Reimagining Governance: What We’ve Learned and Where We’re Going
By: Hannah Whisler, Senior Manager, Capital Collaborative by Camelback Ventures
The Capital Collaborative by Camelback Ventures exists to move more money to leaders and communities of color and shift power in funding. We have done this by working with White funder professionals to further their equity journeys and help them make changes to funding norms in the organizations they work for. We also know that the funding staff we work with are not ultimate decision makers in their organizations, and that they struggle to make significant changes within the current governance structures of foundations and funds. So, we’re embarking on a new chapter, with the ultimate decision makers.
In the fall of 2024, Capital Collaborative will launch a cohort designed explicitly for board members, trustees, and wealth-holders who want to discover ways to cede their power and create space for new forms of governance to flourish. Participants will be in the safety of a peer cohort, have space to redefine their roles, and support to imagine a transition plan for letting go of power and leaving a metamorphic legacy.
Metamorphic legacy is a beautiful, wise, intelligent form of stewardship. It knows its unvarnished history, feels the present weight of opportunity, and courageously faces a future it won’t control. It embraces change, complexity, and collective design. It recognizes that qualifications and expertise for philanthropic governance are not determined by proximity to wealth but instead by proximity to community, directly relevant diverse types of knowledge or experience, and multifaceted understanding of the systems that hold problems in place.
The results of metamorphic legacy are distributed power and liberatory forms of governance. Read more about Metamorphic Legacy in our first blog post on the topic, by Camelback Ventures’ Funder in Residence Jessamyn Shams-Lau.
As we’ve embarked on this journey, we have had many conversations with other leaders in the funding space. This is the first blog post in a series that will follow highlighting some of the innovators and thought partners we’ve worked with to better understand how governance in the funding landscape currently functions, who is working to redefine it, and how they are already making changes. We’re excited to share some of their words starting next month, but for now, here are a few of my own learnings and reflections on redefining governance.
Get Collaborative
Since our team set out about 18 months ago to begin learning about systems change in funding governance, our idea that governance structures need to shift has only been affirmed. AND, the difficulty of reaching the top decision makers in order to truly make changes has become apparent. While Camelback Ventures’ work is all grounded in working in community, we have learned that in order to do this systems change work, collaboration with others seeking to make change is absolutely essential.
The saying “if you’ve seen one foundation you’ve seen one foundation” may be cliche, but it rings true when it comes to donors and boards as well. While the boards and systems may all look eerily similar, the folks leading them are unique. They all come to the work with their own deeply personal reasons for being there, theories of change, levels of experience with funding work, passions, and ideas. Each of these people has their own network of advisors, colleagues, and community members they trust. So, there is a need for everyone who works with donors and funders to engage them in conversation about the importance of reimagining governance if we want to be heard.
Be Creative
Once we work together to reach people, the next challenge is helping folks get creative in order to truly reimagine governance rather than just slightly adjust it. Our Capital Collaborative team has facilitated many different discussions, and also full length sessions, on this exact topic. Getting people to think outside the box about what boards can look like is challenging. Our board structures are rigid, decades old, and inherited from the financial sector. Simply put, systems don’t like to change, and these are very entrenched systems. This means that in order to have generative redesign conversations, it’s important to give people the structure to do so.
At the beginning of our sessions on this topic we like to do an extensive creative exercise to get participants thinking, and we spend most of the session reminding people to continue to think even more expansively. The exercise, brought to us from the Cambiar Education team by Jonathan Santos Silva, is known as “cat on the roof.” Essentially, a facilitator gets the room warmed up and thinking expansively by having them come up with different ways to rescue a cat stuck on the roof. Adding caveats like trying to do this in ways that are expensive, cheap, dangerous, or extremely complex gets different ideas flowing. Encourage thinking from different perspectives by asking them how a 5 year old child, a NASA scientist, or a performance artist might do it. This activity is just one way to introduce truly creative thinking, but doing so in some way is an essential part of the brainstorming process. While it may seem silly or like an indulgent use of time, our team has led this session without engaging in the warmup activity, and the ideas generated are significantly less creative and more stilted. Activities like this help us practice questioning the world as it is, and push beyond our first assumptions about how things can be done.
Name Power
As with all of our work in funding, naming power dynamics is essential. Calling individual funders and board members into conversations about change can feel dangerous from a job security standpoint, or even just socially awkward or taboo. While doing this change work, we need to acknowledge these dynamics and help people name and navigate them so that they can feel confident staying in the work. We also can’t let ourselves or funders off the hook because of this risk. Our risks are nothing compared to the risks for communities if we don’t do this work, or to the risks community leaders and those more proximate take on daily.
Applying Learnings
I’ve talked a lot about this work from a donor support and engagement perspective, but how can individual donors get involved in reimagining governance?
Learn more about the history of board governance and where our decision making norms came from in philanthropy in Rob Reich’s book. Then, watch this interview with Stephanie Brobbey from Good Ancestor Movement, and think about how you can challenge the currently unquestioned status quo of wealth accumulation & stewardship.
Get creative – reflect on how you’re bringing creativity and imagination into your work. Attend an online event hosted by Freedom Dreams in Philanthropy and consider how to think more spaciously about the systems that are unquestioned in funding.
Be brave and open in your conversations with colleagues. Share your reflections from this article with a friend in funding. Try the “cat on the roof” exercise and then spend 10 minutes brainstorming wild ideas to rethink how you work together.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed at the prospect of completely reimagining board governance, simply start with a conversation. Talk to your closest allies about this. Just mentioning something you’ve learned or a question you’ve been thinking about on this topic to another funding leader can get them thinking about how they might begin to engage or engage more deeply with systems change. Having conversations with other donors and trustees about why change is necessary, that change is possible, and how you have begun shifting your mindsets and practices around decision making helps bring more people into the movement. We have to acknowledge that this is hard work, continue to allow ourselves space to be creative and question our assumptions, and keep going.
To continue engaging in this conversation with other influential groups in philanthropy, don’t miss our upcoming blogs, featuring leaders of movements to redesign governance from organizations like GEO, Justice Funders, and Board Source.
This thought leadership piece and others like it can be found in Camelback Ventures' Giving Compass ‘Racial Equity in Philanthropy' e-magazine collection. Check it out!
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The Capital Collaborative by Camelback Ventures works with funders and social impact investors who want to deepen their individual and organizational commitment to racial and gender equity in order to move more money to BIPOC-led organizations and diversify power in funding. In Fall 2024, Capital Collaborative will launch a two-year experience designed explicitly for board members, trustees, and wealth-holders who want to examine the status quo of governance, and redefine and co-design how power is held within their funding organizations. You can learn more about how to get involved by submitting an interest form or signing up for the newsletter.