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When the Rogers Family Foundation announced the sunsetting of our Oakland education strategy in October 2020, our team knew we’d reach a point of reflection on our grantmaking and practices over the last two decades. That time is now. This piece focuses on the concept of “Beyond the Grant,” which challenges funders to leverage internal organizational capacity to support their fund recipients and partners beyond grant dollars alone. According to the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, non-monetary support can bolster a grantee’s leadership, capacity, and organizational health. This is the story of the Rogers Family Foundation’s approach and culture of providing meaningful support beyond the grant. This piece was originally published by the Rogers Family Foundation and is re-published here with permission.
In 2004 during the early days of the Rogers Family Foundation, Brian Rogers would sit in his office on College Avenue in Oakland reading and writing reports. He’d grown increasingly frustrated in shaping and finding focus for his family’s new philanthropy. His parents, founders T. Gary and Kathleen Rogers, had given him the latitude to shape the Foundation how he thought appropriate. He’d spent a great deal of time gathering information from other funders and the principal advice often came back the same: keep your professional distance from grantees. The power dynamic and perceived control of resources would get in the way. Building a “Wall of No” to reject grantee requests would be easier from afar. Then he listened to one of the country’s leading educators/civil rights activists speak at a conference. “I heard Howard Fuller describe what it takes to connect with communities,” Brian recalled. “He was speaking about the field of philanthropy, but it applied to everything. He said it’s not about the grass roots or grass tops. You need to burrow in to get to the heart of your community. The true connections happen in the tunnels underground. At that point, I decided to be accessible. No more sitting in the office. I knew I needed to be in the community.”
Making grants is the Rogers Family Foundation’s core business function. It is, however, our opening line – not our final act. We thrive on the opportunity to connect our roles to our mission and strategy, and to deploy our array of talent to meet the needs of grantees and community partners beyond the execution of a grant. For our team this is both expectation and exhilaration. Commitment and connectedness. Responsibility and reward. The story we share is not a how-to guide. It is about the organizational will and culture required to deliver for our grantees and ultimately the students and families of Oakland, California.
As the Foundation team grew, Brian applied accessibility and community building as key tenets of the organization. Sometimes it can be as simple as lending your space for a grantee retreat, and other times it’s staffing a community coalition among like-minded organizations. “In my first month, Brian said to me ‘I don’t want to see you at your desk,’ meaning, I should be out in the community listening, learning, supporting, and meeting people in their places and spaces,” reflected Senior Program Officer Sara Levine. “I think that mandate really encouraged me to just lean in and do whatever I can to support people.”
Read the full article about foundation learning and listening by Rhonnel Sotelo and Kate Ray at the National Center for Family Philanthropy.