Transcript: Doing the Homework
Shaady Salehi: Hello everyone, welcome. We are thrilled to be here today in partnership with Philanthropy California, which consists of our lovely partners at Northern California Grantmakers, Southern California Grantmakers, and San Diego Grantmakers. This is the second webinar in a series of seven, all focused on the principles of trust-based philanthropy and how to make the case for this approach. Today’s focus is on Doing the Homework. We’ll hear from three different foundations on how they embody this principle, and we’ll have time for questions.
Our three fabulous speakers are all Steering Committee members from the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project. We've got Carrie Avery, President of the Durfee Foundation in Los Angeles, Pia Infante, Co-Executive Director of the Whitman Institute in San Francisco, and Brenda Solarzano, CEO of the Headwaters Foundation in Missoula, Montana. I first want to invite Pia Infante to share her reflections on the bigger picture of trust-based philanthropy and the values that underlie all its principles.
Pia Infante: Thanks, Shaady. It’s so good to see so many of you here. I think the moment we're in currently really highlights exactly how our systems don't work well for most, right? Whether we're talking about healthcare, democracy, education, and so on. We’re hoping that a trust-based approach contributes to making systems-level shifts in how power is shared and distributed. Sometimes with the principles, it can seem like we’re focused solely on how funders do grantmaking—but it’s so much more than that. We want to shift philanthropy to be more accountable to communities, to be better partners for social movement leaders. Trust-based relationships are the foundational component—not just between funders and grantees, but between boards and staff, nonprofits and communities, and so on. With the principles, we’re starting with a look at how systems operate internally. But it’s not just a simple checklist where you can cross them off one by one and then be done. This is meant for culture and systems change.
Shaady Salehi: Given this big picture, why is doing the homework so key in alleviating power dynamics in philanthropy?
Pia Infante: A lot of the unevenness comes from the fact that we, as funders sitting on endowments, often act as gatekeepers. The way these funds are designed to be released, it’s all about us claiming a lot of power for these monies…which are really monies that were not put into the taxation system, right? Monies that should have gone to public programs that have been set aside for us to direct. From my experience, for our powerful partners on the ground doing the policy work, the movement work that is so necessary, it lands like…you know, like they’re the supplicants and we are the experts or monarchs. There’s an inherent dynamic that is created just by virtue of us holding money and being in the decision-making seat. We can’t fully alleviate the power dynamic, but there are ways w can start to democratize the process and take on responsibility for deepening our role beyond that of gatekeepers.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you, Pia. So, what do we actually mean when we're talking about doing the homework? One of the main threats of this is what Pia was alluding to—nonprofits put so much time and energy into positioning their work in the context of a funder’s priorities, into applying for funds and evaluating their work and reporting back to us. There's a lot of front-end work. In some cases, folks are going through a million hoops to submit pre-application materials. Sometimes there's a million attachments that you have to include. The burden of due diligence, of proving fit, has been put onto the nonprofits. How can we balance that? How can we alleviate that? I want to start with Brenda from Headwaters Foundation—Brenda, doing the homework was such a key part of how you approached even developing the initial strategy for Headwaters as a startup foundation. Can you share your story?
Brenda Solarzano: Absolutely. Hello everyone. I'm really excited to be joining here. Headwaters is a health conversion foundation, and I was the founding CEO. I had had about 18 years of prior experience in California at a number of different health foundations. I’d spent those 18 years wondering why we do a lot of the things we do as funders, all of the hoop jumping and obstacles we impose, and what value those things really created for anyone. The nonprofits that I funded over the course of those 18 years really were the experts on their social change work, and they just needed the resources to make it happen. I wanted create a completely different foundation that isn’t a gatekeeper to resources, but rather a facilitator lifting up organizations that are the experts in their issues and their communities.
That was the premise I used in developing Headwaters. I started with what I call “600 Cups of Coffee” across Western Montana with community leaders, students, hospitals, CEOs, with just about anybody that was willing to talk to me. I spent 3-4 months just going up and down the region having conversations with folks about what it was that they wanted to see a foundation prioritize.
