Every time someone proposes a bold new reform, whether a new financing mechanism, a new partnership model, a new coordinating platform, or a new commitment to local leadership, I have started asking myself the following question: Does this cost us anything?

I’m not asking this question of the communities that receive development assistance. Nor the abstract system. I’m asking it of us – the people in the room – the foundations, the aid agencies, the big multilateral institutions, the intermediaries who channel the money, and the conveners who host the meetings. Does the reform reduce our authority, our budgets, our visibility, or our sense of indispensability? Or does it, however sincerely, leave us exactly where we were, at the center, holding the pen?

I ask because the development sector is living through a genuine rupture. Aid budgets are contracting sharply, trust in the old institutions is eroding, and geopolitical fragmentation is scrambling the assumptions that organized development cooperation for eighty years. In response, an entire industry of reimagining has emerged: summits, coalitions, roundtables, and reform frameworks, each earnestly asking how to build something better from the wreckage.

I don’t doubt the sincerity of these efforts. I’m part of some of these conversations. The people leading these conversations are, in my experience, thoughtful, self-critical, and responding genuinely to the profound disruption facing our sector. The calls for courage within philanthropy itself, for loosening risk, retooling grants, and shifting power, are all necessary.

And yet as I sit in meetings to reimagine development or read about conversations elsewhere that I am not a part of, I can’t help but observe a pattern, namely that the reforms that attract the most enthusiasm are almost always the ones that keep their authors central. A crisis of state capability becomes a coordination problem, because coordination is what we know how to fund. A crisis of domestic political economy becomes a localization agenda, because localization is something we can administer. We reimagine the problem into the shape of our existing skills or tools, and then propose ourselves as the solution.

This is certainly not a conspiracy – it is normal for humans to respond in a way that preserves the institutions that support their existence. When the ground shifts beneath a profession, the natural instinct is not to disappear. It is to become newly essential, which raises an uncomfortable possibility: perhaps a significant part of what we call “reimagining development” is, in truth, reimagining our own jobs, our mandates, our relevance, and our place in a system whose original justification is dissolving.

I want to take that possibility seriously, without collapsing into cynicism. Because the fact that a reform protects our position doesn’t automatically make it wrong. Some of the people closest to this system are precisely the ones capable of redesigning it. And some current efforts genuinely do move power: resources flowing directly to organizations in the Global South, country platforms (arrangements where the government, not the donor, sets the agenda) beginning to work as intended, tax authorities building the capacity to fund national priorities in ways that actually reduce our leverage rather than merely expand our portfolios. Those are not efforts aimed at self-preservation.

The question therefore isn’t whether this is reform or self-interest. It’s whether we can still tell the two apart.

And the simplest test I have found is also the most uncomfortable: the reforms most worth trusting are the ones that cost the reformer something. They move authority away from us. They shrink our role. They make us, in some measure, less necessary.

We understand this instinctively everywhere except here. When apartheid ended in South Africa, the powerful did not propose a better way of administering the existing order; they were made to surrender it. When civil rights legislation advanced in the US, its champions risked the very coalitions their power rested on. In both cases the powerful were forced by mobilized pressure from below that left them no comfortable exit. No one is forcing the development sector’s hand. We are asked to diminish ourselves voluntarily. That is the whole difficulty, and it is why it so rarely happens.

By that standard, most of what I hear is not yet reform. It’s adaptation: the system’s remarkable capacity to change its language faster than it changes its distribution of power.

This essay is an attempt to stay inside that discomfort, not above it.

Running the Reforms Through the Test

Once you adopt the test, you can’t stop applying it. It becomes a lens you carry into every room. At first I thought it sorted our reform conversations cleanly into two piles: the reforms that cost us something and the reforms that do not. It turned out to be less tidy than that, and the untidiness has an explanation.

Take localization, the reform the sector has embraced most enthusiastically. Almost everyone now agrees with the principle that development should be led by local people rather than run from abroad. The language has won completely. But run it through the test and ask what has changed in reality. In most cases, we have delegated implementation, consultation, and voice – the labor of development – while retaining the most important decisions: what gets funded, what counts as success, what level of risk is acceptable. The starting question was never who does the work – we already know the answer to that. It is who decides. And we have distributed participation far more generously than we have distributed the power to decide. Localization, as usually practiced, costs us very little. That is precisely why it has been so easy to embrace.

Now take domestic resource mobilization: the work of helping governments build the capacity to fund their own priorities through their own tax systems. Run it through the same test, and here it gets complicated, in a way that is more revealing than a clean pass.

In its logic, this reform genuinely costs us something. A country that finances its own development through its own tax system needs us less, sets more of its own agenda, and answers to its own citizens rather than to our reporting requirements. Its success reduces our leverage. By the standard of the test, it aims at exactly the right target: our necessity.

And yet look at how the sector has held it. Domestic resource mobilization has been a funder favorite for more than a decade. We convene on it, publish on it, fund the capacity-building and the technical assistance and the peer-learning platforms. Consider the semi-autonomous revenue authority, the model donors have promoted across some two dozen African countries since the early 1990s: three decades on, the economist Odd-Helge Fjeldstad notes that careful study has found no robust evidence it improved revenue performance. We have found a way to fund the reform meant to make us less necessary, and to remain entirely necessary while doing so.

Here’s the trap: the test does not only sort reforms into passing and failing. Rather, it exposes a subtler capacity: the system’s ability to take even a genuinely power-shifting reform and metabolize it into one more thing we administer. The end state, a state that funds itself, would cost us something. The work of getting there costs us nothing, and can run indefinitely without the end state ever arriving. We can fund the road to our own redundancy forever, provided we never quite reach it.

This is what the two-pile picture misses. A reform can aim squarely at our necessity and still cost us nothing, because we control the pace at which it arrives. The test cannot ask only what a reform would cost us. It must ask how good we are at deferring the bill.

