(Illustration by Hugo Herrera)
In the last decade, as funders have embraced a wide range of approaches to amplify their impact, philanthropy has become more complex. Many funders are engaging in co-creative, collaborative approaches to strategy and implementation, including collective impact, to leverage different forms of power and create real, sustainable community transformation.
In FSG's more than 20 years supporting funders large and small at all stages of their work, trust has proven to be one of the most important elements of effective collaboration. When funders build trusting relationships with their community partners, they can better understand the nuanced challenges those communities face. This allows them to identify and support more appropriate responses, distribute resources more effectively, strengthen coordination within collaboratives, support local leadership to address community challenges, and maintain better reputations within the community. During the COVID-19 pandemic, collaboratives with trusting relationships have been better able to meet the emergent needs of communities they aspire to support; meanwhile, collaboratives that haven’t developed trust have struggled to coordinate and amplify efforts amidst the acute needs of the time.
So then, what does it look like to build trust? Many funders have used frameworks like the Whitman Institute's approach to trust-based philanthropy, and practices like those discussed in the Collective Impact Forum's Funder Action Learning Lab’s “Advancing Funders' Openness Practices” report to help embed trust into their grantee relationships. Regardless of the approach, building trust requires creating authentic and vulnerable connections with community partners while taking concrete actions to be a genuine collaborator. This article suggests four ways funders can do this, with two focused on external actions and two on internal conditions.
External Actions for Building Trust
Many funders struggle with what Lori Bartczak, senior director for knowledge and content at Community Wealth Partners, describes as a “delicate balancing act” inherent in the power dynamics between themselves and potential or existing grantees. For example, there may be tension between the specificity of many funders’ strategic plans and the necessary flexibility for local leadership to guide the work. We have seen even the best-intentioned funders struggle with these dynamics, in part because traditional funder behaviors often fail to center equity, and equity is at the heart of this balancing act.
Here are two external actions foundations can take to tip the scale in favor of building trusting relationships:
1. Be a humble learner. Funders are effective at building trust when they recognize the experiences and expertise of others and enable those experts to share that knowledge with others in the collaborative. These experts include not only the national thought leaders, researchers, and peer funders that funders traditionally engage, but also the local leaders, practitioners, and community members with lived experience who should be guiding their learning. Funders without a humble learning orientation may use their own perception of the problem to steer their work, resulting in a misdiagnosis of the social issues that need addressing and misalignment of the collaborative's response.
Take W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s work with BC Pulse at the W.E. Upjohn Institute, the backbone dedicated to aligning and coordinating a collaborative effort among residents, service providers, and early childhood leaders in Battle Creek, Michigan. The group is working to make their community one where every child—prenatal through third grade—thrives. In 2010, the foundation funded the Early Development Instrument (EDI) to collect and centralize data about five critical domains of local children’s lives. Combined with an expansive community engagement effort to gather perspectives from residents in different neighborhoods, leaders from city government, school districts, the faith-based community, nonprofit organizations, direct service providers, educators, and child care providers, the EDI helped to clarify the barriers children face, align the collaborative’s priorities, and better coordinate both existing and new activities. By learning in tandem with others, funders can discover new insights about the social issues they are tackling, adopt national best practices to their local community context, and uncover solutions for future investment.
Funders with this kind of humility and learning orientation take the time and spend the resources to build a shared understanding of the collaborative’s specific context. They might, for instance:
- Fund a joint training session among partners on subjects like the history of inequity within the place they are working.
- Support the collection of qualitative and quantitative data, as with EDI, around a particular challenge, enabling community partners to arrive at a shared view of what is happening.
- Tap into the perspectives of residents, while reimbursing them for their participation or connecting them to resources within their network.
2. Be transparent about data and funding priorities. Another critical component of trust-building is transparency. At their best, funders openly convey their incentives and goals, while remaining flexible and open to shifting these as they learn more from the work and the community. This transparency can help balance power dynamics, mitigate competition between partners, and create more alignment—all of which contribute to greater trust and ultimately better results.
In the case of the Battle Creek initiative, "Data became a tool that brought us together to improve," says Megan Russell Johnson, program officer of the Kellogg Foundation. Annual data and progress reviews became a joint effort of the foundation, the evaluator, and grantees. BC Pulse facilitated collaborative reflection of the combined data with community partners in order to move away from traditional funder-grantee power dynamics and create broader transparency. Combined with data-driven conversations among partners, the foundation’s honest communication about funding priorities and limitations mitigated competition and built alignment on how best to allocate resources in the local community. The Kellogg Foundation allowed these data-centered conversations with the community to shape new funding opportunities as they emerged over the life of the initiative.
