How Grantee-Led Systems Change Is Evolving Our Funding

A learning journey: Funding justice means changing systems, and only communities know what that looks like for them.

In late 2023, we invited organizations across the region to respond to a funding opportunity that reflected the new justice-centered grantmaking approach we developed and shared at the end of 2021.

In that first invitation, we awarded 18 grants that totaled around $3 million.

We’ve learned from our grantees that pursuing justice doesn’t look the same everywhere. This first group of grantees is further demonstrating the diverse ways community-led initiatives are changing policies and practices to advance racial, social, and economic justice.

This new funding approach embodies what we learned from our grantees over the past decade, including the idea to center funding on justice and to eventually change our mission last year. It’s led us to continue to stand with some current grantees, but also to build new relationships with other groups in our region. Across all the work is a need to restructure and reimagine systems in ways that support justice.

I want to share some of what we’ve learned so far and how those discoveries will impact the next wave of justice-focused funding in late 2024 or early 2025.

Spotlighting two lessons from our grantees—both are at once simple and layered.

1) DEFINING SYSTEMS CHANGE ISN’T OUR TASK.

One of the most frequent questions we fielded as we worked on that first wave of grants awarded under the updated approach was: What systems change do you fund? And we realized we shouldn’t be making that determination; we should ask prospective grantees what systems they’re working to change and how.

Our grantees have taught us that necessary systems change is best determined by the communities experiencing injustices—and because each community has a unique history, circumstances, and culture—part of our job as funders is to be constant and humble learners.

For example, a number of grantees from that first round of grants are working to strengthen the cultural systems in their communities. The work of those organizations illustrates how deeply cultural wisdom informs justice. And we hadn’t really made that connection in such a tangible way.

2) COLLABORATION ACCELERATES CHANGE.

Many of our grantees have teamed up or created diverse coalitions to effect significant change. It’s been exciting to see how that strategy—building an ecosystem that prompts change from multiple perspectives—can accelerate justice.

An example of this is the Mountain | Plains Regional Native CDFI Coalition, a collaboration among Native community development financial institutions (Native CDFIs) that, working together, secured a record investment from the US Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration. (Read more.)

How are grantees changing systems? Context matters.

The mission of Whiteswan Environmental (WE), a Native American-led organization Indigenous to the Washington coast, is to support community healing through holistic restoration—natural, cultural, and historical—for the Indigenous peoples who have called the Salish Sea home for thousands of years.

WE’s programs educate and strengthen relationships across transboundary borders of the United States and Canada. The work reconnects Coast Salish youth and community members with their ancestral homelands and culture while addressing public health issues and advocating for legislative change and educational initiatives.

The Foundation’s grant of $250,000 over two years will go to general operating support for Spirit of the Sxwo’le (SOS) Coalition, which partners with Indigenous and non-Indigenous working groups that collaborate on longhouse restoration. They are rebuilding 14 longhouses, places of healing and learning, on the San Juan Islands and the Gulf Islands.

According to WE’s cofounder and executive director Shirley L. Williams (Lummi), a registered nurse focused on public health, “We aim to restore our longhouses to our ancestral homelands, soon, so our remaining culture bearers can be present and practice our traditional reef net fishing technology and food sovereignty and begin teaching our next seven generations.”

As Williams points out, Indigenous peoples have called the Northwest coast home for thousands of years. But in the less than two centuries since Europeans settled in the area, Native cultural traditions and practices have been decimated and environmental stewardship of the area has taken a backseat to commerce.

“We were dislocated and disassociated from our land, territory, and way of life,” Williams says. “Our inherent right to clean food and water is violated. Our reef nets are the most respectful, sustainable way to produce the highest-quality salmon, but the Strait Salish fishermen were forced out or outlawed.

“Our work is about survival, transforming an educational system to move beyond the genocide of traditional knowledge systems, providing knowledge democracy to honor all peoples’ history, culture, governance, and language, and making sure our bioregion doesn’t become a concrete jungle.”

Restoring longhouses is one part of a revival for ancestral village sites, camps, reef net locations, and 13 moon food sovereignty. WE’s broader vision includes the Coast Salish Tribal Heritage Field Institute, an educational initiative for students at all levels, kindergarten through PhD, to learn to balance Indigenous and Western perspectives along with place-based curricula.

Williams, also cofounder of a Washington State charter school, says, “I want to teach children that their voices could help make change, that we’re all important, and we’re all valued. Today researchers know we can hold trauma for seven generations, just as our people have always told us through oral stories. It’s time to heal the Saltwater Salmon People by returning to our homelands. As a First Nation matriarch stated, ‘the land misses us.’”

That’s what justice looks like for the First Peoples of the Salish Sea. And we’re honored to stand with them as they work toward it.

Building consortiums of like-minded collaborators accelerates systems change.

“Collaboration is key,” says Shiho Fuyuki, a lab leader at People’s Economy Lab, a Seattle-based nonprofit that seeks a just transition to a solidarity economy—that is, an economy that serves all people and the planet, rather than an extractive economy that enriches certain groups at the expense of others.

As part of our justice-centered funding approach in late 2023, People’s Economy Lab received a two-year, $250,000 grant (through fiscal sponsor Front and Centered) to build the capacity of its Black, Indigenous, and people-of-color (BIPOC)-led efforts to transform the Seattle-area economy in ways that center justice.

Fuyuki points out the importance of banking trust over time with organizations whose mission and programs complement their own. “The time and capacity it takes to build trust among communities has always been under-resourced. Spending time and building relationships within communities has been really important to us.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, People’s Economy Lab convened local BIPOC leaders to discuss the ways an extractive economy harms their communities and to envision a future economy that will benefit their communities instead. Now, they’re seeing the results of the relationship building they started virtually and have continued since. As Fuyuki notes, “Building trust over time really allowed us to move forward. You don’t get to a place of collaboration without trust and aligned values.”

People’s Economy Lab is taking aim at the root causes of economic injustices, and that demands taking a fuller view.

“When we bring aligned partners together, we can do so much,” says Fuyuki. “Our partnerships have looked differently in our various projects, but in all cases, we’re prioritizing the needs of BIPOC communities across Seattle.”

They spend the time to listen and really understand each community’s particular challenges, and then they highlight those challenges to other stakeholders to find the resources they need—whether those resources are more funding or access to more relationships and opportunities. “We’re an intermediary—or a weaver, in a sense,” she describes.

This has included community assemblies held across the state that look at collaborative governance as a path to economic democracy and community wealth-building initiatives through direct ownership and control of assets. It’s the mutually beneficial connections among groups that build a healthy dose of synergy and amplify each other’s work to build an economy that works better for all people.

Looking ahead with anticipation and hope.

Another wave of justice-centered grants will be released in late 2024 or Q1 2025. This new round is informed by what I’ve detailed above and insights from applications of community-led organizations: What does systems change look like in their communities, and what’s the context for it? What does collaboration look like for them, and how deep and strong are the partnerships?

These new grants will certainly reflect our ongoing commitment to providing at least 40 percent of our grant dollars to Native-led organizations. And, we’re looking to fund more immigrant- and refugee-led organizations as well. Look for more from us about these grants in the coming months.

Meanwhile, we invite your continued engagement with us.