Money, power, and what it actually takes to change.
Trust-based philanthropy has a language problem. The principles are widely endorsed: unrestricted funding, streamlined reporting, and power-conscious relationships. But endorsing these principles and putting them into practice are different acts, and the gap between them is rarely about operational design. It’s about things that are harder to recognise and define: the individual beliefs, fears, and habits around money and power that funders, grantee partners, fundraisers, campaigners, and movement builders carry into every transaction yet rarely explicitly examine.
Which is where this workshop begins. Before there can be an institutional shift, there must be a personal reckoning. Because we cannot restructure our relationships across the funding divide until we have honestly examined our own relationship to money, risk, and control.
You will move through that examination as a group, going from individual reflection to honest conversations with your peers, resulting in a collective harvest of what is named and what each of us commits to doing differently. You will leave the session with implementation guides, useful frameworks, and curated list of resources.
This isn’t a session about how to build trust-based systems, but about what gets in the way, and who we need to become for those systems to be realised.
Learning outcomes
- Examine your personal relationship to money, power, and risk, and how it shapes the way you participate in funding relationships.
- Identify the barriers that prevent trust-based philanthropy from being practised across individual, relational, and organisational levels.
- Define a specific, near-term shift in how you will show up differently in your work, grounded in what you surfaced during the session.