Transcript: Being Transparent & Responsive
Shaady Salehi: Today we'll be hearing from Lisa Cowan, Vice President of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation in New York City, Liz Dozier, Founder and CEO of Chicago Beyond in Chicago, Pia Infante, Co-Executive Director of the Whitman Institute and Steering Committee Chair of the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, as well as Eleni Refu, Senior Engagement Associate with the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, also known as NCRP.
Before jumping into the principle of transparency, it's important that we recognize that trust-based philanthropy is a values-based approach. At the heart of it, there's a priority of equity and power awareness. The thing that has really landed in this moment of convergence of multiple crises is that these power imbalances exist and ripple into every single sector in our society. And of course, philanthropy is no exception.
It's important that we lead with values of equity and an awareness of how power and race are interconnected. In many ways there has been a values to practice gap in our sector, where many foundations stand for equality and justice, but that doesn't necessarily show up in the actual day to day practice. Our intention today is to discuss ways of putting these values of equity and justice into practice, specifically with this principle of being transparent and responsive.
I'm going to hand it over to introduce Eleni Refu from NCRP. And as you may know, NCRP has been a lead thinker in assessing power, especially with the Power Moves toolkit.
Eleni Refu: Thanks, Shaady. So I lead NCRP’s Power Moves initiative. NCRP is an independent watchdog for the philanthropic sector. We're also a nonprofit organization ourselves, and are funded through a membership model made up of funders and nonprofit members. Power Moves is a self-assessment tool that we created for funders two years ago. It's designed to walk funders through the ways that you can center equity and social justice in your organizations. One of the core components of Power Moves is how important it is for funders to share power with their grantees, and transparency and responsiveness are necessary for this power-sharing. You have to be willing to relinquish some or all control based on the feedback you receive from your grantee partners.
So what does transparency actually mean, at its most basic level? Funders who practice transparency are intentional about being open with information that is expressly needed and most relevant to their grantee partners, such as information about how funding decisions are made. They make that information available in a clear, accessible manner.
Transparency promotes accountability. Echoing Green and the Bridgespan Group recently did research on the racial disparities in nonprofit funding. What they found echoes the experiences of our nonprofit member organizations, who have been telling us that organizations that are led by black women receive less funding than those led by black men or white women. They've also looked at where funding is given when it comes to restricted funding and unrestricted funding, and they found that nonprofit organizations with leaders of color received 76% less unrestricted funding than organizations that were white led.
If more funders were transparent with how and to whom they allocated funding, it would go a long way to help close this gap by making the issue more visible. It would make the philanthropic sector more accountable to grantee partners that aren't receiving as much funding.
Transparency also promotes inclusive decision-making. When you make your information accessible, you provide an avenue by which you can receive feedback from your grantee partners. By doing this, you're also promoting partnership in in your work. You are all here because you understand that there's an inherent imbalance of power between funders and grantee partners. Being transparent is one way you make room at the table when decisions are being made, because being transparent means that your grantee partners have information to be able to start these conversations with you, to be able to provide input and walk with you.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you so much, Eleni. Really appreciate that context on defining transparency and responsiveness, particularly in this moment and particularly around accountability. Pia, can you share just some reflections on why transparency and responsiveness are a key part of a trust based approach?
Pia Infante: Thanks, Shaady. Hi everyone. It's good to be here with you. I will just back up a little bit to say it's a prescient day/morning/time in history to be talking about transparency and responsiveness. Clearly the sector of philanthropy is asking existential questions--what does it mean to be responsive to both the pandemic and then the uprising of social and political movements? These themes of transparency and responsiveness have been in our consciousness for weeks.
So going back to your question, why is it a key principle? I mean, it underscores the kinds of relationships that we're trying to reset in society, Since the early 1900’s, philanthropy has been terribly opaque, we aren't legally required to tell anyone what we’re up to, and there are very few rules and legislation that regulate philanthropy. So even the notion that we are accountable to the communities we serve to and need be transparent is radical. Raise your hand if you've ever been completely confused because a foundation who used to fund, I don't know, clean air or something like that, went into an 18 month strategic planning process, and you had no idea what they were going to come out with and fund afterwards? Exactly.