Based on that community input, our board determined the focus of our foundation and our grantmaking. We got very clear and very specific—because while we are a $100 million foundation, making us the second largest health foundation in all of Montana, it's not nearly enough to address all of the issues that exist in the region.
So this formed the basis of our strategic plan, and we’ve been very intentionally transparent from the start about what we do and do not fund. We believe that if you're on the ground doing work aligned with our foundation’s mission and strategy (which were defined by the community) then we should be funding you. And if you’re not mission-aligned, then we can’t fund you. I had so many candid conversations with nonprofits that did not align with our mission, and they really appreciated the clarity—so many nonprofits spend a lot of times turning themselves into a pretzel and adapting their work to fit into a funder’s narrative in order to access resources. We didn’t want people to have to do that with us.
So, it was our responsibility to have these cups of coffee from the beginning. We also had a series of town hall meetings in every county that we worked in. And doing the homework continues to be key in how we work as a foundation. In our larger systems-level grants or complex grants, we spend time sitting with mission-aligned partners and developing an understanding of what they do and what they need. Our staff then comes back and enters all the information into our grants management system. There is actually no application required on the nonprofits’ side, freeing up their time to focus on their work. Our system then spits out a grant agreement that we send back to the grantee. We say, this is our understanding of our conversation—let us know if there’s anything you want to add, remove, or edit. And then we incorporate that feedback and send out the final grant agreement. So it’s a complete role reversal, right? Instead of nonprofits, our staff does all the work of collecting and entering information and going back and forth.
Another example is a responsive grantmaking program we have called Go! Grants. There it’s actually mainly the system doing the work, as opposed to the nonprofit or foundation staff. Nonprofits go in and create a short organizational profile, answering a few basic application questions which takes 5-10 minutes. Our system checks against a couple of existing databases to ensure the organization is a legitimate 501c3, does a word algorithm check to make sure the organization’s mission statement aligns with our focus areas, and then checks the zip code to make sure they’re within the region that we serve. If all these criteria are met, the system gives the organization a green light and then we can automatically approve the grant. As a result, we’re able to approve grants in 24 hours and get a check out in two weeks. These are general operating grants. It moves so quickly, and we’ve gotten so much positive feedback from our grantees, hearing again and again that it’s the easiest, simplest application process they’ve seen. And it’s very minimal workload on staff because the system is doing the work they would normally do. From a due diligence side, 501c3 status and mission alignment are really the two things that are most important for foundations to be able to act.
The last example I’ll give is that for both our big grants and our go! grants, our grantees don't submit reports. We go on coffee dates with them to local coffee houses and we have a conversation, and then our staff takes notes and comes back and enters all of that into our system. That is how we're actually tracking the stories of impact and outcomes from the grants that we're making.
Shaady Salehi: Thanks, Brenda. There's a few themes that I want to pull out. One is that you’re hearing elements other trust-based principles here: simplifying paperwork, gathering feedback, and being transparent and responsive. So one thing to remember is that all of these principles are more effective when practiced together, and they’re all inherently connected
On to Carrie—what does your approach to doing the homework look like at Durfee?
Carrie Avery: Durfee is certainly very different from Headwaters—Brenda had the ability to build a brand new foundation from the ground up, based on her experience working in traditional philanthropy. Durfee, on the other hand, is a 60-year-old family foundation. It was founded in Los Angeles in 1960 and we've been practicing in a trust-based way for a very long time. We have four staff…often people say, we don’t have enough staff, wwe don’t have enough time to be able to do the homework. But we are very small-staffed and have long operated this way.
As a foundation we focus on LA county. I’ll begin with one of our grant programs called the Springboard program, which is for newer organizations, less than five years old, focused on the grassroots level with strong leadership. We have an open application process. An organization called Project Q applied to us last year. They aim to give gender appropriate haircuts to LGBTQ youth, and also act as a conduit and provide services for the many homeless youth that come through their doors.
