Short on Funds, Long on Relationship: Spending Out to Meet the Moment
By Elise Belusa, Executive Director
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.
As Glen highlights, “I think spend downs are well suited to a moment like this because we have had to let go of so much already, we don’t fret all that much about letting go what needs to be let go now.” For the Stupski Foundation, this means rapidly deploying funds to meet this moment’s crises, an immensely useful and necessary muscle to exercise when our movements need us to show up in unwavering solidarity. (You can read more about the Stupski Foundation’s decision to accelerate their spend out grantmaking here.)
At Tara Health, our path looks different. When we finalized our spend out plans in 2022, we committed our remaining grantmaking dollars to partners through large, unrestricted, multi-year grants. These commitments mean we don’t have a pool of uncommitted dollars to deploy.
This constraint is teaching me a lot about the full lifecycle of redistributing wealth.
For years, my identity as ‘the funder who makes grants’ functioned as proof to myself that I was doing good in the world. Over recent years, I’ve worked to let go of this identity, which means I’ve had to grapple with what was left without it – without the money giving me purpose. I suspect I’m not alone in this struggle.
What I’ve discovered in this grappling is that the identity I was shedding, ‘the funder’, was only the narrowest version of who I am at Tara Health. What’s emerging instead is access to the deeper textures of my humanity, and therefore my ability to connect and build the relationships needed to collectively shape a future that works for all of us—a future that meets this moment and then moves beyond it. This has been messy and left pain, but it’s opened so much possibility, change, and shift. Real relationships mean real vulnerability, the kind that transforms both sides of the partnership.
We’re living this identity shift as an institution, too. Without money as a primary lever, our relationships, voice, and reputation are taking the lead in supporting our partners. We’re using these resources to weave new connections, take bold stances, and convene conversations that wouldn’t happen otherwise, unlocking new forms of connection and possibility in their own right. And we are doing this with the interconnected web of movements, community, and people also doing this work.
What I’ve come to see is that our attachment to our endowments has everything to do with how we see ourselves and little to do with what movements need. Until we see our role as bigger than our bank accounts, we’ll never be able to release our grip on their balance.
This transformation matters now more than ever. Movements need bigger, longer, and more flexible resources, and as a sector, we have a responsibility to increase payouts and seriously consider what spending out makes possible. But this isn’t just about the mechanics of money; it’s about fundamentally shifting our mindsets and embracing the practice of doing things differently. Whether that means increasing payout rates, reimagining internal practices, beginning the deep work of governance transformation, or finding other ways to share power, each step away from business-as-usual creates space for the radical reimagining our movements deserve.
Yet I also know that decentering perpetuity touches something primal: our need to matter, to be important, to have lasting purpose. It forces us to confront the deep, often unconscious belief that we are our assets, and that our goodness is tied to what we control. But for those ready to take that leap, I promise there’s life on the other side (I can attest to it!), life that moves us beyond despair and into the meaning, joy, and connection that this moment, and the future beyond it, so require.
Subscribe to our channel to watch the series →
Subscribe to our newsletter for updates when new videos release →
