Transcript: Soliciting & Acting on Feedback

Shaady Salehi: We have some fabulous speakers with us today. We've got Claire Peeps, who's the executive director of the Durfee Foundation in Los Angeles; Phil Li, who's President and CEO of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation in New York; Pia Infante, Co-Executive Director of the Whitman Institute; and Austin Long, Director of Assessment Advisory Services for the Center for Effective Philanthropy.

So what is trust-based philanthropy? The root of what we're talking about here is power imbalance. We recognize there is a fundamental power imbalance between funders and grantee partners, and those power imbalances are even further magnified when you factor in all the other racial and gender injustices, and the many other injustices that occur in our society.

So I'd like to invite Claire Peeps, Executive Director of the Durfee Foundation to share. How has Durfee thought about its role in this current moment? Particularly as a white-led organization navigating racial injustice as a Los Angeles-based foundation?

Claire Peeps: Thank you, Shaady. In this moment of time when we were all isolated and physically separate from the people we work with, the dual pandemics are especially challenging. Most of our work is based in fellowships. We do a lot of feedback loops because we do a lot of convening. We're not able to convene very much right now except on Zoom, of course. So in the middle of this racial reckoning, we had a conversation among staff about what is the appropriate response.

Everybody is posting their anti-racist statement on their websites and we are certainly considering that, but we also want it to have some real traction. So we wrestled with what to do. We are a white-led organization. It's a family foundation, so it's the family who runs the entity. I'm a staff person and while we have diversified our board by bringing in community members and we have worked hard to build a diverse staff, we are still a white-led organization.

I'm going to share with you really briefly just something that's not yet resolved. We decided to reach out to our fellows. We have more than a hundred fellows in Los Angeles and a couple dozen of them are actually black leaders. They're a very diverse group in terms of the issues that they're working on; a very influential group. We have people from city council, people working in justice reform in public health, in education, and economic development. They're an extraordinary group.

I approached two of our principal leaders with the roster of all of the folks who were in the cohort and we said, “We are not quite sure how to proceed at this moment. We don't want to ask you to do our work for us, but neither do we want to act without your input. We'd like to put everything on the table, everything from how Durfee does its grantmaking to what we're choosing to fund, how we're investing, and how we're doing our operations.

Two of the leaders—the two leaders we spoke with (one is a two-time Durfee fellow and the other is a Durfee alum)—and a former board member talked between themselves and then got back to us and said, “We'd like to offer to hold a meeting for you on your behalf with this group.” That's happening right now. The letter just went out to the group yesterday. We don't know what's going to transpire, but we trust these people immensely.

This is actually just an example of trying to live the trust-based model. We don't know exactly how it's going to be resolved, but it is about the idea of redistributing power and working for systemic equity.

Shaady Salehi: Thank you so much, Claire. It's really helpful to hear about that kind of process. I'd like to introduce Austin Long from the Center for Effective Philanthropy.

Austin, I'd like to invite you to share any reflections on Claire's story, and also share with us about the Center for Effective Philanthropy—what you're all about and what kind of insights you can share around this whole concept of soliciting feedback.

Austin Long: Sure. Thanks, Shaady. Really appreciate it. I really appreciate Claire's reflection on how the Durfee Foundation is thinking about its work right now, that willingness to open itself up and be vulnerable in this moment, which is understandably challenging. I think that example is a great one of putting trust-based philanthropy values into going straight to the leaders who are on the ground to inform the foundation's response, rather than putting all of this time and energy into developing a strategy, perfecting it with staff and the board, and only then going out and testing it with partners. I think that going straight to the folks who are doing the work first is certainly something that we work with funders on all the time, and it’s a crucial part of building and creating those feedback loops.

I can share a little bit more about CEP. We've been working with funders for nearly two decades to make sure that they have the data and insights they need to help them improve their effectiveness. That includes helping funders seek candid, confidential feedback from grantees, declined applicants, donors, staff, and a variety of different stakeholders, and using all of that information to inform the research and programming that we do across the field.

We actually ask several questions specifically about funder-grantee relationships. Those questions, in part, are informed by our research around interactions and communications, but we also work closely with the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project to include questions that are about underlying values of trust, candor, respect, and compassion. What's interesting, just speaking from my experience delivering these findings to foundations, is that we often see very close connections between all of these different questions related to the broader construct of relationships. There's some clear highs and lows on the trust-based philanthropy measures and questions specifically. So in my experience, some funders are much more effective at applying these trust-based values with their grantees.