These kinds of grassroots organizations are often not connected to traditional philanthropy. They come to us in a variety of ways. We have our website of course, because we are regionally focused word definitely gets out in the LA area about us. And then we do most of the work in finding ourselves in finding strong, aligned organizations, through conversation, through being out in communities and just through being open and available.
We also have a deep network. Even though we're a family foundation, we also have non-family on our board—community members, former grantees, executive directors from the area. When an application comes in that seems promising, we will reach out to our network, whether it's our board or former grantee staff and EDs.
Because we're issue-agnostic, we don't have subject matter expertise. If we get an application in domestic violence or mental health, we have people that we can go to, to get further information about these organizations and their fields. For our sabbatical program that we offer for nonprofit Eds, we always have alums sitting on the selection panel. The alums are the experts and they typically outnumber us as staff and trustees on the selection panel. That’s the basic outline for how we operate in terms of doing the homework.
Shaady Salehi: Thanks, Carrie. We had a question come in from the chat—how do you structure community decision-making in a way that is mindful of power dynamics that may be present in the communities themselves?
Carrie Avery: Yeah, that's a great question. We are not fully participatory grantmakers, which is when, you know, the funders turn the entire decision-making process over to the community. We're still holding the decision-making process, but it's informed by the community. But the question is still an important one. We really have a…a no jerks rule when we’re looking for partners. Because we operate as a network, we have a lot of events and retreats. We want our partners to get along with and support each other. We have our radar on for those who are territorial, who don't play well with others. We're really looking for the collaborators and the generous folks who recognize that the more that we partner, the better we all are. So that's something that we're paying close attention to. I can't say that we're perfect at it, but it's part of our values.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you, Carrie. Brenda, would you speak to your process of having nonprofits identify other nonprofits to receive long-term funding? That was a very unique community-driven process.
Brenda Solarzano: One of the things we heard from our community through the 600 cups of coffee and town hall meetings was that they wanted us to focus on early childhood. We looked at models around the country and realized that most of the states that have early childhood efforts have an anchor organization that drives efforts at the local level. And so we developed a similar model. Instead of putting out an RFP and taking months and months to figure out who you're going to fund in each community, we held an open meeting in every single community we work in. We put the information on our website, we put it in the paper. We told people to pass it along. So we had big groups of people show up.
We put up on a board the ten things we were looking for in an anchor organization and asked everyone to nominate organizations that they thought met those criteria. Then we had everyone pull out their cell phones and vote. We said that whichever organization got to 70% of the vote, we would fund. In every community that we did this, it only took one vote to get to 70%. That to me was a clear indication of the strength of community knowledge. They really knew who were the trusted leaders, who had the expertise, who met the criteria. We've been working with those anchor organizations for about a year and a half now, and they have been phenomenal partners. The community was right. And we were able to do this process in a couple of afternoons, rather than over months. And it was totally transparent, and the power was really with the community. And this gets back to what Pia mentioned—it’s about building a culture, an ecosystem of trust.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you so much Brenda. A lot of people are also curious about the trust-based principles in the time of a pandemic. Carrie, how have you and the Durfee foundation team deployed your approach of doing the homework in your COIVD response?
Carrie Avery: Our current response has been to release 20 grants immediately, whether they were scheduled to go out in December or October or whenever. We started smaller peer networks so that people can meet week by week to discuss new challenges and support each other, especially around leading online, which is a new challenge for so many executive directors right now. We’ve also been doing emergency funding and making general operating support grants to food security organizations that are in our portfolio.
We can do all this because we have already done the homework, you know, because we have trust built with our partners. Doing the homework sets the stage for success in difficult times like these.
Brenda Solarzano: We had a very similar experience at Headwaters—because we were already in relationship with grantees, we already provided a lot of general operating support. So a lot of our partner organizations were able to pivot very quickly, especially our policy advocacy groups. Our Montana nonprofit association partner pivoted completely and has become a go-to resource in the state. We also asked our board to approve an additional allocation to address some of the new needs that we were seeing and hearing from our community partners. Our staff spent the first two weeks of lockdown time talking to all of our grantees, to understand what was happening in the communities across Western Montana and what the needs were.
