Five Questions We Should Be Asking About Trust-Based Philanthropy

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When trust-based philanthropy shows up in the charitable giving conversation, most of the time, it’s proponents calling for more of it and citing familiar arguments about overweening funder power and the evils of restricted funding. Recently, however, a number of dissenting opinions have appeared — here, for example, or here. Trust-based philanthropy doesn’t “work," the claim goes. It’s feel-good fluff and we’ll tell you why, critics declare.

And while it’s perfectly reasonable to examine and even question the tenets of this trending approach to giving, which can be open to interpretation, some of its critics seem to be posing the wrong questions — misunderstanding the philosophy or simply setting it up just to knock it down. Meanwhile, many of its advocates take premises for granted that are not shared by those they’re trying to convince.

So how should we talk about trust-based philanthropy in a way that honors its intentions but is constructively critical? What are the questions we should ask of this way of giving? And can those questions help us refine how we’re thinking about this sometimes vague topic?

Below is an attempt to lay out a few such questions, aiming not at any definitive answer, but at informing a conversation that lies at the heart of what we think philanthropy should be doing. After all, billions of grant dollars, not to mention the success or failure of movements and nonprofit missions, are on the line in the debate over whether trust — however that’s defined — should underpin the future of charitable giving.

What actually is trust-based philanthropy, anyway?

Part of the challenge here lies with the fact that the definition of trust-based philanthropy is itself up for grabs. Is unrestricted support the central idea? What of lessened or nixed reporting requirements, or support across multiple years? Is this more about nurturing the funder-grantee relationship than it is about any specific practice? Is it about ceding power to communities closer to the problem? All of the above? Some?

Proponents often reach for loftier definitions. For instance, in their recent defense of trust-based giving, Cynthia M. Gibson, Lisa Pilar Cowan and Jocelynne Rainey called it “an approach to philanthropy that attempts to address power imbalances between foundations and nonprofits and is rooted in a set of values that advance equity, shift power, and build mutually accountable relationships.” 

While it’s unrealistic to expect any kind of universal definition to emerge, the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project and others are working to articulate what the approach is and isn’t, an important endeavor. Still, all this conceptual fuzziness gives free rein to opponents who set up overly limited definitions of trust-based giving that they can attack as straw men (i.e., “It’s about unaccountable, follow-up-free money”). Meanwhile, it enables promotion of the practice on the basis of overly broad generalities and cliche. Neither seems helpful. 

What values does trust-based philanthropy uphold?

One way to talk about trust-based philanthropy is in the strictly tactical sense, as a means for a funder to achieve greater impact over time — or, on the flip side, as a misstep that limits impact. It’s also positioned as a matter of practicality — all those applications and quarterly reports are just a waste of everyone’s time. It could also be seen as basic decency in professional relationships, respecting others and maintaining a two-way street. 

But for many proponents, it’s also more than that, considered a virtue or even a duty. Trust-based philanthropy as it’s often promulgated is not a values-neutral prospect, even if something like “unrestricted funding” might be.

Pia Infante, a senior fellow at the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project and former co-executive director of the Whitman Institute, is one of the originators of the term. In a recent interview, Infante put it this way: “We acknowledged that our socio-political and economic structures were intolerably inequitable, and we were highly concerned that the racial wealth gap was widening while resources and strong public infrastructure had been under attack for decades. These sentiments and values serve as the foundation of trust-based philanthropy.” 

Here, trust-based philanthropy shows up as bound to a progressive worldview, or at least a worldview that recognizes and seeks to challenge injustice. Moreover, it is often tied to a belief that wealthy donors are not entitled to maintain power over their grantees. That holds true for much of the favorable commentary I’ve seen on trust-based philanthropy, including here at IP.

On the other hand, conservative critiques of trust-based giving, like the one James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley penned late last year, unsurprisingly question those values: “Demanding benchmarks for success or performing due diligence have become passé, or even a sign of structural racism; the often-white donors should simply trust leaders of color to make decisions for themselves.”

Complicating matters further, conservative funders’ own decades-long, open-handed support for right-wing think tanks, scholars and advocacy groups (which has paid handsome policy dividends) actually bears many of the hallmarks of trust-based giving. Should that be considered trust-based philanthropy? 

Is there a values-neutral version of the concept, one that boils down to establishing respectful relationships, or simply trusting the expertise of practitioners and communities? Or does it need an underlying, justice-seeking ideology as its foundation? It isn’t clear.

