A letter from our Vice President of Programs

Happy New Year! As we kick-off 2022, we wanted to take a moment to share the work we started last year to fundamentally change our approach to grantmaking. With the crises of 2020 and acknowledging the long history of inequitable and harmful power dynamics between funder and grantee partners, we saw the need to change our approach to be more grantee partner-focused and aligned with the values of racial justice and trust-based philanthropy.  

At the core of this, we believe in shifting power back into communities, actively listening to needs, and intentionally fostering collaboration. It means that we believe those most impacted are best suited to lead the process of defining and solving problems, and in our role as a funder, we can reduce the administrative burden that our grantee partners experience, so they have the space to focus on the critical work of organizing and advocating for racial justice.

So, what has this looked like in practice? 

The work for us started by first acknowledging and listening to constructive feedback from our grantee partners, specifically the challenges with our grant application and the arduous amount of time it took to complete. This gave us an opportunity as a team to walk through the application and reflect on what aspects of it were necessary and where we could streamline it to make it less burdensome. This also led us to look at the overall steps for our grantmaking process and see what we could eliminate. Since we wanted our new approach to align with the values of trust-based philanthropy, we needed a new focus on dialogue with our grantee partners. We took time, as a team, to explore and challenge our shared understanding of equity and justice to help inform the work we do as a foundation and help us deepen our relationships with our grantee partners.

We decided to eliminate our multi-step process to apply for funding and simplified it so that prospective and returning grantee partners are now only submitting an Organizational Profile Form. This form collects organizational and contact details, and demographic data. We collect demographic data as part of our funding criteria to support organizations that have 51% people of color on the executive leadership and Board of Directors combined. 

In addition to the Organizational Profile Form, we are asking new applicants to include a proposal that has been submitted to another funder for consideration that speaks to their organizing or policy work. We’ve included this step to help eliminate some of the pre-proposal work prospective grantee partners experience in the early vetting stages of funding. Additionally, we are doing homework on the front-end to learn about prospective grantee partners through publicly available information and from our colleagues in the sector. 

We are no longer requiring grant proposal narratives or reports. Instead, information normally requested in proposal narratives and reports is now collected through site visits and check-ins with Woods Fund Chicago staff. The site visits and check-ins create space to have more substantive and candid conversations about our grantee partners’ work. 

Since we already make general operating support grants, a practice of trust-based philanthropy which allows for grantee partners to determine where grant dollars are needed most, we are also exploring ways to fund more multi-year grants to create sustainability, flexibility, and innovation for our partners’ work. We’re also committed to centering BIPOC voices, leadership, and organizing and have started identifying gaps in current grantmaking portfolios, including needing to fund more groups led by young, LGBTQIA+, and Indigenous people.

We are devoted to disrupting white supremacy culture, confronting power, redistributing resources, and creating systemic transformation for real change. We will continue to identify gaps in our existing grantmaking and continue to take feedback from our grantee partners about our grantmaking process and approach, and use lessons learned to adjust. We’ll share our journey as we make changes and learn how to be a better partner and understand what it means to demonstrate racial justice as a practice within a foundation. We also hope to learn from others who are also leaning into grantmaking approaches that are centering grantees, addressing traditional power dynamics, and building equity in philanthropy. 

— Caroline McCoy, Vice President of Programs