Healthy Relationships Help Us Deliver On Our Mission

Denise Swartz, Senior Program Officer, Mid-Iowa Health Foundation

Our foundation, The Mid-Iowa Health Foundation, had been operating in a trust-based manner before I had those words to attach to our approach. We’re in Des Moines–it’s a smaller community, so we have the ability to have really personal connections with our nonprofit and other funding partners. And if we’re going to make progress, the only way we’re going to do that is in partnership with others. It’s a requirement. So when I started reading more about trust-based philanthropy, I was inspired to dive deeper.

We’re lucky that our board was there with us from the beginning, sharing a desire for the foundation’s approach to be trust-based. Some of the changes we’ve made sound boring, but they have an outsized impact with our community partners. We’ve been streamlining our application process, and expanding the ways we accept applications (we recently accepted a PowerPoint as an application, for example). It’s a noticeable difference to our community partners, and it demonstrates a greater level of trust from the foundation. That becomes a tool to establish or deepen our relationships with them.

Another tool we’ve invested in is translating and documenting our partner’s work. We always want to share learning from our partners and fellowship programs, so initially we wrote into our grant agreements that members of our fellowship program would do at least two blogs about what they were learning. It was a complete failure – they didn’t have time to write a blog! So we hired a communications consultant to interview them, and it made all the difference in the world. It helped us share our partner’s work, and it helped elevate and celebrate their contributions to peers and colleagues in their own organizations. 

Sometimes one of the biggest challenges is convincing our community partners that we’re serious about our commitment to support them without the traditional grant requirements. Some of them have suffered through traumatic funder experiences, so they have reason not to believe us when we say, ‘Let us know what we can do to partner, we’re learning together in this relationship.’ It’s been gratifying when we get to the point where they do believe us. They know that if something isn’t working or needs to change, it doesn’t mean that we see them as a failure or that we’re going to stop funding them. 

All the little changes and conversations add up to a board that actually feels more connection to what we fund because they better understand and trust what our partners are doing in community. We’ve replaced compliance and checkboxes with a more authentic way of telling the story of our grantees’ impact to the board. We better trust what our partners do, they better trust us, and that’s how we meet our mission.