My husband, Chris, loves boats, so I’ve spent over 30 years watching him fish and even build a boat. When I switched from leading a nonprofit organization to building and leading a new private foundation, it felt like I was fishing with a blindfold on with no bait on my hook. Not only could I not see where I threw my rod, but I often had little idea of the context around me and if I had the right story about my nonprofit to “hook” a new grantmaker.
So when I leapt into starting the Kinship Fund, I knew more about what I didn’t want to do than what I did. I believed that bringing my experience from the nonprofit side of the table to this new work could make a difference. The difference I sought was not only to create a different kind of foundation but also to change how philanthropy operates.
I call these ideas my “Big Hairy Audacious Goals” (BHAG), and I have had a few of them over the years. So the Kinship Fund’s Theory of Change grew to become the roadmap behind that BHAG.
It started with our Theory of Change Goal: To practice bold, community-driven, trust-based philanthropy that fosters meaningful, long-term partnerships so everyone in our community can thrive.
Those are more than words to me. The Goal describes a way of being that the team has committed to leaning into at every step along the way. After over 30 years spanning higher education, healthcare, business, and nonprofit leadership, one of my strengths is seeing possibility in spaces of complexity. I can now embrace that I am a system-disrupter.
With trust-based philanthropy as the foundation’s starting point, and now moving toward care-based philanthropy (shout out to Loretta Turner for this), this approach embodies our Goal because it is relatively novel here in the San Diego region. I see glimmers of it, but much of our philanthropic space is still governed by old ways of being – traditional philanthropic practices that do not best serve our community – and probably never did.
Community-driven means leading from the end of the line, and for me, that means I try every day to set down my own set of filters and look towards others doing the work in the community to ask them what needs to be done and how to do it. I am a work in progress, but meaningful, long-term partnerships will only be built at the speed of trust.
With our Goal in mind, we’ve spent the last two years developing our focus areas. What I initially saw as a constraint in a region with so many impactful nonprofit organizations, I now understand that clear strategy areas help us be aligned, accountable, and transparent, and to continue learning. They also allow us to be better partners because we own that we cannot support every nonprofit, and nonprofits are clear when their mission fits ours.
Strategy Areas
- Foster the thriving of at-risk youth through mentoring
- Catalyze flourishing in a refugee/immigrant community
To pursue our BHAG/Goal, we identified what levers of change need to be in place to get to the outcomes we seek. The levers are the “how”, connecting our activities to our outcomes, and are the key drivers or mechanisms that move our work forward and help turn our vision into reality. In our case, some of the necessary levers of change do not come from us – they depend on the partnerships we are building and those organizations’ levers of change. Together, these levers reflect our values and clarify where we invest our financial resources, time, and energy.
Levers of Change:
- Unrestricted, multi-year funding
- Nonfinancial assets in support of nonprofit organizations
- Relational support to keep kids in school and out of detention (Grantees)
- Partner collaboration to increase the impact and reach of services in the El Cajon refugee/immigrant community (Grantees)
Next time: What do Assumptions and Context have to do with a Theory of Change?