How do trust-based practices and funders’ goals align – or not?

In a recent critique, Call of Duty Endowment Executive Director Dan Goldenberg lamented the “decidedly lackluster” results of his organization’s attempts at trust-based giving. “We didn’t come close to reaching our goal of making a significant dent in veteran unemployment rates,” Goldenberg wrote. “In fact, it took us almost four years to place just 1,000 veterans in jobs.”

As Goldenberg makes clear throughout the piece, hard metrics and “quantitative measures” are integral to what the Call of Duty Endowment wants to achieve. It makes sense: If a funder’s goal is something concrete and measurable, like placing a certain number of veterans in quality jobs — with “quality” also measurable via salary, retention rates, benefits, etc. — it’ll be difficult to deviate from an instrumentalist, metrics-heavy, strategic approach.

But as we all know, not all grantmakers define their goals that way. A funder aiming to empower climate justice movements, for example, just isn’t going to be able to measure “impact per dollar” in such a granular fashion. For funders that want to build the field in their chosen areas, providing general support to capacity-limited organizations may be the only way to get them past the starting line to the point where they’re having any impact, measurable or not. 

For still other funders, the overarching goal is to move lots of money out the door quickly, which lends itself to high-dollar, long-term capacity funding. MacKenzie Scott is the operative example these days, but any spend-down grantmaker could fit the bill. Regardless of these funders’ ideological stances, trust-based practices may come with the territory simply because they’ll lack the capacity or the timeline for close, prolonged scrutiny of their grantees.

However funders conceptualize their goals, a bigger question hangs over all of this: whether funders should be the ones setting goals in the first place. For many proponents, the question of whether trust-based philanthropy meets rigid goals that a funder dictates is the wrong question. 

Who, exactly, should trust-based philanthropy be trusting?

In a rebuttal to Goldenberg’s critique, the folks at the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project appealed for funders to cede their authority to define goals and set agendas: “Trust-based philanthropy starts with a different yet common-sense premise: If we want to move the needle on any issue, grantmaking strategies and goals should be informed by those working on and experiencing these issues firsthand.”

Bringing ground-level voices to the table does seem like a prerequisite if the aim is to counteract philanthropy’s inherent elitism and power disparities. At the same time, it isn’t always clear-cut who exactly is “working on and experiencing” any given issue firsthand. Who counts as proximate? The people who’ve suffered the most? The people with the least wealth? Those with certain lived experiences?

Faced with the problem of actually identifying proximate people and groups, many institutional funders end up falling back on another form of proximity: their own peers and professional networks. To be fair, some grantmakers’ networks do include ground-level organizers, some of whom may truly represent the people most affected. But in most cases, the criteria seem to be “who do we know?” and “who are our peers funding?” 

Trust, in that sense, may have de facto limits that are simply a byproduct of the fact that grantmakers aren’t omniscient and only have 24 hours in a day. 

What is trust-based philanthropy working toward?

So what would it look like for trust-based giving to shed the patina of professional proximity and actually go all the way? Fortunately, we have models for that in participatory philanthropy — putting actual grantmaking power into proximate people’s hands. If the goal is to rebalance out-of-kilter power dynamics, giving communities actual say over grantmaking decisions seems like the fullest expression of trust.

But again, who are the “communities” here? Someone’s still choosing the participants in participatory philanthropy, and in that way, funder power remains intact. As Piereson and Riley put it in their critique, “too many groups are applying for funds to give them all a role in donor deliberations. By and large, donors work out relationships with grantee organizations over time, learning which ones to trust, which to monitor closely, and which to turn away.”

Taken to its logical endpoint, truly leveling funder power would mean nothing less than the mandatory redistribution of the philanthropic corpus — mandated by government, I suppose, who else? — and at that point, both “trust” and “philanthropy” no longer have any relevance to what’s going on.

While some might welcome such a scenario, the current reality is starkly different. Far from being redistributed, the philanthropic corpus is inflating and growing more top heavy by the year. In this environment, it’s worth asking whether philanthropy can ever be meaningfully democratized. 

If the answer to that question is no, we’re left with the notion, increasingly in vogue these days, that philanthropy should itself spend down and disappear. With that unlikely to happen en masse, trying to make philanthropy as democratic as possible may be the best course available to funders who want to challenge structural inequities in the sector, but remain subject to its structural limits.