How Panta Rhea’s Connie Malloy Builds Grassroots Infrastructure by Moving at the Speed of Trust

Connie Malloy, CEO, Panta Rhea Foundation

The first year as a new CEO would be a challenge for anyone, but Connie Malloy made the transition only a few months before the world as we all knew it changed. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Malloy drew upon the knowledge she’d gained from her years of community organizing and leaned into the potential of a crisis to facilitate systemic transformation. Building on the Panta Rhea Foundation’s bones-level commitment to change, Malloy and her team quickly adapted its grantmaking strategies, governance and operations in ways that enabled the foundation to better respond to the needs of front-line leaders in real time and provide the highest level of resources the foundation has given to date.

I spoke with Malloy about how funders can be more creative in mobilizing resources, the false assumptions that stand in the way of solidarity philanthropy, and what it takes to defy the funder-activist binary.

Tell me about the path you took to come to philanthropy.

When I was a child, adoption shifted my place in the world from a Caribbean-Colombian family into a white, Midwestern family. For much of my growing up, as a minister’s child, I lived in different parts of the United States—from the Midwest to the Deep South to the Pacific Northwest—and in a circumstance where people who shared my racial and cultural background tended to live in a different part of town, go to a different school, and face issues that my adoptive community did not face. As much as I loved my adoptive family, I questioned and resented the differences I saw around me.

My life experience growing up forced me to bridge between very distinct worlds. It was a survival skill that has translated into a superpower I have now. When I reintegrated with my birth family as a young adult, my sensitivity toward social justice and fairness deepened. My Caribbean family and community gave me a way to understand where I had come from and how I could be a source for positive change at a time when I was just starting to think about my career.

I ended up going to school to be an urban planner, but it took me a hot second to realize that even though there are a lot of great ideas out there, the power and resources to make those visions real are not equally distributed. I got interested in the social aspects of how to build community power, and the financial and human resources that were needed to do so. Now, to be at a point in my career where I’ve been able to support amazing communities, leaders and causes in a way that’s really grounded in the places where I came from—and where similar struggles are being faced—it feels like I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing with my life.

When you came to philanthropy, did you enter the sector with a particular purpose in mind?

By the time I had the opportunity to work in philanthropy, I was coming from working with grassroots campaigns around all kinds of urban planning and environmental issues, like access to affordable public transportation and limiting the amount of toxic exposure for low-income communities located next to oil refineries or trash facilities. In that work, it was clear how important it was for the people who are most affected by the policies and resource decisions to be the ones driving those decisions, and how much of a barrier it is that the ones who usually get to decide have little to no experience on the issues. They might have “the right academic background,” but have they ever actually ridden the bus or lived in a community where there are toxic flares?

My initial intention to work in philanthropy was to support organizations doing voter and civic engagement on environmental and economic justice issues. Having been in these organizations, I had firsthand knowledge of what hadn’t worked with the funding streams I had seen. I knew there was a need for larger-scale, flexible funding to build grassroots power and shift city, state and national policies. I’d been around really amazing movements, communities and organizers who had great ideas that just needed to be funded. So I saw philanthropy as an opportunity to be a bridge and help support some of the smartest people I knew who were taking big risks. 

To me, I felt like I was still organizing. My job was to organize within a funding institution and mobilize those resources to support people who were organizing in communities and creating the changes that we want to see in the world. That is the purpose that sustained me through that first experience.

Are there things you wish you had understood sooner about the work you were there to do?

I went into my first program officer role at the James Irvine Foundation focused on doing the thing that I knew, which was creating a strategy around voter and civic engagement, but I realized how important other elements were to promote the change we wanted—like, how we worked as a foundation. My eyes opened to the assumptions around operational considerations or human resources and the processes around how budgeting and grant allocations are done.