Let's take the example of Novo a really core funder of women and girls’ rights globally, who recently said, we're probably going to turn away from that role. Now whole sectors around the globe have no idea what direction the Buffets are going to take. So even the lack of transparency around how that process will go, how they are going to go from the kind of funder they've been to something totally different…I mean, sometimes the word transparency feels a little bit like overused and jargony, so one-way. I think of it as working against this norm that foundations have the power to keep everything behind the curtains in terms of our decision making processes, our focus, and literally anything else.
I see Claire Knowlton from NFF is here on the line. To nonprofits we funders are like, we want them bare, stripped naked. We want to know everything about them. What's under the hood, what color’s your underwear? You know what I mean? It’s such a testimony to the power imbalance. Nonprofits have to share the specifics of how they’re using every last penny, and there's no requirement that foundations do anything similar. That’s what we're coming at with transparency. It's not just a nice thing to do. It's not just like, well, you can look up my 990’s. It's about our commitment to ameliorating power imbalance.
And responsiveness should be a given. If we are here to support leaders, nonprofits, social movements, our grantmaking needs to be responsive to the communities that we want to support. Right now, the country is being called in a historical, political, social, and economic way to account for hundreds of years of the devaluation of black bodies. We're still in the same country that had to have a civil war about whether to abolish slavery. The history of that is definitely at the roots of what we're up to today. And of course we want to be responsive to the shrinking of government and public services—healthcare, the post office, education. Philanthropy also has this existential moment right now of asking, do we try to expand in order to fill those gaps? Or do we advocate for a stronger democracy?
We need to be thinking about a universal level of responsiveness in our roles. And then there’s also responsiveness to the direct feedback and requests that we get from the communities or nonprofit organizations we are in direct relationship with, to be willing to meet them regardless of whether it fits with our strategic plan, regardless of the kinds of culture change we will need to enact in our institutions to make that happen.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you, Pia, for really articulating the layers of transparency and responsiveness that we're talking about. I'd like to introduce Lisa Cohen, Vice President of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation in New York City. Lisa, can you share how transparency has been such a cornerstone of your work at Robert Sterling Clark?
Lisa Cowan: You know, I've just been thinking this whole time, I'm kind of pathologically transparent myself. It's exciting to think about how that plays out professionally. The Robert Sterling Clark foundation was started with the money of the lawyer to the man who invented the Singer sewing machine. When Mr. Singer invented his sewing machine, he violated a patent, and so he needed a lawyer to help him keep his money. During the course of their relationship, the lawyer left with half the money. And so four generations later, we had our Robert Sterling Clark, who had never worked in his life but inherited a ton of money that he put into a foundation. We now fund leadership development as an equity strategy in New York City.
Whenever I meet a new grantee, I start with the story of our money. I do that to make it very clear from the outset that this is not my money, and that I am not doing anyone a favor by giving them something of mine. And to make it clear that the fact that the family amassed this fortune has nothing to do with any expertise in the work that our grantees are doing. This false notion that rich people are smarter and that therefore the funder knows more than the grantees underlies a lot of philanthropy. And that plays out in lots of different ways, both implicit and explicit. So my trying to dispel that right from the beginning is one way of getting at that power imbalance. It’s often the case that the grantee partner that I'm talking to doesn’t generally know where their funder’s money comes from, which I think is an important part of this story. Ss our country embraces more and more an honest conversation around reparations, I think it will become even more important to have that conversation.
Shaady Salehi: That’s great. How do you strive for transparency in your work with grantee partners? What does that look like?