Or take the endless conversations about coordination and philanthropic collaboration. These are among the most energetic in the sector, and among the most revealing. Coordination asks nothing of our authority. If anything, it extends our reach while easing our burden: more alignment, more shared intelligence, more collective visibility, all of it keeping us firmly at the center as catalyst, connector, and curator. I don’t doubt the value of coordinating better. But I notice that it’s the kind of reform that costs the reformer nothing at all.

The pattern, once you see it, is difficult to unsee. The reforms we pursue most eagerly tend to be the ones that leave our position intact. The reforms that would genuinely move power – direct financing to Global South institutions on their terms, domestic revenue systems that displace external leverage, country platforms that set agendas we do not control – meet subtler fates. Some are supported in principle and advanced slowly in practice. Others are embraced with real enthusiasm and then hollowed out, funded as process, so the costly end state never arrives. Either way, the distribution of power holds.

This isn’t because anyone is acting in bad faith. It’s because the reforms that cost us something are, by definition, the ones we are least equipped to want. We’re asked to be the architects of our own diminishment, and no profession is good at that. So we gravitate, almost invisibly, toward the versions of change that ask everything of the world and very little of us.

What Would It Cost Us to Mean It?

If the reforms worth trusting are the ones that cost us something, then the next question is the hardest one: are we willing to pay?

I want to be careful here, because this is the point where essays like this usually reach for a grand blueprint: a new model, a new framework, or a new architecture for development. That instinct is itself part of the pattern. The reflex to produce the next framework is how we reassure ourselves that we remain the authors of whatever comes next. So let me resist it, and offer something smaller and more uncomfortable instead.

A genuine reckoning would not begin with a new design. It would begin with subtraction. It would mean asking, of each thing we do, not “how do we do this better?” but “should this decision be ours to make?” It would mean treating the transfer of authority, not the delegation of tasks, as the real measure of progress. It would mean being willing to fund institutions we do not control, toward ends we did not set, at a pace we cannot dictate, and calling that success rather than loss of rigor. It would mean accepting that a healthier development system is one in which people like me are needed less, and being able to greet that prospect with something other than dread.

That last part is the test, and I do not want to pretend I pass it easily. There is a difference between believing – intellectually – that power should shift, and welcoming – personally – the diminishment of one’s own role. I can believe in the first principle and still feel the second as a threat. That distance between what I can argue and what I can want is where the whole difficulty of this moment lives. It’s not out there in the system. It’s in here, in the chair I occupy.

None of this means dissolving philanthropy or aid tomorrow. Ceding who decides is not the same as abandoning what sustains, and in a moment when programs are collapsing for far worse reasons than principle, the distinction is important. Capable institutions still matter and self-abolition would be vanity. The point is not to disappear, it’s to stop confusing our own continuity with the goal. Our relevance is not what is being reimagined, it was never supposed to be the point.

Coming back to the small question I started with, I have made my peace with the fact that it does not resolve. When someone proposes to reimagine development, I ask what it would cost us, and I watch, in myself first, for the flinch. The flinch is the information. It marks the exact place where a reform stops being comfortable and starts being real.

Perhaps that is the truest contribution I can make right now. Not another framework for reimagining development, but a willingness to notice when our reimagining is really a way of not changing at all, a very sophisticated way of not having the reckoning we claim to want.

The future of development may not belong to those who best reimagine it. It may belong to those who are willing to reimagine themselves out of the center of it, and to mean it.

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I understand the excitement.

Philanthropy has always followed wealth. Industrial fortunes built libraries and universities. Oil and manufacturing wealth helped shape modern foundations. The internet era produced a generation of donors who imported the language of innovation, disruption, measurement, and scale into the social sector.

Now, many expect AI wealth to do the same. Yet much of the conversation begins with the wrong question. The debate so far has centered on how much money AI will bring into philanthropy. Supporters envision new resources for scientific progress, poverty reduction, and global public goods. Critics worry about elite influence or the concentration of private power. Both sides, however, have tended to focus on the capital itself.

Money matters, especially given the current disruptions to development finance. But every fortune carries a worldview.

In my opinion, the more important debate is not how much wealth AI will generate for philanthropy. It is what assumptions about progress, expertise, governance, and social change will accompany that wealth when it arrives.

This question feels especially urgent because AI is not simply another industry creating another group of wealthy donors. It is a technology that may reshape labor markets, alter how knowledge is produced and consumed, concentrate economic power, and challenge institutions across society. Even some of the leaders building these systems have warned that AI could produce levels of wealth concentration capable of straining the social contract itself.

That creates an unusual situation. Philanthropy may soon be funded by fortunes generated from the same technological transformation that many nonprofits, governments, and communities will be struggling to understand, govern, and adapt to.

The question, therefore, is not whether AI wealth will be generous. It is whether philanthropy is prepared for what that generosity represents.

Every Fortune Comes with a Theory of Change

Philanthropy often presents itself as the redistribution of wealth. But it is also the redistribution of ideas.

Every significant philanthropic fortune arrives with an implicit theory of how progress happens. Carnegie believed knowledge could uplift society, and built libraries to prove it. The theory came bundled with the money.

AI wealth will be no different.

The emerging discourse around AI philanthropy already reveals certain assumptions. Some advocates envision a new era of highly optimized giving, where unprecedented resources are deployed with analytical rigor toward society’s greatest challenges. Others see opportunities to build entirely new institutions, support transformative technologies, and accelerate solutions at a scale traditional philanthropy could never achieve.

I genuinely admire a lot of this ambition. Yet every theory of change contains blind spots.

I’m not worried that AI philanthropists will bring too much analytical thinking to philanthropy. I worry that the worldview that emerged from building successful technologies may be mistakenly assumed to apply equally well to solving social and political problems.

