In May, the 2024 National Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) Conference was hosted in partnership with Philanthropy California in Los Angeles. Each year, the conference invites grantmakers and practitioners of philanthropy from around the world to participate in conversations around grantmaking practices focused on community and equity. They aim to not only initiate dialogue, but to incite positive action among the funders and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that take part.
With that goal in mind, our colleague Abby Sarmac at Philanthropy Northwest —who also serves as a consultant to EMA partner Lighthouse Relief—invited EMA to participate on a conference panel titled “Exploring an Anti-framework to Shift Philanthropic Culture.” EMA Executive Director Bill Meyer and Partner Relations Associate Tracy Tran were joined on the panel by Oskar Zambrano and Anna Gonzalez, the development director and executive director for the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice (CCAEJ), a small nonprofit working to organize communities around environmental justice in Southern California.
Tran, a third-year student studying public health at the University of California, Irvine spoke from their perspective as a member of the EMA Partner Relations team, detailing the impact of trust-based philanthropy in their work supporting EMA partner Children of the Forest (CoF).
“My story is a living example that trust works and is great for everyone. Trusting our partners works, trusting youth works, and it's better for everyone when trust is there.”
As part of their role at EMA, Tran has worked closely with CoF on their organization’s website design and has helped to sort its impact statistics to better convey their influence to a wider audience. Through her direct experience listening to and then best responding to CoF’s needs, Tran brought a lot to the table at GEO. “What I hoped to give was my lived experiences of being with EMA as a means for people to trust in trust-based philanthropy and in youth,” they said.
During the panel discussion, Tran shared how their experiences working with CoF had helped them understand the importance of messaging. And, as someone who identifies as being on the autism spectrum, playing a part in the process to define and articulate EMA’s mission to the world helped Tran develop a deeper understanding of the structures around them.
“I've always struggled with understanding systems and how I fit in them, or how any kind of entity expresses themselves. Learning all of these things really helped me understand the world. I'm really glad that I was able to speak and that I was heard. I do think I represented myself well and by representing myself, I'm also representing young people.”
By attending the GEO conference, Tran hoped they could learn even more about how EMA might ensure more equitable relationships with our partners. But after attending a session with Meyer titled “Evolving How You Know What You Know: the Equitable Evaluation Framework in Practice,” Tran was encouraged to see that EMA was already heading in the right direction. By having confidence in our partners and valuing their stories, EMA was already working within an ‘equitable evaluation framework.’ “We're on the right track with trusting our partners and valuing their qualitative data,” said Tran.
Tran feels optimistic about where EMA is headed, but also felt like something clicked after hearing from plenary speaker Marcus Walton, who argued that philanthropy is merely a response to restore what was promised: equality, freedom, and happiness.
“I hadn’t really situated philanthropy in a broader system before. I hadn't thought of the overarching goal: to fix what was promised that wasn't delivered.”
Additionally, Meyer felt that many of the conference’s plenary speakers challenged the funders to do better by shifting to unrestricted funding. Their call to action was coupled with a call to acknowledge where the money that philanthropy has to offer comes from and to whom it truly belongs.
But it was plenary luncheon speaker Alok Vaid-Menon, an internationally renowned gender non-conforming writer and performance artist, who surprised Tran and Meyer the most. Through comedy, Alok spoke candidly to the power dynamics of philanthropy, emphasizing the importance of love in grantmaker-grantee relationships while calling out the absurdities of historical philanthropy models that treat grantees as inferior. In contrast to the more serious demeanor of the majority of conference speakers, “the energy shifted” with Alok’s keynote, said Tran.
What really caught Tran’s attention was Alok’s statement that “philanthropy is a joke”—the notion that it is absurd to think that foundations, who have largely profited off of marginalized communities, are forcing those same communities to ask for funding. As Tran noted, “Alok pointing at that and many other things during their speech was really good because everyone just was able to like, laugh at themselves for how ridiculous the whole concept is.” Tran also found Alok’s talk particularly powerful because it allowed older generations to see what she saw: that philanthropy as a whole needs to change. “A lot of the people in that room I think have been in philanthropy for a long time,” noted Tran. “Once you're in any space for a while, everything just gets normalized, and Alok really shook that up.”
The best question posed at their panel, Tran said, asked how EMA measures the needs of its partner organizations. The audience member, seemingly amazed by what had been proposed, needed confirmation that philanthropy could really be as simple as a conversation. Meyer’s answer: Yes it really is.
“We're in a position not only to participate in those conversations, but to lead by example.”
