It has been a year since we formally launched the Ishkode Fund. A year of building, stabilizing, learning, creating, and growing. We have an incredible team, and we have focused on strengthening relationships with grantee partners and colleagues in the field. We have moved resources to communities doing extraordinary work, and we have spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to do philanthropy well. 

For a moment, I would like to focus on this last point.

I am grateful for the work that has been done by many brilliant colleagues to encourage philanthropy to become more effective in the way that money is deployed. But I have also been thinking a lot about what I continue to hear from both community partners and colleagues. The majority of them feel that philanthropy is still falling short. This feedback is not only about practices that need to change, though there are clearly many. It is also about results, or, in many cases, the lack of them. Why has philanthropy continued to step in with big ideas and world-changing initiatives only to see many of them end without noticeable change? What is being missed? 

I won’t pretend that I have that answer, but I would like to share some of the thoughts that I have been discussing with both the Ishkode Fund team and various trusted partners in the field. I hope that naming these ideas can be the beginning of some rich and productive conversations and that we can then move past the world of ideas into concrete actions.

A statement of values was created to support more effective funding practices known as the Five R’s of Indigenous Philanthropy. They are: Respect, Reciprocity, Responsibility, Relationships, and Redistribution. If you are unfamiliar with these, several of our partners have written great articles going deeper into how these values can impact the way we move money, and they are worth reading.

While each of the five values represents a key aspect, there are two words from the list that have been jumping out to me recently when I think about what we are missing as a field: “respect” and “reciprocity.” They are simple words, but I think they invite us into some conversations that might feel uncomfortable at first, but must be at the core of both how and why we give. 

There are two other simple words I have been considering that are at the core of modern philanthropic systems. One is the word “philanthropy” itself, which comes from the Greek roots meaning “love of humanity.” The other is the word “charity,” which comes from a Latin word denoting dearness and affection. The definitions sound so good, yet in our modern systems, these terms, and the word  “charity” in particular, evoke less the feelings of affection or love and often instead give the impression that others are “less fortunate” or “needy.” 

Of course, there is real need in the communities where we work. And it is also important to understand historical harm and why that need exists. Context matters. But there is a difference between understanding need and seeing a community through the lens of need.

When we do the latter, we begin to see what is missing before we see what is already there. We see problems before we see strengths. We see people who need our help instead of people whose knowledge, ideas, and leadership also hold tremendous value. However well-intentioned, when we look at someone through that lens, it doesn’t feel respectful. In fact, it often feels condescending and harmful to the people on the receiving end.

Then, strategizing with an overlay of that lens, we invest billions of dollars trying to address some of our most persistent social and environmental challenges. When we don’t see enough change, our response is often to revise the strategy, narrow the focus, or develop a stronger work plan. We create new measurements, and we become more specific about what communities should do with the resources we provide. 

But what if that is part of the reason we’re not making the degree of change we want to see? What if the problem isn’t always that communities need stricter measurements or a narrower plan? What if the problem is that philanthropy needs a different understanding of the value of the relationship?

Respect asks us to enter a community differently. It asks us to recognize need without defining people by it. To understand historical harm while also recognizing the beauty and strengths of these communities.

Reciprocity asks us to recognize something else: the value in this relationship does not move in only one direction. When a community receives a grant, they are not the only one that benefits. There is something beautiful coming back to us too.

We are accustomed to thinking about investments in terms of a return. Usually that return is monetary, but there are other kinds of returns. David Bollier and Natasha Hulst have been exploring this idea in their work on what they call “relationalized finance.” They use the term transvestment to describe moving money from systems where value is primarily understood in monetary terms into systems that generate other forms of value: ecological, social, relational, and ethical.

What if a grant is not simply money given away, but an investment whose return comes back in a different form to all of us?

That return could take many forms. It could look like a restored wetland, or a healthier forest. It could look like a language brought back from the brink of extinction, carrying generations of knowledge about a place and how to live within it and care for it. It could look like Indigenous birth workers strengthening maternal care, or communities restoring ways of caring for children and elders. Traditional ecological knowledge is helping us understand how to care for landscapes at a moment when many of our existing approaches are failing. Indigenous communities are restoring knowledge and practices that speak directly to these challenges and more. That, too, is a return.

Yet philanthropy can become so focused on “helping” a community that it fails to see what those communities might have to teach us. That is what respect and reciprocity change. When those ideas come together, perhaps we may begin to see philanthropy itself differently. Not as the haves giving to the have-nots, or as people with answers helping people with problems, but as one part of a much larger ecosystem of resources, knowledge, relationships, and responsibility.

We are grateful that this fund has been able to support so much meaningful work, but it would be a mistake to describe our work over this past year simply by saying that we have given grants to communities who needed support. We have received something too. We have learned, and we have been challenged. We have seen possibilities and solutions we would not have imagined ourselves. We have observed exponential growth when our partners feel respected and valued for their work. And we have been reminded again and again that some of the knowledge our world needs most urgently already exists.

Maybe that by itself doesn’t answer the question of what philanthropy is missing, but I do believe it is a good start.