The REACH Healthcare Foundation began a transformative journey in 2018 when a portfolio review revealed that Black-led, Black-serving organizations were largely excluded from the foundation’s grantmaking investments. Acknowledging this shortcoming led to the launch of the Centering Black Voices (CBV) pilot project, which centers trust and captures the insights and lived experiences of Black leaders from nonprofits serving Black communities in Kansas and Missouri. Their shared experiences of limited access to funding for Black organizations helped shape REACH’s funding approach, which aims to repair previously neglected—and in some cases, damaged—relationships. REACH hopes that by sharing honest reflections on how the foundation questioned and reimagined its philanthropic practices, it can support other health funders embarking on similar efforts focused on reconciliation and repair.

A recent REACH Healthcare Foundation report, “The Broken Triangle: A Framework for Reparative Philanthropic Relationships,” examines how traditional philanthropic practices have often created imbalanced power dynamics and barriers for Black-led, Black-serving organizations, while offering a useful framework for creating more equitable and effective partnerships between funders, grantee partners, and consultants.

The paper details how REACH adapted its approach to centering trust by:

  • Shifting from traditional short-term, restricted funding to longer-term, flexible support;
  • Moving away from top-down approaches to community-led priority setting;
  • Reducing administrative burdens and barriers for grassroots organizations;
  • Rethinking the role of consultants as bridge-builders between funders and grantees; and
  • Creating new rapid-response funding mechanisms for urgent community needs.

At the heart of this paper is the concept of the “broken triangle”—the often-deficient relationship between philanthropic funders, grantee organizations, and consultants. This dynamic, characterized by power imbalances, limited trust, and misaligned expectations, frequently hinders the very impact philanthropy aims to achieve. REACH surfaced these challenges through honest, often uncomfortable conversations with Black nonprofit leaders and consultants, many of whom shared how capacity constraints and a lack of access to trusted expertise have long limited their organizational growth and trust in funder-identified consultants.

Read the full article about reparative philanthropic relationships by Carla Gibson and Kathryn Evans at Grantmakers in Health.