We then developed expansions to our portfolio accordingly, with a focus on frontline workers and food security. The board approved the buckets, they approved grant ranges. And then the next day, our staff called all these organizations to get the grant agreement finalizes. We were able to move quickly, because of the culture of trust at the board level, at the staff level, at the community level. For us, it always comes back to trust.
Shaady Salehi: Brenda, a follow-up question here from the chat: By “community” in the phrase “community decision process”, do you mean grass tops, grass bottoms, or both?
Brenda Solarzano: Both. We have partners all across Montana, all across all different levels. We were talking to government officials at the state level, at the local level. We were talking to our grantee partners and asking them, who should we talk to? We were asking our board’s network. We try to end conversations like these with the question: who else should we talk to? This helps us broaden beyond our immediate network.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you Brenda. Pia, could you talk a little about the Whitman Institute’s to doing the homework?
Pia Infante: Before I jump into our work, can we I just say…snaps to these amazing woman like Carrie and Brenda! Not to be vulgar, but these are some dope ass people, right?! I feel very honored to be following in the footsteps Claire and Durfee, who've been doing this for many decades and to be able to learn from them. Brenda’s foundation may be young, but her experience is so deep and strong, I’ve been taking vigorous notes! I really appreciate the nuances you both shared and want to lift them up a little because they help clarify what we really mean by doing the homework.
First, both Durfee and Headwaters have a very clear mission and strategy, and a very clear profile of the kinds of work and groups that they want to fund. This includes a race, economics, gender, and regional analysis of who gets funding and who doesn't in their areas. They're different from TWI in that their regions are very distinct. For Durfee it's Los Angeles County and for Headwaters it's the state of Montana. The clarity of these strategies is what allows a lot of this work to happen—if institutions are not clear about any of those things, and are not clear of how a race or gender or economic or political analysis impacts who gets funding then we're already in muddy waters, right?
As someone asked, which community members are you talking about? Elected officials? No, we’re all talking about community in a very diverse lens, lifting up the most marginalized especially. Both Carrie and Brenda also spoke to having diverse boards and referral sources—it’s about equity, even when it might not be an open application process. Who even gets recommended is different depending on who is in your networks. So that's part of the do the homework context.
Another piece is the behind the scenes work of foundation leaders. Brenda worked with her board for eighteen months to help them understand trust-based philanthropy. Carrie’s steady leadership at Durfee and vision for a strong nonprofit infrastructure in Los Angeles that includes tiny grassroots organizations without robust development teams…it takes work to make that happen. So many organizations in dire need of funds can’t hire skilled fundraising and development staff. So even in these stories, we can see that you're accounting for that inequity, which I think is an invisible part of do the homework. This precedes due diligence. This is about culture and structure and systems, about all the different levels of power.
So there's a question about how we begin to trust a nonprofit that we might not know. Just to be clear, TWI is a spend out foundation. We fund in the areas of civic engagement, human rights, and journalism. Because we are spending out and our closing date’s only two years away, all of our funds have basically been committed. In order to have any kind of extra for COVID, we went back into our operations budget and literally cut everything we could. We were like, do we need sponges? No. You know, we just like went through to try to find some more money for our partners.
Anyway, so we fund in those areas, but we don't fund in a particular region. And we've always said that we can’t really ever take credit for a specific policy or impact in a specific issue area, because we're generalists who care generally about strong inclusive democracy, human rights, and communications in journalism. We know that these issues are so broad and our endowment is modest, so we were never going to try to take credit for like, same sex marriage or something like that. All to say, because of the size of our endowment, we don't have an open application process. If we got applications from all over the world, we would have to say no to 99.9% of applicants. That didn’t feel equitable. But we do have an equity lens around these areas that we support. We do know that Black and Latinx and Indigenous leaders get the least funding. We do know women of color get the least funding. We do know that organizations with a budget size of under a million, certainly under a half a million, dollars have a very difficult time getting large grants. We know that many grantmakers do not provide multi-year support.
