Trust Is Our Work

Building trust is important because it transforms grantees into true partners – and within that trust-based partnership, everyone is accountable to their words and actions, including philanthropy. At the Tinker Foundation, we think of building trust with grantees and community as a responsibility rather than an option.

When you make that shift in perspective, pursuing trust becomes ingrained in your modus operandi. Trust becomes your work: building it, maintaining it, not letting it break down. The comparison I always think of is the “trust fall” exercise – where a person (or group) catch you as you fall backward – used for team-building. It requires a strong sense of trust to fall with the expectation of being caught. In a trusting partnership between grantmakers and grantees, you trust in people, their process, and their methods to produce an outcome that meets everyone’s expectations. And when the outcome is not what we expect, trust plays a key role in maintaining the bonds that have already been formed.

One of the ways trust shows up in our work is our deliberate choice to fund international organizations that have never received a grant from an international or U.S. funder. We take this risk to help organizations build their capacity to expand the search for support, and to increase trust in their work among other grantmaking agencies.

In addition, we don’t shy away from grants that require us to exercise expenditure responsibility, and we provide grantees with the support to understand what that means. We are also working on ways to incorporate equivalency determination into our grantmaking process so that we can provide even more flexibility in funding and reporting for our international grantees.

I have found that trust is truly valuable in propelling the work and making a more significant impact. If the broader philanthropic sector can also make trust its modus operandi, we can welcome a greater diversity of grantees to our community, and with them a greater pool of creativity and approaches to draw from – meaning greater chances to solve the problems that we have been trying so long to overcome.