Then it turns to an interesting conversation about the opportunities to strengthen those partnerships and work in service of the impact that funders and grantees are seeking to achieve together. Soliciting and acting on feedback's a pretty crucial component of effective philanthropy.

I just thought I'd share a few tips on how to listen well in this moment. I'll start with listen only when you're willing to act. There's a lot of concern about extractive listening right now, given the incredible challenges that nonprofit leaders are facing as a result of COVID and of battling systemic racism. It creates incredible challenges and also a desire to have better information about how to help the folks who are doing the work on the ground. We all recognize that seeking and providing feedback takes time, but I just want to remind folks and encourage everyone to keep in mind that it only becomes additive when that feedback turns what you've learned into meaningful change for the folks who provided it in the first place.

One of the first questions we ask any funder as we start to work through our assessments is how that feedback fits into their approach to learning. What do they want to use it for? What's it meant to inform and change?

I'll talk about this other piece, listening comprehensively. There are a lot of ways to listen, whether it's through one-on-one conversations, focus groups, or interviews. When folks use feedback through surveys, it can do a couple of things that are particularly important right now. It can generate candor that allows feedback to be anonymous or confidential. That can allow the respondent to be unseen or unnamed.

Listening comprehensively can also reveal inequity. I think it's all too easy to not see the ways that foundation processes or approaches might unfairly disadvantage nonprofits folks, even when we're starting with the best intentions. Really look at survey responses and any data you get back to look at differences based on various demographic characteristics or experiences to really understand, are there unintentional barriers that are making the foundation inaccessible or preventing advancement of the mission? We often do see a lot of those differences come up in the Grantee Perception Report, for example.

Finally, there are a lot of ways to listen. Whether it's having a third party facilitate conversations on your behalf, where you can still kind of guarantee that confidentiality and anonymity, but get the feedback that you need. Some funders have even set up a websites or mini surveys where folks can go in, anonymously share any feedback they have. There are also online tools like Grant Advisor.

Shaady Salehi: Thank you, Austin. I'm going to hand it over to Pia Infante to share. Why did you do a Grantee Perception Report and what was the motivation behind that?

Pia Infante: Thanks everyone. I'm taking notes over here. The Whitman Institute decided to spend out because of the last financial crisis, the last time we had this huge economic downturn through a lot of irresponsibility at corporate and government levels, which now sort of feels similar.

The Whitman Institute decided, let's just spend well above the minimum and spend ourselves out. Part of the motivation for even going to our partners and saying, “What should we do?” is that we had 10 years of a runway in front of us and we really wanted to know about listening in order to act comprehensively. We wanted to understand if they were in the driver's seat, what direction would we be going? That's where we got to the deep intentionality and the spirit of service around this Grantee Perception Report.

It's another impulse to get a good report card so that we can show off. We had Austin and others at CEP help us craft this process. It wasn't just a survey. It was a series of interviews, conversations, some focus groups, but it really felt like a comprehensive process. I'm not going to go through all of it, but I'll just say that the high notes of what they turned back to us with is, “You have ten years left. There's something about the way that you approach the relationship and the culture of the power-brokering between your foundation and grantees as partners. For the most part it was a positive relational experience.”

I think this is an important story, because at this point trust-based philanthropy is really far and beyond the Whitman Institute's grasp, meaning people are using it and interpreting it in a lot of ways. In a lot of those instances, we have the Claires and the Phils of the world. In some instances, it's not quite in the spirit of what we started with. So, the origin story is important.

Austin Long: Even though this was back in 2013, which really does feel like a lifetime ago, this experience really stands out for me because it was such a different way of engaging with grantees and partners. It was the survey, it was some conversations and interview style pieces. But what stands out most to me is the annual grantee convening in October 2013. That was, in my experience, an all too rare moment where a funder brings grantees together to actually hear directly from the folks who collected data at CEP, the results of this feedback, along with other funders and partners and stakeholders. You can imagine that potentially being really awkward and rife with power dynamics, but it was actually set up so that everyone left their titles at the door. You couldn't tell who was a funder, who is a grantee. It was really just about connecting and building relationships in service of a broader mission.

It was just this really powerful moment to hear directly from the individuals who had provided this feedback and have a genuine conversation about what to do well. There's something about this trust-based approach that is powerful and really needed in philanthropy right now.

