Supporting Big Leaps Without Holding the Reins: Lessons in Power and Partnership

This month, the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation joined other funders to contribute reflections on our stumbles, trips, and faceplants. The series — The F Word: Stories About Failure — was started by the Kataly Foundation as an invitation for funders to practice honesty and transparency, hold ourselves accountable to moving differently going forward, and share lessons that others in philanthropy can learn from. We invite you to explore the collection of articles, including our reflections on our miscalculation of power dynamics.

A Big Idea: Reimagining Citywide Leadership Development

In 2017, the foundation introduced a bold vision for doing leadership development differently. It had been largely funding cohort-based leadership development at the organizational level, and we were curious: What happens if we expand the scope and scale in who and what we fund to encompass all of New York City? This curiosity was coupled with a broader sense of the role of philanthropy to use its resources to translate interesting ideas into practice and experiments. 

With this in mind, we launched the Sterling Network — a city-wide network, connecting leaders across nonprofit, government, and private sectors working on systems-level change. It was a different model for leadership development — something different from what we normally funded — but it aligned with what we believed would make New York City stronger and more vibrant.

We also recognized that meaningful change does not follow fixed timelines and that relationships must be reciprocal. As part of the long-term design and investment, we committed to supporting the network over multiple years and the participants we recruited committed to engaging in a shared, decade-long learning partnership. 

A Big Mistake: Misunderstanding Power

The foundation was trying to hold this experiment with a lot of care and intention, but we made the mistake of misunderstanding our power. We were trying something new and were excited to learn in real time, which meant we stayed closely involved. We also wanted to create ease for participants. We had the resources and capacity to handle the network logistics, which we thought would open up space for participants to think expansively and focus on network building. However, our proximity — though well-meaning — had side effects. It created a distance from ownership that the network needed in order to be able to really set their own direction. Our involvement unintentionally shaped the agenda, and our presence in shared spaces became a distraction as partners are often conditioned to perform in certain ways to secure future funding. We underestimated our influence and the power asymmetries between us and the network, which led to overstepping even as we sought to minimize those dynamics.

The challenge became figuring out how to support the network without directing it. Fortunately, the Network Fellows were doing a lot of calling in and seemed comfortable saying to the foundation, “This is how you're showing up and this is how we need you to show up.” This marked a shift in the dynamic, prompting deeper reflection on our role and a deeper focus on supporting the network to develop the level of self-governance needed  — the leadership structures, the community agreements, the decision-making and conflict resolution practices — to own their experience. Though heartbreaking, we agreed that spinning off the network was the clearest path to its survival. 

A Big Takeaway: Foundations Should Be Mindful, but Support Leaps Anyway

One thing we want to be clear about is that while we didn’t get everything right along the way, we still think it’s important for philanthropy to fully embrace its role as the ‘risk capital’ of the sector. One clear takeaway from this experiment was that we needed to be more mindful of our role and release power and control to the network. Following the spinoff of the network, we codified our Leadership Lab area of funding which is now bounded by a clear set of guidelines and time horizons that limit the extent of our involvement in experimentation. But our biggest takeaway is that it is still important to support big leaps. For example, while we stepped out of our role as the host of the network, we decided to continue the reciprocal commitment to the Network as a funder through the remainder of the 10 year experiment.  

One high point of releasing control was a resource-sharing experiment within the Network. We entrusted participants with control over a pool of funds so that they could make their own decisions on what kinds of collaborative opportunities to support, and to what extent. Fellows could direct resources toward emerging ideas however they wanted —  travel, meetings, or advisory support. The idea was to ensure they had the resources they needed to move ideas into action and shared experimentation. This approach generated excitement because participants were being resourced to not only develop solutions or ideas but to also implement them.

The continued investment helped maintain the space for Fellows to cultivate deep trust, affection, admiration, and reliance on each other, as well as a sense of possibility and imagination about what folks could do together. Over time, the network strengthened a key practice of community resourcing: someone would name a need, and others in the room could meet it. This enabled rapid coordination and revealed how abundant and well-resourced the group truly was. A marker of success is that the network continues to thrive independently from the foundation. It operates with its own structure, including a paid organizer leading it, and continues to operate as an interconnected web of leadership that stretches across the city of New York. We are so proud that the Sterling Network continues to live into the original vision and that we as a foundation are able to stand beside them in an appropriate role as supporters.