Infante says she’s more of an extrovert, used to being “in the front of the room,” and a fast-talker while Esterle listens longer before speaking up.
After the foundation decided to spend down by 2022, the board decided that its concluding mission would be to share its experiences with trust-based philanthropy — a term developed from grantee responses to a Center for Effective Philanthropy survey — with other grant makers. Infante, who had been consulting with Whitman for years, was named co-executive director to help define the practices put in place by Esterle and founder Fred Whitman (who died in 2004) and spread the word.
Any disagreements between the two are decided by the board — a tiebreaker vote has never been necessary.
The shared duties reflect their belief that collaboration is the best way to drive progress in their community-organizing and journalism grant-making programs. And collaboration means giving up control.
“When I gave up some of my personal power, we became a more powerful organization,” Esterle says of the decision to bring Infante on as co-executive director.
In addition to minimizing paperwork, trust-based philanthropy calls on grant makers to be responsive to grantee questions and mindful about the inherent power imbalance between foundations and the nonprofits they support. To lessen the burden on nonprofits to raise money, the approach recommends that grant makers provide unrestricted multiyear grants and do their homework on the subject matter they are supporting before a grant is made so nonprofits aren’t saddled with the extra task of educating the foundation. One of the most important goals, Infante says, is to reduce burnout and turnover at nonprofits while giving them the freedom to take risks.
Each relationship is different and directed by the grantee, Infante says. Some want to meet like clockwork every few months, offer detailed written reports, and ask her or Esterle to serve as advisers. Others touch base only during key decision-making moments.
Through dialogue, Infante says, she and Esterle can develop a strong understanding of their grantees’ needs and nourish the trust that’s necessary to reduce the bureaucracy that often accompanies grant making.
“This approach is attractive because it gets you out from behind the laptop, gets you into the field and into relationships and community partnerships,” she says.
Unequal Power Dynamic
Lots of other grant makers have taken notice. In October of 2018, officials from the Libra, Compton, and McKnight foundations participated in the retreat Whitman holds each year for its grantees. The goal: to learn more about trust-based philanthropy. Representatives from philanthropy networks like the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, and Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement were also on hand to learn about Whitman’s way.
While the unequal power dynamic between foundations and grantees never entirely goes away, Esterle believes that if it is acknowledged upfront and people take the time to get to know one another, it can gradually dissipate.
“The field would benefit from more space where nonprofits and funders, practitioners and researchers can come together and kind of bring their whole selves into the room,” he says.
By “whole selves,” Esterle means that participants need to have free time to talk about their personal lives, their families, pastimes, and aspirations. The goal, he says, is to get to know people through meaningful dialogue.
That can happen only if grant makers are vulnerable, too. If they own up to the fact that they don’t have all the answers and rely on grantees rather than dictate to them, foundations and the nonprofits they support can be true partners, Infante says. “It makes it all a little less daunting and a little less stressful.”
Alex Daniels covers foundations, donor-advised funds, fundraising research, and tax issues for the Chronicle. He recently wrote about the distribution of $1 billion in grants to four research institutions and the Carnegie Corporation’s urging fellow grant makers to support voting rights. Email Alex or follow him on Twitter.