Technology often advances through optimization. Governance rarely does. Many of society’s most persistent challenges endure not because solutions are unavailable, but because people disagree about priorities, values, trade-offs, and power.

Consider democratic accountability, social cohesion, gender equality, state effectiveness, climate governance, or public trust. These are not primarily engineering challenges. They are institutional and political challenges.

I have spent years trying to get evidence into policy, and the lesson that stuck is that better evidence alone rarely changes outcomes. Evidence matters, but so do incentives, institutions, relationships, and political context. African evidence practitioners put the risk plainly at the recent Global Data Festival that I attended in Nairobi: AI’s promise can tempt policymakers into believing that complex problems have quick, attractive solutions, when the underlying issues remain deeply human and institutional.

The question therefore is not whether AI philanthropists will be generous. It is whether philanthropy can absorb their resources without adopting the assumption that every social problem is ultimately waiting for a technical solution.

When the Problem Funds the Solution

There is another reason the rise of AI philanthropy deserves closer scrutiny.

Several prominent AI founders have publicly framed their philanthropic commitments as a response to the very disruptions AI may create: economic concentration, labor market displacement, and institutional upheaval.

We all should welcome those commitments. However, they raise a difficult question. What happens when philanthropy is funded by the same forces that are generating the social disruptions philanthropy is later asked to address?

History offers precedents. Industrial fortunes funded efforts to soften the consequences of industrialization. Financial wealth has supported initiatives aimed at reducing inequality. AI may simply be the latest chapter in this story. But the scale of potential disruption makes the tension harder to ignore.

Imagine a future in which AI contributes to widespread labor displacement while simultaneously creating unprecedented private wealth. Philanthropic capital might help workers retrain, support new forms of education, or cushion communities affected by change. All of that might be valuable.

But it doesn’t resolve a deeper question: who gets to decide what adaptation looks like?

This is not a new question. Philanthropy has always had to answer for who decides - it is why the sector now argues about shifting power, participation, and whose voice sets the agenda. What AI changes is where the money comes from. Ordinarily a fortune and the problem it addresses have separate origins - Carnegie’s steel did not cause the illiteracy his libraries answered. AI wealth is different. It is generated by the same force now reshaping labor, concentrating power, and straining institutions. The funder is no longer an outsider bringing resources to a problem. The funder is implicated in it.

Funding Its Own Oversight

If legitimacy is the problem, the instinct will be to reach for solutions. Fund retraining. Fund education. Fund the institutions that hold power to account.

Now think about that last one. If AI wealth is a product of the disruption, then funding the universities, journalists, and civic groups meant to scrutinize that disruption is the disruption paying for its own oversight.

This is not a reason to refuse the money. It is a reason to be honest about what the money cannot buy.

Scrutiny funded by the thing being scrutinized is not independent by default. It becomes independent only if the funder builds in the freedom to be turned against itself - and honors that freedom when it is used. Most philanthropy is not built to do this. I have watched foundations fund independent institutions and still expect them to arrive at the funder’s conclusions. The money advances the funder’s theory of change; it rarely underwrites dissent from it.

So the legitimacy problem does not dissolve when philanthropy starts funding good institutions. It moves inside the funding relationship itself.

The harder discipline is not choosing what to fund. It is funding it in a way that leaves the recipient free to turn against you - and staying at the table when they do.

The point is not to solve the problems AI creates. Societies solve their own problems, or they do not solve them at all. The point is to fund the capacity to do so: the ability of a society to make collective choices, and to change its mind when it gets them wrong.

That capacity is not a solution. A solution is a fixed answer. Capacity is what a society uses to keep answering, long after any single funder has lost interest.

The Humility Test

Why, then, is the instinct always to fund solutions?

Because the people who will hold this wealth built things. They optimized systems, shipped products, watched effort convert into outcomes. That experience teaches a powerful lesson: hard problems yield to enough intelligence applied with enough rigor.

It is the wrong lesson here.

Building a powerful system teaches you nothing about how a society should govern it. Optimizing a process teaches you nothing about what a good society owes its members. These are not harder versions of engineering problems. They are different in kind.

This is what humility means in philanthropy - not modesty of ambition, but accuracy about the limits of one’s own expertise. The ability to build is not the ability to govern. Resources are not wisdom.

The sector rarely admits this. Philanthropy is built around certainty: strategies, theories of change, metrics, plans. Yet the advances that last have tended to come not from the certainty of powerful actors, but from institutions that leave room for learning, disagreement, and correction.

The arrival of AI wealth will test whether the sector can tell the difference between having resources and having wisdom.

The coming wave – if it arrives – will reshape philanthropy. The question is whether philanthropy sees itself as the architect of that future or its steward.

One path concentrates influence, however good the intentions behind it. The other accepts a smaller and more democratic aspiration: helping societies build the capacity to govern themselves in an age of extraordinary change.

The defining test of AI philanthropy will not be how much it gives away. It will be how much power it is willing to leave in the hands of others.

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Just a few weeks earlier, Santa Clara, where I live, had been one of the centers of the football world. Fans in jerseys crowded the streets. San Pedro Square in San Jose buzzed with watch parties. Even my layover in Newark felt like part of the tournament, with the airport full of supporters, matches playing on every screen, and conversations between strangers about who might win it all.

Now it was over.

The flags had come down. The crowds had dispersed. The TVs had moved on to baseball and the news. It was as if the World Cup had never been there.

Yet the more I thought about it, the more I realized that almost everything that makes the World Cup remarkable happens when no one is watching.

The tournament lasts only a month. The teams that compete in it are built over decades.

Every pass, every goal, and every dramatic upset rests on years of investment that most of us never see: youth academies, local leagues, coaches, referees, sports medicine, and football associations. By the time the opening whistle blows, much of the real work has already been done.

The World Cup does not create great teams. It simply reveals them.

