Tesmerelna Atsbeha shares the truths she has learned, as both a grant-maker and a funding recipient, about how to build and sustain relationships of shared power and purpose that move us toward the future we desire.
There is a commonly held belief about how power operates in philanthropy. In this one-dimensional perspective, the grantmaker holds the power for most aspects of decision making. This power extends to whether they entertain a funding partnership with an organization, how the resources they hold will be shared, what evidence is needed for them to decide to share those resources, what information they believe is relevant to report back about how the resources are used, how and when they expect to receive that information, and how long they will choose for the partnership to last.
Out of this narrow interpretation of how power operates in philanthropy, many calls for change have been made that are so familiar that most of us in the sector can recite them by heart: provide long-term, flexible, general operating support; use a common grant application; eliminate issue silos and fund intersectionally.
These are incredibly important calls to action, but they are just pieces of the much larger puzzle of how to move funding ecosystems towards less extractive and more equitable practices. On their own, these structural changes do not necessarily build the muscles that grantmakers and grantees need most to mobilize resources in ways that encourage transformation that is just and long-lasting. Fundamentally, these practices must be accompanied by a political analysis.
After more than ten years as a funding recipient and more than nine years as a grantmaker in the global health and human rights sectors, I have come to learn some truths about how to build and sustain relationships of shared power and purpose that move us toward the future we desire. These truths have been hard-earned and born out of discomfort, mistakes, misjudgments, and taking corrective action toward repair. At times, I have leaned on the skills I gained through my roles as an auntie, mother, partner, and caregiver as much as from my professional experience or academic training.
The first truth I’ve learned is that the relationship is the work. How we show up in our interactions with others, having clarity about the values we are practicing, and growing our capacity to analyze power in a complex and dynamic setting is technical grantcraft. The ability to create and hold containers for candid conversations, surface and move through tensions, cultivate shared assessments, and co-create strategy are critical skills in philanthropy.
When I started in my current role, I drew from my previous experiences in the international development sector. I understood that my role was to “inquire” about an organization’s plans and programmatic results, to ask challenging questions that assessed the strength of their interventions (and demonstrated my intellect and credentials), and to encourage opportunities for scaling the work. This led to many interactions that probably felt like inquisitions, and that were transactional, centered my needs and priorities, and created distance between them and me.
At first, I wasn’t able to see the full scope of the work that my grantees were doing. I couldn’t hear the depth of their grounded analyses or provide space for them to share genuine challenges and concerns. In approaching the work as an employee with a conceptual problem to be solved, I was limiting my own ability to engage in grantmaking with strategic rigor, intellectual integrity, and high-quality impact.
To shift this dynamic, I had to learn how to demonstrate my commitment to the work by sharing what it means to me personally, how to listen in the language of my partners, and how to let go of standards of practice that prevent open and caring relationships. Sometimes that meant that I just needed to be a normal human being who took the time to delight in photos of a new baby and commiserate about the struggles of breastfeeding.
The strongest measure of effective grantmaking practice is the quality of the relationship between grantmakers and grantees.
This relational reorientation often requires an incisive inquiry into things that may appear mundane, but are actually proven practices for cultivating authentic and egalitarian relationships. How do you schedule calls and meetings? Who determines the purpose and agenda? What is the structure of the conversation? Is it focused on monitoring progress of predetermined outcomes or on understanding how the context may affect a grantee's needs and strategy? Have you fully and transparently explained your institution’s priorities and process for decision making? Have you created the conditions to bring our full selves into the conversation or do we each have to leave parts of our identity at the door? Is the language you’re using one in which everyone is able to fully express themselves? Do you share the struggles you’re having with making the case for their work? Have they ever said ‘no’ to a meaningful request you made, and if so, were they met with punishment or grace?
The strongest measure of effective grantmaking practice is the quality of the relationship between grantmakers and grantees. In order to quickly pivot when things go wrong, take advantage of an emergent opportunity, or take action in a crisis situation, you must have a well-founded relational base that allows you to move fast and in alignment. That base is born or broken in the seemingly small, everyday practices that prove your shared commitment, trust, reciprocity, and intent. (And, of course, a grantmaker’s ability to do this is supported when their institution gives long-term, flexible, core grants.)
