PEAK’s Top 10 Insights of 2022

We are both proud and grateful to share our communications platforms to feature perspectives and knowledge from members and social sector allies. Every article published in the Journal and on our Insights page illuminates how grantmaking professionals can rethink current practices, live and work by our Principles for Peak Grantmaking, and transform the field of philanthropy to best support our nonprofit partners and the communities we all seek to strengthen. This list of our most-read posts of last year offers inspirational calls to action, firsthand accounts of equitable relationship building, and takeaways from community confabs that have resulted in new ways of approaching this work. We hope these stories provide insight and inspiration, and we look forward to elevating many voices throughout the PEAK Grantmaking community in the year ahead.

Centering Grantees With Reporting Alternatives

Since members of PEAK’s CONNECT online community banded together to challenge traditional approaches to reporting, they’ve initiated practice changes at their respective organizations. Here, Rachel Kimber shares Arcus Foundation’s emergent learning journey.
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How We Can Advance Support for Racial Equity and Racial Justice Funding

“Everyone in philanthropy can potentially play a role in supporting transformative racial justice work,” Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity’s Lori Villarosa writes. “But to unlock that potential, each person needs to apply racial equity and racial justice lenses to all aspects of their work. And grants professionals can be a driving force by both shifting practice and ensuring that the organization is impactfully looking at its work through both lenses.” READ MORE

Three Ways to Operationalize Trust-Based Philanthropy Practices

Stupski’s Malila Becton-Consuegra, San Francisco Foundation’s Brandi Howard, General Service Foundation’s Elaine Mui, and Stupski’s Daniel Oviedo share how their respective organizations are operationalizing trust-based philanthropy practices in these highlights from a joint PEAK Rocky Mountain and PEAK Northern California event. READ MORE

Packard’s Personal, Ongoing “Grantsformation”

Packard Foundation’s Jennifer Adams shares how the organization underwent a three-year journey to reimagine its grantmaking processes to uplift and center grantee partner voices. And as she found out, processes are deeply personal. “We must work together to understand why processes exist,” she writes. “By centering grantees, using data and feedback loops, and hearing from staff that do this work, we get clarity about when to hang on to a process and when to let go.” READ MORE

The Changemaking Ideas of the PEAK2022 Keynotes in Three Graphics

Our three keynotes focused on how centering people and equity in all that we do can drive transformational change. Using this series of graphic recordings, reflect on powerful insights and takeaways from Vu Le, Amoretta Morris, Aiko Bethea, Megan Reitz, Satonya Fair, Carmen Rojas, Susan Taylor Batten, and Sherece West-Scantlebury. In addition to these resources, recordings of all three keynotes are open to the entire community. You’ll find a link to each presentation in the post. And thank you to Blackbaud for sponsoring these graphic recordings. READ MORE

Create Cultures of Care to Transform Philanthropy From the Inside Out

Healing justice practitioner Richael Faithful provides effective ways to embed care practices as an individual and as an organization that will help you to better manage personal and professional stress, foster a healthier workplace, and best support communities. “Some philanthropic staff have felt a two-sided squeeze,” she writes. “[O]n one end, pressure to support grantees in crisis during twin pandemics, and on the other end, lethargic or bureaucratic responses to quickly deliver necessary changes. READ MORE

The Impact of Putting Equity at the Center of Strategy

PEAK’s Satonya Fair and Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Lisa Hamilton discuss how equity-based strategy drives change within and outside of your organization. “We know we can’t change the world by ourselves,” Hamilton says. “No matter how deep the work we do as an institution might be, we’ve got to help facilitate others’ growth and development in this space.” READ MORE

Demographic Data Collection: The personal, the practical, and the potential for impact

Demographic data matters. Here, PEAK board member Kevin Bolduc shares how he and his colleagues at the Center for Effective Philanthropy are collecting and contextualizing data to help funders make equitable grantmaking decisions. READ MORE

Indirect Cost Coverage in Project Grants: An equity issue

BDO FMA’s John Summers and Rodney Christopher show how indirect cost rate policies for project grants are often untapped opportunities to drive equity using demographic data. “In the case of funders’ policies regarding coverage of grantee indirect costs,” the authors write, “there is a strong case that low indirect cost rate caps are particularly unfair to smaller organizations—a category that tends to include many grantees led by and serving people of color as well as those in rural communities. READ MORE

How Bainum Family Foundation Is Working to Challenge Traditional Power Dynamics

Bainum President and CEO David Daniels and PEAK’s Satonya Fair discuss what it means—and looks like—to share power with grantees, how Bainum embeds its values through its grantmaking practices, and how these practice changes are working to build up communities. “Our perspective has got to shift,” Daniels says. “It’s not about our prerogative, it’s about getting the community’s permission for us to come in. We like to think that we’ve done that, but often we haven’t. READ MORE