Moving Beyond 30-Page Applications: One United Way’s Radical Transformation
Emily Johnston, Vice President of Impact and Engagement, and Grace Pesch, Impact Strategist, United Way of Olmsted County
This story was crafted from a shared conversation between Vice President of Impact and Engagement, Emily Johnston, and Impact Strategist, Grace Pesch, of United Way of Olmsted County. The insights below are a result of their shared learnings and practice in Trust-Based Philanthropy.
A few years ago, our Community Impact Team set out to radically change our grantmaking processes and strategies. It started from an operational standpoint: we needed greater flexibility so that we could weather some revenue fluctuations while continuing to provide stability in our granting relationships. But more than that, we were experiencing a lack of trust in our relationships with grantees. When our current President started, he asked people in the community, “When you think about United Way, what are some words that come to mind?” People would say: rigid, inflexible, hard to work with. Clearly, it was time to change.
When we completely revamped our process and operations, we tried to bake trust-based philanthropy in from the start. It takes a lot of very vulnerable communicating with our grantees, and tailoring our approaches to their actual needs. We used to have up to 30 page application processes, including requesting organizations’ theories of change, their logic models, their financial documents, and even asking for detailed information on staff’s educational background! This was one of many examples of the ways that our operations needed an overhaul– both for our grantees and for us. We needed more flexibility both in our finances and our staff time, and our massive RFP processes were not helping. In explaining that we were streamlining our application process going forward, and how our priorities were changing, we had to acknowledge: this burdensome process and the less-than-collaborative culture it has fostered is our bad, not your bad.
When we started with trust-based philanthropy, we used the principles as a model for specific practices to implement. I definitely wouldn’t say we were checking boxes, but we were looking to a set of activities where we could see visible progress. Over time, we came to see the TBP philosophy as a way to live more deeply into our values, and it continues to be infused in everything we do. We are committed to being a learning organization, and being open in our partnerships with grantees. For instance, with an upcoming RFP, we circulated it during the drafting process to some of our local partners and asked, “Would you feel good about working with us after reading this document? If not, what can we do to change that?” Soliciting that feedback, and being responsive to it, has been one of the places we've seen a lot of movement and positive change in our grantee relationships. We talk directly with our grantees about our values around trust and relationships to generate accountability with our grantee partners.
As we continue to live into our trust-based values and practices, we see how this philosophy must extend beyond our grantmaking. As an intermediary funder, we also have to make sure these values are reflected in the ways we interact with our donors. Now we are focused on making sure that the way we talk about our work to donors matches how we would talk about it to our community partners. That’s not always in line with what others say is “best practice” or what is going to generate the best short-term results. It turned out that the more boldly we lived into our values as an organization, the bolder our impact would be – which would ultimately bolster our revenue and meet our business needs as an intermediary funder.
At this stage in our TBP journey, we are taking inspiration from the concept of emergence, where if every day we can do something that is inspired by TBP, eventually it will be a natural reflex to show up and behave in that way, even under pressure. Building our own capacities to be responsive to feedback, and continuing to build trust with our partners through every step of our relationship with them, means we always keep learning. Complex, authentic relationships sometimes mean acknowledging that it’s okay to have conflict, and committing to treat it with care and kindness. We look at our journey as a sort of stacking of new ways of doing and being that continues to tumble us toward a new type of relationship with our stakeholders. It’s amazing to see the work build on itself that way. Each new phase gives us new ways to serve our grant partners better, and the things that previously didn’t seem possible, or like a huge leap for us, become the baseline from which we move.