It’s hard not to worry these days about what is happening to democracy in North America. Yes, this worry is particularly concentrated on the United States given the constant stream of news from the USA about polarization, conflict, and outright attacks on democratic institutions. We have not experienced these attacks in Canada. But we should worry about the frittering away of social cohesion in Canada as we too experience the impacts of social media disinformation, social isolation, and lessening of trust in community, which can lead to a lessening of trust in democratic institutions. We need to reinforce our degree of civic empathy. And philanthropy can play a role in this.
I was struck by this term of civic empathy in listening to the Giving Done Right podcast with Stephen Heintz, the long serving President of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Heintz has been a leader in strengthening civic spaces, culture and empathy across America. He participated in the bipartisan Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship which went on a listening tour (well before the 2024 election). As he puts it, “listening is an incredibly important part of the restoration of trust. We need to approach each other with civic empathy as opposed to civic antipathy, which is what is practiced a lot these days. And empathy is more about trying to put yourself in the shoes of the other and understand them and listening to them rather than trying to persuade them. In our information environment, that is a difficult practice, civic empathy, but it is essential. I think we all need to retrain ourselves in this skill and really listen to each other. That happens in community settings.”
Heintz believes that the best way to rebuild trust by listening is to do it locally, in community, around shared interests. This requires the creation of community space and programming to fill that space and to draw people together. His other insight is that national funders can have more local impact when they collaborate. The Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship devotes a section of its final report Our Common Purpose to the importance of the “hyper-local world of libraries, playgrounds, public parks, community gardens, churches, and cafes” which are the spaces that support associational life. Heintz and the RBF worked with other major American foundations to create the Trust for Civic Life, to help build community gathering spaces and to reinforce civic life across rural America.
This idea of civic empathy of course also applies in urban communities. Without mentioning civic empathy directly, Local Trust in the United Kingdom gives unrestricted funding to 150 communities to enable them to transform and improve their lives and places as they choose. People feel listened to when they are given the resources to act. In Canada the Tamarack Institute is proposing a Strategy for Belonging aimed at strengthening communities and “sustaining our democracy by way of community-led involvement”. A more involved and empathetic community is likely to be a community that supports democracy. It is also a community that engages people in strengthening their own economic “nutrition” as the social enterprise Shorefast puts it. The link from trusting community to strengthened economy to engaged democracy is clear. DemocracyXChange at TMU is planning a conference in 2026 to explore these links and how to build an economy that strengthens democracy and “deepens civic trust”.
The idea of civic empathy and its connection to lessening isolation and polarization has been understood for years. Community foundations in Canada know this well and are rallied to the cause of Belonging by their national organization Community Foundations Canada. Local United Ways are also invested in funding community connections. The federal government’s 2025 Budget recognizes the link between a strong economy and a strong community infrastructure and has launched a Build Communities Strong Fund which will help to create more community spaces across Canada, where people can meet through sport, culture and education.
What about the role of Canadian private philanthropy in building civic empathy as a way of strengthening democracy? There are many opportunities to support local community infrastructure and individual foundations have done so. But there are gaps. And this is where more collective action may have more impact, as Heintz suggests. Building civic empathy is a complex challenge. Empathy and listening must work across socioeconomic divides. The places where people gather to work on a common activity, to debate, to meet each other, to read and watch, to garden or to play a sport are all essential. A strategy to build civic empathy can be built around them. Some private foundations have come together in Canada to support local journalism as a way to counter disinformation, and to make connections across all parts of a community. Other foundations have joined together to tackle urban and rural community needs for parks, for cultural spaces, for community gardens, for libraries. These needs are for capital to create and maintain physical space and to fuel the brains that animate them. This is “civic culture”. As the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (sponsor of Our Common Purpose) put it in in their 2025 report Habits of Heart and Mind, “ a strong and vibrant civic culture provides mechanisms to manage collective anxieties about who we are. It makes it possible for people to respect differences, freely exchange ideas, shape institutions, actively engage with diversity and build a more just society.”
In this time when Canada also is challenged to become stronger, a philanthropic commitment to reinforcing civic empathy and civic culture could not be more important.
It’s January again, time for forward looks (and a backward glance or two). In this post, I do some of both. In a similar post at the beginning of 2022, I noted that others looking at the coming year were cautiously avoiding predictions, given the uncertainties in our world. That uncertainty dominated 2022. Perhaps 2023 will be no different.
So, for 2023, rather than predictions, I suggest new hopes and reluctant fears for the work of philanthropy, building on what I suggested in early 2022.
My starting point for these hopes and fears is the belief that philanthropy is an act of relationship. Not just a handover and hand-off but a mutual exchange. Not a choice between trusting or controlling but a productive combining of assets.
I share this belief with Phil Buchanan of the Centre for Effective Philanthropy. Towards the end of 2022, he described his hopes (and some fears) for grantmaking philanthropy in the United States in a long public essay. This essay summarizes very effectively the questions posed by changes in the philanthropic landscape over the last three years. Buchanan puts his finger on an important question provoked by the calls for less control by funders over their grants. Many of these calls suggest that funders should simply trust their grantees and give with no conditions. This did not consider the need for ongoing and mutual accountability, so necessary to relationship.
