Trustees: Are You Building Trust or Are You Thwarting It?

Anonymous Storyteller

Our organization has been moving with trust for many years, but it is a continued struggle to bring the board along with us. My staff is ready and willing to make significant structural changes that would deepen our trust-based approaches. They’re doing it in many ways, but also hit barriers from the board.

Foundation staffs often have the courage to challenge the status quo but many boards, mine included, do not. I’ve been repeatedly told not to “get ahead of my board” in this role. Why?

If our purpose is to create collective good, then why are we deferring to people who are overwhelmingly white, wealthy, powerful, centering their own comfort, and are slow to change? And why are we punishing leaders who want to move faster to meet what the moment requires?

I’ve witnessed toxicity in many different ways through different board configurations. I’ve seen boards push leaders of color out. I’ve seen a board in one organization that was trying to do racial equity work say that they didn’t want to hear anything negative. And I'm currently in a situation with a board that is so focused on themselves that they're not providing any real support for the ED or the staff. I think they feel outpaced by the change that we're creating and, despite all that we share with them, they don't have a sense of ownership. And so that's making them tell us to mind our place. Connected to this is the lack of understanding between intent and impact, a core element of equity work. Boards often get stuck on their intentions and fail to consider or even believe the impact of their actions on staff, on grantees and the communities served by the grantees.

The trend I see and fear is that leaders of color are going to continue getting recruited and seduced into these leadership positions. And as soon as we start doing the real work, which means questioning everything including the thus-far paternalistic authority of the board and seeing them more as partners, we get pushback. Boards often don't do the work to prepare themselves for bringing in leaders of color. They want to pat themselves on the back for recruiting a woman, or a person of color, or an immigrant, or someone with multiple identities that check the board’s diversity boxes but they are often unwilling to prepare for a very different leadership style.

Tokenism is real: a former colleague shared with me a conversation that took place just ahead of me joining an organization: the CEO had shared that they and the board were excited about me joining but somewhat disappointed that they’d recently discovered who my partner was, because they thought that I was in a same-sex relationship in addition to being a person of color and an immigrant. This is the type of objectification and dehumanization that leaders of color are dealing with. Until we address governance within philanthropy and try or demand that trust-based approaches be part of governance, philanthropy cannot change.

Trust means reorganizing every component of our work, not just our outward facing relationships, but our internal ones as well. When we start thinking about our governance functions as a partnership functions, then we can shift into much healthier ways of working.

* While open communication and mutual accountability are core values of trust-based philanthropy, our sector still holds barriers to transparency. Navigating complex power dynamics and the history of oppression that underscores our field takes strategy and courage. Some storytellers may elect to remain anonymous as a part of that navigation process.