Pia Infante, Trust-Based Philanthropy Project [Starting at 06:14]: Thank you. Well, everyone, it’s good to be here. I’m glad it’s an intimate group. It seems like we can have a real conversation, so in case this picture doesn’t convince you, I’m a very serious person.

So we’ve gotten some welcoming and, I think at the top here, I’ll also just do a little bit more introduction. Introduction of myself and thinking about what I’m sitting with and thinking about as we enter this conversation.

Let’s see. I’m an accidental philanthropist or funder. I didn’t go in, I didn’t lay in the fields as a child, and think, “When I grow up, I’m going to be a funder.”

I think I was going to be–oh no. I knew what I was going to be. I was going to be, at the very least, a backup singer. For like Aretha Franklin or someone like that, that was my big plan for life, that I was going to enter into vocal music as my career. So, I think of that, the accidental-ness, or maybe it’s the fates aligned and the stars aligned, but I do, it feels to me like what I get to do now, it brings forward all of what I’ve learned from the experience of being a middle school teacher and a high school teacher, from being someone who has been in nonprofit management, who has for many years coached executive directors, leading social movement organizations through Rockwood and others.

And then, I do organizational development work myself. So when I think of what I’m up to with trust-based philanthropy, or you could call it, solidarity philanthropy, participatory philanthropy, can be interpreted in similar ways. Grantee-centric philanthropy, community-based philanthropy, philanthropy that takes into account the extractive history from which it comes, takes into account the ironies of accumulating wealth and then doing good by giving some of it away, you know?

I think integrating all of that into how we do this work and this time, with our full hearts and minds and consciousness. I have to mention here that I spent like 30 minutes just crying this morning because, as someone who’s a compassionate person, it’s hard not to take in, what’s happening in the Ukraine and the family separations, and the deaths on top of continuous genocide globally of indigenous people and Black folks in this country.

It’s hard to absorb even just a little social media news headline. This is not even clicking into the full story, but just recognizing how much violence and war are just huge in this period of time. So I think one of the questions I ask myself is, what am I doing?

Am I being a contribution to history right now? Or is what I’m doing just a feel-good exercise? So that’s the question I want you to hold me to: is this talk giving us all an opportunity to ask ourselves, what are we doing and why, and how are we doing it?

How are we doing it? Which I think is different from like, let’s talk about how to be strategic or how to impact. I mean, I think both of those things are important, but I think essentially, I’m in this work because I think it’s one of the best ways I can contribute to a really large collective effort to ensure that the planet is here for our great-grandchildren, to ensure that society is much more highly functional for these great-grandchildren.

I think this right now feels like a right, purposeful place to be. Even though it sometimes feels far removed, I’m in a funding role which means that I’m giving resources to many important struggles and efforts and fights, whether they’re policy, economic, or community organizing, and there’s this once-removed feeling too, that we care and want to help.

And I think one of the essential values of trust-based philanthropy is to think of ourselves not as experts in a topic, but think of ourselves as in a deep relationship with communities that we are supporting. And I think you can be both right. You know? But I think of trust-based philanthropy as like a Ph.D. in accountability to the community.

That’s how at least I’ve been holding and interpreting it. And that’s what I hope to offer to you in this short time we have. So that’s my way of introducing myself today.

Click on that little button to raise your hand if you feel like you have a really good understanding of trust-based philanthropy right now. Good to know. I’m happy to tell this story because, whenever a phrase or a framework starts to catch fire in philanthropy, I think it’s important to know where it came from, and strategic philanthropy came from, for instance, Stanford’s philanthropy arm.

So very academic. Some other phrases in philanthropy that I use often were created by consultants. So the first thing I want to tell you, is that trust-based philanthropy came directly from the mouths of my foundation’s grantee partners. So this is what you’re looking at. You thought you knew what it was, right?

I know. It feels really simple when you look at it at the outset and then actually try to embody it in all the dimensions, of leadership and structure and culture. So, it starts to be some work. But what you’re looking at here is a history of the foundation that I’m the co-executive director of.

We are months away from spending out our endowment. And the money came from Fred Whitman, who was one of the heirs and benefactors of, benefitors of, I think they literally would be called a robber baron family. So a family whose wealth came from taking land from indigenous folks, the Ohlone people, specifically, in northern California.

