This is the final 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 leadership team plays a key role in upholding and reinforcing values and culture—not just by what is said, but what is done. For this reason, trust-based philanthropy is most successful when there is buy-in and modeling from leadership. In a trust-based context, leaders strive to be collaborative and facilitative, focused on lifting up the whole team and building trust internally rather than consolidating power and influence at the trustee level. Most importantly, they lead by embodying values of humility, equity, and transparency — with a willingness to give up some of their power in service of the organization's greater purpose.
So what does this tangibly mean for leaders at various roles within an organization? And how can a foundation’s CEO and board work to intentionally build trust among one another while upholding and reinforcing a trust-based culture? In this final session of the 4D series, we will hear from practitioners who have embraced self-reflective practices to cultivate their own trust-based leadership, as well as what they’re doing to reimagine their roles and their trustees’ roles toward advancing a more intentional trust-based culture within their organizations.
Participants can expect to walk away with a clearer understanding of what it means to be a trust-based leader; tools for taking a coaching stance to uplift, guide, and support teams; and strategies for reimagining board leadership to support your organization’s big-picture vision for trust-based philanthropy.
