Hearing the Alarm Bells: Practical Ways Funders Can Respond

Speaking truth to philanthropy carries risk. So when our partners tell us how they are navigating the hardships of this difficult moment, one of the ways we honor that risk is by amplifying and directly responding to their concerns however we can. In this moment, the message is clear: Our partners need our support more than ever as they experience high levels of burnout, organizational strain and funder retrenchment.

We have heard, observed, and experienced their urgent call. In response, we are stepping more fully into our role as a responsive funder and sharing practices our partners have found valuable so that our philanthropic peers may experiment with them, too.

The practices that our partners have found valuable: 

• Investing in care to sustain people and organizations
  There’s plenty of current data about the state of our partners’ wellbeing, what is happening in the sector, and what is needed (see reports by Center for Effective Philanthropy and the Building Movement Project). These reports echo much of what we hear in our one-on-one conversations: Our partners are doing their best to look toward the horizon with fortitude and resilience, and they are tired mentally, physically, and creatively.
  
  There are larger systemic and structural changes needed to prevent burnout. We also know that, along the way, direct support from funders for rest and care can help sustain organizations and leaders, especially during heightened stress, pain, and threat. We’ve taken a multi-faceted approach, and we plan to continue to experiment with how to respond. For example, while most of our funding goes directly into multi-year grants, in recent years we’ve used budget surplus to provide every partner with supplementary wellness grants, which they could use in whatever way the organization deemed most useful. Even with less surplus funding for supplemental grants in recent years, we continue to identify opportunities for our partners to access care when they need it. For example, we partnered with Ananda Valenzuela to offer free 1:1 coaching to any grantee staff person regardless of their level and sponsored co-LAB Collective’s Radical Sabbatical to allow a sub-set of our grantee partners to ‘try on’ the experience of stepping away from work and begin to consider the possibility of a longer period of rest. 
  
  We don’t think there is a singular solution. What we think matters is that we continue to affirm for our grantees that their personal and organizational thriving is just as important to us as their community impact. So we will keep creatively navigating our own institutional restrictions to ensure partners have consistent access to support and care. 

• Funding spaces and supports for organizational transition, transformation, and closure
  We’re hearing from our partners that they need safe spaces to gather, grieve, and confront questions like: What might it look like for our mission to continue even if our organization must wind down, transition in some way, or become something else? They are seeking opportunities and spaces to explore these questions both institutionally and as part of a larger system recognizing that what they are experiencing is part of a bigger set of sector problems. There is a need for collaborative spaces to make sense of what’s happening and imagine what comes next together.

In addition to directly supporting sensemaking spaces, for years we’ve provided supplemental grants when a partner informs us of a leadership transition. We do this in part to signal to them and their other funders that we see transition as a natural and welcome part of social justice work. However, with the increase of partners naming more existential organizational transitions beyond leadership, we have started to explore extending these transition grants to partners actively exploring what might be next for their organization as a whole. Organizations like SeaChange Capital Partners and the Wind Down have been excellent resources and learning partners as we continue to shape our thinking about how best to support our grantees in this area. 

• Continuing to fund the connective tissue of the field
  In this period of heightened stress and complexity, the sector needs people and organizations to help them to ask: What is leadership in this context? What tools, skills, and relationships are needed to practice liberatory leadership within your institution? What does it take to move from imagining together to acting together? Many of our Field Building partners like Rockwood Leadership Institute, Leadership Learning Community, and Change Elemental hold spaces for frontline workers to do just that along with building relationships and strengthening their practice. However, we’re hearing from these same partners that as funding shifts in this moment to the important work of frontline and direct service providers, funding for these critical capacity-building and reflection spaces is drying up.

Despite the urgency that we’re all grappling with, our frontline grant partners report over and over again that they deeply value and rely on the facilitated spaces our Field Building partners provide for critical reflection, sensemaking, and practice improvement. When that work is lost, so are the insights that can be leveraged to strengthen the field and inform all of our strategies. 

So while the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation is a place-based funder focused on NYC, we dedicate 25% of our grantmaking to national capacity and field building organizations — and will continue to do so. 

• Honoring existing funding commitments
  Like many funders, we are exploring new strategies to respond to the moment our partners are navigating — but we aren’t shifting money away from our existing commitments to do this, which our partners appreciate. Maintaining our grantmaking commitments during a time when our grantees tell us that they are particularly vulnerable is a trust-building practice. This isn't a new strategy so much as an intentional choice to stay in a relationship, even when there is a lot of uncertainty. This is not the time to abandon the people and organizations we’ve built relationships with for years. When partners can count on flexible, multi-year support, they not only have a better chance to survive, but to imagine, innovate, and respond to what emerges. 

Experiment with us

For us, creating the conditions for our partners to survive and thrive isn’t about finding the perfect strategy or intervention. It’s about staying curious alongside our peer funders and grantee partners, learning through experiments, and iterating on our practices. We don’t have all of the answers, but we are committed to figuring it out together. If you’re curious to learn more about what we’re doing or share how you are experiencing and approaching similar field challenges, please reach out to Trish at ttchume@rsclark.org.