And, making tons of profit on it through extractive labor and then creating railroads and banks that have made that specific family very, very wealthy for many generations. So, yes, bravo on spending down. I’m about to be unemployed. Anyway, I just wanted to say where the money came from, from the endowment.

So Fred Whitman was a very troubled person who came from this very wealthy family where two of his immediate family members, like his mother and his, I think his brother committed suicide before he even turned 12 years old. And so, from the very beginning of his life as a wealthy person, he questioned, is wealth actually like a toxin?

Is it something that can warp and destroy families and people because of all its many complexities of being a wealthy person? So anyways, he started this foundation in the eighties to ask the question, how do families make decisions about their money and their resources and their giving?

He was curious about that. He thought that people were convinced that it was a rational, intellectual exercise. That due diligence was a rational, intellectual exercise, but he had this gut sense that it was all emotion. Any decision that we make about how to give is based in his mind, he thought, on pure emotion. So it’s a fascinating history.

So I’m going to try to fast-forward myself because I get lost in it. But anyway, when he died, he endowed the foundation separately from the inheritance of his children. My co-executive director, John, was the executive director of the Whitman Institute at that time.

So John then inherited, all of a sudden, the complete power to do what he wanted with this endowment and this foundation. He wasn’t related to Fred, he was someone Fred trusted over time. So he began grantmaking, and our focus areas have remained the same over the years. The grantmaking was always based on human and civil rights, independent journalism.

And so he began grantmaking, but instead of doing it the way all the other foundations or other donors did it, he did it as a process of inquiry. He would ask a question, for instance, what is the future of life for independent journalism in a time where corporate conglomerates are taking over all the media, you know?

And then he would find partners to ask those questions with. And then the funding would come as part of that inquiry. So already from the very beginning, we’re talking about a very different process, that it’s not so much about competition or John feeling like he was the expert and his strategy was the one that was the right one, and that people needed to write a grant report, grant applications, for instance, to fit into the strategy of the foundation.

He was almost completely the opposite. The strategy of the foundation came from the inquiry that he did, and the work in partnership he was doing with the grantee partners. So that’s the ethos and spirit of the Whitman Institute. If you ever meet John, he’s about to retire, but he’s the loveliest boomer-aged feminist white guy from Northern California that you’ll ever meet. He’s a doll.

So then down the line, the Whitman Institute board, the endowment was hit hard by the financial crisis, the mortgage crisis in 2009. And the board decided instead of shrinking their giving, they were going to blow it all out. Let’s just give all the endowment away. Instead of, I think many, many DAFs or folks that were sitting on accounts that sort of a third of them were cut, like lost in that financial crash.

The response was to constrict, and yet the needs only grew, whether we’re talking about social movements or the nonprofit sector. So the Whitman Institute Board decided at that point, we’re going to spend out. At that same moment, there was a question, well, how should that be informed and who should inform us?

So obviously we went right back to our social movement and community partners, and we asked them to tell us what we should do with our final time, and our final funds. And what came back to us was the phrase “trust-based philanthropy.” There were also, in these sort of focus groups that the Center For Effective Philanthropy did, a whole bunch of descriptions of relationships, like what a relationship is in the context of a funder partnership like this.

However, trust came up over and over again. These grantee partners felt like this foundation was one that they could trust to disclose vulnerabilities to. For instance, “I want to quit because I’m burnt out as a nonprofit ed.” Or, “Our fiscal sponsor just went down and took down a million of our dollars.”

Like, that level of vulnerability that feels different from what can be very performative when there’s a donor-recipient relationship. So, in a lot of different ways, our partners told us in our spend-out what we need to do is try to influence philanthropy. And so, this is our vision 10 years ago for what we hoped would happen.

Trust-based philanthropy wasn’t a thing. Like nobody, nobody ever heard of that phrase, and we were hoping to end up in the right corner here with a vibrant, interconnected network of people who had these same values. So, that’s the history of where trust-based wealth came from.

For the next few minutes, Pia took questions from the audience on the history of the phrase “trust-based philanthropy” and the concepts she’d shared.

Pia Infante: So, what came out of that grantee perception report in 2012, from these partners, was a set of ways of doing philanthropy that they felt weren’t rocket science, but when practiced together created a very different experience for them of the power differential in the relationship.

