The Power of Giving Up Power
John Esterle, Co-Executive Director, The Whitman Institute
The seeds for trust-based philanthropy started when Fred Whitman, the founder of The Whitman Institute, passed away in 2004. We were originally a very small and quirky operating foundation. When Fred passed and left us more assets to work with, I led our transition to become a grantmaking foundation. We always had a mission of promoting critical thinking and more effective decision-making, and eventually we decided to bring those lenses to philanthropy itself.
From the beginning of my leadership tenure, unrestricted funding and multi-year grants just made inherent sense to me. We didn't name our practices at the time, but themes like doing the homework, engaging in dialogue, building relationships rather than requiring proposals, and leading with trust, were present early on. (I should also note that we didn’t invent these practices, they’ve been driving the edges of philanthropy for a long time.) We came into our grantee conversations from a place of, “What can we do to be of service to you?” rather than “What do you have to do to prove you're worthy of us?”
When we made the decision to spend out in 2012, we wanted to check our assumptions about how to do so with integrity, so we asked our grantee partners for feedback. Across the board we heard that: 1) people felt trusted by us, and 2) they wanted us to advocate within philanthropy for our approach. It was our sense of accountability to our grantee partners that led us to use their feedback to develop the trust-based philanthropy framework — and then to use that framework to push the field and inspire the sector to meaningfully shift. I think we've lived into, and maybe even gone beyond their visions for us. Pia Infante and I were early peer organizers around this set of values and practices, but now we’re frequently in spaces where people talk about trust-based philanthropy without even mentioning The Whitman Institute. And that’s on purpose. We put as much of our early energy into peer organizing as we did into grantmaking because the relational roots of this work matter.
In 2014, Pia Infante joined me as Co-Executive Director. When I gave up some of my own personal power, we became a more powerful organization. Having Pia leading alongside me opened up my world in all sorts of ways. My sense of self and possibility expanded. Through the trust-based philanthropy framework, we're asking people to give up notions of ego, expertise, and control with the promise of something bigger on the other side. Trust-based philanthropy is not just the right thing to do, it makes the work more meaningful.
We’re inviting the field to rethink the roles each of us play from the ground up, which is challenging. Take boards, for example. The norm is for staff to devote an inordinate amount of time preparing grant dockets for trustees to approve. But what happens when board members forgo their traditional gatekeeping role and trust their staff’s recommendations? When we intentionally built our board structure with that in mind, it freed our board to have deeper discussions about purpose and strategy, values and ideas, communications and asset management. And for staff, not having to prepare dockets freed up more time for us to do peer organizing and to support our grantee partners. These shifts set the stage for all of us to design our work in really different ways.
It’s essential that if you’re asking someone to give something up, you offer a meaningful role to take its place. As we look to our final year, our hope is that our trustees increasingly become advocates along with us for trust-based philanthropy. The driver for rethinking roles is that you are creating an organizational culture that is fully values-aligned. And when that happens, good things follow, both internally and externally.