Make Shift Happen
The Deeper Work of Trust-Based Philanthropy
By Mia Reilly, Deputy Director, Tara Health Foundation
Turns out, trust-based philanthropy has no endpoint.
A few months before this conversation with Shaady Salehi, then Co-Executive Director and now Senior Fellow at the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, I led the Tara Health Foundation through a comprehensive rebrand process, including the creation of a new website to share our work and stories as we spend out.
The Relational Capital Behind Rapid Response
By Diana Parker-Kafka, Abortion Movement Fund Advisor and former Executive Director of Midwest Access Coalition; Founding Board Member for Apiary for Practical Support, Elevated Access, and Foxglove Fund
Alicia Harris, Senior Program Officer for Reproductive Health Rights and Justice at Grove Foundation, and Elise Belusa, Executive Director at Tara Health Foundation, surface the accountability and mutual learning between them, which proved critical in moving each other, moving each other, other funders, and, ultimately, more resources into solidarity with movements for justice.
The Human, Relational Work of Systems Change
By Elise Belusa, Executive Director, Tara Health Foundation
Our journey toward racial justice asked each of us to set down the performance of goodness and step into real relationships.
Episode 15 of Make Shift Happen is called “The Personal Work of Systems Change,” but listening back to my conversation with Ruth, I keep thinking it should be called “The Human Work Necessary for Systems Change.”
It Matters Who Manages Capital
By Ruth Shaber, MD, Founder and President, Tara Health Foundation
The flow of capital reflects what we, as people, value.
I could talk with Erika Seth Davies, CEO of Rhia Ventures, all day.
You’ve heard us talk about opportunities for philanthropy to align endowments with grantmaking and the ways Rhia’s unique structure reorients our relationship to capital to better resource movements. Through all the finance and philanthropy wonkiness, our conversations keep coming back to the humans in the midst of all this capital—the people owning it, managing it, and using it to build a more just and equitable world.
A New Model for Change in Impact Investing
By Ruth Shaber, MD, Founder and President, Tara Health Foundation
When longtime colleagues and confidants, Erika Seth Davies, CEO of Rhia Ventures, and Ruth Shaber, Co-Founder and Board Chair of Rhia Ventures (and Founder and President of Tara Health Foundation), sit down together to talk about the innovative impact investing model behind Rhia Ventures, you can feel the strong sense of trust, relationship, and thought partnership between them.
Why Is Tara Health Spending Out? And Other FAQs
By Ruth Shaber, MD, Founder and President, Tara Health Foundation
A window into our spend out journey
Episode 12 of Make Shift Happen features Tara Health’s Executive Director, Elise Belusa, in conversation with Glen Galaich, CEO of the Stupski Foundation, about the experience of leading a foundation as it spends out its resources.
Can We Heal Philanthropy’s Money Stuff?
By Elise Belusa, Executive Director, Tara Health Foundation
We’re all longing for the same thing: healing from capitalism’s harms.
In Episode 11 of Make Shift Happen, Maria Nakae, Senior Director of Just Transition Investing at Justice Funders and Tenesha Duncan, CEO and founder of Orchid Capital Collective, talk about the healing work necessary to realize a future where we all can flourish.
Movement-Led Funds as Experiments in Regeneration
By Maria Nakae, Senior Director of Just Transition Investing, Justice Funders
What becomes possible when we shift power with integrated capital?
In Episode 10 of Make Shift Happen, I had the pleasure of talking with Tenesha Duncan, CEO and founder of Orchid Capital Collective, about the growing ecosystem of movement-led funds that are shifting the flow of capital and power while rewriting the rules of finance.
Building New Futures from the Grassroots
By Mia Reilly, Deputy Director, Tara Health Foundation
What needs to shift to move funders from listening to doing?
In Episode 9 of Make Shift Happen, I got to talk with Hannah Yi, Program Manager at the Levi Strauss Foundation, about how her lived experience directly informs her role as a funder of social movements. Even in her own proximity to the work, though, she remains grounded in an approach to grantmaking that centers and responds to those closest to the issues on the ground.
Community-Led Care Requires Integrated Capital
By Tenesha Duncan, Founder and CEO of Orchid Capital Collective, Tara Health Foundation Anchor Organization
Our support for midwives and community-led care must reflect their value in dollars and cents—and beyond.
For this episode of Make Shift Happen, I had the honor of speaking with Kiki Jordan, Founder and Executive Director of Birthland Midwifery, about what becomes possible when we value all forms of capital—social, knowledge, and financial, to name a few—and invest in community-owned and -rooted care systems that are changing outcomes and trajectories for families and communities.
