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.
I loved everything she shared, but one of her points bears repeating here:
“You can’t expect people to advocate for themselves and the systems that are harming them if they aren’t getting their basic needs met.”
Hannah may be a Program Manager at a foundation, but in this moment, she sounded like an organizer, someone deeply connected to her own humanity and those she’s trying to support.
It shouldn’t be so remarkable that someone in philanthropy listens to people and moves to respond. And yet many of us with resources to redistribute get it backwards: we come to a community or issue area with a plan in place, a box that organizations either fit into—and get funded—or don’t.
At Tara Health, we’ve grappled with how to be responsive in the ways that Hannah describes. When we expanded our mission to include racial, gender, and economic justice, we took a step in the right direction, acknowledging the full breadth and complexity that we and our communities are facing.
But the work has been imperfect and ongoing.
As Maria Nakae and Tenesha Duncan describe in “Philanthropy: The Origin Story,” philanthropy wasn’t built for relationships. It’s a sector born from the extraction of resources and the consolidation of wealth, and our siloed strategies, individual mission statements, and isolating governance structures, including conflict of interest policies that treat relationship as risk, are just some of the ways this legacy manifests and cuts us off from our shared humanity.
But as our friends at the Stupski Foundation would say — these are all fake rules.
Here’s a question animating our work at Tara Health right now:
What would it take to build the kind of philanthropic structures — in our governance, strategies, and cultures — that would let us actually be in real, responsive, accountable relationship with the communities and movements we exist to support?
I’m finding that Emergent Learning offers some guidance for an alternative. One of its core principles — "maximizing freedom to experiment" — draws a clear distinction between the goal and the strategy to get there, and insists that every actor in a system needs room to shift gears when something isn't working. This freedom, an essential element of trust-based philanthropy, is what makes real relationship possible.
When we treat our strategies as hypotheses rather than mandates, when our governance structures give us permission to shift in response to what we're hearing, we can actually be in relationship with communities, not just in consultation with them.
That's what I heard in my conversation with Hannah: not a case for better listening, but for the kind of structural freedom that moves us from listening to action.
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