Lisa Cowan: Well, it looks like a lot of things. I try to be really upfront about what we fund and what we do not fund, quickly and honestly, to save prospective grantees times in trying to court us when it wouldn’t turn into anything. And, of course, we also are trying to get rid of this notion of courting funders. When I was a development person for a nonprofit, I had this whole strategy around romancing funders which, involved laughing at their jokes and trying to figure out where their kids went to school, and finding any way possible to connect to them and to try to get those dollars for the thing that I was working on. It did get me grants sometimes, but I absolutely don't think that should be how grants are given.
So anyway, so we try to be really honest, even if it feels rude to say to someone no, we're not going to fund this. A little bit of it is letting go of the need to be liked. Or even the idea of what is rude versus what is honest and kind and helping people to do their work.
Another thing I was thinking about recently—when somebody uses an acronym that I don’t know, or talks about an unfamiliar piece of legislation, my instinct is often to knowingly nod my head so that they believe I'm the smartest person in the room. What I’m trying to do now is to admit when I don't know what someone is talking about. And then I hope that they will do the same with me. That’s about just being really clear about what I do and don't know. There's so much that I don't know, that all of us don't know. Especially right now, we are living in such an unprecedented, chaotic, rapidly changing moment. Nobody knows what they're talking about. And being honest about that builds trust, frees us up and helps us imagine together, rather than sort of presuming a false expertise.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you. Thanks for highlighting the two way street of this process. Robert Sterling Clark has been really great about sharing your face plant moments, where challenges have come up or where you're like, Oh, maybe we should've done that a little differently. That in and of itself is modeling transparency. I'm curious, what is a challenge that's come up for you in trying to be transparent and responsive?
Lisa Cowan: There are two of us that do grant making at the foundation. Both of us most recently come from being grant seekers, and hold that identity closer than being donors. So that has gotten worked out into a lot of our approach. But when we started, we said, we're going to talk to anyone who comes to us. We're not going to be these foundation people who hide behind their desks, anyone who wants to have coffee with me, I'm going to have coffee with. And we sort of felt…revolutionary in this approach. About a year in, I started looking at the people who I had had coffee with in the past year.
An awful lot of them were people who I had gone to school with, or who I had worked with in the past, or whose kids went to my kid's school, or like five people from little league. It was very clear that this was not actually an equal access strategy.
So then we said, we would only talk to people about their prospective projects after they had submitted something to our website. We accept proposals written for other foundations, so it's a very low bar to submit something to us. But it did require that a person would actually read what we funded and submit something. And then we would talk to anyone, with the caveat that this is not likely to result in funding.
I hope that that did equalize access…and, I have no idea if this is the right strategy. It could be that in a year, I'll look at it again and I'll see some other huge blind spot.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you so much, Lisa, for modeling transparency. There's something really refreshing in being able to say that we don’t have all the answers. That in itself helps build trust. Next I'm going to introduce Liz Dozier, Founder and CEO of Chicago Beyond. Liz, can you share your story and how you all approach transparency and responsiveness.
Liz Dozier: Thanks, Shaady. Chicago Beyond was born out of the idea to back the fight for equity. It started when I was the principal on the far South Side of Chicago at a high school. Every single day, we were coming into contact with structural racism. In our school community, that meant that there were 300 arrests inside of the school building. It meant there was a 20% dropout rate—and we're talking about almost 1500 kids. Over the process of a few years, those numbers shifted. The 40% graduation rate became 80%, the 20% dropout rate went down to below 2%, and those arrests went down to virtually nothing. We became a leader in restorative justice, in healing and academic interventions that gave our kids and our community what they needed.
So I am not a philanthropist or in philanthropy circles by trade, but I had an opportunity to start Chicago Beyond. And I know what it means to be a grantee, how it is often a grand show—exactly what Lisa mentioned a second ago, this idea of having to laugh at all the funder’s jokes. Our interactions with funders always felt performative, and honestly, it felt like the funders never knew what the heck they were talking about half of the time.