Consider Spain, the eventual champions. Their success was not built during the tournament. It was the result of a football ecosystem developed over decades. Spain invested in youth development, coach education, and a shared football philosophy that runs through its system, from local academies to professional clubs and the national team. Players arriving at the highest level were not starting from scratch. They had spent years learning within a system designed to develop talent.

The trophy was the visible outcome. The real investment happened long before the final.

This is true across football. The strongest teams do not emerge simply because they discover exceptional players. They emerge because they create environments where talent can develop, where knowledge is shared, and where excellence becomes possible at scale.

No country becomes a football powerhouse by investing only in its national team. It needs the ecosystem that produces the national team.

***

Philanthropy has a similar choice.

There is real value in backing exceptional organizations and ambitious ideas. The world needs institutions capable of taking on complex challenges and achieving meaningful results.

The philanthropic sector has created mechanisms to support this kind of ambition. Initiatives such as MacArthur’s 100&Change and The Audacious Project have demonstrated what can happen when significant resources are concentrated behind bold ideas and organizations with the potential to create transformative change.

The question is not whether philanthropy should support exceptional organizations. It should.

The question is whether we invest enough in the systems that make exceptional organizations possible.

Philanthropy is increasingly beginning to recognize this distinction.

The Ford Foundation’s BUILD initiative was an example of investing beyond individual projects to strengthen institutions themselves. Through multi-year, flexible funding combined with organizational strengthening support, BUILD recognized that durable organizations require more than short-term project funding. They need the resources and stability to adapt, learn, and grow.

Similarly, the Think Tank Initiative (TTI) was a 10-year, multi-funder program that strengthened independent policy research organizations in low- and middle-income countries across Latin America, Africa, and South Asia by providing flexible core funding and institutional capacity support.

More recently, Wellcome’s Evidence Synthesis Infrastructure Collaborative (ESIC) reflects a field-building approach. Rather than simply funding individual pieces of research, it is investing in infrastructure hubs that strengthen the systems, capabilities, and networks needed to produce and use evidence effectively.

These investments recognize something important: fields need infrastructure.

They need institutions that train. Networks that connect. Intermediaries that support. Communities that share knowledge and build collective capacity.

Football has academies, coaching systems, leagues, and governing bodies. Fields of social change need their own equivalents.

There is another lesson hidden in the World Cup.

The teams we see competing on the global stage are not a random sample of countries. They are the result of decades of investment, infrastructure, and institutional development.

Some countries appear consistently because they have built systems that continuously develop talent. Brazil has appeared at every World Cup, while Germany, Argentina, Spain, and other football powers have become regular fixtures at the tournament. Their success is not simply the result of having talented players at a particular moment. It reflects generations of investment in football institutions, coaching, youth development, and competitive leagues.

The same pattern exists in philanthropy.

Organizations that repeatedly appear in competitive funding processes are often those that have had the opportunity to build the equivalent of football infrastructure.

They may have experienced leaders, strong governance systems, dedicated fundraising capacity, communications teams, institutional relationships, and years of experience navigating funder expectations.

By the time a funding opportunity opens, the competition has already begun.

For other organizations, particularly those that are smaller, newer, or closer to the communities where challenges are most acute, the barriers often come much earlier. They may have deep contextual knowledge and trusted relationships, but lack the unrestricted resources, networks, or institutional support needed to compete in a process designed around organizations that are already prepared for competition.

Talent exists everywhere. Opportunity does not.

This does not mean that the strongest organizations are undeserving of support. Just as the World Cup should celebrate the teams that reach the final, philanthropy should support organizations that demonstrate excellence.

But it should also ask a deeper question:

Who never made it onto the field?

And what investments would allow more organizations, from more places, to develop the capabilities needed to compete?

There is a second reason to build the field, and it has quietly become the more urgent one.

A great team can be beaten. You study it. You mark its stars. You plan for the one player who decides games. Concentrated strength is powerful, but it is also legible. And what is legible can be targeted.

Leave football for a moment.

If a single bee finds its way into your house, you deal with it. If a hive moves in, you are the one who leaves. Not because any one bee is stronger, but because there is nothing single to swat.

But a scattering of bees is not a hive. What makes a hive hard to defeat is not number. It is coordination. The comb, the shared defense, the capacity to keep working when part of it is lost.

That coordination is the ecosystem. The academies and networks and intermediaries again, seen from the other side. Not only what produces excellence, but what makes a field hard to take apart.

This matters now in a way it did not a few years ago.

The pressures facing social change are no longer events that a strong organization can out-fund. They are conditions. Civic space continues to narrow. Trust erodes. Funding retreats.

And when funding retreats, power does not stay where the need is greatest. It flows back toward whoever is large enough to outlast the drought, which is rarely those closest to the problem.

A single strong advocacy organization is a legible, ‘swattable’ target, and a networked field is not. The autocrat's move is to name one prominent, foreign-funded flagship, raid it, deregister it, smear it - cut off the head. A dense field of locally-rooted actors can't be delegitimized wholesale; you can't credibly call all of them foreign agents, and removing one doesn't stop the function. Similarly, in a low-trust, AI-saturated environment, concentrated authority is a liability - you only have to discredit one named source, and discrediting is cheap. A single marquee institution, a flagship fact-checker, "the experts," is the easiest possible target. Whereas distributed, interlocking, replicable evidence - many independent producers, plural verification, local knowledge institutions - is harder to discredit wholesale because trust isn't staked on one swattable node.

A champion can be beaten on the day. A field is harder to defeat, because there is no one to beat.

One reason field-building is difficult to fund is that its results are often invisible.

A national team can point to a trophy. A player can point to goals scored and matches won. A club can point to championships. These are visible achievements with clear moments of celebration.

Fields are different.

The impact of a stronger field is often distributed across many organizations, many years, and many people.