Must there be a choice between trust and accountability? No, according to Buchanan. “Thoughtful donors and foundations”, he says, “reject the notion that there need be a dichotomy between strategy, assessment, evidence, and learning on the one hand and trust, listening and flexible support on the other. They recognize that trust develops over time. They embrace mutual accountability. They realize that, while the knowledge and expertise of those closest to issues should be respected, foundation staff and donors do often possess useful knowledge, too.”
The key to this is the assumption that there is value in ongoing relationship between funder and fund receiver. In the Canadian context we too hear calls for more trusting, more flexible, more responsive philanthropy. The overlapping crises of the last three years have lent urgency to these calls. Many funders have responded by providing more general and unconditional support and by relaxing their reporting requirements. These changes should endure. But there is more to do if funders are going to build more effective relations with a broader range of communities and partners.
In that vein…. I hope in 2023
I fear in 2023
A Wild Guess
Last January 2022 I guessed that the federal government would act to reform the Income Tax Act and guidance restricting the ways in which charities grant to non-charities, in Canada or beyond borders. And the government did indeed move toward change in this area, after enormous advocacy efforts by the charitable sector. My hope for 2023 is that the federal government (through the Canada Revenue Agency) will put out guidance that truly responds to the sector’s needs for clarity and flexibility and that expands accessibility to funding. A wilder guess is that the federal government will agree to have an open dialogue about the wider definition of charitable purpose, with a goal of modernizing our regulations.
Final Note: You will find many more examples of foundations changing their strategies and building more effective relationships in my new book From Charity To Change: Inside the World of Canadian Foundations, out now from McGill Queen’s University Press.
One of the big debates swirling around in philanthropy today is the debate about trust. Can trust really exist between funders and the organizations they fund, given the power imbalances, the different communities that funders and grantees come from, the different operating models of grantmakers and operating charities? This matters a good deal to funders who are considering trust-based philanthropy as a strategy. There are mixed views on what constitutes trust-based philanthropy. For funders, does it mean giving funds unconditionally and standing back from organizations because funders trust them to know how best to deploy them? For organizations, does it mean simplified funding application and accountability practices that build trust in the funder with whom they are in relationship? Does trust imply standing back or getting closer?
Charles Keidan, the editor of Alliance the global philanthropy magazine, wrote a recent column on trust-based philanthropy and its critics. He evaluates the arguments for practicing trust-based philanthropy and the arguments of funders who are uneasy about this approach. One of the worries of funders in a trust-based approach is how to retain accountability for using their funds responsibly and effectively. But as Keidan and others have pointed out, the underlying question is more about power and privilege than it is about trust. Keidan makes an important suggestion: “A good question to ask of critics of trust-based philanthropy is how willing they are to invite scrutiny of their own power – how their wealth was made, who sits on the boards, how they invest their assets and yes, how well they respect, partner and trust their grantees.” How are their own practices engendering trust?
We need to think more about what trust feels like in practice. Who has to trust who? And on what is trust based? The German philanthropy think tank Maecenata Foundation has been thinking about trust for a while. Through their Philanthropy.Insight project, they have developed a framework that helps a funder with some penetrating questions about what constitutes trust. They have called it the Philanthropy.Insight Assessment Tool (PIAT). This tool is conceptually based on two elements of trust: trust in intention and trust in competence. It’s an interesting distinction. Both elements of trust matter if funders and recipients of funds are to trust each other. And both funder and recipient can demonstrate these elements.
The PIAT identifies five separate principles that must be considered together to establish or to assess “trustworthiness”. To develop trust in intention, there must be evidence of Commitment, Public Purpose and Relevance (which represent the emotional side of trust). To develop trust in commitment, there must be evidence of Performance and Accountability (the more practical side of trust). The PIAT has created a list of diagnostic questions for funders to ask themselves in each one of these five areas to assess trustworthiness. These questions are ones that funders can use to think about the levels of trust within their organizations (intra-organization), among their funder peers (inter-organization) and across sectors (inter-sectoral) in relations with grantees, governments and other players in a philanthropic system.
If we use this framework to think about trust, we realize that it is much more complicated than the notion that earning trust or giving trust is simply a matter of shifting where power lies. It is more a matter of shifting practice. The developers of the PIAT, Dr Rolf Alter, Rupert Graf Strachwitz and Timo Unger, suggest that it offers an “invitation to philanthropic funders to apply the trust lens to their current strategies and programs so that they can ultimately become better at what they are doing.” In thinking deeply about their practice and being prepared to ask questions and to change, they will begin to earn the trust of staff and board members, partners and collaborators. Whether institutional philanthropy is ready for this or not in Canada is a relevant question. There is evidence of interest and of changing practice. As an example, the Lucie et Andre Chagnon Foundation in Quebec has been working on rebuilding trust with the community sector over the last five years and has been asking itself many of the questions outlined in the Philanthropy.Insight method. Other Canadian foundations are working on different aspects of the trust pentagon described by Maecenata. But it is challenging work. In Europe, Maecenata has ruefully paused its project because it was not able to rally enough participants and supporters among funders to test its approach and create a peer exchange platform. However, it has shared publicly all its analysis and thinking about trust-based philanthropy in an effort to keep the conversation going. Perhaps this is a basis for more Canadian philanthropic peer exchange and hard thinking about what trust means in philanthropy today?