So Chicago Beyond started with this idea that we as an organization are not the experts, and that it is incumbent upon us to trust the expertise of people that we partner with and to walk alongside them, to support their vision. It was also about challenging the understanding of risk in philanthropy. Is “risk” code for something is too black? Too small? Too different from your beliefs and experience?
Shaady Salehi: Thank you, Liz. How do you embody that commitment to transparency and responsiveness in your grantee relationships? What does that look like?
Liz Dozier: For us it goes both ways. I'll tell you one of our biggest missteps. I think there's a big learning from it. Chicago Byond is funded solely by two wealthy individuals, Mark and Kimbra Walter. We were all really clear that our work shouldn’t be about them. It’s not about their story. So from my vantage point, in talking with them, it was best for them to kind of step aside. They weren't going to be listed in our materials or on our website. We were really going to focus on the work of Chicago Beyond. I felt very strongly about that. But as we progressed on our journey, we realized that although that was well intentioned, it didn't make the most sense in terms of is what is right for transparency and accountability. That was a misstep on our part.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you. That’s such an important lesson. I would also love for you to share your COVID response—it's such a great embodiment of listening to communities’ needs and responding and pivoting.
Liz Dozier: Yeah…I don't think it's rocket science. Immediately as we went into shelter in place, our team began to reach out to partners and community members to ask, what is it that you need? How can we help? The number one concern that came up was food scarcity.
So we began to pivot, inserting ourselves into the supply chain and procuring enough food to feed anywhere from 5,000 to 7,000 families with a week's worth of groceries. Chicago has the greater Chicago food depository and other larger entities that get food out to families. But we knew from our partners that there were going to be people that would be left out. So we formed our own distribution unit, with trucking, with young men from our communities work packing and delivering food. That’s what came from us being open and honest in our relationships with community partners. I want to emphasize that we were able to shift because our partners—45 organizations across the South and West sides—were helping coordinate and do the work. It was truly a joint unified effort.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you. And that really does highlight one of the core values of a trust-based approach: this is a partnership. I'm going to hand it back to Pia Infante, one of the original architects of the trust-based framing. As a representative of a spend out foundation, how do you deal with transparency as an organization going through big changes?
Pia Infante: Thank you. I'm just super inspired by all of you in your leadership. Liz, I continue to be grateful that Chicago Beyond is articulating this story of collaborative responsiveness and accountability to our current crisis.
I want to build on what Lisa was saying, about being very clear in your selection process and the leaders you’re funding. Before I became the co-executive director of Whitman, the foundation had always funded equity work. But when I took a look at the portfolio, the Executive Directors of the grantees were all white women. As a pattern, it seemed troubling. So, we applied a new lens around nontraditional leaders who have a hard time getting funding. They are women of color. They are people without the Ivy league credentials. Applying that lens on top of the issue lens or the regional lens we have is so important, because it means that we are proactively addressing the structural inequities in who gets funded
When we create relationships with organizations, we also try to be very clear about our intention for the lengths of funding. Because we advocate for multi-year funding, everyone who we offer a grant to sort of assumes we’re going to fund them for 20 years. But because of our spend out, we're closing our doors in 2022. So we're not going to be able to fund anyone for 20 years.
One huge face plant that I have done at least twice is to not be really, really clear with a new grantee about how long we’re funding them. So there was a misunderstanding and it was painful to realize our mistake and clarify. If we don't communicate our intentions clearly, then it's our bad and we're not paying attention to the power dynamics. The other kind of face planting thing is that ending funding with a multiyear grantee partner is difficult. And sometimes it has to happen, right? The Novo way is a slash and burn way, you know? The Whitman Institute has almost like a—forgive me for saying this—a lesbian breakup way. Like, we're still going to stay married for a little while. Then eventually, we're going to be broken up. TWI has committed to multiple years of tie-off grantmaking, just because funding relationship are difficult to end.
