Recent Developments in Social Justice Giving

Introduction

The compounding crises of the past two years — the health and economic emergencies of COVID-19, the widespread reckoning on racial and Indigenous justice, growing political polarization and violence, and the looming threat of climate change — have marked a watershed moment for the field of philanthropy. Now social change leaders, inspired by Winston Churchill’s often-quoted admonition not to let a good crisis go to waste, are working with a renewed sense of purpose and possibility. They’re hoping to use the current disruption of the status quo as a way to rethink long-entrenched systems and practices. But as non-profits look to emerge from the pandemic, the sense of hope for fundamental change is accompanied by the countermanding inertia of a return to normalcy and the pull of old ways of working. The good news is that we may be returning to normal; the bad news is that we may be returning to normal.

At this transitional moment, the potential for accelerating change goes beyond just the social and environmental issues that philanthropy aims to address; it also applies to the practice of philanthropy itself. It remains to be seen whether many of the recent changes in philanthropic processes and charitable giving will continue after the pandemic, or whether they will simply snap back to the way they were before. But what if the post-pandemic years could represent an opportunity for philanthropy to begin to more fundamentally reimagine itself and the role it plays in society — in ways both large and small?

·      What if, for example, philanthropy tried to take on bigger issues, influencing large systems and cultural narratives like capitalism, democracy, systemic racism, and gender discrimination, rather than more narrowly focused challenges?

·      What if foundations shared their endowments with historically marginalized populations to truly begin building assets in those communities?

·      What if funders paired each of their direct service grants with related investments in advocacy and policy change?

The seeds of ideas like these are already starting to take root in the field. New funders are challenging traditional assumptions about the foundation form. Established institutions of all sizes are rethinking their strategies, looking for ways to share power and make their giving more “proximate” to the communities they serve. Funders from Vancouver to Halifax are experimenting with political action — advocating for policy change that can guide the allocation of large pools of government and philanthropic funding. And popular books like Winners Take All, Just Giving, and Decolonizing Wealth, along with recent critiques focused on donor-advised funds, have called out harmful power dynamics and posed serious and existential questions about the practices and structures of philanthropy.

Philanthropy today takes place in a context that is radically different from the environment in which many of the field’s traditional models, systems, and structures were developed. Even before the pandemic, economic uncertainty, demographic shifts, blurring sectoral roles, and the ubiquity of powerful new social media and mobile technologies were already fundamentally altering the landscape of social change.

Definitions of philanthropy are expanding as many of the traditional lines between the public, private, and independent sectors are beginning to blur with new hybrid organizations and cross-sectoral partnerships. Increasingly, social change is becoming “sector-agnostic,” with people seeking impact on pressing societal problems without concern for where the solutions come from. Changemakers are experimenting with new ways to create social and environmental impact, from impact investing to political giving, to socially responsible purchasing.

Aligning with Supporters in a Changing World

In just the last two years, we experienced the sudden convergence of several changes — all capable of upending the natural fundraising order of things. We experienced a global pandemic, a long-overdue reckoning with racial and Indigenous injustices, shifts in supporter demographics, cultural polarization, a shift in worker attitudes, and The Great Resignation. The “pandemic era” has signaled an influx of new donors and a new level of participation by donors of color. Whether or not non-profits leverage these positive trends for the long-term remains an open question.

Sharp Changes in Supporter Behavior and Demographics

In the spring of 2020, when it became apparent that the disruptions were not going to be temporary, many organizations hunkered down, figuring that actively fundraising during this period would be futile or unseemly. Other organizations pressed on and adapted to the shifts. It is the latter group whose strategy appears to have been most successful. In recent research by the fundraising software company Blackbaud, nearly 90% of organizational professionals report that they feel the same or better about their organization’s health since the pandemic began. Roughly half of the respondents say that their income increased during the pandemic.

More Donors and Increased Donations

The research shows a possible departure from the decade-long trend of a diminishing number of donor households. Nearly half (45%) of participating non-profit professionals reported increases in the number of new donors. More than one-third (34%) of participating donors say they increased their giving during the pandemic.

