We Can’t Sit Content In A Broken System
Mailee Walker, Executive Director & Andrea Bretting, Senior Program Officer, Claneil Foundation
This story was crafted from a shared conversation between Mailee Walker and Andrea Bretting from the Claneil Foundation. The insights below are a result of their shared learnings and practice in trust-based philanthropy.
Trust-based philanthropy allows funders and grantees to begin a shared conversation–it’s like a signal or a handshake like, “Hey, you guys do that trust-based thing, right?” And the principles established by trust-based philanthropy are such that you can revisit them over and over again. It’s not one and done; we continue to practice and build the muscle.
A big part of that practice is input from grantees. Learning from trust-based philanthropy, our approach to feedback has become more of an ongoing conversation. Some of those conversations happen during the grant cycle, some of them happen at the end of the grant program. But when we are considering an organizational pivot, we are now particularly intentional about requesting grantee feedback. Our board values that. Recently, we presented our board with anonymous quotes and input from our grantees about how to best approach our grantmaking during a time of transition. Grantees overwhelmingly emphasized the importance of multi-year general operating support. After reading these quotes, the board unanimously voted to shift all our grant programs to multi-year general operating funding. We’ve gotten to a point where our board truly values our grantees’ input as a way to shape our decisions.
At the same time, in our conversations with grantees, it can be hard to find a balance of when to check in with them and when not to. How do we center the importance of trust without centering ourselves in the power dynamic that comes with being the funder? Are we taking up too much of their time? Are we not spending enough time with them? We try to be conservative. They need to do their work and we should respect how much they want to talk to us.
But over time we’ve seen some of our grantees get more comfortable and open with us. We’ve had conversations with nonprofit leaders about an organization’s commitment to fixing broken systems where they’ve said, “You know what? Philanthropy is a broken system, but no funder ever wants to be the topic of that conversation.” Just the fact that they were willing to say that to us was a signal that there’s trust there.
Trust-based philanthropy is a reminder not to waste the privileged seat that we’re in. That’s part of our journey and what we’ve been able to work on through this approach. We have to be proactive and make choices to speak that truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. As funders, we work in such a comfortable place, and it’s easy to stay comfortable. But given the pain that a lot of nonprofit leaders are in, we have to realize: we uphold this broken system and we can’t sit content in it.