And my last metaphor for now is to, as a funder, be a good date. Like, let's really just operate as human beings, the way we want human beings to operate with us, and make sure all our systems and policies reflect that.
One of the big questions we have right now with our spend out is, how do you responsibly go away? I’d love to hear from everyone on this call about what do transparency, accountability, and responsiveness look like when you know, that you're spending out, that your dollars are drying up. What does it look like now, because we want to stay committed to our work even when we’re longer in a grantmaking cycle.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you, Pia. I'm going to hand it back to Eleni—from an NCRP Power Moves perspective, what are some themes you want to lift up?
Eleni Refu: Great. I want to highlight what Pia just said about processes and systems. Do you have the systems in place for being transparent and accountable? Like to make sure that your communication system is not only clear, but is two-way with grantees.
I think people often misconstrue transparency by saying, this information is on my website, so I’m checking off this bullet. I've done enough. Really, it’s a continuous process, because the intention behind being transparent and responsive is to meet the needs of your grantees and communities. It’s a continuous process of asking whether or not you're doing enough to address the power imbalance that will always exist.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you so much, Eleni. Such an important reminder that this is a continuous process. We've also heard a lot of examples today about how this requires a constant practice of self reflection and checking yourself.
We’re going to move into our Q&A portion. The first question, that we get a lot, is: How do we make the time to be responsive to everyone? Like, we’re busy. Is it even realistic?
Lisa Cowan: A couple of things come to mind. I think it's easy for me to underplay how important it is for me to respond. Like I'm used to just thinking of myself like, if my brother writes me and I forget to write back to him, it doesn't matter. Like, I don't think of my response as being that important, because I have a sense of who I am as a human. But as a funder I have a lot more power, and I have to remember that. I’m not just Lisa responding to another person, but a part of an institution. So that’s one way I try to hold myself accountable.
We're also a pretty small foundation, so I don't have thousands of emails a day to respond to. But strategically, you could set up an auto response that just lets people know how long it might take to hear from you. Like, I’m sorry, because I get 10,000 emails a day and I can't respond. Just so that people know what’s going on—because people often think, Oh, I submitted and I didn't hear anything back. To Eleni's point about not just putting info up on your website—it’s really important to be proactive with communicating. But it’s also important to be realistic about how much you can do as an individual. Automating is a good, easy way to get started.
Shaady Salehi: That's really helpful, Lisa. And I think it's also helpful to just remember that you are a representative of your institution. You know, I had this personal experience as a former grant seeker myself, where you send your beautifully crafted email to your funder or prospective funder. And you've read it through like a million times, colleagues have tweaked the language, and you feel great about it. You put your heart and soul into this email, and then you don't hear back and it's like…it just, it floated off into the ether. You never know if it was even read, and that causes so much stress and anxiety for nonprofit leaders. So even if it's as simple as, I'm acknowledging this email, thank you. I will get back to you.
Lisa Cowan: All of this is actually a big reason why we stopped demanding that prospective grantees write proposals for us—I knew as a grant writer how much work went into writing that proposal. And I knew as a grant reader how little work I put into reading it—I was really just looking for, is this going to take them to the next level of conversation? Maybe that's the kind of thing you don't say out loud, but we're being transparent! So we stopped asking for that level of detail in proposals. I mean, I don't suggest that people carelessly send emails to prospective funders, but it’s important to remember that funders are so fallible. Thinking that there's some careful system by which they're reading each word you wrote is really just overselling the funder and underselling the grantee.
Shaady Salehi: That's a good reminder. Thank you. We're hoping that one of the takeaways from today's discussion is that there are both large and small ways that you can model transparency and responsiveness. Even if you're not ready dig in and respond to a long email, just acknowledging receipt can go a long, long way.
I was on a webinar last week with a bunch of filmmakers talking about the challenges of finding funding, especially for first time filmmakers of color. There are huge barriers to accessing funding in that space. It was a community of filmmakers that had applied for a grant and had gone through the super rigorous, time-consuming process. And none of them heard back—not even an acknowledgement of receipt. Just nothing.
