Can Shifts In Grantmaking Lead to Deeper Culture Change?

Mauri Ingram, President & CEO, & Pamela Jons, Executive Vice President, Whatcom Community Foundation

This story was crafted from a shared conversation between Pamela Jons and Mauri Ingram from the Whatcom Community Foundation. The insights below are a result of their shared learnings and practice in trust-based philanthropy. 

Over our many years at the Whatcom Community Foundation, there have definitely been times when we knew that the right next step was in the direction of what we now understand to be trust-based philanthropy, rather than existing procedures and policies or even “best practices” from the field. But in the past few years, two transformational events accelerated and deepened our trust-based practices: the COVID-19 pandemic and a natural disaster in the area. Our board dramatically changed the grantmaking authority process in response, making it possible for staff to approve grants which sometimes meant being able to get money out the same day. Now, we’re working on policies to codify those shifts into our non-crisis grantmaking. 

We don’t have this perfectly figured out, but we find it helpful to experiment and see what works for the communities of Whatcom County, WA, and for us as an organization. We’ve offered to have conversations with grantees instead of a written report, we started streamlining the application process in coordination with other organizations, and we’re revisiting conversations with our board about continuing to increase our foundation’s payout rate. We paid out more money in the last calendar year than we ever have before, with a tiny staff, and the only way that has been possible is to lean into trust-based principles.

Something we’re wrestling with now is how to really embed those principles in our procedures and culture–our work is relationship and person-centered, but what happens when we have staff turn over? How do the relationships stay with the organization? What happens if we have a new CEO? We’re realizing the power and potential of leading with our values - the non-negotiables - when we think about attracting board and staff members who are going to help us evolve the organization. 

In philanthropy we frame our thinking around being good stewards of the money. What does that really mean? It doesn’t mean making it harder to get! For us, these conversations are happening in bits and pieces over time: maybe there’s no application, maybe no grant agreement, maybe no reporting. But the grantmaking is just one way to operationalize the core principles, it’s not the end all be all. It’s been so helpful to have trust-based philanthropy to point to and say: look, we’re not alone! There are other folks in the pool and the water’s warm.