It appears in the researcher who was trained by a stronger institution. The policymaker who has access to better evidence. The organization that avoids repeating mistakes because it learned from peers. The emerging leader who found a community that invested in their growth.

There is no single trophy to lift.

This creates a challenge for philanthropy. It is often easier to tell the story of one organization changing the world than to explain how a network, intermediary, or professional community made dozens of organizations stronger.

Yet football teaches us that these investments are not optional.

The coach who develops players, the academy director who builds a pipeline of talent, and the local league that gives young athletes a place to compete may never receive the same recognition as the person who scores the winning goal. But without them, there is no winning goal.

The strongest philanthropic strategies recognize that we need both tournaments and academies. We need investments that back exceptional organizations and ambitious ideas. We also need investments that strengthen the ecosystems around them. We back champions for the concentrated force only they can bring. We build fields for the resilience no champion has alone.

The World Cup won’t be back for another four years, but when it comes around, perhaps we should ask a different question.

Not only: Who will win?

But also: What made it possible for this team to be here?

Philanthropy should ask itself the same question. The future of social change will not only depend on finding more winners. It will depend on building stronger fields where excellence can emerge from more places. Because no one wins the World Cup by investing only in the World Cup.

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Several years ago, during my time as a locally employed staff with USAID, I attended a refresher training in Crystal City, Virginia. Most of it has faded from memory. One concept stuck: inherently governmental functions.

The idea was simple. Governments can delegate a great deal. They rely on contractors, advisors, and local staff. They draw on expertise from well outside the formal chain of authority. But some functions cannot be delegated, because they involve the exercise of governmental judgment and accountability. Those decisions remain the responsibility of the institution itself.

At the time, the concept named something I had already lived. I held delegated authority. I managed relationships, offered technical advice, shaped program decisions, and had the trust of my colleagues. And still there were decisions I could not make - not because I lacked competence or judgment, but because of the position I occupied. Certain authorities belonged to the institution, not to me.

I often think about that training whenever I hear philanthropy talk about shifting power.

Few ideas have gained as much traction in the sector. Foundations promise to shift power to communities. Conferences convene around shared decision-making. Strategy documents call for participation, proximity, and local leadership. Power-shifting has become the sector’s preferred language for describing a more equitable future.

But I wonder if philanthropy faces a version of the dilemma I met at USAID.

We tend to speak about power as though it were a single object, something one actor can hand to another. In practice it is a bundle of authorities: the power to advise, to convene, to allocate resources, to define priorities, and ultimately to decide. Many of these can be shared. Some can be transferred outright. Others stay stubbornly attached to the institution.

A foundation can build participatory processes, elevate community voices, and devolve real parts of decision-making. But it still controls the endowment. It still defines the mission. It still appoints the board. And it still holds the authority to keep funding - or to walk away.

This is the uncomfortable possibility: philanthropy has its own inherently institutional functions - its own inherently funder functions - forms of authority that cannot be fully delegated without changing what a foundation is. If that is right, the question is not simply how to shift power. It is which powers are genuinely transferable, which remain embedded in the institution, and what accountability demands from those who continue to hold them.

Part of what makes this conversation confusing is that participation and power are often treated as the same thing. They are not.

Over the past decade, philanthropy has expanded participation in real ways. Communities are consulted on priorities. Grantees are invited into strategy. Participatory grantmaking has given local actors a direct voice in funding decisions. Advisory councils and co-creation processes have become common. These are meaningful changes, and many have challenged long-standing assumptions about who gets to shape a philanthropic agenda.

But participation and power operate on different levels. Participation lets people contribute to a decision. Power determines who owns it.

A community board can recommend. A panel can select. A coalition can help shape strategy. But if the foundation keeps the authority to reject the recommendation, redefine the priority, or end the funding, then ultimate power has not moved. It has only become harder to see.

This is not an argument against participation. Most foundations should probably go much further in sharing voice and influence than they do. The problem is what we conclude from it - when we treat a fuller table as proof that the table now belongs to everyone seated at it.

The more revealing question is not who participated. It is who can say no. Who can change the rules. Who can decide that a program ends, a strategy turns, or a relationship concludes. Those answers show where power sits more clearly than any governance diagram.

Consider what this looks like in practice.

A foundation decides to share its grantmaking. It convenes a panel of people close to the problem - organizers, researchers, practitioners, and community members who have lived the issue the portfolio is meant to address. The panel is not ceremonial. Its members read the proposals, debate them seriously, and rank them. The foundation has done the work of building this: recruiting carefully, paying people for their time, and structuring the deliberation so the loudest voice does not simply win. By any reasonable standard, this is participation done well.

The panel makes its selections. And then the recommendations go up - to a program officer, to a director, to a board that approves the docket.

Most of the time, nothing dramatic happens there. The recommendations are accepted. The grants go out. From the outside, it looks like power that has genuinely changed hands.

But notice what remains. The board still had to approve - which means the board could have declined. The foundation set the issue the panel was convened to address, decided how much money was in the room, and defined who counted as close enough to the problem to be invited. The panel exercised real judgment inside a frame it did not set and could not change. Its authority was delegated, and what is delegated can be withdrawn.

This is not a story about a foundation that betrayed its process. It is a story about a foundation that ran the process faithfully - and still never let go of the authority that made the process a gift rather than a transfer. The power to say no did not have to be used. It only had to exist. Held in reserve, unexercised, it was still the truest description of where authority sat.

That is what makes these functions inherently funder functions. Not that foundations refuse to share them, but that sharing them fully would mean ceasing to be the institution doing the sharing.

But identifying retained authority is only half the question. The harder issue is what legitimizes it.

It would be easy to take this as reassurance - some power is simply institutional, so there is only so much any funder can do. That reading gets the analogy exactly backward.