We’ve got another really interesting question: since the whole construction of foundations is built on tax law and code, what could be done legislatively to require more transparency and more responsiveness from foundations?
Eleni Refu: We've been looking at this issue in terms of what's going on today. In particular with the anti-police brutality movement, we're encouraging funders to take a look at what they are able to do. There is a lot of capacity and imagination that isn’t really being exercised right now. One example that was raised by one of our nonprofit members is the fact that community foundations are set up to support individual organizers and activists on the ground. They don't have to be under a 501c3 umbrella in order to receive funding.
And yet there isn't a norm of funding organizers and individuals. There’s a misconception that philanthropy simply can't do that. So investigating the radical possibilities for what you can do is a great place to start. And then, look beyond that to existing grassroots advocacy organizations in your issue areas and uplift their work.
Pia Infante: I saw that someone shared the stimulus bill, which isn’t exactly transparency and responsiveness, but it's legislating higher payout or, you know, legislating for DAFs to be more accountable and not just sit on their funds. When it comes to specifically legislating for transparency, there are other efforts that we could ask, like the Glass Pockets effort to get foundations to be more transparent about how they're allocating grants and investments.
I think the other kind of thing it reminds me of is the, some of the pushes for how the investment dollars need to be used transparently and responsively. So, so philanthropy has gotten to operate in this way with where capital can be used in, you know, we can be invested in terrible things, right. That are very harmful to people, planet and everything else and democracy. And then on the other hand, so that's 95% of the, of the endowment. And then the 5% of it is spent then trying to like ameliorate inequality. Right. So I think there have been efforts that are about making that, making more accountable to the missions of, of foundations, what they're doing with their investment dollars. That's all I've got there.
Shaady Salehi: That's great. Thank you, Pia. Another question: does being transparent mean being completely transparent about everything? How do you know when to draw the line?
Lisa Cowan: The notion of being human is so important for this too—at what point does being transparent just turn into laying your crap on somebody else? So think about, where is it useful to be transparent?
Pia Infante: I would also add that this is the way that transparency and responsiveness are interlinked. Because your goal when you're being transparent is to be responsive to the needs of grantee partners. You're transparent as much as it meets the need of the grantee partners, and you do that by creating the systems and processes to get them the information they need.
I don't mean this to sound matriarchal, but like, when your kids ask you questions about sex—you just answer the question they've asked you, you don't keep on going and telling them more and more. It’s about listening for what people actually want to know from you.
Shaady Salehi: That's very helpful, thank you. It's like, what do people need to know in order to do their work well and to make the decisions they need to make?
Liz Dozier: I want to back up what Lisa said. I think sometimes we overcomplicate things based on our own egos. This work is truly relational, it's about showing up as human beings. When we overcomplicate and when we make it transactional and make it about numbers, we get disconnected from true community and true voice. We just don't get to where we need to need to ultimately go.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you, Liz. So helpful. Another question: what if you are modeling transparency, but you still feel like it's not being reciprocated by your grantee partners?
Liz Dozier: I can take that one. We wrote about this a little. We published a guide book called “why am I always being researched?” last year. We talked about the seven inequities that are held in place by power, but also seven opportunities for change. The work of changing, is really hard, but the most important thing for all of us is continuous effort to check our own bias. If we make some of the technical changes that we were talking about earlier today without that commitment to openness, they won't work.
There have been times for us as an organization, when, for an organization that we were investing in, there were some questions around what was happening with funds. We spent months in conversation, and also dedicated a full time team member to get in there and help them just shore things up. It all goes back to this idea of openness, of relationship. Cause it truly is all about the relationships.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you, Liz, that's such a great reflection. We have another question: has anyone on this panel completed an asset map or power map, where the foundation's resources are mapped? Has anyone gone through an exercise like that?