An Increase in Younger Donors and Donors of Color

Among this cohort of newer donors, young people and donors of color figure prominently. Among Generation Z participants, 53% say they increased their giving in 2020 with just under half of Millennials saying the same. Roughly a quarter of Gen X and Baby Boomer donors say their giving increased.

Not only were these donors younger, but many were also non-white. Nearly half (46%) of Black donors say they gave more in 2020 with Hispanic (44%) and Asian (38%) donors close behind. Among white donors, only one-third say they gave more during the pandemic. Black and Brown donors were also more likely than whites to say they gave to a new organization in 2020, with 54% of Hispanic donors representing the high-water mark.

When asked what prompted their giving, donors of color reported that they were especially motivated by the pandemic and from the attention to racial and social injustice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in the U.S. A higher proportion of Black and Brown donors also report increases in campaign-related giving compared to their white counterparts. As Blackbaud reported in its 2015 Diversity in Giving study, the demographic makeup of the supporter population has been disproportionately white for some time. To see increased participation by donors of color was one of the more encouraging developments emerging from their recent study.

Retention: Challenges and Opportunities

It’s not unusual for giving to increase in the wake of natural disasters or politically volatile moments. Crisis donors and episodic donors are historically difficult to retain. However, new donors participating in the Blackbaud study offer some hope.

A third (33%) of participating donors say they are “very likely” to give again to organizations they first supported in 2020, with only a slightly smaller proportion (29%) saying they would be “very likely” to become monthly sustainers. Notably, these percentages are higher than the industry-wide first-year retention rate, which hovers around 25%.

Rapid Evolution of Donor Engagement Preferences

Personalized Communication

The theoretical promise of digital communication is the ability to connect with each supporter on the topics of greatest interest to them, via their preferred channels, and at the most convenient time. Yet the full promise of personalization — of speaking to supporters as individuals — has yet to be fully realized

Many supporters say they want to dictate their communications channel, set the frequency of communications, and receive content tailored to personal interests and involvement. Overall, nearly 80% of supporters say they would prefer to get at least one form of personalized content. A stark generation gap exists among supporters’ appetite for personalized content. While 40% of supporters overall say it’s a great idea, only 12% of Baby Boomers think so, compared with approximately 60% of Generation Z and Millennials.

Personalization Halo Effect

Donors bestow a halo effect onto organizations that personalize their digital communications. Donors who say they receive personalized content are more likely to give their favorite charity high scores on a wide range of attributes, including the extent to which the charity “pulls on their heartstrings,” creates engagement opportunities, and makes donors feel appreciated. These attributes are widely seen as important elements of a successful retention strategy, all the more critical at this time to retain first-time donors during the past two years.

Donors and Organizations Diverge on Some Key Issues

The Blackbaud studies revealed several places where supporter expectations and organizational practices diverged. For instance, 60% of organizations rated the way in which they stay true to their mission, values, and goals as “excellent.” Only 44% of donors said the same. Organizations also appear to overrate the quality of their impact reporting and the security of their online donation process.

Conversely, donors tend to give organizations higher marks for several things that the organizations do not recognize themselves. Among these are using money wisely, reporting on how donations make a difference, and making donors feel appreciated. Looking only at the organizations donors considered to be early technology adopters, however, most of those discrepancies disappear. In fact, when compared with organizations seen as early or late adopters, the early adopters earn higher ratings across the board.

Trust in Charity Holds Steady Amid the Pandemic

After years of declines, trust in civil-rights and community-action charities increased in 2020, according to a new study, which also found that trust in charities over all held steady as millions more came to rely on non-profits amid the pandemic.

The share of people with high trust in civil-rights and community-action groups fell steadily from 25 percent in 2017 to 13 percent in 2019 before reversing course in 2020 to 16 percent, according to the annual “Profiles in Charity Trust and Giving” survey, conducted by Give.org, a charity evaluator affiliated with the Better Business Bureau.

