Trust is a practice, not a promise: Trust-based philanthropy and the grantmaking it takes

When NILO Foundation was set up five years ago, “trust-based philanthropy” was already circulating as a phrase in the sector. It was harder to find as a real practice amongst foundations and peers.

Five years and a small portfolio of long-term, unrestricted partnerships later, we have a clearer sense of what a trust-based approach to philanthropy involves, what it makes possible, and where it can go wrong when funders treat it as a slogan rather than a real ethos and practice.

Trust-based philanthropy as a shift funders needed, not one grantees invented

The instinct behind trust-based philanthropy did not start in foundations. It came from years of civil society organisations describing — patiently, and then less patiently — what traditional philanthropy was doing to them: reporting burdens that ate into programme time, short grant cycles that made planning impossible, and funders who wanted transformation but would not resource the operating costs it required. For many organisations, the relationship with funders was something to manage, not something to lean on.

Shaady Salehi, who co-founded the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, has written about how readily funders still treat rigid due diligence and constant renewal anxiety as simply the way things are done, and how that culture, more than any single decision, is what limits what a nonprofit can achieve.

The pandemic and the 2020 racial justice reckoning forced a reckoning of sorts: many funders dropped reporting requirements overnight and converted restricted grants to unrestricted grants, almost as a live experiment in what trust-based grantmaking looks like at speed.

What we have learned is that the sector-wide version of that shift and the lived version — inside one small foundation trying to fund two difficult, intertwined theses: a wellbeing economy and a liveable planet, and the inner capacities that make that transition possible — are not the same exercise.

Trust is not a policy you adopt once. You build trust through small decisions repeated over years: how much you ask a partner to justify, how early you release the next tranche, whether a difficult monitoring call becomes an audit or a conversation where both parties can name obstacles and support each other.

What five years of unrestricted, multi-year funding has confirmed

Three things have held up.

1.  Upfront research changes what trust can mean later. We invest heavily before a grant is ever signed — understanding an organisation’s theory of change, its organisational culture, how it sits in the wider system, and the specific structural barriers it works against. We do this so the relationship afterwards can be lighter. 

Trust granted blindly is not the same as trust earned through genuine understanding of a partner’s context. It is close to what many in the field describe: the grantmakers whose commitments hold up under pressure tend to be the ones who did the work of understanding a partner before the grant, not after.

2. A small portfolio with sustained accompaniment beats a large one with light touch. We chose depth over breadth: fewer partners, longer horizons, and support that goes beyond the cheque and adapts to each partner’s context. This is also where the model is tested hardest. Sustained accompaniment can tip into a funder having opinions about a partner’s strategy — the “control dressed up as partnership” dynamic that critics of a trust-based approach rightly worry about. We are conscious not to let it. 

Partners, researchers and people with lived experience should drive the change; we listen, we learn, we reflect alongside them.

3. Qualitative measurement is harder to collect, and often more meaningful. Relying less on quantitative indicators and spreadsheets of “means of verification” is uncomfortable for trustees used to watching numbers rise. But as one grantee account put it, reporting done through dialogue, honest sharing of difficulties, and real listening produces narratives of change that a checkbox report never surfaces. 

Monitoring through conversation treats learning as something both sides do, and begins to rebalance the unequal relationship between funders and grantees into a more equitable, relational one built on mutual accountability. It also lightens the administrative load on small organisations, who so often describe the hours spent feeding other funders’ appetite for numbers, usually in return for small, restricted grants.

Where we’ve had to stay honest with ourselves

Trust-based philanthropy has attracted real critics inside the philanthropic sector, and their arguments are worth sitting with rather than dismissing. Some argue that unconditional trust in local capacity, taken too literally, becomes an excuse for funders to disengage from rigour altogether — a comfortable narrative standing in for the harder work of judging whether an approach is working. Others, from the funder’s side, point to an uncomfortable asymmetry: the conversation about trust-based philanthropy tends to dwell on what funders owe partners, and much less on what happens when a grantee partner is not, in fact, being fully transparent about difficulties. 

Both critiques land. Redistributing to streamline power responsibly is not the same as ignoring power dynamics; left unmanaged, the old power imbalances between funder and grantee simply reappear in a friendlier register. Trust without any structure for honest disagreement is not partnership. It is avoidance dressed up as care.

The hardest moments of the last five years have not been about how to allocate large, unrestricted funds. They have been about staying in a relationship through a strategic disagreement, a missed milestone, or a partner’s own internal crisis without retreating into control or pretending the difficulty away.

That is the part of a trust-based approach that does not fit neatly into a framework, and the part we have had to learn slowly, partnership by partnership.

What we’d tell another funder starting out today

Do not adopt trust-based philanthropy as a communications position. Build the capacity for it first: the upfront diligence that makes lighter-touch monitoring safe, the internal culture that lets your own team sit with ambiguity, and a human-centred approach to learning built on dialogue, field visits and regular informal contact. Maybe most importantly, you have to shift to a governance structure — trustees included — so that everyone understands why a foundation funding a paradigm shift cannot report success the way a foundation funding a discrete service can. That infrastructure takes years to build, as we have experienced at NILO Foundation.

The Trust-Based Philanthropy Project is right that this is, in the end, about funders willing to shift the power, relinquishing a degree of institutional power.

What five years has taught us is that relinquishing power responsibly is itself a skill — one that takes practice, missteps, and an unusual amount of patience from everyone at the table, grantees very much included.We do not think we have arrived at a finished model, at all. We think we have arrived at a better set of questions we’re better equipped to ask, and at organisations and the communities they serve, willing to work through them with us.