It sounds very basic, but one of the things I hold most dear about the time that I was in that foundation role are the people we were able to hire there. Some of my close colleagues during that era really reset what the foundation was looking for in the people they were hiring in a way that better reflected the communities that we were aiming to serve, not just demographically, but on a values level. Although many of us have moved on, I still consider them my closest advisors.

I came to see grantmaking as one very small piece of a much larger system at the foundation. As I grew in my own leadership, I realized that the institutional values and the ethos of who I wanted to be in the world as a funder set the stage for good strategy. You can’t really have one without the other.

Now that you’re the CEO of the Panta Rhea Foundation, you have a lot of responsibility for interpreting how the institutional values show up in the organizational culture and ways of operating. How do you think about that responsibility? 

One value that I hold very dear personally, and that is also one of our institutional values, is around solidarity. Our experiences are unique as humans living different lives in various ways, but my ability to trust, support and show up for you is really critical, particularly being in an institution where our headquarters and resources are based in the Global North.

At Panta Rhea Foundation, we have been significantly increasing our resources that support work in the Global South, with a focus on the Caribbean and Americas, and that value has concrete implications for how we operate as a foundation. I can’t operate in solidarity with partners elsewhere if I’m expecting them to fully adhere to Global North cultural norms and legal structures. In my previous funding experiences, the rules were more rigid, and the belief was that organizations would just have to follow those rules or we’d move on to the next potential grantee. Being in a values-aligned organization, part of the way I show up in solidarity is by learning new environments and helping to create new structures that bridge between those two worlds.

Clearly, we have a responsibility to maintain our charitable status, but even within the legal parameters, there’s actually a lot of flexibility. There are a variety of partnerships and ways of reimagining these historical patterns of operating that foundations have so that we are able to support new kinds of partners and new kinds of work. Panta Rhea Foundation’s commitment to flexibility and creativity have given me a powerful opportunity to lead at a time when it’s not enough to just give money, but to be thoughtful about how we give that money.

Can you say more about the importance of focusing on how funding is given, not just the dollar amount? 

The complexity of what we’re facing now with so many intersecting crises and opportunities means that philanthropy can’t only be about making individual organizations strong. It has to think about how we are enabling the collective voice and power of movements that are sowing the seeds for transformational outcomes at a societal level. That is a different kind of philanthropy with a new set of partners that many of the funders I am familiar with haven’t practiced.

Even though I’ve worked at very different kinds of philanthropy, there’s a common tendency to think about impact in terms of what we produce, which is a Western concept that’s tied to monetization and production, and often takes the form of the question: What widgets are we getting for our investment? In the context of organizing, this can lead to a focus on campaigns outcomes and whether a specific policy has been won or lost. It’s a very binary sort of equation.

The reality that I’ve experienced in the work I have done, and I am doing, as an activist—and in what I’ve been able to support as a funder—is that so much of the work is actually about the ongoing relationships that underpin those campaigns. It’s about coalescing around who we are and the ways in which we’re working to build power. And with that understanding, even in the cases when we lose a particular campaign, we can see all the gains that the process itself allowed the movement to make.

Is there a specific example you can give that illustrates the difference?

One example that Panta Rhea Foundation has been supporting over many years are the organizations that are part of the Schools and Communities First Act. The most simplistic way of looking at that campaign is that the ballot initiative did not get passed in late 2020. But 10 years ago, the possibility of even having a campaign like this was not even viable. The community organizing that has happened at micro-levels all around the state of California over the last decade, and the infrastructure and capacities around communications and public policy that have been built in unions and community-based organizations of all different types, has enabled coalition-building that allowed communities to dream and act together with a bigger vision for how progressive tax policy reform could bring more resources to local needs. And even though they lost, they came within a hair of winning that ballot initiative and set the stage for a future election cycle.

Part of what I have always felt like my job is, first as a program officer and now as a CEO, is being able to tell both sides of that story. There are people in philanthropy who are better able to understand and anchor on what happened during that campaign, but the larger story of what had to take place first to allow the campaign to happen and what’s possible as a result of the campaign is often not as visible.