Elvia Castro, a manager at Give.org and one of the authors of the report, said the racial-justice movement almost certainly is behind the shift in donors’ trust for organizations that they perceive as being in favor of social change.

Sam Graddy, diversity giving officer at Jackson Laboratory, said donors may see civil-rights organizations as problem-solvers in an area that has generated tremendous public attention in recent years. “I can see where trust would go up in those types of organizations. They seem to be about the solution,” said Graddy, who works to persuade donors to support researchers from diverse backgrounds and to support scholarship on what’s behind health disparities between whites and people of color.

Overall, 18 percent of people surveyed in 2020 place high trust in charities, a figure that has held steady from 17 percent to 19 percent since 2017. At the same time, fewer people say trust in charities is highly important to their giving decisions, declining from 73 percent in 2017 to 63 percent in 2020. As for the broader finding of a persistent lack of faith in non-profits generally, Graddy said it likely reflects societal trends of heightened suspicions of people toward their fellow citizens.

Leslie Lenkowsky, a professor emeritus of public affairs and philanthropic studies at Indiana University, said even though more people have relied on charities in recent years, those experiences were not necessarily positive. Lenkowsky also noted that trust is a difficult thing for researchers to measure, and he cited a previous survey by Independent Sector, in partnership with Edelman Data & Intelligence, that found the largest share of people fall somewhere in the middle when asked about trust in non-profits.

Where to Find Willing Donors

The Independent Sector study pointed to a key finding for fundraisers: People of color are more likely to be open to charitable solicitations. For example, 22 percent of African Americans and Hispanics said they would like to be approached more by charities to give, compared with 9 percent of whites. The figure was 11 percent for Asian Americans. An  additional 28 percent of African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans said they might be willing to give more if approached, compared with 16 percent of whites. There were also big generational divides, with 24 percent of millennials saying they would like to be approached more often, compared with 2 percent of people 77 or older and baby boomers.

Lenkowsky said it is important for fundraisers to note another statistic in the report: Fifty-five percent of respondents don’t want to hear more often from charities. “A lot of people in this report do not want their door darkened by more solicitations,” Lenkowsky said.

Other findings:

·      Fewer donors in 2020 reported giving to religious, animal welfare, veterans, education, international relief, youth development, and police and firefighter organizations in 2019. But more gave to environmental, health, arts and cultural, and civil-rights and community-action organizations.

·      20 percent of those surveyed responded to a mailed appeal for money, compared with 28 percent in 2017. Nine percent participated in a fundraising event, compared with 19 percent in 2017.

·      51 percent of African Americans expressed a preference for giving to groups that help other Black people, compared with 40 percent of Hispanics who wanted to help people like themselves, 29 percent of whites, and 27 percent of Asian Americans.

Affluent Donors’ Giving to Social Justice Non-Profits During the Pandemic

Unprecedented stock market gains amid a volatile global economy drove a 6.3% global high net worth individuals (HNWI) population increase and a 7.6% jump in global HNWI wealth in 2020. Canada experienced a 2.9% increase in HNWI in 2020. The number of high net worth women is rising through both inheritance and increasing female entrepreneurship and presence in senior management positions. The pandemic and its life-altering consequences raised interest in Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) topics for HNWI, institutional investors, and financial advisors. For many investors, such as youthful new-wealth HNWI and various others, conviction about social justice and a low carbon economy is as strong as concern about the fall off in equity markets or the possibility of higher capital gains rates.

In a recent survey of affluent donors (households with a net worth of $1 million or more) by Indiana University, respondents were asked about their giving to support social justice or racial justice causes (e.g., non-profits or grassroots organizations with social or racial justice missions, community bail funds, marginalized groups). More than one in five (21.6 percent) of affluent households gave in this way.