So we are proactively working to address those issues. We also have a very diverse referral source, both from our board and our network. When I came on six years ago, our board was an all-white boomer-age board. John, my co-ED, and I have worked very hard to transform that into a very diverse group of amazing practitioners. The actual grantmaking process involved getting really good feedback from networks that we knew, networks that were tangential to us about leaders working on the issues we cared about. Especially very nontraditional leaders who also had a very difficult time getting funding from any institutional sources. We had to be very clear about the criteria for approaching potential grantees. One was, as Carrie said, humility in leadership. We want to fund organizations that are led by collaborative, humble people. We recognize that leaders who are charismatic and have huge personalities are often rewarded for that. But that doesn't necessarily translate to being transformative managers or leaders. Like the no jerks thing…that’s a big deal for us. Because there are people who can get funding just based on personality and that's not what we're talking about.
Once we have these lenses around issue area and type of organization and type of leader, then we have the clarity to approach people. For example, we’ve actually funded Vu Le, who you probably know from Nonprofit AF. We had heard about Vu’s blog and had heard about his leadership development work with a lot of nontraditional leaders in Rainier Valley. We did all the possible due diligence on our end—990’s and things like that, all available online. We approached him, and we said— we've heard amazing things about your work, we really want to support you and if you want to send us information that you have already written up for other funders, we’re happy to review it. He didn't even have to take the name of the other foundation off of it. And then before we met with him—and I think this is key to TBP—we read what he sent us. It is definitely a power move to not read something someone sends you, and to ask questions when they’ve already written out the answers. If anyone has ever run a nonprofit or been part of fundraising for a nonprofit, raise your hand if you've ever said in your mind, “Oh my God, this person didn't even read the website. I sent a five-page strategy plan, and now they’re asking me to talk them through the same thing”. Exactly! Also, finding a time to meet that's on their schedule and in a location that works for them is huge. I'm not making them come our office. We’re mitigating some of those micro-aggressions that we can conduct unknowingly. What we're looking for is: does this person seem to live up to what our understanding is of him as a leader? Often we try to attend programming that potential grantees are putting on so that we can get a sense of, how does this leader interact with staff? With communities? Is there a trust-based culture? So we try to have lived experiences of those things to inform our understanding. Then we say, okay, we'd like to fund you first for maybe a year. Then leads to the multi-year funding. With Vu, after our second conversation, we offered him funding. When he tells this story, he often says, “Then I fell out of my chair because I didn't have to run in circles. I didn't have to put on a show, I didn't have to make promises about things that I was going to do and the number of leaders I was going to train, etc.” That’s a walkthrough of how we get a new grantee partner.
We have to be clear what we mean by community as well. For us it was the underfunded, non-traditional leaders working at the intersection of areas we fund nationally. When we think about it that way, it shrinks and focuses the range of leaders and nonprofits that we can fund. Being very, very clear about what's in the funding zone and what isn't and saying no clearly is actually a very big part of doing the homework. It means that the burdened and stressed out nonprofit leader can say, their foundation sounds great but I don't live in LA, or I’m not a nontraditional leader. And not waste their time applying.
Shaady Salehi: What you're hearing from all three of these examples is the need to get super clear about your foundation's mission, vision, and values. Start with that clarity to make funding decisions and re-examine pre-proposal requirements. We're also hearing a lot about being proactive—putting it on the funder to get to know prospective grantees through research, available public records, asking around. Of course, the way these show up in your organization will look different. We hope some of these different examples give you a sense of what's possible. Let’s move into Q&A. One common question we get is: how can you be sure you aren't just funding people you like?
Carrie Avery: For us it's about having an open application process, and about being really clear about what it is that we fund. We are always delighted when we get applications from organizations and people that we had never heard of before. It's also about challenging yourself and making sure that you aren't staying comfortable with only the people that you know. Our wide network helps us by referring people to apply to us.