Funders have to encourage and resource our organizations to tell the larger story, and we have to dig deeper ourselves to see these other transformative shifts happening, because that is actually what reaps dividends over the long term. Those are the dividends that outlast any specific campaign or election cycle, and funders have to stay in it for the long haul for the actual breakthroughs to be achieved. The work that went into today’s loss might have been what built the relationships and capacities needed to win next time, and it is our responsibility as funders to keep the resources stable for the communities we’re trying to serve.

Speaking of keeping resources stable, can you talk about the work you’ve been doing with the Seaflower Resilience Fund to create an activist-led funding vehicle to move resources to Afro-Indigenous organizing in the Western Caribbean?

The islands of San Andrés, Providencia, and Santa Catalina are part of a biosphere reserve that has played a critical role environmentally and is the world’s third-largest barrier reef. It also has a long history of being in a tricky political and governance space as an Afro-Indigenous Raizal territory that’s legally a department of Colombia in South America. Over the years, that relationship has grown increasingly challenging as the Western Caribbean region has been facing increased impacts of climate change in ways that mainland Colombia isn’t. Those things came to a head in late 2020 when the islands got hit with two devastating hurricanes in the span of two weeks.

Until that moment, I had never been professionally involved in what was happening on the islands, but because my family is from there, I was aware of our long-standing social movements and environmental struggles. Looking at the situation anew through an urban planner, organizer and funder’s eyes, I was shocked to realize how little focus was being given to this part of the region. I saw an opportunity to not only mobilize my own personal networks for individual solidarity donations that could support disaster relief and the basic needs that came after the hurricanes, but also to support the community leaders and social movements that had been anchors in the efforts for food sovereignty, economic independence and political autonomy for many decades—and doing so with little to no philanthropic resources. They were often volunteer-run or supported by small donations from someone in the diaspora who would send a little bit of money home to buy seeds for the farmers or to help a promising student buy books for school.

The Caribbean is one of the regions hardest hit by climate change and most underserved by philanthropy. I initially thought: Panta Rhea Foundation funds climate and environmental justice movements, so maybe there’s a way we could make some grants to support what’s happening there. Then I quickly realized how difficult it is to get money there because of the legal and financial landscape. Many of the organizations in this archipelago don’t have formal incorporation, and even the ones that do might not have the right kind of bank account to receive international funds. Some banks had a waiting period of six months or more. With the urgency that people were experiencing day to day, I knew we had to find a way to show up immediately because that was when people really needed it. And I knew that if we wanted to support the Raizal community’s self-determination over the long term, we would have to build that capacity locally.

What has the process looked like, and who has been involved?

We were fortunate that there were a couple of small foundations that existed through members of the Raizal diaspora to fund cultural projects or scholarships for students. After the hurricanes, we looked carefully at how those vehicles could be used to get resources to the islands in a way that was informed by an emergent, local community process to direct where those funds went.

We also had a parallel track to figure out how to resource people who were already dedicating themselves full-time to doing charitable work and organizing the community, because there was no trusted local non-governmental entity to be able to receive our funds and pay them for the work they were doing. We developed the Seaflower Resilience Fund in partnership with Amalgamated Foundation to serve two purposes: One, they could receive individual and institutional donations and provide a tax-deductible receipt for those who wanted it. And with those funds, they were then able to manage contracts for people who were based in the islands. So we have been able to pay stipends directly to people living and working on charitable projects in the islands while the local organizations make sure their infrastructure is strong enough to receive a grant and take on that cost directly.

Seaflower Resilience Fund has also been a vehicle where some foundations who don’t have the ability to make modest grants to these local organizations can make a grant to Seaflower as a bridge to distributing the funds. The endgame is having more of our local organizations able to directly receive and manage these grants, and we’re starting to get to that point. I just got word from one of our local partners that the bank finally cleared them to receive a grant directly from Panta Rhea Foundation, which they will then be able to leverage to seek other grant funding. Our board approved the grant nearly a year ago. This is a big step in building the infrastructure with an eye toward systemic change, and it’s been a long time coming. Clearly, it’s going to take many years to rebuild the social, economic and political environment in our islands, so we’re just getting started.