In addition to explaining their giving to charitable sub-sectors, affluent individuals indicated whether they had given to an affinity cause or organization in 2020. Nearly a quarter (24.9 percent) of wealthy individuals gave to social justice causes and/or organizations. Less than one in five (17.3 percent) gave to women’s and girls’ causes and/or organizations, while 16.8 percent gave to youth causes and/or organizations.

The survey included more detailed data on donors who gave to women-and-girls-focused organizations and causes, as well as those who gave to organizations focused on the donors’ own ethnic group and/or country of origin. Those who gave to women and girls-focused causes were influenced by “a belief that supporting women and girls is the most effective way to solve other social problems,” as well as an eye to the future and the desire to create a better world for their children. Nearly 20 percent also cited a personal experience of gender discrimination as a driver of their giving. Additionally, when asked about the intended purpose/s of their gifts, over 44 percent of donors who gave to women and girls’ causes reported that they were motivated by a desire to support reproductive health/rights.

Potential Shifts

In a recent report, the Monitor Institute identified at least seven critical “Big Shifts” occurring now that have the potential to create fundamental change in the philanthropic landscape:

ECONOMIC INEQUALITY, which is at once producing tremendous new challenges and need in communities while also creating massive fortunes that are bolstering philanthropy at an extreme scale. And the growing awareness of this divide (and its interconnection with racial and gender disparities) is producing a highly visible public backlash against the severe concentration of wealth that is fueling much of today’s philanthropy.

EXTREME POLITICAL POLARIZATION that is dividing the population along partisan lines and politicizing previously apolitical issues. These divisions are making it increasingly difficult for philanthropy to remain outside the political sphere and, at the same time, opening up new opportunities to influence government funding streams and bring people together across differences.

SHIFTING DEMOGRAPHICS that are literally changing the face of communities, as well as the issues they need to address. Traditional philanthropy — white, male, and older (oftentimes even dead) — is giving way to a far more diverse group poised to take up the mantle of community change. And as baby boomers reach retirement and millennials move into the workforce in record numbers, generational shifts are auguring new attitudes and new approaches to philanthropy.

NEW MOMENTUM AROUND RACIAL AND INDIGENOUS JUSTICE, which, after decades of work by activists, is driving significant increases in public support for addressing systemic racism, bias, and the destructive impacts of colonialism. In light of police violence, the discovery of hundreds of children’s graves at former residential schools, Truth and Reconciliation, and the growing visibility of systemic inequities affecting Indigenous communities and communities of color, public awareness of long-standing injustices has risen dramatically. Racial justice has become a critical backdrop to almost every other issue and has pushed organizations across sectors, disciplines, and geographies — including philanthropy — to grapple with systemic racism in both their external actions and their internal practices and cultures.

UBIQUITOUS TECHNOLOGY AND ACCESS TO INFORMATION that allow people to easily communicate and connect with one another, to access diverse perspectives, to build and share data, and to coordinate and organize action in new ways. This is creating new possibilities for generating impact, but also new challenges that philanthropy will need to address in its work, especially as ownership of data, the spread of misinformation, the filtering of information flows, and expectations around participation and voice reshape public discourse.

A STATE OF CLIMATE AND SOCIAL EMERGENCY that, with the COVID-19 outbreak and recent weather-related disasters, is increasingly impossible to ignore at both the local and global levels. Health and environmental crises, as well as human-made ones, can exacerbate existing problems or swiftly and unpredictably trump the existing agenda of any community or funder. Think of how a wildfire or a flood drastically change local priorities. And, as we are seeing with COVID-19, philanthropy can no longer escape being called upon to act and respond to what may become the “new normal” of increasingly frequent public and environmental crises.

A SOCIAL COMPACT IN FLUX, which is fundamentally reshaping both how people relate to the institutions of business, government, and the social sector, and how the different sectors relate to one another. More and more, businesses are engaging in social benefit activities, social enterprises are blurring the lines between non-profit and for-profit, and philanthropy is increasingly being asked to fill in where government has retrenched. And as public trust in traditional institutions declines and expectations shift about the roles that the different sectors play in people’s lives, there is space for philanthropy to position itself very differently vis-à-vis the other sectors in the years ahead.

