Will trust-based philanthropy solve the funder to nonprofit power imbalance?

“Once you signal to a nonprofit, ‘hey, we trust you to use these resources the way that you deem best,’ that automatically opens up an opportunity to build a relationship of trust that may not already be there. And it creates space for you to say, ‘let's have a conversation about what you're learning and what's going on.’ It creates a bigger container to understand the whole of the work so that we can be better-informed funders to support that work.

— Shaady Salehi

Shaady Salehi, Executive Director of the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, joins Fluxx co-founder Kerrin Mitchell for a conversation on Untapped Philanthropy, where the two dive into how trust-based philanthropy seeks to rebalance power between funders and nonprofits. Trust-based philanthropy requires us to take a long view of change and recontextualize our definitions of impact and rigor, not only in quantitative measures, but in terms of our relationships. In addition to concrete entry-points into taking a trust-based approach, Shaady and Kerrin’s conversation explores how our impact can collectively grow if we focus our concepts of rigor onto creating relationships that attend to power and build trust.