Make
Shift Happen
You’re invited.
We’re tackling the tough questions about how philanthropy must transform in service of gender, economic, and racial justice. Come explore with us what it means to work differently to support change as we try to lead with relationships, share power, and transform from the inside out.
We know firsthand how difficult this is. We’ve faced our own resistance, made countless mistakes, and continue to learn from movement leaders who generously challenge our assumptions.
Now, we’re embracing the vulnerability of honest reflection. Follow along with our ongoing series, Make Shift Happen–offering up stories, reflections, insights, lessons learned, and breakthroughs–as we work to transform philanthropy, starting with transforming ourselves.
The Human, Relational Work of Systems Change
By Elise Belusa, Executive Director
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.
Can We Heal Philanthropy’s Money Stuff?
By Elise Belusa, Executive Director
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.
From Conflict to Confluence of Interest
By Rachel Robasciotti, Tara Health Foundation Board Member and Founder and Co-CEO of Adasina Social Capital
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.”
Philanthropy: The Origin Story
By Elise Belusa, Executive Director
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
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.
Shifting Power and Resources to Build the Democracy We’ve Never Had
By Elise Belusa, Executive Director
In this crumbling present, how do we hold onto vision? How do we nurture hope and find joy? At Tara Health, we’re examining what we can do with our power, influence, and institutional resources. Again and again, this reflection has led me to confront an uncomfortable truth about philanthropic structures: despite our best intentions, we know that private foundations are deeply undemocratic spaces.
A New Chapter for Tara Health
By Elise Belusa, Executive Director, Tara Health Foundation
For years, our grantees, partners, and peers called on powerful institutions, like ours, to confront an uncomfortable truth: the money and power we hold and steward are often built upon the very unjust systems we seek to change.