Recently, I had a call with a funder who was considering whether to commission a Grantee Perception Report (GPR) for the very first time. Usually, these kinds of conversations have a predictable cadence and arc — an overview of CEP’s comparative dataset and the unique insights it generates, and sometimes a frank discussion about the difficulty of timing and even some skepticism about the cost of the assessment.
This conversation felt a little different from the start, though. Despite having never worked with CEP, the Foundation’s president — let’s call her Jane — was already familiar with the GPR. She seemed to be open to the idea that grantee feedback could be a powerful tool in cutting through the noise and measuring her foundation’s effectiveness, and she’d known other funders who’d used the GPR to drive meaningful change.
But I got the sense that Jane was a bit wary of the idea. Finally, after going in circles for some time, I asked her more directly what her misgivings might be. She answered slowly but with conviction. “I think I’m tired of feeling like if I’m not being held accountable by my grantees, that I’m an oppressor.” Jane went on to describe a regional meeting of funders where the topic had been about creating meaningful feedback loops, and how trusting grantees was fundamental to the “right kind” of impact. “It was made to seem that if I didn’t fully embrace every single aspect of trust-based philanthropy, I was going to get canceled for not caring about equity. That’s not fair.”
Her words took the wind out of me for a minute. It’s rare that a funder speaks so candidly about this particular perspective, especially since, even though the GPR is about much more than trust-based philanthropy, CEP as an organization does believe that feedback is a building block of grantmaker effectiveness, and that funders holding themselves accountable and grappling with feedback lays the path towards greater equity, justice, and, yes, trust.
With some of these layers peeled back from Jane’s perspective, I felt more emboldened to dig deeper. What, then, were the strategies and approaches that underpinned her foundation’s grantmaking?
Jane proudly described having known and worked with many of her grantees for years, some of them for close to a decade. She talked about having a near-implicit understanding of their core needs and challenges, since she, too, had been a grant recipient in the past. She cited a chance conversation with a grantee which led to her learning about a spectacular program that expanded the work already being funded by the Foundation, which in turn inspired her to push through a grant amendment with her Board to extend the work for a second year. Jane discussed her “somebody might know somebody” philosophy in building relationships with grantees, allowing her to make connections between grantees and other players in the region. She mentioned the Foundation investing in volunteer programs for a number of her grantees and helping to make their work more visible to other donors. She talked about all of the informal ways she already heard back from her grantees: via site visits, phone calls, even running into grantees around town.
At a certain point, I had to stop her, since it had become almost painfully obvious (as it might be for many of you): what she was describing was, technically, a trust-based approach to philanthropy. Offering multiyear support, centering relationships and understanding, providing support beyond the grant, soliciting feedback — it seemed like, for all intents and purposes, the Foundation was doing exactly what its peers at that grantmakers meeting had discussed under the umbrella of “trust-based philanthropy.” It was adherence to the term itself — not necessarily the ideas — that Jane was pushing up against, since anything short of complete identification with it was seen as a political statement, including an assumed opposition to equity.
Jane’s experience at that regional meeting of grantmakers had hurt her on a deeper level. Repudiating the label of “trust-based philanthropy,” or even expressing ambivalence about it — if not the practices — had led to an outpouring of what she perceived as judgement of the Foundation’s character, values, and impact, and perhaps of Jane personally as well, despite decades of her life devoted to supporting the nonprofits in her community. No wonder it felt unfair.
Recently, CEP’s president, Phil Buchanan, shared a piece on this blog pushing back on dogmatic approaches to philanthropic practice — including trust-based philanthropy — after he found himself criticizing the term (while agreeing with most of the tenets) in a pot-stirring moment on the podcast he co-hosts with CEP colleague Grace Nicolette. Standing by his statement, Phil noted that, “Any effort to boil down good philanthropy to a single word (maybe even ‘effective!’) — or even a single conceptual framework — inevitably misses vital nuance and context.” I couldn’t agree more.
Of course words and frameworks matter insofar as they help us to understand the ways that these concepts shape our ideas, actions, and responses. To put it more plainly, calling a relationship that is suffuse with transparency and understanding “trust-based” helps us to grasp and communicate the relationship more clearly, giving us the tools to not only perceive its contours but to share the recipe with others.
But what happens when a term becomes loaded or politicized to a degree that even identifying with said term — or in Jane’s case, not identifying with it — carries with it all kinds of presumptions, symbolism, and maybe even baggage? What happens when, based on your fidelity to a term, you’re either on one side or the other, so that the assignment comes loaded with other, more weighted terms or ideologies (in Jane’s instance, “oppressor”). And, crucially, what additional progress could be made — and what benefit might grantees and the communities and issues they serve experience — if we were willing to lay down some of these well-meaning cudgels in favor of nuance?
If the goal in philanthropy is for as many funders as possible to embrace trust-based practices — because the outcomes of these practices matter so much — we should also be mindful that when we expressly tie the framework to specific values, this tactic can produce an unintended response. Empathy is a core tenet of trust-based philanthropy, but it has to go both ways. Shaming a funder into adopting trust-based philanthropy can only take us so far. How much more effective would we be if were emphasizing everything the funder was already doing that fell under the auspices of trust-based philanthropy? And applauding them for carrying out and acting on their values in ways that we could also learn from?
In other words, and in the end, what’s in a name? Trust — or whatever you want to call it — has everything to do with the best kind of grantmaking. But what would happen if we didn’t let the word, or a dogma, get in the way of that?
Joseph Lee is a senior manager on the Assessment and Advisory Services team at CEP. Find him on LinkedIn.
