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. She’s in conversation with Nwamaka Agbo, founding CEO of Kataly Foundation and managing director of Kataly’s Restorative Economies Fund, about what happens when wealthy individuals, like me, share our wealth abundantly and in community with others.
I set up the Tara Health Foundation as a sole member organization, a structure that meant decisions about grantmaking, investing, and the make-up of the board ultimately came down to me. I had a lot of power, but I didn’t seek it out just for power’s sake. I created a sole member structure because I felt responsible for creating and stewarding the foundation. I didn’t expect anyone would want to share that responsibility, and I worried about burdening others by asking them to walk fully alongside me.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
When Rachel and the rest of the board invited me to interrogate those assumptions and restructure our governance, I was deeply touched. It moved me to know that others wanted to hold—to truly be responsible for—this work with me. Those conversations unlocked more democratic decision-making, but what’s more, the isolation of the sole member structure transformed into a feeling of community, belonging, and love. My partners on the board and on staff were in this with me to collectively move our work forward. Trust and deeper relationships grew among all of us.
We talk a lot about shifting power in philanthropy, but what Nwamaka and Rachel surface in their conversation, and what I’ve learned from moments like this at Tara Health, is that shifting power is only the beginning of the story. In the next chapter, I’m finding myself offering deeper, more relational value to movements for justice, a value not limited to the checks I can write. Instead, my contributions are rooted in the innately human drive to connect to one another and build toward a future that no one of us could realize alone.
Adasina Social Capital creates innovative investment products that seek aligned social justice returns. As both a past grantee and an investee of Tara Health Foundation, Adasina has led the way in creating tools, community, and resources for values-aligned investing.
The Kataly Foundation moves resources to support the economic, political, and cultural power of Black and Indigenous communities, and all communities of color. We find inspiration and wisdom in how they redefine relationships to capital, the planet, and each other in their work to redistribute wealth and power.
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