As part of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors’ new mission and values, we are featuring in-depth profiles of our clients to highlight their work in creating a just world. RPA Senior Advisor, Tina Joh, spoke with Tina Lee of Dropbox Foundation and Hannah Chotiner-Gardner of Kids in Need of Defense (KIND). Dropbox Foundation is a supporting organization under RPA, and KIND is a grantee of Dropbox. The conversation focused on Dropbox’s approach to grantmaking, the work they are facilitating at KIND, and the importance of trust-based philanthropy. This interview reflects edits for length and clarity.

Tina Joh:

You’ve both talked about the values that drive you in your lives and your work. That is a good segue because I want to talk about trust-based philanthropy and how taking a trust-based approach is a values-based approach. What I love about your foundation, Tina Lee, is that you all adopted a trust-based approach from the get-go. This was before the concept had gained the traction that we’ve seen recently. Why did the foundation decide to take this approach and what does trust-based giving mean to you?

Tina Lee:

Since its launch in 2016, Dropbox Foundation has supported human rights organizations around the world through unrestricted grants, skills-based volunteering, and product donation over a three-year partnership with each grantee. The Foundation was funded jointly by Dropbox and its two co-founders, Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. At the inception, we had this great opportunity to build from scratch and decide what we wanted this vehicle to look like. We surveyed around, trying to identify some of the areas that our corporate tech peers were not currently able to address or support. Every decision we made was based on trying to create the largest impact with limited resources. We were surprised to see that human rights is an area that is underfunded in many ways. As a global company that believes in the fundamental need for human rights around the world, it made sense for us to adopt that as our focus.

How we approach the work gets back to looking at best practices. Again, we surveyed a lot of different stakeholders, grantees, and funders. We have a small team, so for us, it was important to build deep relationships and partnerships, focusing on depth over breadth.

One of our company values is to “make work human”. And so given our size, our scope, and our topic area, we realized we needed to adopt a way to partner with grantees and best utilize the resources that we had for the long term. We thought about giving smaller grants over shorter time periods, but that didn’t feel like the best way to invest in partnership. Having unrestricted, longer grants made a lot more sense in terms of impact but also operations.

From an internal perspective, we wanted to build partnerships in the major geographies where we were located. We started with four nonprofits. Today we currently support eight global nonprofits around the world where we have a major presence. And we continue to grow our portfolio of grantees.

Hannah Chotiner-Gardner:

Choosing a trust-based approach is a sophisticated and mature decision in that it involves understanding that those closest to the problems are closest to the solutions. Showing trust in grantees empowers them to say: we know what is needed, we are on the ground, we are serving these communities, we are working with these constituencies. Some funders don’t have the knowledge, the networks, or the experience to know what the solutions are, or they are working within a vacuum as their closest partners are other funders who reinforce shared ideas and values. Trust-based grant making makes good sense for so many reasons, yet it is a path that remains underutilized.

Read the full article about trust-based philanthropy at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.