Folly #42: Trust or Control?
It all depends on your view of human (and nonprofit) nature.
You know when your multiverses start to converge? A repeating theme these last few weeks has me thinking.
Hobbes or Locke?
It started with Throughline, a wonderful podcast that looks at current issues through an historic lens. In a recent episode, they talked about control vs. trust, evil vs. good, selfish vs. altruistic. Altruism. Another word for philanthropy. So this felt very relevant.
No doubt this duality reminds you of high school social studies. Humans are selfish, brutal, barbarian and only the structures of civilization save us from ourselves (Hobbes) vs. humans are born good and society taints us (Locke/Rousseau).
Hurricane Katrina, one of the worst natural disasters in this country, answered it – but not as disaster myths in the media portrayed. Not with chaos or violence, but with something else entirely.
“The elites are supposed to help .. they are watching from a distance … and decide the rest of us will behave badly.” [But what really happened in Katrina is that people on the ground created] “spontaneous communities of mutual aid and care.”
– Throughline podcast, When Things Fall Apart, 1/11/24
I encourage you to listen for yourself – and be inspired by organizations that demonstrated trust and impact during Katrina (and since), like Common Ground Relief.
Transformative Grantmaking
Next I got to “meet” an organization doing amazing work with participatory grantmaking and community collaboration. With my yearend gift, I sent a note offering to volunteer fundraise if that was useful to them. This led to a call from one of their management team. (Their work is really inspiring. I hope to profile them and how they demonstrate trust to partners, grantees and staff in a future Follies.)
When that brilliant, generous person who took time to talk with me mentioned Justice Funders, I knew it was something special: a grant-making network committed to transforming philanthropy. I joined as an individual member that day. (Honor to them for sharing their wisdom and membership beyond foundations and grantmakers.)
Now that sounds like trust.
Trust-Based Philanthropy
Then a colleague mentioned a discussion on Key Nonprofit Trends in 2024 (excerpts start at :16). Alex Daniels, Senior Reporter from the Chronicle of Philanthropy, shared that “less than half of the nonprofits that the Center [for Effective Philanthropy] surveyed last year continue to receive multi-year general operation support.” Worse still, he said he was “hearing, anecdotally, about program officers that have to beg their boards to continue instilling [trust-based philanthropy] across their organizations."
Beg for what, exactly? To trust grantees to do the work that is their area of expertise??
(Daniels went on to celebrate a funder we laud here: the Walter & Elise Haas Fund. An 80-year-old foundation that asked grantees sensible questions like, do you prefer restricted or unrestricted funding? What would a seven-year grant make possible for your organization? More on unrestricted grants and trust-based philanthropy here and here.)
Back to Throughline. In their words, many “accept as truth” this “story we tell ourselves” about the need to control our innate evil in order to justify “institutional violence … inequality ... lack of rights and freedoms.”
“The science, the evidence, the sociology doesn’t really support that, but a lot of people believe it, and it props up a lot of social structures that … are themselves pretty brutal.”
Is grantmaking one of those brutal systems of control? I hope not. But it doesn’t usually feel like trust either.