Conversations like these can be tense, but funders who articulate organizational priorities and funding limitations are more likely to establish and maintain trusting relationships with their partners. Humility and a willingness to change priorities over time based on partner input further this trust, which then helps fuel results. In Battle Creek, for example, the number of children ready for kindergarten more than doubled from 2014 – 2020, and while BC Pulse and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation would point to multiple factors behind this improvement, transparency and trust have certainly contributed to it.
Internal Conditions for Developing Trust
While valuable, the external actions listed above can seem inauthentic and ultimately prove ineffective when funders don’t support them with internal systems, cultures, and behaviors that build trust. Whether launching a new collaborative or rebuilding engagement in existing efforts, funders must explore whether the state of their internal systems, cultures, and behaviors—or their internal conditions—fosters the trust necessary for authentic collaboration.
3. Align internal expectations and practices. It’s important to set expectations across the funding institution—including among senior staff, board members, program staff, and non-programmatic teams—for how the collaborative work may unfold and how internal processes can help or hinder trust-building with partners. Many collaborators know well that community-led change is emergent and nonlinear. Yet, the underlying assumptions and practices of traditional philanthropy often conflict with this reality. Strategic planning processes, when intentionally designed and managed, can be an ideal opportunity to level-set internal expectations and create the right internal conditions to build trust.
In early 2020, for example, the Cleveland Foundation, one of the oldest and largest community foundations in the United States, set out to refresh its strategic plan. Proud of its history and excited for what lay ahead, it expected a relatively traditional planning process. But the start of the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the compounding challenges of 2020 forced the foundation to pause and commit to confronting, wrestling with, and ultimately resetting expectations toward a new vision of strategic community philanthropy.
Together, staff and board members began to reckon with local history, the foundation's role in that history, and what its role should be moving forward. All-staff and strategic planning committee meetings—which included not only the board but also junior foundation staff and external community advisors—became reflection sessions with vulnerable and transparent conversations that prioritized relationship-building and relational trust across the enterprise. Winding and challenging, the process began to trigger the collective mindset shift necessary for sustained change. It aligned both board and staff toward a new vision grounded in collaboration, co-creation, and continuous learning in partnership with the community.
There are multiple areas across a funder’s operations that can be examined and may need to shift in order to support trust. For example, boards may have unrealistic timeframes that undervalue the time it takes to build trust and relationships. We have seen this happen when funders attempt to expedite progress in ways that undermine trust with collaborative partners and ultimately delay impact. Similarly, grant timelines may be unrealistically short, or grant guidelines may be overly prescriptive, which signals a lack of trust in partners to adapt to changing conditions.
4. Develop feedback loops. Setting expectations among foundation staff should not be a one-time effort, but part of a process of continuous learning and improvement. In service of this learning, funders often establish formal feedback loops to understand how a collaborative is progressing, but they also need to create feedback loops to understand how their institution is influencing and/or hindering the work of that collaborative.
This means funders need to develop a transparent mechanism to assess their own performance as a trusted partner, as well as set aside time and space to determine how to evolve their institution in the context of the collaborative. Feedback loops can include informal conversations, surveys, or formal evaluations with partners and the community and can lead to important changes to internal processes (such as new funding guidelines and timelines) and outward-facing practices (such as increasing the time program officers spend outside the office with community partners). If funders can utilize these feedback loops to honestly assess their own performance and identify opportunities for improvement, they will be more able to meet the needs of their community partners and build trust.
The Cleveland Foundation, for example, conducted more than 50 individual and group interviews with local civic leaders, donors, and grassroots activists who had never received a grant. Through this feedback process, the foundation began to uncover an opportunity to go deeper and set a bold vision to activate and align partners in service of addressing the root causes of inequity. To effectively seize this opportunity, which was highlighted through community feedback, the foundation’s full board participated in the Racial Equity Institute's two-day Phase I Training, developing a deeper understanding of structural racism and its impact on the entire community. Guided by the belief that shared learning leads to effective group decision-making, the process became a learning journey for the entire organization.
Program teams explored how they might shift power and build trust through their grantmaking practices, and non-program teams identified opportunities to align their work to broader impact objectives. Everyone recognized they had a role to play, from how the foundation’s corpus is invested to how each guest is greeted at the front door. As the foundation announced its new strategic plan, the impact of that community feedback loop and associate learning was clear. From a stage in midtown Cleveland, where the foundation is already helping to spur equitable community development, the foundation’s board chair acknowledged that race and racism impact all of us and made a commitment to 1) pay attention to race in all aspects of the foundation’s work, 2) look at the big picture and exploring root causes, 3) collaborate and co-create with people across the community, and 4) learn from the past, while building on strengths, and continuing to respond to community needs as they emerged.
As funders work to become more inclusive and equitable institutions, they must recognize how important it is to build trust both externally and internally. That trust will be the foundation for collaboration both at times of acute need, like the COVID-19 pandemic, and for long-term systems change.
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Read more stories by Victor Tavarez, John Harper & Fay Hanleybrown.