Pooled Funds As a Gateway To Trust-Building
Henry Rael, Senior Program Officer, McCune Charitable Foundation
About five years ago at the McCune Charitable Foundation, we noticed that when we started talking to grantees about collaboration, we got a lot of rolled eyes. So we decided to go on a listening tour–we spent two years connecting with grantees of the foundation, everything from one-on-one coffee conversations to state-wide convenings. That was how we started our journey: just talking to our grantees to understand how we could best support their collaborative efforts.
Certain themes immediately emerged: the value of flexible funding; the power of multiyear grants; and the benefits of streamlined application and reporting processes. We had funded many of these grantees for years and had engaged in multiple conversations about their work, but this was the first time we talked to them about the mechanics of running their organizations and how our behavior as a funder impacted that. We got to see these leaders in a different light and share with them aspects of our work that had previously been undiscussed.
Those conversations encouraged us to make all of our grants unrestricted general operating grants. We also radically changed our reporting and renewal process to streamline the paperwork. But we’re a small family foundation. We realized that no matter how hard we worked on our own internal practices, the reality is we’re only one funder, and there’s no organization that’s getting all of their funding from us. So in our last strategic plan, we made a commitment to envisioning and creating structures that would enable our partner foundations to also adopt some of these practices. We worked on a pooled fund in collaboration with other foundations.
I think there are so many funders that just know in their gut that a trust-based approach is the right thing to do, and that this is the way funding should happen. Creating the pooled fund structure gives them some cover. It’s made it possible for more funders to participate in ways that we didn’t expect them to, and when you have a partner like us who has really flexible money, we can slip in and fill any gaps.
If foundations are wringing their hands about the siloing that happens in the nonprofit sector, then why do foundations insist on operating in their own silos? We’re spending a lot of energy on the culture of philanthropy in New Mexico, a state that doesn’t have a lot of philanthropic resources. Our practices are about relationships: finding the humility to put aside being in control of what the answers are, being willing to ask questions of our communities, and trust that the solutions actually exist within them. Seeing our partner foundations start to think that same way was a big shift. It becomes not just the McCune Foundation’s practices, but collective practices of the sector in our geography.
What we’re proposing, this shift from a compliance frame to a relational frame, is so radically different. The word trust is such an interesting piece of all this–we have to trust ourselves that we’re doing the right thing. Even as an individual person, it’s scary when you become vulnerable and trust another human being, and to put that into practice at your work is hard. It requires vulnerability and it requires taking risks. But the most exciting and fun thing about this is listening to the instinct that says, let’s just take a leap and see what happens. And you know what? It feels right.