NCRP: Farhad, I wanted to meet with you to essentially talk about the story of Chorus Foundation that you, you know, have some involvement in [laughs]. And Chorus is still sunsetting at the end of this year, is that correct? 

FE: Yeah, yeah, this is our final year. 

NCRP: Final year. How are you feeling about, overall, about the final year? 

FE: Pretty good. I think that the personal, closing a big chapter, “what am I going to do next” stuff? I think that’s one of those things where that hasn’t really hit me emotionally yet. I’m in that space where I’m feeling a way that I’m not feeling a way yet, if that makes sense. But, as far as what we’ve done, and what, hopefully that sets up for other folks to do and things like that. I’m feeling pretty great about it. 

NCRP: I’m wondering, along those lines, what does it mean to be informed by movements? You talked about how the state of the world, and your conversations with movements have kind of like led you to spend down. And so, I want to know, what does that mean for you? 

FE: I mean, I think it starts with being really as relational as possible and approaching our work with a radical humility. In philanthropy we can talk a lot about processes and structures: how do we get those exactly right?  How do we make decisions about who to fund if we’re making the decisions? Or how do we create processes for democratic decision making, if it’s community members making those decisions? How do we structure collaborations between funders? Things like that.

Don’t get me wrong, process and structure are legitimate areas of inquiry. It’s really important that we try to learn from past efforts and really get them right. And also, to me to what it means to be informed by and accountable to movements is that those processes and structures are ultimately only as important, or only as useful, as our willingness to change them or scrap them entirely if the movement leadership and community leadership that we’re in relationship with informs us that these structures are not working for the folks that they’re supposed to be working for. Part of it is how we show up.  

We see ourselves as an instrument of movements. And to do so we need to be flexible, we need to be emergent, we need to be relational, we need to be the kind of folks that people can reach out to easily without fear of it being like, a whole thing, reaching out to a funder. We’re receptive and ready to respond if there’s anything that we could be doing differently, or if there’s anything that we need to do because of something another funder did. And maybe it’s not even our fault, but we’re in a position to help folks deal with it. To me, being informed by movements has to do with how we take our leadership from movement folks. Not that we say what we’re going to do, and we get everything right. It’s that we’re in constant conversation. And are always willing to do things differently. And relatively quickly, and with relatively few asks of our grantee partners, for us to have what we need to be able to do things differently. 

Read the full article about climate justice movements by Senowa Mize-Fox at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.