As someone who believes that people should be defining their own lives, what have you learned from this experience that you didn’t expect when you started?

In my dream, we would have been able to immediately move into a participatory conversation about where to put resources, but the corruption experienced at the hands of the Colombian government is really deep. Our Raizal leaders have a default assumption that systems and processes will not be transparent, and they will be corrupt. It became clear that the whole thing would blow up if we did that from the beginning, particularly given the level of survival stress that folks in the community are suffering from in the day-to-day. When you’re worrying about putting a roof over your head, trying to think about the most long-term, strategic use of this collective pot of resources wasn’t something that could happen.

If we’re going to explore a completely community-driven and participatory process, we had to have more flexibility around what the building blocks were to create an environment of transparency and shared clarity around values and criteria. Through that scaffolding, we can continue to grow the advisory and participatory elements of how the funds are distributed. So we are actually experimenting with a new way of working together, and collectively learning about and managing resources. It’s like building new muscles.

Meanwhile, the Colombian government has punished Raizal activists who have spoken up and protested the way the post-hurricane reconstruction has been happening. Many have been pushed to the back of the line for their houses being rebuilt and are still living in tents. Others who have taken on key environmental, economic and social issues have had their lives threatened, including leaders of local NGOs and individuals we’ve supported for their charitable legal and community organizing work. It’s critical to understand the level of risk that people are taking individually as context for why some who are doing transformative work are reticent to be given any formal title or given recognition for the things they’re doing. Funders have to be cautious in terms of how we listen and learn and follow the lead of the people who are taking those risks when they tell us what the structures of organizations look like or how they need to receive funding, so as to center community care.

For some, having an informal legal structure is what makes their work strong and sustainable—because no one can go after the center of their power or the source of their resources. They don’t want a centralized place where the government can see everything they’re doing and possibly shut them down, though some do have highly sophisticated grassroots democracy structures. So, what I’ve learned is that there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. There have to be different pots of money that can be used for different purposes and with different speeds to match the circumstance, and we have to adapt as circumstances change. This level of solidarity takes more time and bandwidth on the part of the foundation. And it’s a strategy with more operational implications than we realized when we set off down this path.

You identify as both an activist and a funder, which many people think of as a dichotomy. Can you speak about how you hold those identities that are sometimes in tension with one another?

I think that’s really important, because the power dynamic of being a funder and being an activist can have a distorting effect on strategy. To help manage that, I’ve worked with our Raizal community on developing a “job description” for what my role is and what it isn’t in the collective infrastructure of how we’re working together. There are ways I can and will show up based on how they want me to show up, and there are things we intentionally separate out.

For example, Panta Rhea Foundation provides resources to support the Raizal community’s legal agenda. But I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not living day-to-day what my community in the islands is living. So, generally, I don’t participate in the legal meetings because whatever strategy that’s getting developed should come straight from our impacted communities, and they should decide and manage who they want to partner with. Instead, I stay on call to follow up on the funding implications, for communications support, and to troubleshoot as needed, which they’ve identified as my role.

As our Raizal community in the islands and abroad shifts from post-disaster response work to the long haul, we’re continually reflecting and reshaping how we embody our values. What I’m learning in my ancestral homelands now transcends borders, and keeps me grounded across the broader scope of our work at Panta Rhea Foundation.

Mandy Van Deven is a philanthropy consultant with 20 years of experience in strategy and planning, grantmaking, organizational development, capacity building and strategic communications in the philanthropic, nonprofit and journalism sectors—with an emphasis on gender, racial and economic justice and fortifying the infrastructure for narrative power.