The Transforming Power Fund (TPF) is a Detroit-based social justice grantmaker supporting nonprofits focused on community organizing in fields like economic justice, food insecurity and LGBT rights in Detroit and neighboring Hamtramck and Highland Park. It has moved $2.2 million to regional grassroots organizations since its launch in February 2019.
What’s especially striking about the fund is its governance model. At a time when many funders are still showing reluctance to adopt trust-based philanthropic practices, the TPF “is focused on shifting decision-making to the people most impacted by the issues we’re trying to solve,” said Mark Greer, co-executive director, external relations. Among other operational innovations, the fund’s grantmaking strategy is led by a community panel, it awards rare, multi-year general operating support, and it asks organizations to self-select evaluation metrics.
In other words, the fund checks off all the critical boxes for grantmakers seeking to shift power to advance racial justice, and its unique origin story echoes the adage that necessity is often the mother of invention.
In 2015, Allied Media Projects (AMP) and Detroit People’s Platform (DPF) embarked on a community listening project to understand the perspectives of the region’s grassroots organizational leaders. The groups found that leaders almost overwhelmingly expressed frustration with a lack of support from local and national funders. “There was a real tension between the disparities of what was funded and what members felt like needed to be funded,” Greer said.
In response, AMP and DPF published a document, 12 Recommendations for Detroit Funders, calling on grantmakers to adopt a set of practices, like providing general operating support, to better support underinvested organizations focused on diversity, equity and inclusion, and racial justice. “Today, we call these things trust-based philanthropy, and they seem like common sense, but in 2015, funders weren’t adopting these practices,” Greer told me. “So the community came together and said, ‘If funders aren’t going to hear us out, we’re going to start our own fund. And that’s where the Transforming Power Fund came from.”
A community-centered approach
A native of Detroit, Greer grew up in a working-class family and became a community organizer at the University of Michigan. He continued in this role after graduating, but grew frustrated by what he called “the lack of resources that organizations had to effectively do the work.”
After receiving his MBA from Wayne State, he landed his first role in philanthropy through an internship with the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, which was followed by stints at the Kresge Foundation and PricewaterhouseCoopers Charitable Foundation. When an opportunity at TPF came up, Greer, who oversees the fund with Bishop Marcia Dinkins, co-executive director of operations and giving, recognized it as an “opportunity for me to get back to my roots to fund organizing.”
The TPF’s operating model was developed by a body called the Design Team, which used the 12 Recommendations for Detroit Funders as its strategic guideposts. The team, which currently consists of three individuals, serves in a role similar to a board of directors.
Grantmaking is led by a group of community organizers, local leaders, artists and advocates called the Community Table. Members serve one-year terms up to three years and establish grant eligibility criteria. Greer noted that a Community Table member who is a disability justice advocate helped to develop a previous grant centered on the issue. Members review applications and evaluate them using a form of ranked-choice voting.
Cognizant that some risk-averse funders often take a “wait and see” approach when it comes to adopting trust-based practices, the fund routinely communicates its progress with regional grantmakers. “We operate in a way where we can go to larger institutional funders and say, ‘Look, this is possible, and this is what we’re learning,’” Greer said.
Trust and accountability
Greer has spent his career seeking to redress entrenched power imbalances between wealthy institutions and community-focused organizations, and when I asked him why funders remain skittish about adopting trust-based practices like general operating support, he was quick to note that the field isn’t monolithic.
“I’ve met some amazing program officers who understand how trust-based philanthropy embeds racial equity into their work,” he said. “But from my experience, they have trouble convincing their senior managers or their trustees to fully embrace these practices.” Greer’s perspective aligns with research from the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP), which has found that board members are sometimes an obstacle to the funder providing general operating support. CEP identifies general support as the least operationally disruptive trust-based tactic.
So why do these individuals push back against trust-based practices, even when research attests to its impact? “Oftentimes, there’s a mindset that people with access to wealth know better than the people on the ground, and they’re allowing organizations to use their money versus trusting the community,” Greer said. “There’s this fear of not being allowed to make all the decisions.”
This fear is frequently rooted in the idea that unrestricted funding connotes a lack of accountability. Grantees, the thinking goes, could misappropriate the funds or even “embezzle” no-strings-attached funding, and as fiscal stewards of the foundations, trustees — particularly efficiency-minded individuals hailing from the business world — instinctively gravitate toward metrics-heavy, project-based giving. The problem with this mentality, Greer said, is that “trust-based philanthropy has accountability and metrics.”
He speaks from experience. The TPF’s grant applications ask organizations to list metrics they would like to be tracked on should they get the grant. If the organization secures funding, its leaders work with TPF stakeholders to build out and track those metrics. “We put the ball in the organization’s court because we can’t apply a one-size-fits-all approach,” Greer said. “They’re working on different things, and even if they’re working on the same issue, those metrics are going to be different.”
Metrics naturally have a quantitative component, like how many people the organization reaches throughout the year. But the TPF also encourages organizations to view their impact through the lens of building power. “We look at things like, ‘What organizations are you working with to advance a policy agenda?’” Greer said. These metrics are just as important as the quantitative piece because it gives the fund a “big-picture view” of the region and enables staff to “find points of connection where organizations can work together.”
A mixed prognosis
Since its inception, the TPF has raised general funds, with the Community Table establishing topic-specific priorities. However, this spring, the TPF will launch a new multimillion-dollar pooled fund to regrant to nonprofits focused on climate and environmental justice. The topic came from the communities, Greer said. “We need to focus on ensuring grassroots organizations are centered in this climate change conversation.”
As far as the larger field is concerned, Greer is of two minds when it comes to funders’ willingness to embrace trust-based practices. On one hand, “we’re definitely seeing a regression,” he said, “particularly as we get further away from the commitments that institutions made in 2020 around racial equity and justice.”
Greer cites a “fear-based reaction” to the Supreme Court’s abolition of affirmative action and looming court cases challenging diversity, equity and inclusion practices. Funders (and their lawyers) are surveying the landscape and concluding that if diversity can’t be a factor in college admissions, they can’t make it a factor in grantmaking decisions. “That narrative is driven by people who didn’t want to focus on racial equity and justice in the first place, and they’re using that case as an excuse to revert to the status quo.”
At the same time, Greer views this fraught conversation as a sign of progress. “I’m optimistic about the future because I think this backlash is to be expected. You’ve seen that in every kind of social progression that we’ve made in this country. There’s backlash, and then there’s a push from people who say, ‘No, we’re moving forward, regardless of if you’re ready or not.’”
Greer is specifically encouraged by program managers advocating for general operating support, the encouraging number of living progressive donors who have made racial equity a part of their philanthropic legacy and the proliferation of research attesting that trust-based giving can effectively shift power.
“For every article that comes out that attacks trust-based philanthropy,” he said, “hopefully, there will be more energy to combat those narratives, meet those folks where they’re at, and bring them along.”
