A Special Access Philanthropy Research Piece
Do Foundations Trust Trust-Based Philanthropy? (download)
In January of this year, the Chronicle of Philanthropy published an opinion piece by Dan Goldenberg, executive director of Call of Duty Endowment, on his organization’s choice to back off from trust-based philanthropy.
Goldenberg cited the “lackluster” results and “lack of accountability” for nonprofits. What followed was a slew of comments, additional letters to the editor, and posts on separate websites picking apart Goldenberg’s argument and alleging such critiques are “a red herring to justify status-quo approaches” (Pia Infante and Shaady Salehi, Chronicle of Philanthropy in a letter to the editor published days after the initial opinion.)
Just five years ago, the whole of philanthropy was abuzz with this new way of conducting business and the promise of transforming donor-grantee relationships. Now, after seeing the volleys back and forth between grantmakers, grantees, and organizational leaders, we at Access Philanthropy wondered 1) how far we’ve come with trust-based philanthropy and 2) will we continue to go further or are the challenges too complex to tackle?
We asked our researcher Laura Wilson to take a look.