Inherently governmental functions are non-delegable for a reason. Government exercises them under accountability to a public: elections, courts, legislatures, the machinery through which those affected by a decision can contest it. The retained authority and the public accountability come together. One is the justification for the other.

Philanthropy keeps the retained authority and loses the public accountability. A foundation’s answerability runs inward - to a board, to the legal and fiduciary stewardship of charitable assets - not outward to the communities its decisions land on. The powers that are most inherently funder are precisely the ones exercised with the least external scrutiny. Agenda-setting - the authority to define the problem before anyone is consulted about the solution - is where funders hold the most leverage and face the least accountability.

So the analogy breaks in the place that matters most. What makes these functions non-transferable is their tie to accountability. And that is exactly where philanthropy is weakest.

Which turns the usual conclusion around.

If some powers genuinely cannot be transferred, the obligation attached to them should grow, not shrink. “We cannot hand this over” is not a reason to owe less. It is a reason to owe more - because the people affected by these decisions have no vote, no appeal, and no exit.

In practice that means making the retained authority visible instead of quiet. It means saying plainly where a decision was shared and where it was not, rather than letting participation stand in for a transfer that did not happen. It means putting the reasoning behind agenda-setting - why this problem, this framing, these people in the room - where someone outside the institution can see it and question it. It means an accountability that does not rest solely on a board answerable to no one further.

None of this eliminates the asymmetry. Institutions built to steward concentrated wealth will always hold power the people they serve do not. Legitimacy was never going to come from pretending otherwise.

The danger is not the funder who holds on to what could have been given away. It is the funder who treats “this power is ours to keep” as permission to account for it less. The powers a foundation cannot give away are the ones it should have to answer for most.

The views expressed here are my own and do not represent the positions of my employer.

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The rejection arrived in four sentences. The funder had received a high volume of excellent proposals. They had decided to move forward with applications that were more aligned with their current priorities. They were unable to provide individual feedback. They wished us well in our work.

I remember reading it twice, not because the language was ambiguous, but because I kept expecting more. I wasn’t expecting an apology or a lengthy explanation, just something that acknowledged the specific thing we had submitted. Something that showed someone had actually read our submission.

I think about that rejection quite often in my current role as a funder. I receive more requests than the program I work within can support. My organization operates on multi-year funding commitments within fixed strategy cycles, which means the grantee list does not refresh much between refreshes. When a new organization approaches me, the honest answer is often that we don’t have budget - not that their work isn’t compelling, not that the timing is wrong in a way that might change, but that the money is spoken for.

This creates a tension I have not always handled well.

There are meetings I have taken knowing I could not commit. The justification I have reached for in those situations is that funders offer more than money. We offer connections, intellectual thought partnership, and a signal of credibility to other funders. All of that is true. But it is also true that the primary tool we are known for is money, and that most organizations requesting a meeting are requesting it because they are hoping, at some point, that money will follow.

I have started declining some of those meetings. Not because the organizations are unworthy, but because I do not want to string them along. That decision is uncomfortable because it can feel like a dismissal when it is meant as a courtesy. But I have come to believe that occupying someone’s time and hope when you have no realistic path to funding is its own form of disrespect. It just wears a warmer face than the four-sentence rejection.

The harder version of this problem is not the initial meeting. It is the silence that accumulates as a grant cycle approaches its end.

I have been a grantee waiting to hear whether a grant would be renewed. The funder had not communicated. The end of the grant period was approaching. I interpreted the silence the way most grantees do: as a reasonable sign that things were proceeding normally, that renewal was likely, and that if there were a problem I would have heard something.

The problem arrived late. The grant would not be renewed. I was left managing staff contracts and organizational obligations on a compressed timeline, scrambling to adjust to news I had assumed, reasonably I thought, would have come sooner.

What I learned from that experience is that silence is never neutral in a funding relationship. Grantees are always interpreting it. And the default interpretation, at least in my case - that silence means continuation - is not unreasonable. It reflects how most functional relationships work: you hear about problems; the absence of problems means things are fine. Funders who rely on that assumption while privately deliberating about non-renewal are, perhaps without realizing it, deciding whose time and planning horizon matters more. Every funding relationship contains uncertainty. The question is not whether uncertainty exists, but where it sits. When funders delay decisions or communication, they often retain flexibility for themselves while transferring uncertainty to the organizations expected to absorb the consequences.

My organization has a policy on this. Program officers are expected to communicate well ahead of the end of a grant cycle if renewal is not being considered. The notice window is defined. The expectation is explicit. That policy exists because someone understood that the absence of a policy produces harm - not dramatically, not maliciously, but reliably.

That kind of policy is not standard across the sector. It should be.

The situations are not identical. A funder owes more to an existing grantee than to an applicant it has never funded. But they are connected by a common question: what do we owe people when we know the answer is likely no?

The four-sentence rejection I received was not cruel. The funder who sent it was probably managing a high volume of applications with limited staff time. The language was professionally courteous. Nothing about it was designed to hurt.

But here is what it communicated, beneath the courtesy: the effort you put in was not worth a specific response. We processed your application. We moved on. We wish you well.

I am not asking for lengthy feedback on every declined proposal. I understand the volume constraints. What I am asking for is something narrower: an acknowledgment that the organization on the other end of that rejection invested something real, and that the investment deserves more than a canned response.

That might mean a sentence that names something specific about the proposal. It might mean a brief explanation of what the funded proposals had in common, so that the applicant can orient themselves. It might mean a phone call for organizations that have reached a certain stage in the process. None of this is operationally impossible. Most of it requires will more than resources.

And for relationships that already exist - for grantees who have delivered on their commitments and built genuine trust - silence as a renewal strategy is not a neutral administrative choice. It is a decision to let the grantee bear the uncertainty that the funder is responsible for resolving.

