Working in the Same Direction
As we experience a time of significant challenge against nonprofit and philanthropy sectors, it’s that much more important we come together and streamline our efforts towards the same goals.
Our growing practice of trust-based philanthropy, made possible by our incredible funding partners, keeps this understanding central. In addition to long-term and unrestricted support, trust-based philanthropy encourages reporting processes that reduce burdens upon organizations, ultimately freeing more staff time and resources for direct support to communities.
“The spirit of trust-based giving is contribution versus attribution….We work on very large-scale and long-timeline programs and one thing that we learned as we grew, as we attracted more funders, as we had more complex relationships, was that keeping track of attribution was more and more burdensome for our staff….we knew if we wanted to grow we had to figure out a better way to approach this problem.” - Sebastian Africano, TWP Executive Director
In moving towards contribution over attribution with our funding partners, we are increasingly practicing group reporting – rather than creating a separate written report for each partner supporting the same efforts, we bring those funders together for an open conversation with our staff and with one another.
As we would in a written reporting process, we use these conversations to share our progress, challenges, and visions for the future; however, this structure drastically reduces staff time spent on reporting, creates space for more honest and horizontal conversation, and builds connections between foundations and funders supporting similar outcomes.
Ultimately, nonprofits and funders are part of one larger team, working together on complex, long-term challenges. The more we can reduce the friction we all face in our work, the more progress we can make towards our shared goals.
“Multi-year and unrestricted grants and group reporting have produced less strain for our team as the organization grows…. There are a lot of statistics out there about nonprofit burnout and a lot of that has to do with the pain of growth, having to report on outputs and not on overall impact. We are making a concerted effort to work with all of our funders as impact partners so we can have more productive conversations, have reciprocal relationships, and talk together about how to solve these really challenging problems in really challenging places.” – Sebastian Africano
