We Can’t Achieve Impact Without Investing in Relationships
Sarah Walczyk,
Executive Director,
Satterberg Foundation
What do you do when your foundation changes overnight? In 2012, we went from $4 million to $400 million in assets after a member of the family passed and left his estate to the foundation. That moment of scramble also presented the opportunity to ask, how can we change the funder and grantee relationship? How can we share power more equitably and imagine a less transactional approach? Working in nonprofits for 14 years before coming to this side of philanthropy, I wrote grants. I tried to make relationships with funders. I knew what the potential for real partnership, and for listening to the actual needs of nonprofits, could look like. But that potential is realized over time, not overnight.
When Satterberg had an opportunity to reenvision our approach, we centered relationships. We established a new multi-year grant strategy that emerged from -- and was co-created with -- the community through a participatory process. We reimagined the application and reports. We started to see ourselves as learning partners with our grantees. All that laid the foundation for our trust-based principles.
It takes a lot of work to create the culture that needs to exist for trust-based pivots to happen. We spend just as much time developing our grant strategies as we spend developing relationships with each other. When I talk to people who are trying to change practices and they don’t have a relationship with their board to push certain things, or who are working with boards that aren’t open to change, I have been trying to name what conditions existed for us to do this work. What does our internal culture need to feel like to do this work together? It needs to feel like everyone’s voice is heard. What do we need to know this is working? We need to listen for feedback, and not pretend to have the answers. This can be a challenge, and it can be exhausting. It means reimagining the grant strategy every year, acknowledging that change is a constant in our work, and not running on autopilot. And in my case working with a family foundation, it also means acknowledging that how this group of people treats each other inside the boardroom may have to look different than outside. It means we need a set of ground rules and culture different from the implicit rules of their family structure. And that’s messy sometimes.
Deepening our relationships with each other in this way continues to allow us to move resources swiftly when people need it most. Around the 2020 election for example, our board president at the time showed up to a board meeting with the idea that we needed to move some money to Georgia. I had this moment of saying, “Well... we don't do national funding.” Everyone panicked at first. But he was committed. We started talking about how his idea aligned with our newly articulated values, how we could move resources in a trust-based way to organizations that needed them urgently. Eventually we made a $10 million commitment over 10 years for movement work nationally. We can get decisions like that based on values faster than if someone wrote a proposal, working from what feels right. If it feels like it's our responsibility to respond to this moment and if it’s aligned with our core values, we’re learning to follow that impulse.