The courtesy of a real no is not about softening rejection. It is about recognizing that the organizations going through these processes are not applicants in the abstract. They are institutions with staff, obligations, and plans built partly around the hope of a funder’s yes. When that yes does not come, they deserve to know it - specifically, promptly, and with enough honesty that they can learn something and plan accordingly.

Funders cannot always say yes. That constraint is real and, in most cases, legitimate. But the manner of the no is a choice. And in a sector that speaks often about partnership, trust, and the dignity of the communities it serves, the manner of the no is not a small thing.

It is, in fact, one of the clearest signals of whether the partnership was real.

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I had come from research and was not in a hurry to leave it. The interview process was straightforward, but I was unsure I would take the job. During contract negotiations I remember hesitating, partly because I was not fully ready to step away from what I was doing.

Then my future manager called.

We spoke for nearly two hours. I do not remember every detail, but I remember the tone clearly. He listened in a way that felt unusual. He did not treat my experience as a list of credentials, but as something he was trying to understand. He described how he thought about the work, where the organization was going, and how he saw my skills fitting into it. He made the role feel real in a way I had not managed to do for myself.

By the end of the call, something had shifted. I was still unsure about leaving my job, but I was no longer unsure about him. I joined in November 2010, mostly because I wanted to work with him.

A few weeks later, I learned he would be leaving the following summer. His time as a foreign service officer was ending, and with it his time in the role.

I remember an immediate loss of orientation. It was not only disappointment at losing a manager I respected, but confusion about how an institution could invest so much in selection and trust, only to rotate someone out just as working relationships were beginning to take shape.

At the time, it felt like a mistake.

Looking back, what I experienced as a personal disruption was part of a larger institutional logic. I did not yet have language for what bothered me beyond the personal. I experienced it as interruption: just as I was learning the work, the structure around it was about to change.

I also did not yet understand that this was not accidental. In that system, time-limited postings were not a flaw but a design feature. Foreign service officers built expertise quickly, contributed, and moved on.

Eventually, I came to see the logic more clearly. Some roles are intentionally structured to prevent permanence, even when individuals are effective. The aim is to preserve openness, prevent stagnation, and avoid concentrating authority in a single person or perspective.

I understood the logic. I still felt the loss.

Years later, after moving into philanthropy, I began to revisit that experience differently. The question of when grantmaking staff move on sits quietly beneath many funding systems, even if it is rarely made explicit.

From within philanthropy, these trade-offs often appear differently than they do to the organizations experiencing them.

Philanthropy complicates the picture. There is no clear training pipeline for program officers, and much of the work is learned through exposure to organizations, policy environments, and internal decision-making. Over time, people accumulate tacit knowledge that is difficult to formalize but central to judgment.

That accumulation matters. Experienced staff carry institutional memory, pattern recognition, and relationships built over years. In a field where context is everything and ideas recur in new forms, continuity is a real source of strength.

Continuity is often treated as expertise. The longer someone stays, the more they understand a field - its history, its patterns, its people. That knowledge is often indispensable.

Yet continuity also shapes judgment. Familiarity narrows what feels plausible. Networks crystallize. Certain organizations become reference points. Even when questioned, established theories of change quietly frame how new ideas are evaluated.

None of this happens suddenly. It accumulates slowly, which is why it is easy to miss.

This is where renewal enters the picture.

Continuity builds judgment, but it can also harden a point of view. Renewal - new people, new questions, new interpretations - is one of the few ways institutions reopen what has become too familiar to see.

That dynamic becomes most visible at the level of relationships.

Foundations need continuity to build judgment and trust. But they also need renewal to keep that judgment from narrowing. The difficulty is that renewal often travels through people and when people change, relationships can feel less secure from the outside.

Each time a program officer transitions, grantees genuinely worry about the continuity of their relationship with the funder. The standard reassurance is that their relationship is with the foundation, not the person. While that is true in principle, most organizations experience a foundation through their program officer. When that connective tissue breaks, there is justifiable reason to worry.

I experienced this firsthand. In my first weeks, I held introductory meetings with the grantees I had inherited from my predecessor. They needed reassurance that the change in personnel would not affect their relationship with the foundation. I could not, in good faith, guarantee that. I already knew my first major task would be to co-lead a strategy refresh.

Strategy refreshes are one way institutions renew. But when renewal arrives through leadership and staffing transitions, it can feel less like learning and more like instability to the organizations on the receiving end.

What I could stand behind was different: that if a relationship needed to end, it would be handled with care. And as in any serious strategy process, there are trade-offs. When we completed the refresh, we discontinued some lines of work. We ended some funding relationships - not because the organizations had failed, but because their work no longer aligned with the new direction. At the same time, new organizations came in, some of them relationships I had brought with me.

If program staff turn over too quickly, institutions lose memory. Relationships reset before they deepen. Lessons are only partially carried forward. In fields where change takes time, that loss is costly.

If they stay too long, what they see can narrow. Familiarity can replace fresh perception. Questions begin to reflect past experience more than present reality.

Continuity builds judgment. Renewal keeps judgment honest.

From inside, continuity feels like expertise; from outside, it can feel like inertia. Renewal can feel necessary internally, but externally it often feels like interruption - relationships reset just as trust is forming or the foundations for change are getting established.

There is no stable point where continuity delivers only its benefits. The same forces that create depth can also narrow what is visible. The same forces that enable renewal can also produce loss.

At a moment when philanthropic priorities are shifting more rapidly, and when organizations are being asked to navigate increasing uncertainty, this tension becomes more than an internal design question. It shapes whether the fields institutions support can plan, adapt, and sustain their work.

Seen this way, the question is not whether program staff should stay indefinitely or rotate more often. It is whether any single design choice can manage a tension built into the work itself.

What matters is not only whether people stay or leave, but whether the system regularly interrupts how judgment is formed. Without that interruption, even strong institutions risk confusing continuity of position with continuity of perspective. But renewal without memory produces its own kind of loss.

