Hi everyone. Before we get started on today’s topic, happy Pride! To all my colleagues who are lesbian, gay, (fellow) bisexual, trans, genderfluid, intersex, nonbinary, queer, asexual, questioning, or any combination of the above and other identities, you’re awesome. Thank you for being who you are. Please take time to celebrate you and the joy you bring to this world.
A few months ago, right after the elections, I met with a couple of board members of a progressive family foundation. It was a nice change of pace. In a world where the default is foundations deciding strategies and nonprofits are forced to apply for funding if they aligned, this foundation was trying to figure out how to transfer strategy-setting and decision-making authority to communities most affected by injustice. This is especially important now, when this administration is aiming to inflict as much harm and cruelty as it could to them.
There has been in recent years an increase in discussion about transferring power to those closest to the problems. I think it’s great. I believe that people and communities most affected by injustice, as well as the organizations and movements they lead, have the deepest knowledge and experience of the issues facing them and thus can propose solutions that are most likely to succeed.
That said, we need to acknowledge that decades of conditional support, short-term funding, and paternalism from funders and donors (though #NotAllFunders and #NotAllDonors) have created a pattern of harm that has profoundly shaped the psyche of nonprofit leaders and thus the entire sector. I’m calling it Funder-Inflicted Layered Trauma and Helplessness (FILTH), and it manifests in several ways, including:
Lessened ability to dream and imagine: It is rare to find a funder who will fund exactly what communities ask for. Most fund whatever is in their strategy, which often varies year to year. They fund one year at a time and never fully. They refuse to fund certain things, such as advocacy and political engagement. Over time, nonprofit leaders’ expansive imaginations and bold dreams are set aside for harsh, narrow, “practical” reality.
Fear of asking for what’s needed: The adage in fundraising is that you will hear ten noes for every yes. And the yes usually comes with caveats, such as the funder will only fund 10% of the project, or they’re only paying for certain expenses, or they won’t pay for overhead, or whatever. This trains nonprofits to ask only for what they think funders will fund, not what they know would most help them achieve their goals.
Focus on the short-term: Most progressive-leaning funders give only one-year grants, sometimes three, on very rare and almost miraculous occasions, five. (As opposed to conservative foundations, who give twenty-year grants). So nonprofit leaders adjust accordingly, planning one year at a time, often suppressing long-term thinking without meaning to.
Tendency toward individualism: We talk and joke about the Nonprofit Hunger Games, where organizations compete with one another for resources. This competitiveness is reinforced by funders’ default grant processes, which tend to pit organizations against one another. Even when nonprofits try to collaborate, it’s often not the deep, catalytic partnerships needed to solve entrenched problems.
Aversion to risk and failure: It’s rare to find a progressive-leaning funder who will fund a project that fails to meet its goals. Maybe they might do it for one year, but a second year of failure almost guarantees a severance of support. This trains nonprofit leaders to avoid taking chances and to only propose things they know will likely succeed.
Bias toward what’s easily measurable: Because grants are often so short, funders so exact in what outcomes they think aligns with their strategies, and failure often punished with loss of funding, nonprofits are conditioned to suppress thinking about lofty goals and instead gravitate toward ones that are easily measurable.
Guardedness and mistrust: All the funder behaviors listed here also lead nonprofit leaders to be guarded, including often lying about or minimizing the challenges they face. Why tell the truth when it could scare off funders, cause them to lose confidence, and possibly lead to them to defund your organization?
Learned helplessness: For years now, nonprofit leaders have provided feedback to funders. Give multi-year general operating funds. Support advocacy and organizing. Fund leadership. Fund capacity building. Increase payout rate. Give money faster. Streamline grant processes. The fact that few things have changed has taught us that trying to influence philanthropy is futile. Overtime this has crystalized into an unconscious learned helplessness not just about philanthropy, but also about the world.
This is not to say that all funders do these things, or that all nonprofit leaders are affected to the same degree. But years and years of conditioning can’t be undone by the occasional participatory grant. Plus, there are also layers of general racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other forms of trauma many leaders must heal from simultaneously.
If funders want to transfer power to communities effectively, it’s important to understand these dynamics. As I wrote about here, funders have been getting impatient and frustrated with nonprofit leaders for not thinking boldly and proposing solutions for saving democracy during these past few tumultuous months. But what results are you expecting when we’ve been proposing ambitious ideas in the past only to get shot down again and again in favor of tiny, low-risk investments that most funders are willing to fund in order to not jeopardize their endowments?
Don’t get me wrong, even with all these challenges to overcome, the people and communities most affected by injustice are still the most qualified to lead in the efforts to address injustice. The solutions they come up with are still more likely to succeed than the ones proposed by those people who have had less first-hand experience. These leaders and communities, with all the shit philanthropy has put them through, are still our best bet for saving our world from spiraling deeper into this nightmare we find ourselves in.
But it will take time, support, patience, and some uncomfortable self-awareness to understand and undo decades of damage philanthropy and society have inflicted on nonprofit leaders, especially those of marginalized identities. It will require funders to examine their privilege and how it affects their thinking and actions. If you’re white, male, wealthy, on a foundation board, and so on, likely you haven’t encountered the same level of rejection, frustration, and demoralization that nonprofit leaders endure. It’s way easier for you to dream big and bold and wield power, because you’ve been encouraged and rewarded for doing so, whereas it is usually not the case for your grantees.
This self-awareness combined with a deeper understanding of these funder-inflicted traumas and how they affect grantees will prevent another common occurrence in our sector: Punishing those who are traumatized because their trauma affects how they act. For example, a funder starts a participatory grantmaking process to allocate funding to nonprofits led by communities of color. But after a year, it’s a mess, with tons of tension and fighting among the groups. The funder decides to not renew the project and instead go back to their default burdensome and inequitable grantmaking process.
If you plan to transfer power to communities, it’s vital you spend time reflecting on these dynamics and accounting for them in your process.
Philanthropy, meanwhile, needs to reverse the learned helplessness, risk-aversion, suppressed imagination, and other things you’ve conditioned in nonprofit leaders. This requires foundations to collectively do things like funding community-led solutions without watering them down; providing unrestricted funds; setting grant timelines of at least 10-years minimum; accepting grant proposals that have already been written; funding advocacy and systems change work; investing in nonprofits leaders’ rest and healing; working as authentic partners with grantees; and committing to long-term transformation, even if it’s messy and nonlinear.
