The Easiest Way to Shift Practice is to Lean on Values

Dimple Abichandani, Executive Director, General Service Foundation

“My experience convinces me that few men are smart enough to foresee the developments and changes that will occur in the next fifty years, so I think it best not to place any limitations on the life of the foundation or the work which you undertake.” Clifton Musser wrote these words on Sept. 6, 1946, as he endowed the General Service Foundation, planting seeds for an organizational culture of trust and humility. The 2016 presidential election proved he was right. 

I woke up the morning after the election thinking about our grantees who were working on frontlines of reproductive justice, racial justice and immigrant rights. The question that we asked ourselves as a foundation at that time was, how do we stand with our grantees?  We immediately moved to increase our grants budget and make rapid response grants. As I was signing those grant letters, I noticed that they embodied a legal, compliance-oriented tone that was completely out of step with how we were feeling about our grantees at that time. The letter made clear that if our grantees didn't perform and report in particular ways, they might not get their second payment. What it did not convey was our immense gratitude for their work, and that it was our honor to support them. As I looked at the letter I also thought about how time-consuming our reporting process was. So I took my pen and crossed out the text about the reports, and hand-wrote instead: “In light of these extraordinary times and in a desire to minimize burdens on you, we are waiving all requirements for narrative reports.” We replaced the requirement with a phone call with a program officer. Most grant reports generally take 10 to 14 hours to complete, and with administering 70 to 80 grants a year, we were able to save grantees 700 hours of their precious time that they could now use to defend our democracy and to fight for racial justice. The phone calls helped us build trust and hear directly from grantees about their needs; they helped us be of greater service.

In my early days at the Foundation, we were working without an articulation of shared values or organizational priorities. In 2016, our board and staff engaged in a process to clarify our values and identify our North Star as an organization. I felt empowered to take out my pen and rewrite the grantee letters because we had done this collective work to know who we are and what we believe as an institution. The positive response to that reporting adjustment inspired us to look across the organization to bring all of our operations, grants management, and application processes into deeper alignment with our values. We began asking: do our processes create burdens and barriers or give our grantees a runway? This practice of trust-based philanthropy was just one way for us to live into our organization’s values.

Having clarity on our values moved us to change not just how we fund, but what we fund. One of our values is that we believe that the leadership of those most impacted by injustice will get us to justice. We wondered, if that's true, then shouldn’t we trust the people doing the work to know how to get us there? Why are we the ones deciding which issues are most important? We listened deeply to our grantees, asking them questions like, “when you are talking with people who are not funders, like your family or your community, how do you describe your work?” Across all the issues we were funding, grantees responded that they talk about their work in terms of building power. So we took our lead from them and eliminated our siloed program areas and created one intersectional portfolio on building voice and power. Some Board members had previously been tied to our program areas and had personal connections to what we funded. But when they heard what our grantees needed, the culture of trust we built enabled them to let go of those attachments. Change is hard for humans in general, of course. But we got there by asking, “How do we put our values into action?”