The challenges we face today—climate change, rising inequality, global health crises—demand sustainable action now. We don’t have the luxury of time. Traditional funding models, with their top-down approach and lack of community involvement, are no longer sufficient. We cannot afford to go back to outdated, disempowering systems. Our philanthropy needs to go beyond buzzwords – from empowerment to power shifts; from inclusion to belonging; and from dependence to mutual interdependence. 

 

The damage caused by ineffective philanthropy, misguided interventions, or paternalistic approaches is often invisible, but its impact can be profound and long-lasting. The antidote to harm is relationships—real, meaningful, and empathetic connections between funders, grantees, and the communities they serve. This is where we come in. 

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How are we showing up? 

 

We accompany funders and grantmaking organizations to shift from giver-recipient to an equitable partnership model with nonprofits and affected communities, focusing on building trust, mutual accountability, and transparency to achieve greater impact. 

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How can we help?​​​​​​​

• Emergent Strategy and Planning: Explore the root of how you might align your values and goals with the principles of trust-based giving while making the impact you have always dreamed of — we can explore how to set up donor-advised funds or create steps towards a spend down strategy if that fits your vision. Let us dream and rebuild a just philanthropy community with you. 

• Building Human-centered Relationships: Learn and unlearn with us on what it takes to foster strong, trusting relationships between funders and the communities you serve, allowing for open communication, collaborative problem-solving, and shared learning. 

• Adapting Effective Grantmaking Practices: Rethink how trust-based practices can transform your grantmaking through implementing multi-year funding, unrestricted grant options, and streamlined reporting requirements. We also accompany you to conduct thorough due diligence, ensuring you have a deep understanding of potential partners and their work you fund. 

• Care as an Organizational Culture: Cultivate a culture that supports trust-based relationships, promoting values of equity, collaboration, and mutual accountability on your team. 

• Transformative Advocacy and Education: Envision how you can strategically influence trust-based values within the broader philanthropic community, leveraging the principles and practices you embody to scale impact alongside your peers

• Meaningful Evaluation and Impact Measurement: Design and implement evaluation systems that measure the impact of your trust-based philanthropy initiatives. We draw from strong storytelling and arts-based models for demonstrating impact. ​​

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Key Values You’ll Cultivate with Us​

• Philanthropy as Medicine: Your resources are a tool of love that facilitates connection and helps us thrive. Imagine how we can use your access to resources for sacred, life-giving, restorative work – your philanthropy is medicine for the remnants of colonialism that make our systems sick. We believe a healing process can take place inside philanthropy.

• Beginner’s Mindset: A beginner does not have any expectations, preconceived notions, or past experiences to limit their view of a situation. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few. Learning imagination and design demands that we dialogue, interact, and transform our thinking.

• Accompaniment: We are the most impactful where we move at the speed of trust. We focus on critical connections rather than critical mass through walking alongside the people we serve, meeting them as humans first and project partners second. 

• Asset-Based Approach: The communities we serve know best as they are closest to the root of the problems we wish to tackle. Our role is to amplify existing strengths and find ways to regenerate this resource from within the community. 

• We Come From Abundance: We have the ability to create all the resources we need, there is no need to compete with one another. We have enough and we have each other. 

• Accountability is Relational: Through trust-based approaches, find the sweet spot between simplified grantmaking processes while upholding transparency and accountability.

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For inquiries about using our existing organizational trainings or philanthropic education resources, please contact team@in-sightcollaborative.org