Also from an equity point of view, we take time to break down our grants and find the holes in what we're doing. We just did a big exercise recently where we recognized that we hadn't been as strong funding in the LGBTQ community and the environmental community. Then we doubled down on that to do extra outreach in those areas.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you, Carrie. Another great question coming in: A challenge in working with individual donors and family foundations, mostly white, is that they are often not in direct relationship with marginalized communities. There’s often conscious and unconscious biases amongst these communities. Any recommendations from our speakers of how to move people along from that far end of the spectrum?
Brenda Solarzano: Great question. So Montana is a predominantly white state. Our population is comprised of 94% white, 4 or 5% American Indian and then a mixture of the rest. Our board was self-described as pale, male, and stale, and had a lot of those unconscious biases. And what that has meant for our work, especially with American Indian communities, is a huge amount of time for myself, my staff, and my board exploring American Indian history and culture in the context of Montana. It wasn’t just one session, it was probably a year to 15 months-long process, where every time we met with the board we had a conversation about American Indian issues. It was very uncomfortable, but it was an eye opening experience for many of them, where they now will talk to me about how they and their ancestors have created some of the inherent inequities that are playing out in today in our communities.
We had to be very thoughtful about it. You can't just bring in three American Indian leaders to come and talk to the board. We had to do a lot of internal work with our staff and our board. We had one American Indian board member and one staff member. They led the process internally, so that people could start out with a safe space for conversation and learning. At the same time, we were also working with our grantee partners who are American Indian leaders and they didn't trust us. I spent a lot of time building a relationship. Once we had a trusting relationship, they shared with our board, you know, a lot of skepticism, a lot of distrust. We had one gentleman come in and basically tell the board, “I don't want your money. I don't know why you would give us your money. I don't trust you.” We kept bringing him back to talk to the board about this. The board made some mistakes in that process. We gave ourselves the space to forgive, to learn, and to move forward. After about a year and a half long process, he just came to present to our board and said, “I'm finally believing because we've built this trusting relationship.”
I also think that once you start changing some hearts and minds, having those people advocate and serve as allies is important. My board chair is your stereotypical foundation board member. He's a lawyer, he's in his late sixties. He's a recognized leader in the community and is part of the good old boy network here in Montana. Now he can talk intelligently about the work that we're doing in our American Indian communities and why it matters. He is a far more powerful speaker than I am when it comes to people who look and sound like him. And so I've tried to deploy him to advocate for the work we’re doing around Montana.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you so much Brenda. It takes time, it takes relationships, it takes dialogue. Another question coming in: What are some ways to address accountability in a trust-based approach, both on the funder side and the grantee side?
Carrie Avery: I think it has to do with how you define accountability. For me, accountability is what we’re doing with Project Q. I'm furthering their mission. We're not giving them money to do X number of programs or hire certain staff or anything like that. We're letting them, through general operating support, make the decisions that they need to make. So it’s a different sort of accountability. As funders, we're often wired to think, we fund this thing and then people have to report back to us about that thing. And um, but instead we think” we're funding an organization, and we're giving them the space to make the decisions that they need to make to further their mission. It's stepping back and being accountable in a different way. It works for us. It really does. Because then we're also much more in this relational role with grantees. If they're hitting bumps in the road and want to talk to us about, you know, what other resources can we access or what advice do you have or can you connect us with people? We're able to do that. They're not afraid to reach out to us if they said they were going to do ten programs in the first quarter of the year and, and they're only going to do four and, and they're afraid that we'll ding them for it.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you, Carrie. That’s related to another question that's coming in: Are there any examples when doing the homework wasn't enough? Where perhaps you entered into a grantee relationship and then something went wrong? How did you manage that experience?
Pia Infante: For me, that is related to the accountability question. What are we imagining as accountability on our side as the funder? One of the measures we think about is, do they trust us? Like Carrie said, are they coming to us with real problems—I can’t make payroll, I want to quit? Can we also be vulnerable with them—I’m feeling anxious about the spend-out? Both institutionally and interpersonally, that's one level at which we think about accountability.