While none of these forces are new, and each of them is significantly changing the social sector on its own, they are also combining, accelerating, and reinforcing one another in complex ways that are fundamentally transforming lives and communities. Altogether, they are creating a whole new context for the work of philanthropy. Take, for example, how the challenges of the COVID-19 crisis were compounded as existing economic disparities, racial inequities, political polarization, distrust of public institutions, and the spread of misinformation through technology served as huge multipliers of the public health emergency.

Four Key Reactions in Response to Shifts

Many funders are beginning to explicitly reconceptualize their role in creating social and environmental change, thinking carefully about what impact they want to see in the world and getting intentional about the different tools they can use to create it. There are spaces for innovation where the Big Shifts are forcing philanthropic leaders and donors to adjust their approaches and strategies. What these stratagems will look like in the future isn’t entirely clear yet, but there is an opportunity for funders, both individually and collectively, to investigate, experiment with, and invest in the potential of these promising areas of activity.

Reaction One: Rethinking Philanthropy’s Role

Some funders are scaling up their ambitions, shifting their unit of analysis beyond narrowly defined interventions to try to fundamentally change systems and influence large-scale policies, movements, and culture. For example:

·      The Moose Hide Campaign is an Indigenous-led grassroots movement of men, boys, and all Canadians – standing up to end violence against women and children. The campaign seeks to stand up with women and children and speak out against violence towards them, teach young boys about the true meaning of love and respect, and build healthier masculinities. Since 2011, more than 2.5 million Moose Hide pins have been distributed free of charge thanks to the support of dedicated supporters.

·      Akonadi Foundation’s “All In for Oakland” initiative supports the work of a local “ecosystem of movement organizations” by investing in people of color–led organizing, advocacy, and power-building focused on ending the criminalization of Black youth and youth of color.

·      Organizations like The Center for Cultural Power and Pop Culture Collaborative work with artists, journalists, entertainment leaders, social justice movements, cultural organizations, and others to try to shift popular narratives and cultural norms as a way of creating enduring change in public attitudes and mindsets about Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities.

·      Omidyar Network’s “Reimagining Capitalism” initiative seeks to address structural challenges embedded in capitalism to shape a new, more inclusive economy where markets serve the interests of all people and society.

For many of the intractable social and environmental problems we now face, the solutions are not yet known. Existing approaches are proving insufficient, and many funders are exploring how they can intentionally fund social innovation and find new strategies with the potential to create breakthrough change. For example:

·      The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio uses a multipronged strategy that helps it scan for emerging new ideas, source innovations, make early-stage grants to explore new fields and accelerate promising new ideas, and support emerging opportunity spaces that have the potential to produce important breakthroughs while also playing an important learning role in introducing new thinking, insights, and approaches to the work of the broader Foundation.

·      Recognizing that non-profit organizations often don’t have the capacity to test and implement new or early-stage ideas, the Barra Foundation’s Catalyst Fund provides risk capital, through grants and below-market-rate investments, for experiments and innovations that local non-profit organizations believe could have an outsized impact on the local region and beyond.

All these examples demonstrate that funders are increasingly willing to find and fund innovation where existing solutions are proving insufficient. As the world shifts in the years ahead, funders should expect to revisit the assumptions they make about their role in creating social change, and align their methods, actions, and structures accordingly.

Reaction Two: Balancing Power

The power dynamics that underlie organized philanthropy — between grantors and grantees, donors and communities — have been an inherent part of philanthropy since its earliest days. But over the past decade, growing awareness of economic inequality and racial and gender disparities has begun to make these often-unspoken undercurrents much more visible. Although it can take markedly different forms, funders are grappling with how to navigate these difficult power imbalances.