Another truth I’ve learned is that grantmakers have a responsibility to do internal work on ourselves, especially around unpacking our relationship to money. We have all been shaped by late-stage capitalism, and our experiences with money are complicated. No matter what our class background or current wealth status may be, working in a financial sector such as philanthropy forces us to confront and grapple with deeply entrenched beliefs about money: who deserves it, what its value is, what it represents, how it can be used, and what it means to be associated with “giving it away.”
For those of us who do not come from wealth, it can be hard to work in a sector whose operational norms are biased against those that have been denied money — historically and in the present day. For example, a common critique of the “absorptive capacity” standard is that it is thinly veiled discrimination based on the unfounded assumption that those who have less deserve less. This leads to the systematic exclusion of those who, due to always having to operate with less, know best how to stretch a dollar, or how to multiply the impact of our money by pooling it with our siblings, cousins, and friends.
Unpacking the narratives we learned from an early age about money — who was “good with money” and what was an acceptable level of risk to take with money — was how I started. Then I developed my own awareness of how interactions with money would make me feel. This helped me to see money as only one type of resource, and to learn to equate value to all of the other critical resources that are needed to make change. It also supported me to step back my assumptions about attribution, by understanding that money alone was not what made projects and programming successful.
To do our jobs well, it is important for grantmakers to take steps to familiarize ourselves with the power of our money psychology and to become aware of the ways it may be influencing our decisions — for better and for worse. For me, that meant unlearning the notions about keeping overhead and operational costs low, which didn’t apply in all contexts, or not adequately accounting for the expense of collaboration and partnership building. These were important lessons generously taught to me by my grantee partners.
Finally, another truth I’ve learned is to stand in your power — together. In almost every funder affinity space I’ve been in, there is a pervasive sense of powerlessness to think, act, and feel differently. Grantmakers across the sector express frustration with opaque internal decision-making systems, distance and lack of clarity from organizational strategy discussions, and the ongoing labor of having to continually make the case for partners’ work and translate movement parlance into financial jargon and investment frameworks. Learned helplessness causes many to consign themselves to tinkering rather than pushing for the real change our sector needs.
But if grantmakers feel powerless, how can our grantees rely on us to advocate for their work? Moving away from a deficit perspective to asset-based thinking requires us to construct new delineations of where opportunities to shift power lie that are entirely within our control. This can be as simple as the choices we make about whose emails we respond to or which spaces we stop contributing to because they sap our energy and have low potential for change. Some of the most powerful contributions I have made were by taking the time to let someone know that while I couldn’t fund their work, I could introduce them to a few colleagues who may be able to. Those small gestures add up to big victories; it just takes time, patience, and discernment about the value you can add versus the value you wish you could add that is actually beyond your reach.
It is also important to remember that there is power and political cover in numbers. Affinity spaces are sites to build power together and support each other to navigate institutional power structures more skillfully. When grantmakers organize together to shift policies and practices in the sector, not only does it strengthen our collective capacity to make change, it sends a deeper message that we are committed to being better partners to social justice movements.
Many of us recognize that our work in philanthropy is about the navigation of power. Yet, how we focus our attention in our relationships is equally if not more important than how we maneuver unjust systems. Bringing our energy to strengthening the quality of our relationships through deepening our connection, communication, and shared analysis is the centerpiece of strong grantmaking. Grappling with our own histories with money can bring us broader awareness of how we take up our roles, and shifting our mindsets to build power collectively supports the sector to move toward more equitable practices. This is the most powerful work we have to do, and we have to do it together.
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Tesmerelna Atsbeha has worked in private philanthropy for nine years. Prior to that she spent 15 years as a program implementer for International Global Health projects.
The Myths of Philanthropy series is being published in collaboration with the Center for Effective Philanthropy, Elemental, and VITA.
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The Funders Collaborative Hub publishes a range of perspectives. The views expressed here are those of the authors, not necessarily those of ACF.