Shaady Salehi: Thank you both. I'm going to move us on from that story. As a trust-based funder that has built this into your work, how do you manage acting on feedback? You can't possibly act on everything. Have you ever gotten feedback that you haven't been able to act on, and how have you approached that?

Pia Infante: There were things that obviously we couldn't do from that process with Austin. But I think what's really important is to say what you're going to do. I mean, a lot of times feedback feels basically like a blackhole. You put the feedback in and then who knows where it goes. It's just swirling around the universe. So it's important to say what you're going to do.

If you're not going to be able to fund them after they've made a request, it's really important to say, “Hey, thank you so much for your time and your work. We just don't happen to be able to fund you right now.” People like to say yes and don't like to say no, but it's our job to be able to say both and to say when, and to say how.

Shaady Salehi: There’s a question about making sure grantees don't feel obligated to offer feedback. How do you navigate that?

Pia Infante: When we make requests like that, we say you are not at all obligated to participate in this. We often offer compensation for participating in extracurricular things. We try to make it very clear that it's not part of their grant requirement. It's not part of our expectation of them. Even when we say, “look, we're having this retreat where we're doing this survey”, we say, “please do not feel like you have to.” Even then sometimes I think there's still, “This is my funder. They're asking me for something.” So I think it's about a consistency of how we are actually showing up in the relationship. Meaning if someone says no to the retreat or to the meeting or to the survey, they don't experience some passive aggressiveness.

Shaady Salehi: We're kind of at this interesting tipping point where there is a realization that we can't survive these ongoing crises without trusting the leadership of nonprofit partners and communities. It's a great segue for Phil Li at Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, who affectionately deemed himself the first follower of trust-based philanthropy. Phil, can you share a little bit about your story and how you've become a leader in this movement in many ways, and also just bringing us back to how you approach feedback and acting on it at Robert Sterling Clark Foundation?

Phil Li: When I came to the foundation here in 2016, the mandate and the invitation from our board was how could we make an impact and make change happen in New York City?

We do that through leadership development. The first thing that we did was actually create an advisory council of a group of about a dozen nonprofit leaders to help influence and share with us what their thinking was about what was needed here in New York.

We had some ideas, but we weren't sure. We didn't want to just go ahead and craft our own solution and then put it in place. We worked with that group for the better part of a year, on everything from grantmaking to our own leadership development program, to thinking about some grantmaking practices and things of that nature. Like many others, we stipended all of them to honor their time and their expertise for coming through that process. It was incredibly helpful in terms of shaping the way that work to this day. The roots of my time here at this foundation are grounded in getting feedback and listening to people with lived experience to see what their needs are and respond.

Shaady Salehi: One thing I love about how you and your colleague Lisa Cowan talk about your work at the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, is that you often talk about your face plant moments. You're transparent about those moments where things didn't go exactly as planned. Can you share one of those moments particularly related to soliciting feedback?

Phil Li: The name of that series comes from a phrase that I have been using since the beginning of my time here, which were Stumbles, Trips, and Face Plants, which was really just to acknowledge that we were figuring this out and making our way through this journey. The whole series came up about as a way to sort of recognize that we're not perfect. So much of the power resides with funders because they have the resources, and I think this was a way to say that we're not the know-it-all. We aren't the smartest on the block. We're human and we make mistakes as well.

I would say the big moment for us was at one of our grantee retreats. We implemented an online capacity assessment tool that we were using with our grantee partners. And in the first year everybody pulled it out. Of course they were renewed grantees and we were just starting in embarking on this work. Everything went fine. Then the second year as well, we're coming up to our annual grantee retreat which is fully optional, but not everyone believes that. Only about a quarter of them had done it ahead of time. And we were hoping to report back during that moment about what the findings were. We just kept asking and people didn't do it. I was just like, “We ask so little of our grantee partners. Could they do this one request or survey for us?” It was eye-opening.

What ended up is that we had our retreat and we have independent evaluators who look at the work and what's being done so that we can hear from others, but they did a private session with our grantee partners saying, “We had hoped to report back to you what the findings were from what you had filled out about the foundation.”

So it became a feedback session on what it was about that survey that didn't work. They all said they absolutely hated it! It was like a sucker punch to us when we heard about that later. But the reasoning was twofold. One was, our grants were too small to warrant taking credit for any changes that would have happened at their institutions. The second one is that particular survey required a board member to participate and sort of give his or her feedback as well. That felt like asking for pretty important shit for something that wasn't that important to them. It was just sort of, wow, it was an eye opener for us.

