Remaking institutional philanthropy to serve the purpose it needs to serve requires an honest, ‘warts-and-all’ self-assessment by those involved

The rallying cry for philanthropy to change has been resounding and gaining momentum over the past few years. It comes from non-profit leaders, academics, the general public and, what we find most heartening, from those engaged in the philanthropic sector itself – and it is a call heard around the world. The call for transforming philanthropy often centres on giving more boldly and democratising decision-making by including more diverse and proximate participants in those decisions. Many recommend a greater focus on risk, impact and on the need to rethink our definition of evidence to include a wider array of experience. We believe this push to reform philanthropy has been constructive and has motivated the philanthropic sector, and in particular institutional philanthropy, to become more reflective in its practices and increasingly embrace new ways of working.

#TrustCreatesImpact workshop. Credit: #TrustCreatesImpact via WiderSense.

Our world needs active and engaged stakeholders right now working together to solve our numerous challenges, so we applaud this push for the philanthropic sector to evolve and play a more supportive role to the non-profit sector in enabling change. Many working in the professional philanthropic sector, in fact, agree with the need for change and have been actively engaged in finding innovative ways to drive it. We have, thus, in this issue of Alliance, invited colleagues involved in several exciting initiatives to share their views and experiences of how philanthropy is evolving. The efforts described in this special feature are largely being driven by the sector itself, transforming philanthropy from the inside out, which we believe is promising in terms of supporting sustainable, lasting change.

We believe this push to reform philanthropy has been constructive and has motivated the philanthropic sector, and in particular institutional philanthropy, to become more reflective in its practices and increasingly embrace new ways of working.

We know that transforming philanthropy requires a willingness to listen to constructive feedback, reflect on internal practices, and embrace shifting power imbalances in our sector. As our colleagues shared how they are responding to this call to transform philanthropy, we noted their ideas and initiatives centred around a few consistent themes, namely:

Collective action: Several contributions highlight how collective action initiatives are key to driving greater impact. For example, WINGS, consisting of over 200 infrastructure organisations across nearly 60 countries, is launching a new initiative called Philanthropy’s Transformation, which will seek to curate our collective wisdom, tools, resources and ideas to encourage further reflection and drive internal transformation in organisations. Catalyst 2030, a community of over 2,000 members, including social entrepreneurs and funders in 114 countries, makes the case that in order to put a dent in the major problems we face globally, collaboration is necessary, but step one is for funders to support and fund collective action. Its global membership has drafted an NGO Call to Action Urgent Letter which calls on donors and funders to remodel their traditional practices to more effectively support grassroots organisations and sustainable social impact.

Shifting power and resources: A consistent call for action throughout this special feature is to shift more resources and decision-making power to smaller organisations proximate to the issues being addressed. The Girls First Fund, focused on ending child marriage, describes how it has developed an effective ‘funding plus’ model, that provides grantee partners not only with the funding appropriate to their needs, but with targeted mentoring and knowledge-sharing to grow their organisations’ capacity to end child marriages and influence positive change in the perception of gender issues at all levels. The Indian Life Skills Collective, which champions life skills for India’s young people, shares its unique model that has the potential to transform the effectiveness of philanthropy by bringing different skills and resources to bear on one problem and has funders and non-profit partners sharing governance and decision-making power in their effort. And finally, Renée Horster, a member of Resource Transformation, a group of young people dedicated to redistributing inherited wealth to movements fighting for social and ecological justice, challenges us with the idea that devolving power and giving agency to communities is important but not sufficient. We must also change the economic system that allows for wealth creation in the first place.

A consistent call for action throughout this special feature is to shift more resources and decision-making power to smaller organisations proximate to the issues being addressed.

Changing practices: But the view from the other side is important, too, so we asked a number of recipient organisations what changes they have seen from their funders and how far those changes have corresponded with the changes they would like to see. Non-profit leaders are encouraged by many of the recent changing practices, but also see room for further improvement. No surprise that the increase of more flexible and unrestricted grants during Covid was welcomed by civil society organisations and the hope is this trend of more flexible funding continues. The contribution from Philanthropy Together suggests that many of these new practices that institutional philanthropy is embracing is really a return to some time-honoured traditions in philanthropy. It sees collective giving practices especially as a positive regrounding in trust-based, abundant, participatory, community-led change. Grantbook shares its recommendations for how to ensure one’s grantmaking operations are supporting one’s values and strategy by equally leveraging people, process and technology choices, iterating on them in lockstep to guarantee they are promoting partnership with grantees. And, finally, leadership in foundations needs to rethink its role in the light of these transformations: it is more about humility, listening and respect for equity. Again, change from the inside out.

The Wider Sense #TrustCreatesImpact collaborative brings foundations together to explore the process of transformation. Credit: #TrustCreatesImpact via WiderSense.

