Trust-Based Philanthropy & Its Misconceptions

“The biggest misconception is that trust-based philanthropy is about writing a check and walking away, and it’s not at all about that. Yes, unrestricted funding is a core tenet of a trust-based approach… however, the trust-based approach is really about a partnership-oriented, relational approach where funders are shoulder to shoulder with the leaders on the ground—learning from them, learning with them, providing a systems mindset to how they’re working with nonprofits, and thinking about ways they can bring other supports beyond financial resources.”

— Shaady Salehi

Shaady Salehi, Executive Director of the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, joins Alberto Lidji on the Do One Better podcast to dig into trust-based philanthropy’s origins, its core tenets, and some of its biggest misconceptions. In grappling with questions of impact, this episode clarifies how philanthropy’s traditional evaluation paradigms need to shift and embrace a learning stance rather than a proving stance. In this vein, trust-based funders ground their theories of change and impact frameworks in principles of self-reflection and accountability to the organizations and communities they are resourcing. Whether exploring the rigor of this approach to evaluation or hashing out trust-based philanthropy’s implications for processes like open calls for proposals, the core call to funders remains the same: cultivate your own curiosity about power and the ways you can mitigate and rebalance it to better align your practices, structures, and culture with your organization’s values and vision.