We’re About Building Relationships, Not Creating Barriers

Ashley Clark, Grants Director, Libra Foundation

I'm a career switcher. Coming into the sector with fresh eyes and not being indoctrinated into the unhealthy habits of our field has helped me to be nimble and to innovate in my role at The Libra Foundation. That, plus the fact that I came into my position at a time when the foundation was hiring their first-ever in-house team, meant that we were able to practice philanthropy in a very different way. Crystal Hayling, the Executive Director of the foundation, also set a direction that shared power with our grantee partners and built trust. We agreed that it was our team’s job to bear the burden of learning about grantees’ work in a way that didn’t waste their time. Most of all, we were a brand new team that didn’t have a set of ingrained habits or pre-existing notions of how the work “should happen,” which meant that we could be free to iterate and learn along the way.

When we first started out, The Libra Foundation staff talked about how so many practices in philanthropy are the result of trying to make ourselves feel better about mitigating a tiny bit of risk. We spoke frankly about the fact that these unhealthy habits would probably not enable us to actually avoid risk or an unfortunate situation. Sometimes nonprofits go through difficult situations and even close their doors, but the likelihood that we were going to find information in their written materials that prevented that from happening was low. We didn’t want to design the majority of our processes around a low likelihood event. Instead, we wanted to honor the grantee partners as experts. If they were doing work that we believed in, we wanted to be in partnership with them.

We started by thinking about how our activities — how everything that we did — should focus on building relationships rooted in trust. That focus impacted our team composition: as we recruited new staff members, we were on the lookout for philanthropy skeptics like ourselves. We spent extensive time in the interview process screening for folks who also wanted to share power and practice philanthropy differently. We included in the job descriptions for our Program Officers the expectation that they were going to find creative and non-extractive ways to learn about the organizations in their portfolios.

Our focus on centering relationships also impacts the way we do our grantmaking. In addition to offering multi-year unrestricted funding, we’ve streamlined our processes by not requiring applications or reports. To better understand their work, we have conversations with grantees, try to show up at places (like convenings) where they are already doing their work, and utilize materials they have already prepared -- like existing reports or newsletters.

There have been some surprises along the way as we’ve opted for conversations instead of requiring written reports and applications from grantees. We assumed that our partners would welcome that shift with enthusiasm, but not everyone did. We were reminded that our field has a historic and fierce attachment to the written word. A few grantee partners wanted the opportunity to articulate, for themselves, the wins that they’ve achieved during the grant period in hopes that this might increase their grant award.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve tried hard to assure grantee partners that focusing on the conversations as opposed to written materials will not affect their grant award while, at the same time, creating the space and flexibility for folks to share whatever materials they want. We’re still deepening our understanding about what trust feels like on both sides of the equation and how to keep building it with each and every interaction.  We see ourselves as on a learning journey with our grantee partners, and it’s unfolding as we go.