Insights on Stewarding Responsively

PEAK’s Steward Responsively Principle calls on funders to reframe risk and to recalibrate their vetting process to make it more transparent, more trust-based, more nonprofit-and community-centered, and less burdensome. And to help our members put this Principle into practice, we recently released our Steward Responsively Collection—resources that delve into the key action steps, guiding questions, and additional resources you can leverage to shift your organization’s concept of stewardship from a function of oversight to a function of nurturing relationships to support nonprofits and communities.

To complement this release, we’ve rounded up a selection of articles that show how members of the PEAK Grantmaking community have already been living by this Principle—and we hope their insights help you to reimagine grantmaking practices at your own organization.

Explore more Steward Responsively insights—and articles supporting each of our five Principles—using the new Select a Principle dropdown menu on our Insights

The Myth of Risk: Fear not the dragons, funders

“In our world, many funders view their most significant role at work as guarding the treasure by avoiding perceived peril,” PEAK President and CEO Satonya Fair writes. “I implore you to advocate that the castles of philanthropy do not warrant the moats devised to protect its assets. In putting aside notions of risk, nobody is asking funders to climb the castle tower and throw all your loot into the wind and hope the treasure floats toward need. Walk to the village center. Get to know the townspeople.”  READ MORE

Prep Your Grantmaking Systems for Effective Crisis Responses

Helping an organization to plan for and adapt to crises and build the capacity to effectively roll with those punches is one way funders can think about responsive stewardship. In this piece, the Center for Disaster Philanthropy’s Taylor Dudley shares how grantmakers can help to prepare themselves and their grant partners for an emergency—and how to provide them with the needed flexibility to weather the storm. READ MORE

Due Diligence in an Increasingly Remote World

“One of the many lessons from the pandemic is that philanthropy needs to be more flexible if it is to both expand and localize the delivery of aid,” says NGO Source’s Martha Lackritz-Peltier. “In an era of inflated regulatory expectations and risk aversion among funders, it is past time to reinvent the way funders conduct due diligence. There are many avenues to building trust, and not all of them require intensive compliance exercises or site visits.” READ MORE

Making the Most of Organizational Assessments

Here, Jennifer Wei offers an inside look at how the Hewlett Foundation decided to take a hard look at its organizational effectiveness practices and the changes they made to better center the grantee experience. “As a funder, it is important to remember that what we care most about is helping our grantee partners be strong, healthy organizations that are sustainable and can achieve the missions they have set out to do.” READ MORE

Disrupting Grantmaking: Matchmaking, algorithms, proposal-less programs, and the future of philanthropy

The effective use of technology to identify and manage risk, anticipating and adapting to change, and streamlining processes to ease the burden nonprofits are often made to endure. And yet, as Adam Liebling observes, philanthropy is one of the few sectors that has yet to be disrupted and transformed by technology. Why? A business need hasn’t emerged that has forced philanthropy to change. Many foundations have inward-facing and self-protective cultures and aversion to risk, from the board down,” he writes. “Without strong vision or leadership in place pushing to bring about meaningful transformation, there is little-to-no incentive to rock the boat.” READ MORE

Explore more Steward Responsively insights—and articles supporting each of our five Principles—using the new Select a Principle dropdown menu on our Insights page.