From Practice to Movement: Deepening our Trust-Based Approach

When the Healthy Communities Foundation began implementing a trust-based approach in 2018, we started with the clarity that our actions and decisions needed to go beyond funding and center the values inherent within the four dimensions of trust-based philanthropy: culture, practices, structures, and leadership.

As a reconstituted foundation, we were well-positioned to lean into not only the practices of trust-based grantmaking but also a justice-oriented approach that required deep internal and external examination, reflection, and course correction. We hear the recent sentiment of those fatigued by the shifting landscape of philanthropy, one that popularizes terms like “trust-based philanthropy” but fails to adopt it and, more importantly, adapt to it.

For us, moving to transformational partnerships with and for the communities of our service region, accelerated due to the deep impact of the global pandemic, has required us to work at the intersection of many tensions: data and lived experience, crisis and systems change, collaboration and individual strategy, power and objectivity. 

Existing within these tensions has not been easy. While our core values, including our focus on health and racial equity and valuing experiential and evidence-based data, have remained the same, our commitment has been tested. We have had to make decisions that highlight intersecting tensions and interrogate not just what we do but HOW we do it and in partnership with whom.  

This perspective pushes us to evolve our strategies and continuously assess how we deepen our trust-based approach through the lens of culture, practice, structures, and leadership.