The session opened with an activity. Brendon Johnson, co-founder and chief catalyst of the Fito Network, led the group through what he called “Hide and Seek Budgets” — a quick exercise asking everyone to name the invisible labor that funding never touches. The answers came fast: trust-building, relationship weaving, planning time for collaborators, and, as Johnson put it himself, “my wife taking care of the kids and the calls that happen at 9pm.” Lauren Dapena Fraiz, reflecting on the list, noted that “the hidden and the relational” tend to go hand in hand — work everyone understands is happening, she said, but that isn’t “more resourced or more supported in a way.”
From there, Lourdes Rodriguez set the stakes for the rest of the hour. Drawing on an essay called “Three Earths,” she described the present moment as three overlapping realities at once: Earth One, “the world as we know it,” now “coming undone”; a chaotic in-between Earth Two that “benefits from pitting us against each other, and threatening our humanity”; and an unrealized Earth Three still waiting to be built. Rooted Philanthropy, she said, isn’t an attempt to restore Earth One or tolerate Earth Two — “it is an invitation, and I would even say a charge,” to imagine and walk toward Earth Three. Her closing line framed the whole session: “in this moment, what I think is sorely needed is imagination and solidarity.”
Dr. Somava Saha, President and CEO of We in the World, then walked through the seven catalytic shifts behind the Rooted Philanthropy toolkit — a synthesis, she explained, of patterns pulled from hundreds of bright spots across the field. The shifts move funders from a charity model toward structural change, from transactional relationships to transformative ones, from funders acting alone to collectives acting together, from grantees bending to funder priorities toward shared goals, from restricted one-year grants toward multi-year flexible support, and from reporting-for-compliance toward mutual, real-time learning. Underneath all of it was a single conviction: “those who are in adversity are some of our greatest wealth of creativity and resource and imagination for the healing of the world.”
That conviction ran directly into a sharp, generous challenge from Vickie Mays, a clinical psychologist, during the Q&A. She pushed back gently on how the field talks about trust: “I ask communities, tell me what would make me trustworthy. I don’t need you to trust me.” Trust, she argued, is an emotion, and for many communities it’s also a protective factor — asking people to hand it over first can itself be a kind of harm. Saha agreed without hesitation: “trust is an outcome that we can look for, but it’s not what’s given prematurely in the process.” Michael Baldwin, another participant, tied the whole exchange back to the shifts Saha had just walked through: “those who are closest to the pain are usually closest to the solution, but furthest from the resources and the ability to do anything about it.”
The practical center of the session was Irmin Durand’s Wheel of Change — 15 specific points along the grant-making cycle, from how funding priorities get set to how communication happens to how relationships are held, each paired with current practice, the challenges it creates, and five concrete strategies for closing the gap. It’s designed, Durand said, to work alongside the seven catalytic shifts so that funders “at every stage of the change process” — starting out, growing their practice, or already blazing a trail — have somewhere to enter. Richard Taylor, describing a new coalition he’s helping build in Nashville among nonprofits and churches, put the stakes plainly: the work ahead is “learning to move from competing against each other for grants to working together to get grants.
