We Journey with Partners to Listen and Learn

Corey Oser, Vice President, Programs, Global Fund for Children

Trust-based philanthropy has always been in the DNA of the Global Fund for Children (GFC). The founder of the organization, Maya Ajmera, had been traveling in India to connect with her ancestral roots. She stepped off a train soon after her arrival and saw a teacher working with some children sitting in a circle on the train platform. After asking the woman what was going on, Maya found out that the teacher was simply meeting a need she saw to help those children learn. The teacher was part of a nascent local organization and knew she could make a concrete contribution to support those kids in self-determining their own futures. That inspiration ultimately moved Maya to wonder, what if there could be support for people like that teacher who innovate in their communities based on real need, not based on what a donor is telling them to do? What if communities were trusted with the resources they needed to find their own solutions to problems without having to fit into pre-designed projects? That became the genesis for founding GFC in 1993, with trust baked in from the start. 

Since our founding, we’ve embedded trust-based principles in multiple ways throughout the organization. We aspire to support youth-led social change work, and so we recently had to look at how to bring unregistered groups into the mix. Young people don’t always organize in traditional ways; they don’t register as 501c3s (or another equivalent) just because they want to change something in their community. It’s taken a while for us to embrace that and contest the notion of risk. A few years ago, our finance team thought: ‘The risk is too high. Why would we fund an unregistered group when there are plenty of registered groups in need?’ It took us looking at some of the countries in which we fund and hearing from our partners about the barriers to registration -- both from a bureaucratic and financial point of view -- to make an adjustment in our grantmaking practices. It also took us admitting to ourselves that formal incorporation is not what all young people want; and we have to trust their leadership. More recently, we launched a Youth Advisory Council, invited a youth leader onto our board and piloted a youth-led participatory grantmaking process, to deepen our trust with young people even further. 

Just like we had to reexamine our grantmaking practices to build trust with the communities we serve, we also had to reimagine our learning and evaluation in order to find more authentic and meaningful ways of articulating change. Since we are a public foundation that raises the funds that we disburse, we have our own funder relationships to manage. Some of our funders want to see numbers of children and youth served, partner budget or fundraising amounts, and other quantitative measures. However, many of our grantee partners are striving for long-term social transformation, and quantitative measures alone aren’t always the best indicators of impact.

For example, there may be an organization that has decreased the number of young people they work with across a certain period, but they are building relationships and working on advocacy strategies geared toward bigger picture changes to affect the lives of more people down the line. For this reason, we’ve brought on a new position into the organization with ‘Learning’ in the title. This gives us more space to explore with our partners which ways of measuring change are most worthwhile and what learning means within their organizations and ours.

We also seek feedback and ask them how we are doing, what aspects of our support are the most valuable, and what we should change. We’ve had to figure out the right questions to ask and experiment with different methodologies like outcome harvesting alongside our partners, and we’re still very much on this learning journey. But ultimately this is necessary work so that we can make sure that we support our partners to document change in a way that is relevant and provides them and us new insight without placing extra burdens that are out of proportion to the amount of funding we offer.