This Foundation Ended a Bold, 8-Year Experiment in Participatory Philanthropy. What Did it Learn?

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As someone who has written about the encouraging growth in participatory grantmaking over the years, I’ve come to realize that funders’ willingness to embrace power-shifting practices often hinges on the extent to which early adopters share their experiences with the wider philanthropic field. 

Sometimes, the most helpful lessons come from case studies where programs in question struggled, or even those that didn’t work out in the end. Such analyses are hard to come by, however, which is why the Denver-based Colorado Trust’s extensive documentation and evaluation of a participatory grantmaking program, which it ultimately decided to end, is uniquely valuable for funders seeking to yield power to the communities they serve.

In 2014, the trust launched the Community Partnerships for Health Equity (CPHE) strategy, a bold experiment in participatory grantmaking and organizing that established 27 community-based, resident-led teams across the state, a starkly different route from traditional setup of program staff cutting checks to nonprofits. The trust committed $43 million to CPHE since its inception, but in late 2022, made the decision to end the program after “carefully reviewing evaluation findings and following many conversations with stakeholders.” 

These findings included a February 2022 evaluation, commissioned by the trust before its end was announced later that year. The funder committed more than $6 million to support grantees during a culmination phase of the Community Partnerships strategy. In 2023, the trust published a series of retrospective reports on the program — a final "macro-evaluation," a summary of its participating communities' accomplishments and a brief exploring how contextual factors like history, geography and social conditions informed and shaped the initiative. 

The four reports, which were created by philanthropy consultancy Community Science, paint the picture of a sprawling and ambitious effort to upend power dynamics between a funder and communities it serves, and one that successfully developed local leadership, provided important services and worked toward systems change. But the reports also outline how the program struggled with unclear expectations, uneven levels of skill and knowledge among resident participants, and a need for greater support and guidance from the trust. The effort also coincided with challenging leadership turnover and, of course, COVID. 

But based on my reading of these reports — and I give the trust a lot of credit for transparently publishing them on its site — the strategy’s biggest disconnect was what the macro-evaluation called a “misalignment between the trust’s role as a grantmaker and community organizer.” By setting up a network of dozens of statewide teams of community members who were empowered to award funding, but also to carry out systems-change work themselves, the project ran into a fundamental mismatch between what the trust was and the new role it was trying to fill. 

“The Community Partnerships for Health Equity strategy was an ambitious undertaking from the very beginning. We are proud of the efforts to innovate our grantmaking with a community-based, participatory approach,” said President and CEO Don Mares, who was on the board of trustees when the CPHE strategy was implemented in 2014, in an emailed statement. 

“Ultimately, our staffing structure, legal constraints and other hurdles we experienced as a private foundation proved to be too significant for The Colorado Trust to continue investing in this effort. We believe these three CPHE evaluation reports provide comprehensive and forthright findings about this initiative, and we hope that they are useful to other foundations considering similar approaches in their grantmaking.”

Indeed, the trust’s reports come as funding leaders continue to grapple with the post-2020 mandate of sharing power with community members, a task that has many in the sector taking on the new challenge of rewriting their roles in the community at a fundamental level. 

Despite the fact that the trust shut down the program, when looking back on these documents, it shouldn’t be read as a negative reflection on participatory grantmaking or even the trust’s efforts, necessarily. Indeed, the organizers racked up impressive achievements in spite of the institutional hurdles. Rather, the evaluation speaks to the wide array of options involved in creating a philanthropic program that’s truly resident led, the potential payoffs, and how a well-intentioned funder can struggle to find the right role while attempting to hand the keys to the community.

A radical overhaul to the foundation’s role 

The Colorado Trust was established in 1985, when the nonprofit PSL Healthcare Corporation was sold to a for-profit organization. The proceeds of the sale were used to create the trust, a statewide, private foundation dedicated to the health of Colorado residents.

In 2016, Nancy Csuti, director of research, evaluation and strategic learning, and Gwyn Barley, director of community partnerships and grants, penned a piece in The Foundation Review laying out the strategy of a new participatory program they had launched two years prior. The authors expressed frustration at the lack of systemic change resulting from many years of grantmaking. “Why do these problems continue to exist despite the millions of dollars spent to alleviate them? Why would continuing to fund the same nonprofits, in the same way, result in anything different?”