Finally, in our conversation with Romy Krämer, managing director of the Guerrilla Foundation, and Kavita Ramdas, previously the director of the Open Society Foundations’ Women’s Rights Program and the senior adviser to the Ford Foundation’s president, we touched on all of these themes and more as we unpacked how to support foundations from within in their transformation. We discussed how challenging it is to be voices for change within foundations and the need to have healthy, internal debates on how we approach our work that holds our own institutions more accountable for standing in solidarity with our grantees and embracing more boldly our role as foundations to be key risk capital for social change.

The efforts described in this special feature are largely being driven by the sector itself, transforming philanthropy from the inside out, which we believe is promising in terms of supporting sustainable, lasting change.

From our own experiences, we know that the work of transforming philanthropic foundations is most impactful and lasting when driven internally with strong collaboration, alignment and commitment from a foundation’s board, leadership team and staff. At Echidna Giving, a private fund focused on supporting gender equality in education globally, we have recently undertaken a strategic alignment effort that refined our principles and increased our programmatic areas for grantmaking. The board of directors and staff started with updating our principles and clarifying how we expect to live them in our internal and external relationships to ensure they are the drivers of all our programmatic and operational work. Our final new Echidna Giving values are:

• We support organisations and work with them to build the field of, and to enable systemic change in, girls’ education.
• We are guided by the ideas, knowledge and expertise of those closest to the problems our grantmaking is helping to address.
• We invest in building understanding and strong relationships with our grantees, our board, and each other.
• We are comfortable taking measured risks and prioritise learning about what is and is not working and iterating to improve.
• We believe in the value of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our work focuses on gender equity for marginalised populations, but we continuously examine our practices and approach in light of this commitment.

This effort to clarify and align around our principles is helping us make bolder decisions in our grantmaking, seek out a wider diversity of grantees, and build stronger, long-term relationships with them. Of course, we know that our actions speak louder than our words, so the real work continues to be in ensuring we centre our approach around the trust-based philanthropic model rooted in meaningful partnership with our grantees and that we reduce bureaucratic processes wherever we can. We give flexibly and multi-year, generally require only one written report annually, instead placing the emphasis on low-stake check-ins to learn about how a grantee’s work is progressing and start our relationships with a new grantee orientation so we discuss expectations and share the best way to communicate with each other. We ask for feedback from our grantees throughout the year and, every three years, we conduct an anonymous grantee perception survey through the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP). Last year, in our CEP survey, our grantees described Echidna Giving staff as ‘transparent, friendly, constructive’, and ‘clear and flexible’, and see our relationship as ‘trust-based’. They also provided valuable feedback on ways to improve such as providing more ‘non-monetary’ support, which includes things like making introductions, providing advice (when asked) about strategic or organisational issues, offering referrals to other funders, etc. The key is that we are working to create an environment of open, two-way communication since we can only reach our goals through strong collaboration with our partners. Our experience at Echidna Giving has underscored that we must work from the inside out in creating an approach where our principles, strategy, processes, grants and relationships are mutually reinforcing.

This effort to clarify and align around our principles is helping us make bolder decisions in our grantmaking, seek out a wider diversity of grantees, and build stronger, long-term relationships with them.

At Wider Sense this transformation is demonstrated in the collaborative initiative #TrustCreatesImpact, whose backbone organisation we are. The initiative brings together more than 30 foundations from Germany and Switzerland that are exploring the road to transformation based on a set of 10 theses on how philanthropy should look in the future. This initiative covers such issues as listening, diversity and also investing ethics. The many workshops and conversations between foundation staff show again and again that this transformation is not an easy journey, but it is recognised by the network as one that will make philanthropy more reflective, more participatory, more inclusive.

We look forward to continuing to support efforts transforming the foundation, and the wider philanthropic, sector. We hope you enjoy this Alliance special feature and that it inspires more initiatives to push for progress in the philanthropic sector. The time is now to be a constructive, supportive partner to the non-profit sector and to put all our available resources to work to solve today’s complex, global problems.

Erin Ganju is managing director at Echidna Giving, a private funder focused on the best ways to support quality, gender-responsive education in lower-income countries. She is also a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow of The Robert Bosch Academy and co-founder and former CEO of Room to Read, a global education non-profit.
Email: erin@echidnagiving.org
Twitter: @EchidnaGiving

Michael Alberg-Seberich  is managing director at Berlin-based Wider Sense, a social impact advisory organisation with a focus on philanthropy and corporate social responsibility. The foundation initiative #TrustCreatesImpact is hosted by Wider Sense.
Email: alberg-seberich@widersense.org
Twitter: @wider_sense

Header Image Credit: Joshua Sortino