To address the other side of the question about accountability on the nonprofit side, first of all, we have to be clear what accountability means. Because lots of things go wrong in change work. It’s not linear. It is complex and it is long-term. If we're going to ding people because the pandemic happened and they can't offer as many in-programs programs as they said they would, then that’s already controlling and restrictive.
But if the question is more in the spirit of, maybe we thought this organization was led collaboratively but it turns out it isn't, or maybe there's a question that comes up about money being used responsibly…that’s only happened once in my experience. There was an organization that we had a three-year grant commitment to, and in the middle of the second year, the executive director left. We thought, of course, transitions happen. The board said it would begin an executive search. They were in it for like 14 months, which did make us nervous. And the decision that was made at the end of the 14-month search was that the board chair was going to become the ED. We were confused by that. We thought maybe their process wasn't particularly transparent. It felt a little bit haphazard and maybe slightly irresponsible. Did we pull their last year of funding? No, because we had made a three year commitment. But it did influence our decision of whether or not to renew them for multiyear funding. So we ended up finishing the funding, actually providing one more year of transition funding because it was clear they needed transition support, but after interactions with the ED we decided not to continue funding. It was painful because we want to imagine that a leadership transition or a difficult year doesn't necessarily sway us from having found a great partner. But sometimes you just have to look at the data. Sometimes you have to listen to your gut. But we never take back a financial commitment to an organization.
Brenda Solarzano: One of our challenges is that we as a field think that we have to be gatekeepers, and look at accountability through that lens. I want to flip that on its head and say, it's not about accountability. It's about learning what works and what doesn't work, and doing that in partnership with our grantees. We are one of the few sectors that has risk capital. We should be taking risks with the money.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you Brenda. We have a question about how to build trust if you're not a place-based funder, so if you want to build relationships beyond where you're currently based.
Pia Infante: Thousand Currents is a great example. They fund globally and have incredibly deep partnerships across many different kinds of, boundaries, nation states being just one of them. Ultimately, it matters what your intention is. If the intention is to really serve and collaborate, then maybe it would be that we form a trusted partnership in that location. So maybe, maybe there are some steps in between being able to fund in a new area or region. When it comes to global development, a lot of folks just charge in. But I think there's a really good argument for landscape analysis. Asking, am I really needed here? As opposed to just assuming that I'm always the answer, you know?
A couple of years ago, we started to feel urgency around our issue areas in the Global South and started exploring funding opportunities there. We checked in with a lot of folks there, and we started to grasp the true complexity of the landscape. And we weren’t even coming in as a long-term player—we’re getting close to the end of our spend-out. Maybe we were just trying to make ourselves feel better. So instead we gave money into a collaborative where there was much more thoughtfulness about funding then we had to offer. Sometimes it's also just stepping back and saying, do I need to be the primary? Can I support some existing infrastructure and work? In philanthropy there's just a real desire to be the first, or to be in charge. And with this question, it's about how to step back and to learn more about context and then support existing expertise. Because there's just no place on the globe where there's not existing expertise.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you Pia. I want to share some key takeaways as we wrap up:
Doing the homework is about putting the onus of due diligence on the funder to help alleviate power imbalance.
Doing the homework starts with clarifying your foundation's mission, vision, and values.
Embracing other principles of trust-based philanthropy like being transparent, soliciting feedback, and streamlining paperwork will help free up the time that you need for doing the homework.
You don't have to do all your grantmaking the same way. Doing the homework can vary depending on different grant programs.
When it's done right, doing the homework can really advance your equity goals.
Steps you can take right now:
Revisit your foundation's mission, vision and goals. Are they clear enough? Are they publicly available to prospective grantees? Will prospective grantees know whether or not they’re a fit before they go through the application process?
Is there anything about your current pre-proposal process that can be streamlined?
Check out the rest of the webinars in these series!