So the first set of communications that we put out about trust-based philanthropy were six grantmaking practices, essentially. So six practices of giving.

Something you’ve heard about a lot is multi-year unrestricted funding. Something that I want to talk about a little, if you’re interested, I know in the giving circle context for staff reasons, for other reasons, this might be something that you do. But, we are doing the homework ourselves. So being proactive grantmakers, and not having necessarily open application processes.

So, having excellent referral networks was really important, but basically being proactive about identifying partners. Something you’ve probably also heard about a lot, which is simplifying and streamlining paperwork. So getting rid of that bureaucratic end, and some of the things that due diligence inherited from the banking industry. Be transparent and responsive. These are just values for how to be a good human solicitor and act on feedback.

So I think a lot of donors and funders ask for feedback. But the question is, what do we do with it? And then offer support beyond the check. So these were the initial, out the gate, probably five years ago.

We, again, are not rocket science. You have heard and thought about these things probably many times before. There are a lot of different frameworks and approaches to philanthropy. This is just one. So this is where we started. I’m going to give you a chance to just take it in. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to just start talking or chat them in.

I was just telling Kelsey that I want to talk about this because I think there’s a tension between being selective and just picking only the people that are like you or only the people that you know, right? And for me, on the other end, there’s like, is it “equitable” to have an open application process where you have a thousand people apply for 10 grants?

How equitable is that? If you don’t have the staff to review all a thousand applications or even connect with a thousand different applicants. So I find that those are the two extremes. One extreme is like, okay, so do the homework as you just pick who you like. And then the other extreme is like, well, it’s, it’s the most fair to do an open application process.

Like, maybe, maybe not. It depends on the purpose, the scale, and the amount of resources you have, to thoroughly review everyone who comes to you. So from the very beginning, the Whitman Institute acknowledges that we have a limited portfolio and now we have a limited time. So we’re certainly going to miss people in this process of doing the homework ourselves.

We very, very intentionally diversified the board. So, when I came on as co-executive director seven years ago, it was an all-white boomer age board. Every single one of these people I love, and almost all of them ceded their spots. All, almost all of them said, pretty much all of them except John himself said, “I give up the seat to someone else who’s going to be a more diverse referral network.”

Like, representing a different body of work, a different life experience, demographics, education networks, et cetera. Let me just see this comment from Deb. Yeah, you could. It’s at both ends. Thank you, Deb. I think it is at both ends. We can do an open application process and make sure that we’re identifying and recruiting folks who, I would say not just identifying recruiting, but like what is what is required of an open application process?

Do you have to have a development staff? Because some organizations can’t afford that, so what are the bars? There are different ways to think of barriers to access. So I think that one barrier to access is even having to create some application process where there are all these specific formats for budgets and word limits.

And the online platform is horrible, you know? So it’s like, what are the barriers to participation when it comes to that? But I think that we’ve always acknowledged that we’re probably missing something and we’ve done our best to have as diverse a referral source as possible, not just diversifying our board, having a very diverse team, but participating in donor collaborations, for instance.

So donor collaborations are a great way to learn about folks who are doing great things that you don’t know in different places, in different ways. I would say there’s also the resource called, Just Fund. Are people familiar with Just Fund? Just Fund is another place that aggregates a lot of social movement partners, information, reports, data, and budgets.

So it’s almost like trying to be a centralized place to identify potential partners as opposed to having all of these individualized application processes, thousands and hundreds, in every region and all across the country.

You don’t have to do, we don’t have to do everything at the same time. So if we try three new things this year in terms of identifying partners, we just continue to keep trying to deepen and broaden our racial equity and racial justice approach and framework. We don’t have to be like, we don’t have to be anywhere we’re not. So if this year a different thing to do is to just identify like Black, Latino, and Indigenous-led.

So I say that very specifically, Black, Latino, Indigenous-led organizations, not just Black, Latino, Indigenous people are on staff or the board, but it’s leadership and vision and is that in the areas that we fund, in the regions that we fund. And identify a set of those folks, through different sources.

That could be just one action that we take this year. And then again, Sara, I think you just wrote something brilliant, in the chat, which is you could also start to ask those folks that you’re already funding to also say like, if you were a funder, who would you fund besides yourself that was doing this?

So even just trying a couple of new things, because I know not everyone has a huge staff and a lot of time necessarily to make these decisions, but I think the desire to deepen our practice means that we’re just willing to go out of our comfort zones in a few different ways, as much as we can.