Liz Dozier: I'll just jump in. We did a cursory look at where our resources were being allocated. We noted about a year and a half ago that a lot of our resources were being pushed into the South side and not on the West side, not particularly in Brown communities. And so there were some shifts that we had to make, as we're thinking about, you know, where our messages go, how like how, how we're moving. And how are we building again, back to the idea of relationships with people in various parts of our city.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you, Liz. We are rounding up toward the end of our time together. We have a great question about how this moment is forcing us to completely reimagine existing systems. What might it look like to completely reimagine philanthropy? What might philanthropy look like if it worked in radical partnership with communities?
Lisa Cowan: In a radically reimagined world, I don't think that there's a role for philanthropy. What we're thinking about right now is, what is philanthropy’s role in getting us to a world where we don't have or need philanthropy? I think that role is making money move a lot easier, a lot faster, and with a lot more trust. And some of these structural things we've talked about today can help do that.
Liz Dozier: Lisa, that's exactly what I was thinking. Like philanthropy should not even exist in the perfect world. Philanthropic organizations are hoarding money. This is an opportunity for people to make huge differences in this movement of liberation. If and when we get beyond the 5% payout notion and beyond our current structures, there’s no place for philanthropy.
Pia Infante: I mean, let's make Liz and Lisa in charge of this future! I mean, Liz, what you've done at Chicago Beyond is such a powerful example of philanthropy beyond the Rockefeller model. It’s a radical reimagination of philanthropy, you know? How can we make that the norm?
I was on a call with four other spend out foundations yesterday, and we were having this conversation about, yes, philanthropy shouldn't have to exist. We should spend ourselves out of the need to exist. But the path there is a strengthened and inclusive democratic socialist system. Because if our public infrastructure were strong, our public education, health, housing, food, water, all of those services were, it would literally eliminate broad swaths of funding networks. The need to fund the arts wouldn't be as dire if we had public arts infrastructure.
If philanthropy were to think that we need to ensure long-lasting, community-informed local, regional, and national public infrastructure, we would have to spend out our endowment in that direction, funding things like advocacy and organizing.
And we have to be transparent about what our intentions are. So much of philanthropy stems from legacy and ego, like putting a family's name on a building or on a piece of research. It’s stunning. Even the Donors of Color Network has studied that high net worth donors of color often give to their alma maters, often Ivy league schools which literally don't need another dime. I think that comes from this notion that philanthropy is about putting your family's stamp on something timeless. And what could be more timeless than a country that actually works for its people? That makes reparations for the violent ways that we became the richest and most militarized country on the planet?
I think so many of you on the line have these same visions. What I think is so powerful about 2020, even with the level of stressors that we are undergoing mentally, emotionally, spiritually, is that it’s…our opportunity to make a collective behavior change. We need to step on the pedal all the way if we are going to survive this administration and this period of time. So I'm heartened always by the brilliant leadership of women, of women of color. I feel like we could use more and more and more of it in every sector, every organization, every institution.
I'll hand it back to our fearless leader Shaady—thank you as always for such thoughtful, creative, strategic programming.
Shaady Salehi: Thank you, Pia. Well, having fabulous speakers definitely makes my job super easy—thank you all! I'm going to close us out with some key takeaways and next steps.
Transparency and responsiveness are key to establishing open and honest relationships.
We are talking about a two-way street. If you want to see honesty and transparency from grantee partners, you must model it.
Transparency is about being open about what you know, but also more importantly, about what you don't know—you don't always have all the answers, and that's fine.
There are so many ways to embody transparency and responsiveness as an individual, even if it isn't built into your organization's policies and protocols.
You can share some of your reflections and discussions during this current moment, but with the asterisk that you don't want to go totally TMI. It's only the stuff that is actually relevant to your grantee partners.
I hope these are tips you can take with you to your next grantee conversation. Hey, maybe you take 30 minutes today to respond to some of those unanswered grantee emails from the last week!