Shift the power! We hear this everywhere now. In politics, in the economy, in communities, in the justice system, in media. And it is being used by many, with sincere conviction, in reference to philanthropy. The exhortation to big donors and foundations is to shift the power they hold because of their wealth, their status, their connections. Hand over the funds, give without conditions, let others decide for themselves how best to help their own communities.
Is this a measure of good philanthropy, good giving? How much power you have shifted? I am not so sure. But then, what is the right yardstick?
This is the question asked by Tate Williams in a recent piece for Inside Philanthropy. And it certainly provoked some thinking on my part. He called his reflection Generosity and Impact Aren’t Enough. Let’s Judge Philanthropy on How Well it Shifts Power. The title gives you his conclusion. In his words, “we often gauge the success of philanthropists by some combination of generosity and impact...I increasingly think we ought to, if not completely replace those yardsticks, supplement them by considering as a measure of true philanthropy a funder’s success at shifting power out of its own hands and into others. This could involve funding program areas that challenge plutocracy, putting into place more diverse and participatory governing structures or simple grantmaking practices that yield power and control to recipients instead of funders.”
I agree with him that measuring philanthropy solely by how much is given, while important, is incomplete. The big giver is not inherently better than the small giver. Indeed, outsized generosity itself may be seen as an expression of privilege not of good will. Nor is it adequate to measure philanthropy by impact, defined as the achievement of intended outcomes. As Williams says, if a foundation achieves the intended outcomes, but it is focused on the wrong things, is it effective? Williams suggest that a better gauge of good philanthropy is the degree to which it lets go of control, in effect, letting go of power.
I agree that we should consider generosity, impact and power in gauging effective philanthropy. But here is a nuance. Power is not just about money or privilege. It’s about networks, and ideas and knowledge. Power is not fixed in my view, to be had only by one and therefore not by another. In this sense, I am not willing to share Williams’ framing of the effective philanthropy yardstick as how much power is handed over.
I am more persuaded by the language of shared power as suggested by Henry Timms and Jeremy Heimans in their 2018 book New Power. According to Timms and Heimans, new power is created by ubiquitous connectivity…in other words the devices we hold in our hands, and other technologies. New power is in the hands of the many, not the few. It flows like a current, not hoarded like gold. In my review of New Power in The Philanthropist, I noted that technology gives us all (or all of us who can access it) ways to participate, to collaborate, to create, and to engage in new forms of community, which can be not only virtual but evolve into actual human connectivity. New power models and thinking are certainly affecting and transforming philanthropy as much as any other domain. Participatory grantmaking is surely an aspect of new power. The possibility of building rapid feedback loops with beneficiaries and grantees; giving agency to the beneficiaries and to the nonprofits who support them; bringing multiple voices to the table; designing data collection directly with the owners of the data; and designing projects together rather than at arm’s length, are all instances of new power thinking and practice.
The key ingredient in keeping the current flowing in this new power model is trust. One of the reasons that funders may not be responding to the idea of shifting power is that it is presented as a “giving away” rather than as an affirmation. Using a framing that focuses on “haves” and “have nots”, donors and grantees, us and them, diminishes the power of both. Funders may think that in giving up the control offered by foundation-managed and self-designed grant proposals, reporting requirements and restrictions of various kinds, they lose control over impact. But what if funders and grantees have agreed first to enter into relationship? In other words, what if they have done the work to build understanding and trust with each other?
When you sit around the table rather than across it, you are going to be sharing the space not wondering about who gets what. And listening to each other to build understanding and to share in shaping the work and the outcomes you want to achieve together. Indigenous approaches to being in relationship and in a circle of trust have much to teach philanthropy, in my view.
To sum up, effective philanthropy is more about sharing and exchanging power. The Center for Effective Philanthropy has launched a terrific podcast series, Giving Done Right, where you can hear the voices of community organizations and funders who are reflecting on the measures of effective philanthropy today. Listening to their episode on Making and Measuring Impact with Tiffany Cooper Gueye, the Chief Operating Officer of Blue Meridian, a funder collective, I was struck by her comments on the importance of “proximity”. What she is saying is that to have impact you must trust and to trust you must get close. Close to people, close to issues, close to organizations. She also put her finger on the nature of the funder-grantee relationship. It’s not about simply handing over funds without conditions. “Unrestricted (money) is not unaccountable (money)”. In other words, funders and grantees must work with each other in a relationship of reciprocity and mutual accountability. This is a yardstick I can agree with.