Kelsey’s writing about the diversity of applicants. Yep. Thank you for that resource. You’re right on. We did move on from here. I mean, this is still inclusive of what we think. We think these are all great grantmaking practices, but, what we realized is all of these can only happen within the context of a culture, an organization, and a leadership that supports all these things.

So what was happening at the beginning of our advocacy for imagining philanthropy being done in these ways, and we’re not the only ones, are people kept coming back and saying, well, look, I’m a program officer, or, I’m in operations and I agree with all of this, but I’m not the one that gets to decide what our process is for making grants or how we do selection or what our budgets are.

So, the next slide also incorporates some other feedback we got, which is that it seems to me like you can do trust-based philanthropy, and fund anything. So, the truth is, super-conservative donors and funders have been doing trust-based philanthropy for probably six decades, just funding big with folks that align with values and share a desire to change society in a certain way.

So, we thought, is that right? Do we want to say that you can use trust-based philanthropy to fund the end of democracy or something like that, you know? So we decided to step back last year and integrate more of our own values and racial justice values into the actual structure of what we’re offering the sector.

So, we realize that you have to be looking at power and how power is thought of and shared in terms of culture, structure, and, forgiving circles, there might not be a lot of different kinds of structures, but maybe there are, you can educate me, and values-driven leadership as well as grantmaking practices.

So those six practices that you saw on the previous slide show up in this bottom petal, where we recognize that all those things can only happen in a system that is attempting to operate in an anti-racist way, in an accountable-to-community way. This is just like the overview slide.

I’m not going to go into each of them, go deeply into each of the petals, but I just wanted to name that we wanted to deepen and broaden the definition of trust-based philanthropy because we felt like it was being too superficially interpreted as, oh, so if I give a multi-year grant or two, or if I will take a video or a phone call report on a grant instead of a written report, then I’m doing trust-based philanthropy. For us, it feels like it was leaving out our actual values.

We are going to share the deeper tool with you that Kelsey formatted for giving circles. I don’t think I have to spend a lot of time on this because I’ve already described where we were at and why we decided to spend out. So I think I’ll just say that, a few months away from closing our doors, the spending out itself has given us a lot of opportunities to try to inhabit the role of donor-funding partner, in a principled, transparent way. And I think our board has modeled that.

So let’s stop the PowerPoint for now. Again, I didn’t go deeply into the resource about culture, leadership structures, and practice, but I did want to say that our broader, deeper definition of trust-based philanthropy is that we do have a stance about the kind of change we want to see in this world. Pro-inclusive democracy is anti-racist, it is hoping that philanthropy can [make that a reality].

We just understand ourselves to be in a historical context, both socially, politically, economically, and climate-wise. And we wanted to create a resource that took that into account because we believe that trust-based philanthropy for us is meant to support the Black, indigenous, and POC-led social movements all around the world.

But specifically for us, we only funded in the United States. Like that was really where it came from, from us. So, I just wanted to name those commitments and those commitments to those leaders that we have funded for a long time. They were the source and the energy and motivation for what then became a philanthropy communications campaign and has become a separate project called the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, which is led separately from us and has its own life now that will continue beyond our foundation’s life.

The rest of the session focused on group discussion of the concepts and history explained in Pia’s presentation. Discussion topics included:

• How do you test out principles of trust-based philanthropy? How can you tell when they’ve worked or not worked?

• How do you reach the people, particularly the BIPOC people, who are on the ground doing the work?

• How do you solicit feedback from your grantee partners or potential partners? From there, how do you implement that feedback?

• How do you introduce the “old guard” to new philanthropic concepts like trust-based philanthropy? How do you help people who are set in their ways realize the opportunities these concepts present?

• How do we move our giving circles away from having largely transactional relationships with our grantees?

Pia Infante: So Sara, Kelsey, and the whole Philanthropy Together team, thank you for being a setting for these kinds of questions that are being asked and workshopped regularly. I appreciate you in the world. I’m so glad you’re hosting these and supporting giving circles. And everyone who is giving circle, leadership, and staff, more power to you literally, and more power hopefully to the groups and the movements that we’re trying to support.

I hope the next time we see each other something better is happening in the headlines. Today was a tough one for me.