I joined Omidyar Network six years ago in large part because I was fed up with the grantee/funder model. Time and time again I saw nonprofits drift from their vision and purpose, moving away from what they saw as the greatest needs of the people they serve and towards the desires of philanthropy. It was disheartening. And I’d come to realize that saying philanthropy should not exist in the near term is a bit like saying that buildings should not exist: It’s great to be an idealist but when you want to go to bed at night and it’s raining, what do you do?

The reality is we’ve built a social sector that relies on funding from philanthropy. We live and work in a capitalist society. If we want to create change, we are not, for the most part, able to do that work without funds. So, if we all need roofs, but we don’t like buildings, what do we do? I, like so many others, entered the sector ready to roll up my sleeves with the hope that I might be able to help reshape its architecture.

For this reason, I was excited to join the advocacy and policy committee of Fund for Shared Insight, a national funder collaborative that promotes listening and feedback in philanthropy and the social sector. I joined the committee just as Omidyar Network was stepping into a new strategy that was more focused on addressing causes of growing inequities and ever-widening societal divisions. As the head of learning and impact, I was being asked how to continue to center listening and feedback in our work as we stepped into our new strategy, and I was eager to learn together with other funders.

Read the full article about changing systems from within by Jessica Kiessel at The Center for Effective Philanthropy.