From Conflict to Confluence of Interest
By Rachel Robasciotti, Founder and Co-CEO, Adasina Social Capital, Tara Health Foundation Board Chair
When we shift power to those most proximate to our work, we find confluence, not conflict, of interest.
We know people with direct experience are best positioned to make decisions about the issues they face, and that they’ll likely benefit from those decisions personally. This is where, as I say in my conversation with Nwamaka Agbo, founding CEO of Kataly Foundation and managing director of Kataly’s Restorative Economies Fund: “It gets messy.”
Shifting Power to Find Connection
By Ruth Shaber, MD, Founder and President, Tara Health Foundation
How shifting power can help us find belonging and community beyond our dollars
A key moment of Episode 6 in our Make Shift Happen Conversation series centers on Tara Health’s board governance. Rachel Robasciotti, a Tara Health Foundation Board Member and founder and co-CEO of Adasina Social Capital, shares a story about our work to restructure power within our organization—and what’s possible on the other side.
Sharing Wealth, Strengthening Community: From Extraction to Beloved Community
By Mia Reilly, Deputy Director, Tara Health Foundation
“I want security in community because where I come from—that’s the only real security there is.”
This comes from Rachel Robasciotti, founder and Co-CEO of Adasina Social Capital and Tara Health Foundation Board Member, speaking with Nwamaka Agbo, founding CEO of Kataly Foundation and managing director of Kataly’s Restorative Economies Fund, in our latest episode of the Make Shift Happen Conversation Series.
To Spend Out, We Need to Build Up
By Mia Reilly, Deputy Director, Tara Health Foundation
The power and potential of capital in the hands of community
I’m so pleased to share my conversation with Mariko Miki in this next episode of the Make Shift Happen Conversation Series. Mariko is the co-executive director of If/When/How, an organization that provides wrap-around legal services for anyone facing criminalization for pregnancy, abortion, or birth, while working to stop criminalization from happening to others in the future.
Short on Funds, Long on Relationship: Spending Out to Meet the Moment
By Elise Belusa, Executive Director, Tara Health Foundation
The full experience of being a spend out means finding a role without capital.
I’m excited to share the latest in our Make Shift Happen Conversation Series. In it, Glen Galaich, CEO of the Stupski Foundation, and I explore the ways spend out foundations stand apart in a moment and landscape marked by retreat and fear.
100% Mission Alignment to Move Beyond the 5/95 Model
By Ruth Shaber, MD, Founder and President, Tara Health Foundation
How impact investing helps us build new relationships with capital—and each other.
In this latest episode of the Make Shift Happen Conversation Series, I talk with Erika Seth Davies, CEO of Rhia Ventures, about the 5/95 model of philanthropy and how foundations can work within it—and beyond—to move toward 100% mission alignment.
Philanthropy: The Origin Story
By Elise Belusa, Executive Director, Tara Health Foundation
When we reckon with philanthropy’s origins, we open up to connection and transformation.
I’m honored to share the first release of our Make Shift Happen conversation series. It features Tenesha Duncan Bose, now founder and CEO of Orchid Capital Collective and former program officer here at Tara Health, in conversation with Maria Nakae, Senior Director of Just Transition Investing at Justice Funders. They dig into how the origins of philanthropy are fundamentally at odds with what movements for justice need from foundations holding vast amounts of money.
Do Philanthropy Differently. Welcome to the Make Shift Happen Conversation Series
By Mia Reilly, Deputy Director, Tara Health Foundation
In passing the mic, have we passed the buck?
In decentering ourselves, we have avoided the responsibility we have to move the conversation—and therefore each other—in philanthropy.
Make Shift Happen: Coming October 2025
By the Tara Health team
At the Tara Health Foundation, we believe that in order to realize a world where all people have full control over their bodies, lives, and futures, philanthropy has to shift the flow of power and resources.
We're not the first or the only people to believe this: our work to do philanthropy differently exists within a long lineage and thriving ecosystem of changemakers already modeling different ways forward.
Meet the Leaders Making Shift Happen
By the Tara Health team
Coming October 2025, we’re looking forward to the release of our Make Shift Happen Conversation Series, where we’ve brought together leaders, innovators, and dreamers across the philanthropic and nonprofit sector who are doing the work of transforming philanthropy into a true force for gender, economic, and racial justice.