In 2024, the Rogers Family Foundation (RFF) will conclude its 20-year commitment to Oakland, CA and public education. Over the past year, as we have prepared to wind down, we have written, presented, and shared our practice of providing Beyond the Grant support. CEO Rhonnel Sotelo reflected on our organizational culture and the comprehensive way our team approaches this work. Former Entrepreneur in Residence Jenna Stauffer, whose sole role was to build the capacity of grantee partners, shared what it takes to establish trust and dive deep with grantees. Here, we encapsulate our story, highlighting our two-decade journey and the learnings acquired along the way.

What it Takes to Connect with Community

RFF’s founding CEO Brian Rogers discovered early that much of the advice he’d received from other, more established grantmakers and funders — to build a “Wall of No” — was not aligned with his vision. While keeping grantees at a professional arm’s length would likely make it easier to say “no” to funding requests, Brian wasn’t interested in following the path of his peers; he recognized that doing the work well would require connection. Inspired by civil rights activist Howard Fuller’s description of what it takes to connect with communities, Brian decided that RFF wouldn’t just be about giving, but also doing. What resonated most was that “you need to burrow in to get to the heart of your community. The true connections happen in the tunnels underground.” With that, a core tenet of RFF’s philosophy was born.

The most obvious way our commitment to connection manifested itself was through our Beyond the Grant work. RFF provided this kind of support from the organization’s inception, before understanding “Beyond the Grant” to be a common practice. The definition of Beyond the Grant work is often a broad one: any support provided to a grantee beyond the financial can fall into this category. Communications, networking and relationship building, and staffing coalitions are all examples of ways RFF has lent support. There is no one-size-fits-all approach and the work will look different from one foundation to the next. However, there is one key factor that informed the success of Beyond the Grant work at RFF: trust. Trusting that our grantees know their needs best, and trusting each other that we all had something valuable to contribute.

There are many tactics the RFF team employed to gain the necessary trust from our grantees, but the one that proved most critical was our commitment to listening. We listened to grantees’ goals, struggles, and needs. We listened as they vulnerably shared their barriers and where they felt stuck. We listened when they accepted support beyond the grant, and we listened when they declined. What’s more, we acknowledged and celebrated their successes. This underscored our commitment to being a partner and not just a funder. We also recognized that the leaders of the organizations we funded are the experts on their own needs, and that the way we showed up for them should be entirely informed by this expertise.

Read the full article about centering connection by Amy Breshears at The Center for Effective Philanthropy.