Centering Communities: Insights from the Northern California Grantmakers 2023 Conference
The Northern California Grantmakers 2023 Conference “Mapping Our Collective Future,” focused on themes of freedom, equity, and seeing the world as a collective us. Without equity, we are not creating the communities we deserve. “The root of freedom is beloved. Freedom is a collective,” Mia Birdsong of Next River stated in her opening remarks. She continued, “Freedom is being in your caring community, in solidarity.” When people do not have access to basic needs, we are not free. Afeni Shakur noted through her activism that freedom is an abstract idea to folks who are hungry, unhoused, and lacking basic needs.
Funders focus on highlighting the positive impact and change based on the organizations they support. Often, these funders already have a general idea of the outcomes and results a certain grant or program will have on its beneficiaries. This means that success metrics are too narrow, and the timeframe is too short. Many of the challenges that the world is grappling with today are complex, intersectional, and require a long-time horizon to fully see the implications of the work, to understand which approaches are the best solutions, and to evaluate which leverage points have the most impact.
With that in mind, here are three ways funders can better support their beneficiaries:
1. Lean into listening to beneficiaries
Philanthropy does not have all the answers. The true experts are those doing the work because they have a better understanding of the gaps and needs of the communities. Communities are resilient and need space to change and pivot the work, often due to external implications such as policy, climate, and social changes. By listening to the needs of the community experts, philanthropy can better support beneficiaries’ innovation and enable them to test new methods that achieve better outcomes for all. Through listening, funders should map their strategies and impact to align with the work already being done by their beneficiaries, instead of beneficiaries creating new or additional milestones that fit with what the funders are imposing.
2. Shift funder mindset from services to resources
Philanthropy has the ability to move beyond the day-to-day operations of building communities and focus on shifting systems. Instead of only supporting programmatic service work, funders can test ideas and innovations to see which leverage points help create the positive change for which communities are striving to achieve. For that work, philanthropic resources are required most that are long-term, flexible, and allow for pivots based on learnings. It’s changing the mindset from focusing on charitable giving and filling in gaps to rethinking, reimagining, and creating transformational changes that address root causes. That is where philanthropy’s role can really make a difference in contributing to the world as a collective us, because communities are already working toward the world they want to see.
3. Not acting is the biggest risk
The world is complex, our goals are ambitious, and the issues we as a sector are trying to solve are interrelated. Therefore, philanthropy has a call to act. If philanthropy is only looking at short-term solutions, it is ignoring the long-term opportunities that uncover the root causes of these issues. Long-term thinking allows for innovation, experimentation, and testing of solutions to understand impact and unintended consequences. Room to fail creates space for learning and reiterating. If philanthropy remains rigid and does not allow for pivots and changes in the work, we are hindering growth, imagination, and new forms of innovation. In order to be open to new ways of working, we need to re-examine our definitions of success, listen to communities about their needs and solutions, and change our mindset to think bigger and long-term.
As one of the panelists stated in her remarks about George Floyd, “If we were surprised about what happened, we didn’t understand what the world really looked like.” It’s time for philanthropy to take a hard look at what the world that is being created really looks like and for whom. As funders, we have the responsibility to learn together for future philanthropic endeavors in the pursuit of creating a world for the collective us that is equitable and where people are free.
