Let the People Lead, and the Real Work Gets Done

Jenn Ching, Executive Director, North Star Fund

Trust-based philanthropy gave North Star Fund a frame to explicitly name things that we had already been doing for a long time. It also gave us the purpose and process to advance and apply these principles more directly to our grantmaking. 

We were founded to support a deeply underfunded area of work in philanthropy: grassroots organizing for systems change, almost exclusively led by Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities. We originated under the principle that the group of people who decide how to give grants should be led by the people who are doing the actual work. So for over 40 years, we have done what philanthropy now calls participatory grantmaking. For us, that means organizers who are the recipients of our grants also direct where our grants go. They help us shape our grantmaking strategy. They are a part of the governance of our organization. As a result of organizers being centered in decision-making processes in the organization, we have given unrestricted grants for many years. Organizers told us that was critical long ago, and we listened. Our best grantmaking work has happened not because of a strategy developed independently by our staff and board, but because we operate as a site of shifted power to begin with. For that reason, the principles of trust-based philanthropy are a natural part of our values. 

When I came into my role in 2016, I didn't realize how different North Star Fund was in philanthropy. We operate community funding committees that meet periodically throughout the year. They are the ones who review applications and make decisions. Our staff facilitates and supports the process, but neither the staff nor our board make the funding determinations. That means our accountability is to grassroots organizers first, our funding base second. 

We're a community foundation, but we're actually funded by thousands of people -- some who give as little as $5 a month and others who give very large gifts. We're sitting in a complicated space of organizing people across race and class to be accountable to their wealth, and give more deeply to social justice movements. This requires trust from a very broad spectrum of individual donors, and isn’t always easy to maintain. We have a programming team that has created content to demystify the challenges of philanthropy, and the harms that philanthropy has participated in (or sometimes directed). We offer new pathways for people to think about what collective wealth, collective practice, and supportive social justice can look like. 

That donor-directed programming is one of many ways that North Star has been doing things differently. With as much disruption as we’ve seen in the last year, between the murder of George Floyd and Covid, there is new space for philanthropy to do things differently as a whole. Even starting with the Trump administration years, there were real moments of reflection in the philanthropic sector about how we got here. How did we get to a place where white supremacy continues to have a foothold in the American cultural and socio-political imagination? That’s what trust-based philanthropy is helping to both ask and reconfigure.