This is the third session of a 4-part webinar series hosted in partnership with the Environmental Grantmakers Association, Blue Sky Funders Forum, and Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Funders. For more information about this series, click here.
An organization’s structures — the hierarchies, systems, protocols, policies, standardized processes, and technologies — are deeply connected to culture and values. Because of the compliance-oriented culture that informs much of philanthropy, even the best-intentioned grantmaking organizations may find that their structures and processes inadvertently perpetuate power imbalances, obstructing their ability to fully operationalize trust-based philanthropy.
A full commitment to trust-based philanthropy requires funders to take a close look at our various structural elements through a trust-based lens – especially grant management systems, grant agreements, hiring practices, evaluation metrics, and decision-making structures. The good news is that these concrete aspects of your operations can be addressed one-by-one, in an emergent way, without overwhelming or overloading your organization.
So what are the core competencies we must rely on in order to be able to identify structural barriers to trust-based philanthropy in the first place? And what are some practical, actionable ways we can reimagine these structures to be more relational and grantee-centric, without disrupting our day-to-day work? In this session, foundation leaders will share their journeys of reviewing and assessing specific structures within their organizations and how they are using emergent learning to iterate and evolve their systems and processes in order to create an infrastructure of trust.
Participants can expect to walk away with a better sense of how power dynamics show up in organizational structures, and heightened clarity on areas of focus and reassessment within their organizations.
