As a partnership practitioner and adviser, I’ve been gratified to see that the call for greater collaboration in philanthropy continues to gain momentum. However, this is just one among many different, and equally important rallying calls to transform philanthropy. As I look across key trends in progressive philanthropy, I can’t help but notice some crucial tensions between them, which often seem to be overlooked by their proponents. Navigating these tensions will be an integral part of transforming philanthropy.
In the last 18 months I’ve had the opportunity to engage with dozens of foundations and philanthropy support organisations of various stripes, most of whom are ambitious to transform how they work and the impact they can have. They don’t just want to collaborate and drive collaboration; they also want to be equitable and to shift power (even to ‘decolonize’ their giving); build trusted relationships with their grantees; enable systems change; increase their risk appetite and catalyse innovation; and to do all of this based on data and evidence. This is a lot to transform, so it’s no wonder that practice so often lags behind rhetoric.
But it’s not just that it’s a lot, it’s also that these practices or approaches can also be at odds with one another. There are tensions between the dominant trends in philanthropy, which means that the transformation agenda is much more complex and difficult to navigate than WINGS’ neat set of ten transformation principles implies. Let’s look across some of these key trends, taking as a starting point the calls to shift power, decolonize, and increase equity in philanthropy.
Challenges in addressing power dynamics while fostering collaboration for systems change
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