Letting go: Re-defining trust in philanthropic relationships
We are pleased to share Firelight executive director Marième Daff’s article which was published in Circle, a magazine dedicated to philanthropy in the Middle East and North Africa region.
Learning to ‘let go’ is probably one of the biggest challenges facing donors as they seek to make transition from traditional giving to the kind of philanthropy that empowers grantees and delivers systemic change. ‘Letting go’ is challenging because it is not simply achieving a deeper level of trust in the relationship with the communities that ultimately benefit from our money, it also involves questioning the idea (reinforced by the patriarchal relationships of the past) that trust itself is some kind of commodity that can be bestowed or withdrawn in philanthropic transactions.
More than that, it means abandoning the notion that we, as donors, should be responsible for determining the scale of success – rather than ‘trusting’ the grantee to deliver.
Passing power into the hands of grantees means that it is they, not us, who get to determine what success looks like.
These power shifts need to start from a place of deep-rooted understanding and acceptance that the knowledge is held by communities themselves – not traditionally trusted iNGOs or even other partners – and that they are the best people to identify and address challenges.
Starting from this place of knowledge, the question that we should ask potential grantees is not: “How can we trust you?” Rather, it should be: “How can we best support you to drive change in your community?”
In 2017, Firelight, a small US-based multi-donor fund, launched a three-year research project to ask community-based organisations in the nine countries where we worked in Eastern and southern Africa for their views on how we could best support them to drive change in their communities.