We finished that retreat and when we came back that weekend, we regrouped and immediately suspended that program. What had happened is our independent evaluators had also told them the reason why Robert Clark is asking you for this information is because they're trying to collect data and information so that they can make a case to the field about the importance of multi-year unrestricted funds. They're like, “We're all for that, so we would be happy to help.” We had a half dozen of our grantee partners actually offer up their time to work with our evaluators, to create a different kind of tool that we could use. What came out of that was something that we call CHAT (check-in analysis tool), our verbal reporting system that we use to this day. That is the tool that we and our evaluators use. So we have our grantees to thank for their feedback which changed the way that we do our work.

Shaady Salehi: Thanks so much, Phil. Can you describe a little bit more about what the questions are? What is the tone of the questions and how often do you use that feedback and updates from your grantee partners?

Phil Li: The CHAT tool is our way of checking in every year with each one of our grantees. It's really a talk or a conversation that we have with them. We actually share the questions in advance. It tends to get refined year over year, just so that we can hone it a little bit.

It's not a “gotcha” or anything like that. It's really a check-in, a way to sort of talk and have an understanding of what's going on. Trying to understand what the impact of multi-year funding looks like to you. It is just one of a number of tools that we use. The CHAT actually gets reviewed independently by our evaluators. We ask our grantee partners if we can record it. So it gets transcribed, and then the transcripts are reviewed by external evaluators on a number of different dimensions to assess their understanding of what's happening between us and our grantees.

Shaady Salehi: That's awesome. I'm going to move on and bring us back to Claire Peeps. One thing that struck me about your website, and how you describe some of your grant programs, is that almost all of your grant programs have been informed by grantee feedback. Can you share a little bit about that and how that shows up?

Claire Peeps: We do a lot of careful listening. In addition, we survey declined applicants as well as those who are actually accepted to get information from them about what they're needing and where we're missing the mark.

Shaady Salehi: Thank you. I should also mention that Durfee has been an example of a foundation that’s been trust-based from the start.

Claire Peeps: Austin earlier referenced the funder sitting in a room and coming up with a perfect strategy and polishing it and employing it. We’ve done that too. It’s inevitable, right? So, because we’ve been funding people to take sabbaticals for more than 20 years, we have seen people reach retirement, and have developed an informal subspecialty around executive transition and people moving on.

We thought it was the next thing that we should do, and that there should be a program for people who had left the sector to continue to be engaged. We thought it would be a really good idea if we created a program to put people into residency at other nonprofit organizations, so that a retired executive director might have a paid stint of offering counsel to another nonprofit in our cohort or even outside of our cohort. We even named it! We specialize in programs that begin with S. That’s kind of a joke. We’ve got the Stanton Fellowship and the Sabbatical Fellowship and the Springboard, which is for the newcomers. So we called this the Sage Fellowship, and it was going to be for leaders who had left the field. We really kind of went the whole nine yards thinking that we had all the input we needed, but we hadn’t really asked. So we designed the program and we invited some other funders to fly in from other places to help be part of the conversation for rolling it out. We brought together about 30 of our fellows, half of whom had retired recently and were in that phase of the people who would receive this fellowship, and half of whom had retirement within the next four or five years.

We rolled out the whole thing and asked for feedback. The first person to speak was a wonderful man who used to run the Little Tokyo Service Center, Bill Watanabe, who’s the kindest person on the face of the planet. He began by saying, “Well, I’m sure it’s a good idea for somebody, but it wouldn’t be for me.” Then it went around the table and people said, “You know, that’s a terrible idea. As an executive director, why would I want to bring in another executive director?” They went around the entire table and everyone said, “You know, there’s a kernel of something useful here, but not the way you’ve designed it.”

So that was a great lesson to us. We just wasted a lot of time sitting in our office among ourselves thinking that we had gathered, from listening peripherally, what we needed. So we scrapped it and we went an entirely different direction. And that’s another story, but it was a definitely a faceplant.

Shaady Salehi: Thank you for your honesty. What would you do differently next time?

Claire Peeps: Well, gee, the exact reverse! I did invite those 30 people into the room, but 8 to 10 people seems like a wonderful number of people who would be in the target range of the users to sit down. If we’re doing it again, bring people to the table at the outset and just to say, “We’ve observed several of you are retiring and we think that there’s still a need for purpose0driven work. We’re trying to imagine where that would be. Can you help us think, and would there be a role for Durfee here?”