The trust committed to a new, community-led approach to addressing health equity, and slotted the new CPHE strategy into its larger grantmaking portfolio. In designing the strategy, leaders reevaluated the role of the program manager, whose authority is often diminished in a participatory model. Funders typically address this issue by transitioning staff to an advisory role requiring soft skills like the ability to facilitate conversations. The trust initially adopted this type of approach, asking program officers “to behave more like anthropologists and community organizers,” Csuti and Barley wrote, but over time, officers inevitably gravitated toward nonprofit leaders with whom they had prior relationships.

So the trust dissolved the program team (they were presumably let go or reassigned) and replaced the program officer post with a new position — “community partners” with organizing experience, who were tasked with building relationships and convening residents to determine where to focus community change efforts.

The residents they organized became responsible for planning and executing the work on the ground. Whether the residents would give funding to nonprofits was up to them, and they often did the programmatic work themselves, a big step beyond the usual participatory practice of having community members simply choose nonprofit grantees. Twenty-seven community teams and over 100 residents participated in the CPHE strategy between 2014 and 2022.

Allen Smart of PhilanthropywoRx, who did some early consulting on the project and initially brought it to my attention, told me that the move “may have been the largest attempt to change the traditional role of the program officer to one that toes the line between foundation representative and community advocate,” although noting that funders like the LOR Foundation and Missouri Foundation for Health are also moving in this direction. Katy Love, an independent consultant who assists funders in adopting participatory and trust-based practices, also acknowledged the trust’s unique approach — “something that is, as far as I know, very unique. I don’t know of an organization that has had this same experience.” 

Powerful impact, but more support needed

While the combined evaluation reports understandably explore the struggles and missteps of the program, they also point to a lot of great work and important progress made possible by the community teams. 

Much of that success was tied to leadership development. One evaluation report noted that the initiative convened and cultivated teams of dozens of highly engaged, informed community members deeply invested in health equity. Members of the 11 community teams featured in the report felt empowered to engage with local officials to drive change at the community level and “built awareness about key issues related to the social determinants of health that are most critical locally.” 

Some teams “conducted extensive community interviews, focus groups and/or surveys to find out about issues most pressing for their communities, including youth, senior citizens and people with limited English proficiency.” They also provided urgently needed services, either themselves, through volunteers they recruited, or indirectly through nonprofit partners. That included providing food, translation services, gift cards, hygiene and other supplies, and supporting the expansion of services among partners. Specific examples listed on the trust’s page include resident team members partnering with state and local stakeholders to construct a greenhouse and a food pantry to address food insecurity.

“Communities that participated in CPHE,” one 2023 report read, “brought people together, filled gaps in programs and services, addressed housing affordability and availability, improved youth’s access to resources and opportunities, reduced barriers to obtaining fresh and healthy food, promoted language justice, built infrastructure, increased access to economic resources and connected people to their histories and cultural heritage.”

However, the 2022 report noted, “awareness alone was not sufficient for advocacy; the community team members also needed the skills to do this.” Some communities were able to begin to build power and create systems change, but overall, “the link between activities and actions and systems change and power building was not as strong as it should be because communities were not ready, community team leaders have not been open to it, and/or regional staff have not sufficiently built community team’s capacity.” 

This is one of the more interesting takeaways from the reports. Funders that have embraced participatory grantmaking are guided by the premise that people with lived experience are well-positioned to address community challenges. They operate from a unique vantage point and understanding of local issues — and they have skin in the game. But taking on new responsibilities still demands new skills, whether community members are being tasked with making grants or generating change themselves. Everyday residents are a powerful force — indeed, one thing we know with absolute certainty about the trust’s strategy was that resident team members were uniformly committed to improving their communities — but they don’t have some innate power to bend systems to their will. 

Ben Wrobel, co-author of “Letting Go: How Philanthropists and Impact Investors Can Do More Good By Giving Up Control” did not comment specifically on the Colorado Trust’s program in this regard, but underscored the importance of having foundation leaders effectively upskill participant decision-makers. 

“One of the misconceptions about participatory grantmaking is that the foundation shifts all responsibility and doesn't actually have a role to play,” he said. “On the contrary, participatory grantmaking requires funders to make sure the teams that are running it are equipped with soft skills as well as the hard skills to effectively do the work.”

The funder struggled in its new role

It’s important to note that, conceptual hurdles aside, the foundation suffered from execution and logistical problems that likely contributed to the decision to wind down the program. Any ambitious, community-led strategy is bound to be complex, especially in a sprawling and diverse state like Colorado. That said, the trust’s strategy became especially unwieldy when it combined two distinct approaches for galvanizing systems change. 