Some funders are working to intentionally share power in ways that bring philanthropic decision-making more proximate to the communities they serve. A number of funders have focused on listening to the voices of grantees and communities and incorporating their viewpoints into their strategies and funding decisions. Others are more explicitly sharing decision-making authority and finding ways to come to consensus with grantees and communities on important strategic decisions. For example:

·      A group of Indigenous leaders and funders in Canada created the Indigenous People’s Resilience Fund, a fund fully managed by and for Indigenous communities and organizations, operating on the Community Foundations of Canada shared platform. The funders have provided unencumbered dollars and are not part of the decision-making process, recognizing that the Fund’s Indigenous leaders have a much better sense of communities’ needs.

·      The Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, a five-year, peer-to-peer funder initiative, is pressing foundations to interrogate their relationship to power. Funders using the approach, such as The Whitman Institute, consciously reimagine their roles away from “compliance stewards” to “collaborative learning partners.” They seek out mission-aligned organizations and provide long-term, resources (often in the form of multiyear unrestricted support), streamlining burdensome protocols, taking action on grantee and constituent feedback, and offering support beyond the check — trusting the non-profits to make good choices and do their work without strategic interference.

Setting Goals and Evaluating with Equity in Mind

There is often a blind spot around evaluation in philanthropy. People are not even thinking about how power dynamics impacts how we assess impact. Or, if they are, they are mostly just caught up in virtue signaling. To address this blind spot, some funders are beginning to reconsider how they work with non-profits and communities to set impact and learning goals and how they can measure and evaluate outcomes more equitably. They are actively working to bring grantees and community members to the table when making decisions about what success looks like, what gets measured, and who gets to decide those questions. For example:

·      The McConnell Foundation in Canada decided to more actively understand and respect community perspectives on goal-setting and evaluation with close partner the Winnipeg Boldness Project, and found that the originally planned focus on outcomes for individual children was incongruous with the family- and community-centric approaches of Indigenous partners. The Foundation fully supported the Winnipeg Boldness Project’s decision to employ a community-led approach, which meant adjusting and expanding original goals to center holistic approaches to well-being that address mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects.

Reaction Three: Catalyzing Leverage

Organized philanthropy’s assets are typically dwarfed by those of other players. Individual donors give more than four times as much as institutional funders, and the combined assets of both pale in comparison to that of the government and, even more so, the private sector.

Funders are testing ways to unlock dollars and influence donors both large and small to give more, give smarter, and give together. This includes increasing efforts to promote philanthropic giving, the proliferation of giving intermediaries and giving circles, and the growth of impact investing, political giving, socially responsible purchasing, and other ways of using capital to create social change. For example:

·      The Giving Pledge, which calls upon many of the world’s wealthiest individuals to make a public commitment to increase their charitable contributions, has grown from 40 donors in 2010 and is expected to grow to include more than 200 people committing upward of $600B to philanthropy by 2022. Meanwhile, Communities Foundation of Texas’s North Texas Giving Day, an online giving event aimed at enlarging the spirit of local giving, has grown from raising $4 million from 6,500 donors in 2009 to almost $80 million from more than 100,000 donors in 2020. Whether a donor is giving a few dollars per day or a few dollars per second, these types of efforts aim to unlock greater charitable contributions to a wide range of causes, building community capacity and strength.

·      The Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) has been instrumental in promoting the growth of impact investing over the past decade — from a nascent market to a more than $715B industry — as funders are looking to align their investments with their values and vision for impact. The growth of impact investment capital is elevating the importance of creating measurable social and environmental benefits alongside financial returns and has fueled new kinds of structures, from social impact bonds to B corporations, that are bringing new resources off the sidelines.

While funder collaborations aren’t new, many practitioners note that as funders work on complex, interconnected issues across geographies and sectors, there has been more effort to partner with others and make shared progress. There’s a sense that after years of growth, philanthropic collaborations may finally be hitting their stride. Philanthropic networks allow funders to identify and engage more of the stakeholders that are essential to addressing an issue, to build shared understanding of complex problems, to mobilize resources that match the scale of the challenges, to work together to test a range of possible solutions, to attack societal problems at their root, and to create feedback loops and systems for sharing that can facilitate collective learning and action.