Shaady Salehi: It’s a great lesson in challenging assumptions. We’re all hearing some examples of different types of ways of soliciting feedback. You could do the formal Grantee Perception Survey, but we’re hearing examples of focus groups that Durfee does. I assume, Claire, that’s bringing in facilitators to lead those discussions?

Claire Peeps: Interestingly for Durfee, we don’t very often bring in facilitators. It’s pretty easy for us just to sit down and have an informal conversation because it’s such a tight knit group. There are occasions when we’ve brought in outside facilitators, and we do actually hire alum as consultants to be facilitators to the peer groups, We have peer groups that are meeting right now during COVID from our sabbatical and our springboard programs. Those are run by other alums. So, yes, it’s a facilitation, but they’re part of the family.

Shaady Salehi: I actually have a question that I want to raise around compensating grantee partners for time offering feedback. What does that look like? What are our speakers’ thoughts are on this idea of compensating?

Claire Peeps: We don't do a lot of compensating for sort of meetings per se, but we have a program in which we recruit established fellows for our Stanton and sabbatical programs to be mentors to folks in the Springboard program. It's helpful to have somebody there as a confidant. The people who come in in the mentor role are selected by the Springboard Fellow with a little bit of guidance from us. Then we paid those individuals $200 an hour. We contract for a bank of hours and they just draw down from that. So we paid them for 50 hours a year for each of two years to be an informal confidant, to be an advisor to the Springboard. So that's something we've kind of built into our system, and there's a lot of them.

Phil Li: When we ask or invited folks to provide input into the work that we're doing at the foundation, those are the moments. So that advisory council that I alluded to, and then the group that helped shape the verbal assessment tool, spent a number of months doing their work. And so that was all part of the way that we looked at what compensation could be to make sure that we honored their time.

Shaady Salehi: Thank you. Austin, I'm curious what from a CDP perspective, what is your take on compensating for surveys or feedback?

Austin Long: I think it really depends on the feedback effort. How that's being collected, what it's intended to inform for something that's meant to be anonymous and confidential. For the GPR specifically, we actually asked funders not to offer incentives for completing the survey. You don't want to create a positive response bias by offering folks something to complete the survey, especially given the power dynamic that exists between funders and grantees. So we don't do it for that.

I think the communication is much more helpful. Why are we seeking this feedback as a funder? What are we going to do with it? Who responds or who doesn't? Those are all of the really important questions that we work with funders to address up front. For something else like focus groups or interviews, absolutely compensation for the time is really important. Or if a funder is running their own survey, that's something that can be flexible, but if it is meant to be confidential or anonymous, a third party can still help disperse those funds to folks who participate without the funder knowing exactly who participated. If it's a pool of funds for a particular project that the third party can then help disperse. We've done some of that as well, just to make sure that there is appropriate recognition of that time for something like a focus group.

Shaady Salehi: I also wanted to raise up a question for our full panel around this idea of survey fatigue. Inevitably there's a lot of surveys flying around and questions being asked of nonprofits about what they need or how they're responding. So how are you all thinking about survey fatigue?

Pia Infante: I think underneath that question, is how are we all going to get through this? Like literally a period like this rubber band time where there's so much uncertainty. Some of the deep desire to get feedback about what we should do with ourselves comes from that. There's just an immense amount of uncertainty about where we're going, what's going to happen with the economy, what's going to happen with this election, when are we going to be able to travel freely? When will we be able to hug our family members? I've literally said myself and heard so many people say, “I don't think I can do another Zoom call.”

All this to say, no one has the answers, not even our movement and nonprofit partners. The desire there is to get a lot of data about the best thing to do, given how completely overwhelming and unprecedented this era is. We're trying to pretend that we can just kind of move along, have our strategic plans, and lay out a work plan for the year. But we never know from week to week, what's going to stop us dead in our tracks. Literally. Physically, like, go back inside. Don't even go across your own town. So I think some of the desire for feedback is almost like an anxiety to do the right thing.

I know Claire has a fantastic story about just honoring how difficult it is to show up in all of our roles that are simultaneously being expected of us right now. Even our family gatherings are now in the same format as our work gatherings. All this to say, we might think that what we really want is to listen, but what we actually want is to be reassured. We want to be reassured that we're not fucking this all up. That we're not ignoring the most important feedback. And we shouldn't be looking to the people we fund to reassure us. We should be getting that reassurance from other places.

