Giving Compass' Take:

• Prentice Zinn argues that for a small foundation’s reflective practice, grantee stories are a valuable source of learning and inspiration, and thinking differently about the future.

• Do these strategies apply to your work? How could you better leverage your assets for your cause? 

• Here's how small funders can drive progress in racial equity. 

Stories are a core element of reflective practice—methods and techniques that help individuals and groups learn from their experiences. In the social sector, the stories of how organizations make a difference in the world offer insight and hope, yet they can get lost in the day-to-day work. Grantee stories may be one of the most underused assets of philanthropy.

The stories offer the foundation a close look at their practices and grantee relationships, which is one way to begin shifting power to the community. The concept is explored in the GrantCraft Leadership Series paper, How Community Philanthropy Shifts Power: What Donors Can Do to Help Make that Happen.

The Sociological Initiatives Foundation (SIF) decided to slow down and harvest some of this wisdom. SIF supports social change by linking research to social action. True to its values of collaboration and participation, the Foundation invited its grantees to share stories of how they fought for equality and justice.

The year-long project provided a framework for board reflection and culminated in the publishing of a casebook.

Reflection through a book project
Stories are a perfect learning and planning tool when you use them as a prompt for the What? So, What? Now What? model of self-reflection. The deceptively simple model provides context, captures salient points, and pushes foundation boards (in this case) to use what they have discovered. The process satisfies the more analytical members of a board as well as the action-oriented ones.

What did the funded organizations accomplish?
Collaborating for Change: A Participatory Action Research Casebook edited by Susan Greenbaum, Glenn Jacobs, and Prentice Zinn documents the stories of a dozen community-based research projects funded by the Foundation. Each chapter, written by project leaders, tells how immigrants, laborers, domestic workers, low-income tenants, indigenous communities, and people experiencing homelessness conducted their own research to help them fight powerful interests.

Read the full article about reflective practices for small foundations by Prentice Zinn at GMA Foundations via Exponent Philanthropy.