Reaction Four: (Re)Designing the Enterprise

The structure and configuration of philanthropic enterprises have long been guided by a number of “default settings” that continue to hold powerful sway over much of the field. That’s not to say that there hasn’t been some degree of experimentation in the field, but even as the world has shifted dramatically around philanthropy, the normal assumptions about how philanthropy should be governed, structured, and managed have remained largely unchanged over the decades. Yet many of these traditional structures and approaches may no longer be an optimal fit for addressing today’s complex challenges.

Philanthropic foundations inherited their board governance structures from the corporate sector in the 1800s, but the models aren’t necessarily well-designed to serve the unique needs of the social sector. As Rebecca Aird, Director of Community Engagement at the Ottawa Community Foundation, summarizes, “Boards are nineteenth-century solutions to twenty-first-century problems.” As a result, some funders are reconsidering the makeup and role of their boards to try to better position trustees to add value and provide effective governance in the philanthropic context. For example:

·      Dimple Abichandani, Executive Director of the General Service Foundation, worked with her board to re-examine the Foundation’s spending policies. As she explains, “Spending policies are the invisible architecture in philanthropy. People get caught up in dividing up budget, but the real money is in the spending policy. And just like the budget, it’s a reflection of one’s values.” So, she and her board very deliberately began a process of grappling with questions about how to balance their commitment to perpetuity with responding to the urgent needs of the moment. The board ultimately voted to increase the Foundation’s annual spend to 10% for the upcoming four years.

Look Outward to Understand Your Context

It’s hard for funders to get on their front foot if they don’t have a very good sense of what’s coming. In a dynamic world, funders can create more impact by better anticipating emerging trends and getting ahead of what those changes might mean for their communities, their commitments, and the ways they work. By understanding these Big Shifts, funders can also help parse which new ideas have real staying power and which might be a flash in the pan.

There are a lot of “shiny objects” in philanthropy, and a fair critique of the field is that funders spend too much time chasing them. Building a clearer understanding of the Big Shifts can allow funders to better differentiate the meaningful Edges that can ride the momentum of the Shifts and ultimately have the power to transform the core of their work from other interesting ideas that come through the door.

Conclusion

After the events of the past two years, it’s become clear, if it wasn’t already, that it’s a mistake to try to make too many predictions about the future of philanthropy. The world can change quickly and dramatically, and even if philanthropy generally moves more slowly, funders will need to be prepared to change along with it. Yet while we don’t know exactly how philanthropy will change over the next decade, we do know the general directions we should be looking in to spot the emerging seeds of what’s next.

The information highlighted in this report represent some best suppositions about where funders are likely to be pushing the frontiers of philanthropy in the coming years. Prominent philanthropists are beginning to rethink the role they play, thinking more critically about the impact they want create and more fully committing and aligning their actions to achieve it. Looking at broader societal trends, many of the changes we are seeing could be lasting. Viewed one way, the pandemic was a needed wake-up call. It has served as a stern reminder that the sand has been shifting beneath our feet for some time now.

Complexity will rule the day now and in the future. Complexity demands new leadership skills. It demands curiosity, empathy, and humility. Traditional “command and control” models of leadership are going to be increasingly ineffective. “Hitting targets” may need to take a backseat to fostering conditions for success. And the non-profit community must embrace the discomfort of reinventing philanthropy for all. Philanthropy has been too white for too long, and the ideal of philanthropy for all is going to ramify how organizations fundraise, how power is shared, who is sitting at the table, and what is being said.

It’s important to remember that fundraising as we know it gets a lot of things right. Done well, it’s about relationships and building communities of caring folks committed to making a better world. The ultimate message of the pandemic might be less about going forward and more about revitalizing these timeless core ideals. Non-profits should rededicate themselves to these principles along with a commitment to make fundraising as diverse as the nation itself.

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