Without getting too bogged down in the details, in 2020, the trust adopted a second approach to funding community teams, which it ran concurrently with the original approach it had been using since 2014. Running these two different strategies concurrently proved problematic, with some community members feeling “abandoned” or “neglected” during the pivot, and others feeling that the new approach suffered from “overly structured policies and processes that were not supportive of or responsive to communities.”  

The fraught transition was further compounded by a lack of guidance from trust leadership as the funder experienced staff turnover, with the VP of grants position sitting vacant during the pivotal period between mid-2020 and mid-2021. Then, of course, there was COVID-19, which, according to the report, impelled the trust to “put a pause on CPHE work in all communities, as participants shifted their focus and energy to meeting basic needs in the community.”

Ultimately, however, the strategy’s eventual termination hinged in large part on the fact that the trust lacked the tools, skills and resources to excel in this new, distinct role as more of a community organizing intermediary. 

By adopting the CPHE, the trust became responsible for hiring community organizers, providing a clear and measurable definition of systems change, convening teams, paying community members for their time and connecting them to leadership courses, teaching participating residents how to run meetings and defuse conflicts, and educating residents on both philanthropy and the root causes of health inequities. 

This charter falls miles outside of the purview of foundation trustees and program managers typically accustomed to evaluating proposals and awarding grants — the idiom of trying to fit a square peg in a hole comes to mind — which can explain why the trust had trouble clearly articulating roles and responsibilities both internally and among community team members. 

But even if a foundation can rise to the formidable challenge of reshaping itself organizationally, there’s also a potential disconnect in the understanding of what shifting power actually looks like. The trust, which retained final sign-off on community teams’ plans, generally approved activities supporting direct services with little fuss. However, when it came to requests for funds to support direct action and systems change organizing, its leaders were more judicious, effectively creating what a 2023 evaluation called a “layer of scrutiny and an extended review timeline.”

In one anecdote, the report noted that a community team wanted to plan an action around a contaminated aquifer linked to a local military base. The trust balked at the plan, citing concerns that it could put the local economy at risk, since the base was the largest employer in the area. The response left the community team feeling like they were getting mixed messages — namely, that system changes should be advanced, but only on the trust’s terms. 

This idea of the trust being unable to get out of its own way was a recurring theme through the report, and it points to one of the biggest takeaways of all for funders with an interest in shifting power — either truly hand the reins to community and let the chips fall where they may, or manage expectations as transparently as possible so residents won’t be disillusioned if the trustees pump the brakes on unacceptably disruptive strategies. As one evaluation report states, “it would be helpful for the trust, as a funder, to understand its power to broker or to inadvertently harm relationships and communities because of unclear goals, expectations and communications.” 

Another report published in 2023, “Community Partnerships for Health Equity: Context Matters,” also recommends that funders pursuing such a shift tread lightly and always remain cognizant of the context within a specific community — its history; social, political and economic forces; and a host of demographic factors like race, ethnicity and gender.

The need for clarity

From my vantage point, that report speaks to the participatory program’s biggest success — the way the effort galvanized community engagement, particularly among demographics that were traditionally excluded from civic life, like non-English speakers, recent immigrants and rural residents. One could argue the trust might have engaged these demographics more efficiently by directly funding grassroots community groups and direct services providers from the outset, but the fact remains that over the course of eight years, the trust further engaged historically overlooked residents in their community’s civic fabric. 

That said, I suspect the trust’s leaders may find some comfort in one report’s more direct takeaway. Remember, one reason stakeholders launched the strategy was because they questioned the efficacy of the conventional funder-grantee relationship. But according to Community Science, the trust — and presumably other funders — can, in fact, effect systems change by funding grassroots organizations and direct service providers. 

The trust “is a grantmaking organization that must work with community organizations to implement its strategies,” one report read. “It should not blur its role across funder, community organizer and intermediary because such blurring causes confusion and strains the trust — operationally, culturally, structurally and relationally — inside and outside the organization.” 

Add it up, and the reports are a reminder that participatory grantmaking practices fall on a broad continuum, and there’s no one correct way to do it (check out an impressive example here). But success requires a certain amount of clarity regarding the role a funding institution can and should play. Here’s hoping the Colorado Trust’s comprehensive and unvarnished look into what it takes to shift power to community members enables funding leaders who are looking to do the same proceed with their eyes wide open.