To explore the facets of our Learn, Share, Evolve Principle, six PEAK community leaders gathered to share their perspectives on how they have seen evolution in the sector from where they sit—and what changes they most hope to see.
PEAK President and CEO Satonya Fair and Chief Operating Officer Dolores Estrada led the in-person conversation at PEAK2023 with The California Wellness Foundation Director of Grants Management Amber Lopez, Helmsley Charitable Trust Senior Director of Grants Management and Operations and PEAK board alum Chris Percopo, Rose Community Foundation Vice President, Operations and PEAK board member Kelli Rojas, and Resilia Senior Director of Institutional Partnerships Anthony Simmons.
This video features some highlights from their conversation. Read additional highlights in our Learn, Share, Evolve edition of the Journal here.
If you had a philanthropic superpower, what would it be?
Anthony Simmons: The power of persuasion. It is not persuasion through comfort. It really is persuasion through context.
Kelli Rojas: I think a lot of us already have this superpower, actually, and that is around connecting—and not just people, but ideas, and bringing in all perspectives: bringing in the perspectives of our applicants and our grantees and all of those folks.
Chris Percopo: The one thing that I’ve always appreciated about this community is how we recognize the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Why would you focus on a superpower. and not the team’s superpowers?
Satonya Fair: I think PEAK’s maybe developing superpower is to accept our members as we find them and expect change on the other side—that you will see something or meet someone who causes you to shift your mindset.
Dolores Estrada: The nurturing and the care is what I think would be the other part of that, because that self-healing allows us to be better on the other side when we’re serving our communities.
How are you gathering data and information from nonprofits in ways that reduces the burden on them?
Amber Lopez: If we have a relationship with you, we’ve given you a grant before; we’re in relationship. There’s no reason for us to ask for another proposal for the next round of funding. We don’t want to be so transactional. We want to be in relationship. And so it shifts that, right? You’re able to take the time that you would have spent here and put it into the things that are really value-adding.
Simmons: From my organization’s perspective, it’s one of the reasons why we exist—is to take that administrative burden off of community partners and organizations that are already strapped. How do we set them up for greater success with the work that they do so that way they are in community more?
Percopo: It has to be a trust relationship to be effective. And it’s so true that the funders who we work the best with were the ones who were clear, who really had purposeful processes. Let’s let them do the work and then be in partnership with them as we try to then see the success we’re trying to go toward.
Rojas: This shift away from being a knowing organization and coming at things as if we have the answers, but coming to conversations and those relationships humbly and really to learn, and to learn what we can do better.
What shifts are you seeing around grants management roles and responsibilities over time?
Percopo: In the last few years, you’re seeing this movement of we’re all in this together. Values alignment across the organization. And it’s not just programs design strategy to make impact. It is—we operate to make impact.
Lopez: One of the most impactful things that I think we’ve been able to do is to bring folks together from across the foundation, bringing people from programs, grants management and finance together, and we see relationships forming. We see some trust forming.
Estrada: And when you bring that unity together and you’ve now built something beautiful that strengthens what you’re doing, that impact, I think, is more powerful than just leveraging dollars, because now you are a fabric within the community that you’re serving.
Rojas: We also think about our grantmaking team and that kind of operations team as being the hub or like the center of a spoke of a wheel in the organization. And I think, over time, one of the things that we’ve seen shift, is grants management being positioned as a strategic partner and being brought to the table during those strategic conversations.
Fair: When you bring people into a room that they were excluded from, that shifts everything. Because when people are seen, when they start to hear and see how their contribution can be furthering the mission differently, you’re never getting those people back out. How do you get your team to not be at the center of that wheel again? It’s hard to go backwards, and that gives me just such great hope.
What comes to mind when you think about major shifts in grantmaking?
Percopo: There’s been complexity built that we built ourselves that we convinced ourselves we need to do. We need to think more thoughtfully about how things were built, and it’s okay to question how things were done to make things better.
Simmons: I think folks are beginning to understand that you don’t need all the levels of complexity that have always existed.
Rojas: I think that it really took leadership in at least some of the experiences that I’ve had seeing that some of this is an equity issue, and that the paperwork or whatever you want to call it, is weeding out really good people. Over time, people have started to see, yeah, actually, some of these things were really problematic. We didn’t even know that some of these organizations exist, because we had created all these barriers for organizations to even have access to us. If everyone could get together and say, “We’re going to do this, and we’re going to do it this way, and this is enough for us; this is all we need,” really create a movement in a direction as a sector.
How have you seen your roles shifting or changing to sustain progress?
Percopo: Something I was very struck by when I got into philanthropy was how willing people were to share their own experiences and learn from each other. Don’t be afraid to follow up “this is how we do” with what not to do, but also what you’ve learned. And we are such a learning community to evolve into what we hope to be next.
Rojas: And so if we’re not documenting what we’re doing, documenting the journey of how we got there, as soon as you take out one of those key players, you risk that regression.
Lopez: You need to have that change management piece in place and the documentation and the training and the stories and the relationships.
Simmons: It is about meeting your members where they are, but also showing them a vision where they can possibly be. Being open and willing to accept feedback, learning from that feedback—add to that a shared learning journey.
What gives you hope for philanthropy?
Lopez: So we’re asking about the transformation of the sector. And I think what actually gives me hope is the transformation of the humans, where people are learning; they’re talking; they’re connecting; they’re questioning.
Estrada: There is an opportunity, and there is a next generation that’s coming, and they’re asking these questions, and there really sometimes aren’t any answers, and that is that behavioral change, that human-centered approach to what philanthropy does that gives me hope.
Simmons: If you’re going to change the institution, then you start by working with the people within the institution. And since we all have deep structural understandings of how these institutions can either coalesce to make things really bad or come together to make things better, the PSOs are critical cogs in that whole entire ecosystem.
Fair: What gives me hope is this conversation. It’s each of you. It is the community that we have curated and contributed to collectively. I really think it’s so important that we remember—it’s the people who work in philanthropy that will change it, that will shift it, that will drive it, that will inherit it. And so, it is the people. It is us.