In a few weeks, I will be celebrating the fifth anniversary of my move from community-led civil society to private philanthropy. In these last few years, I have learned a tremendous amount, especially about funding practices and how they are shaped.
Becoming someone ‘on the other side’ helped me dive into what grant-makers value in relation to strategy as well as how the grantees’ work and its outcomes fits into a broader vision. On the other hand, in this time I have also witnessed the side of philanthropy I was not always comfortable with, including how a group or an individual is scrutinized before receiving a grant – particularly in relation to the content of their work.
It would be an understatement to share that some aspects of philanthropic work have been difficult to get accustomed to. As someone who joined this sector after a decade in community activism – ranging from peer support to high level advocacy to benefit transgender people in Poland and the wider Central Eastern European region – I did not exactly understand the ins and outs of what it means to fund and aid organizers such as my previous self.
Before becoming a grant-maker, my experience with grants was that of someone applying for them – through online and paper applications, by meeting donors at various events, usually for one-on-one conversations, all of which have proven time and time again to be frustrating processes, often lacking in transparency of decision making. Sometimes my former organization would receive a grant after writing a one-page concept note while other times our team would spend weeks preparing a thirty-page long application with twenty different attachments only to never to hear from the funder again.
Throughout the course of my work in civil society I not only fundraised but also wrote and compiled narrative and financial reports, provided feedback to grant-makers for their research and evaluations, and hoped for our rather small trans rights organization to have a bit more say in who receives funding for work that concerns our community. I often felt powerless to the fact that organizations who barely even touched the surface of understanding the needs of trans people were seen as competent and able to execute the work they were tasked with, because they were known to funders and were not seen as a ‘risky investment’, despite the fact that in my first months as a grant-maker I learned that risk-taking is an important and pivotal part of our work.
As an activist, I wanted more transparency, accountability and understanding from grant-makers while at the same time also yearning for a process that would create a much more equal feedback loop between us. And while some of our funders made sure to acknowledge our expertise, others would infantilize us, stressing the need for gratefulness that we were given a chance to be supported by their program. I knew that this was not a fair approach to grantees and their work, despite the clear power imbalance, and I grappled with the question on how that could have been changed.
(And fortunately so had many others who turned those reflections into actual practice through setting up community-based regranting mechanisms or by introducing advisory boards and review panels to their philanthropic practice).
These reflections were among the reasons as to why I sought work in this sector. When I became a program officer responsible for a portfolio of work with more than twenty groups across the world, I finally saw how many additional power dynamics were at play. The relationships between myself and grantees, my own position within the organization I was now an employee of, the limits of my grant-making capabilities and authority, and many others. I understood that I have an obligation to the grantees, to my employer and to the strategies we were bound by, and only wished that our approaches were more prominently based on the expertise of those we were funding. In that regard – there were still a lot to be done within the entire sector, not just in one foundation that in itself is part of a large and complex ecosystem.
I saw philanthropy for what it was – a complicated landscape of diverse and sometimes conflicting approaches, resting on a nest of problematic legacies which are now being hold up to scrutiny, a choir of many voices (some with a direct link to the work being supported and some being complete outsiders) and first and foremost – an entire sector dedicated to changing the world and entrusting that change with promising actors – individuals or groups.
It is more than I ever imagined. And I am looking forward to seeing how it shifts and evolves, and becomes transparently accountable to the world it wants to change.
This post will hopefully be a start of a reflection series on how philanthropy can better serve the people and causes it is meant to support. It was inspired by a piece by Kevin Bolduc for The Center of Effective Philanthropy – Why Do We Bother? The Tragedy of Foundation Reporting Requirements.
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