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.
We thought we’d use this space to answer some of the questions we get asked most frequently about our spend out. In the episode above, Elise and Glen reflect on how spending out requires us to confront, if not embrace, the nature of change. And the answers to the questions below—Why did Tara Health decide to spend out? How is Tara Health spending out? And what is Tara Health doing now?—all allude to the ways our partnerships have called on us to learn and adapt, and how we’ve tried to embody those learnings through our spend out.
Why did Tara Health decide to spend out?
This is one of our most-asked questions. Unlike foundations that begin as perpetual institutions and later make the decision to transition to spending out, I founded Tara Health with the mandate that the foundation would only exist for 20 years.
I made this decision initially because I wanted to see the resources move in my lifetime, and I believed this to be a moral imperative. But as our work has evolved, so has my thinking. I’ve come to see that a world where we realize gender, racial, and economic justice is also a world where everyday people—not foundations and wealthy individuals—decide how to resource what matters to them. Moving the majority of Tara Health’s remaining resources to community control is the step we can take toward that vision and ultimately, a Just Transition for Philanthropy.
How is Tara Health spending out?
One of the practical realities to spending out is that you have to figure out how to actually move all of your money. Do you make larger grants to existing partners? Distribute smaller grants more widely? Endow institutions? Something else?
We’ve always believed that one of philanthropy’s roles in the broader movement ecosystem is to invest in the long-term durable infrastructure that movements need, beginning with our work to seed Rhia Ventures.
When faced with developing our spend out strategy, we knew we wanted to replicate this approach. So we convened leaders from the issue areas we work in across gender, economic, and racial justice to surface what was underfunded in their movements and what their ecosystems needed in order to thrive.
From those collaborations, we envisioned and seeded new infrastructure to meet those needs: primarily, movement-accountable vehicles for distributing flexible capital. We made large, multi-year grants in the range of $6-$7.5M, paired with the people power of our program officers who left Tara Health to develop these new initiatives, as part of our commitment to 100% mission alignment.
We call these initiatives our anchor organizations, and they are responsible for stewarding our most substantial investments out into their movement areas. They govern those funds and hold full decision-making authority over them, which, as Mia and Mariko discuss in Spending Out: The Critical Role of Infrastructure Investment, we believe is an essential component of a spend out strategy that strengthens, rather than harms, the larger ecosystem.
What is Tara Health doing now?
As Elise describes in her conversation with Glen, committing our grantmaking dollars to these anchor organizations years in advance of our closure meant that our formal grantmaking has wound down well before our doors have closed. But, we’ve clearly chosen to stay open. We did so because we believe our work as funders extends beyond moving money. As Elise describes, relationships are a transformative force in their own right, and we still have meaningful work to do through them. Beyond money, we‘re using the rooms we have access to and the connections we’ve built to advocate for our grantee partners and the movements they lead.
We also believe that we have a responsibility to organize other funders to fully liberate their resources toward gender, economic, and racial justice. The shifts that changed how we operate and think happened in relationship with our grantee partners and our peers. We want to offer others what we received through those relationships, so we can continue to learn and grow together—and become the force for justice we all need and want to be.
Have a question we didn’t cover? You can submit them here, and we’ll do our best to answer them in posts to come.
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