We have spiritual practices. We have other community members. We should be the ones trying to be reassuring. The answer for me is that there's no technique. But there is human connection. All of these fantastic leaders, we want to listen for feedback and to act on it, but we also really need human connection.

Shaady Salehi: Thank you, Pia. Claire, I would love to invite you to share just how Durfee has embodied how to be human and how to support grantee partners in this time.

Claire Peeps: Thank you. Thank you, Pia. That was so beautiful and so powerful. Durfee has actually gone through many chapters in the past few months. The first chapter for us was accelerating payments and getting things out the door as quickly as we could.

The second chapter was contributing to pooled funds and emergency funds and jumping in. Then the situation became more protracted. It sparked a great conversation for us about our mission because we only give away a little less than three million dollars a year. And what we give is less than most of our organization’s operating budgets. We couldn't really be very helpful to anyone right now facing economic distress.

So we did a couple of things. We decided not to survey anyone. The other thing that we did, we went to our board and said, “Look, our mission is to support the people on the front lines doing the work, and right now people are working under tremendous duress and tremendous uncertainty. They're trying to take care of their children at home and bringing their parents back from senior care into their homes and trying to show up and do their work at night and take care of the family during the day. They're stressed out. So could we just make a gesture? It's not going to add up to very much, but can we just make a gesture to those organizations in the inner circle of our network?” And they said yes! So sometimes you can act without soliciting input. It was just a small act of kindness.

We sent out five-thousand dollar checks to about fifty or sixty organizations in our network that said we recognize that this is a time of great trial for all of you and these are funds for you to use at your discretion, however will best support your staff’s wellbeing. You can do whatever you want with them, from gardening tools to books online. Whatever you want to do and no reporting back to us is necessary.

The outpouring of warm response we got was so lovely. Just yesterday, I had one of the fellows who emailed me. She wanted me to know they had a staff meeting, and their staff purchased puzzles, yoga mats, coloring books, and pencils for adults, biking gear, walking shoes, manicure/pedi set. Our favorite was a tabletop fountain that somebody had sent for meditation.

We're searching desperately to find our own purpose. We can't do what we normally do, but the least we can do is to try not to be bothersome to people right now and to offer whatever gesture of support that we can.

Shaady Salehi: Thank you so much, Claire. Thanks for just being so responsive and mindful and thoughtful about your grantees needs. Phil, I would love to give you a chance to respond to this question of how to respond in a crisis time.

Phil Li: I would say the whole notion of being trust-based is that our grantees have always been, or many of them, have always chosen to talk to us or share what's going on. So you get a little bit of insight. We went out very quickly in early March, mid-March, with what we were doing and we put it out as our initial response to what was happening. Based on what we had heard, these are the things that we thought would be helpful. We did this thing called plus one, which was adding one year of grant funding to every single organization that we supported, including ones that had finished and completed in 2019. We also added Zoom accounts and office hours and all these other things that we thought might be helpful.

Part of it was a bit of a guessing. We could have been wrong as well, but that's okay. That's what a faceplant is all about. You learn. We've since gone back out again and done additional grants for every single organization for this year, in addition to their current commitments. We started based on feedback and the executive director circle for all our EDs who are looking for a space where they can explore all these really tough issues that they're wrestling with right now.

Shaady Salehi: Thank you so much. I love all these stories because they highlight these other principles of trust-based philanthropy, being transparent and responsive. Austin, what's rising to the top for you? What are some things you would like to underscore for folks to take away today?

Austin Long: It’s hard to follow all of the amazing things that have been shared, but all I'll start with one, which is we've talked a lot about listening, but I think the piece of that is that you're hearing what folks are saying, that we're really focusing on hearing and responding to feedback. We did some rapid response surveys right when COVID was declared a global pandemic in March and across April, and what we actually heard most from nonprofits is not, “I want my funder to listen” or “I don't have opportunities to provide feedback.” It's “we need flexible operating support right now.” Not to do convenings and gatherings, but “we just need the support right now.” That's what came through most loud and clear. So I think that was a great example of really being open to making sure that you're acting on that, and I’m happy to always be a resource for other folks who are thinking about those feedback loops.

Shaady Salehi: Thank you, Austin. I'd like to just take a moment to thank and applaud our amazing speakers for being so transparent, so candid, so insightful. I really want to thank our partners at Philanthropy California and our partners at Northern California Grantmakers in particular for running this so seamlessly.