The question, then, is less about tenure than circulation: how ideas, people, and perspectives move through a system over time, and what prevents any single vantage point from becoming permanent by default.

The design challenge is how to create renewal without making partners pay the price of constant reset.

I sometimes return to my early experience in that organization, and to the manager who recruited me. At the time, his departure felt like a rupture. I had joined largely because of him, and his way of thinking gave shape to my early understanding of the work. His rotation felt less like policy than loss, just as continuity was beginning to form.

I now understand it differently. His departure was not personal but structural, part of a logic about how authority is held and moved. Without that logic, influence over resources and agendas can become too fixed, too dependent on individual relationships, too resistant to renewal.

And yet I still remember it not as a concept, but as a shift in orientation.

The system made sense. And still, something important was lost.

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Then I made an exception.

A larger organization invited us to join their consortium as a technical partner. Our role was specific: contribute our expertise to one component of the proposal. The lead organization was clear that we wouldn’t need to do much work. Much, I would learn, was subjective. I spent hours drafting and redrafting our technical contribution, and more hours reconstructing our past performance and reformatting CVs of proposed personnel. The proposal required five examples of relevant prior work, each with the name and contact information of someone who could verify it. Some of those people had moved on - from the organizations we had worked with, sometimes from the sector entirely. One was deceased. I tracked the four down anyway.

I had written requirements like these. It was only when I was the one doing the tracking that I began to wonder what, exactly, all of that effort was producing and for whom.

Every consortium that applied proposed to do roughly the same thing. That was not a failure of imagination - it was a consequence of how the requirements were written. What would separate one proposal from another was past performance and people: the credibility of what you had done before, and the quality of who you were proposing to do it again.

Everything else was compliance. The CVs formatted to a standard template. The project narratives organized according to prescribed sections. The assurances that yes, we would do what the funder wanted, none of which was especially novel. That work confirmed eligibility, it did not determine fit.

The weeks of preparation did not substantially improve the quality of what we submitted. What they produced, more than anything, was a record - a documented basis for decisions that the funder had already shaped by writing the requirements in the first place. In a system where applicants could appeal selection outcomes, that record mattered. It meant decisions could be defended, audited, and if necessary, explained to someone outside the room.

The rigor was partly epistemic and mostly institutional. The burden it placed on applicants was real. The improvement it produced in decision quality was marginal. What it reliably produced was cover for decisions that were, at every stage, an exercise of power.

Philanthropy has been moving in a different direction. The trend toward trust-based and relationship-driven grantmaking has simplified what applicants are asked to produce - shorter proposals, fewer requirements, less compliance overhead. That simplification is genuine and worth acknowledging.

But simplifying the process is not the same as simplifying the judgment. And it does not redistribute the power.

MacKenzie Scott’s giving is the most prominent example of where this logic leads when taken to its conclusion. Her approach involves no application, no published criteria, no process that organizations can engage with. Organizations are identified by an internal research team, vetted without their knowledge, and contacted with a gift. The only strategic lever available is visibility to the people doing that research. A recent analysis by Wayan Vota found it could describe who got funded but not why, because the decision criteria were never made visible.

Many organizations have hoped to receive Scott’s support, not only because of its size, but because of its quality. Unrestricted funding changes what organizations can do, how they plan, and what risks they can take. Those inside the relationship get flexibility. Those outside are more likely to receive restricted grants with reporting requirements and compliance overhead. The gap is not just about volume. It is about what kind of funding you can build a strategy around.

I know what both sides of that feel like. At the same organization where I spent hours reconstructing past performance for a government funding proposal, we also maintained relationships with funders who had already decided we were worth supporting. Those relationships were simpler. I preferred them.

But I also spent time trying to build new philanthropic relationships with funders whose work overlapped with ours, whose priorities seemed aligned, whose support would have mattered. I failed. Not because our work wasn’t good, but because we didn’t have the relationships. Our work wasn’t on their radar. Nobody within those networks endorsed us. Government funding processes, for all their burden, were at least theoretically open - you could apply, take your chances, make your case. The trust-based world had no equivalent entry point for an organization that hadn’t yet found its way into the right networks. That is not just an access problem, it is a power problem - one that the language of trust and simplicity does not always acknowledge.

In government funding, a disappointed applicant could at least - in theory - contest the outcome. In invitation-based philanthropy, the decision happened before the applicant was visible as an applicant at all. And unlike a competitive process that resets with each cycle, the relationships that determine visibility can persist for decades. Term limits on grantmaking staff are uncommon, which means the program officer whose network shapes who gets invited today may be shaping those same decisions ten or fifteen years from now. For an organization on the outside, there may be no later.

The language used to justify these decisions is usually strategic. Organizations are selected because they align with stated objectives, because they operate in priority geographies, because their approach reflects the funder’s theory of change. In a field where many organizations are doing similar work with relatively similar approaches, that framing raises a question worth considering: what is strategic alignment really doing?

In a crowded space, it serves less as a filter and more as a rationale. The judgment has already been made. Strategic alignment is the language used to explain it afterward - to the organization being invited, to colleagues, and sometimes to oneself.

What is really operating in that moment is much harder to name. Pattern recognition, probably. Familiarity, possibly. The accumulated sense that this organization, this leader, this framing of the problem is credible - built through conferences, convenings, and the slow accumulation of reputation in a fairly small world. That is not illegitimate. But it is not neutral, and it is not apolitical. It advantages organizations already visible in the networks where program officers spend their time - which is not always the same as the organizations doing the most important work. That advantage is not incidental. It is how power quietly reproduces itself in philanthropic practice.

The honest version of strategic alignment, in a crowded field, is often something closer to: this organization fits how I already think about this problem. That is a judgment call. It is also an act of power. It deserves to be examined as such - not because program officers are acting in bad faith, but because the system offers them almost no structural incentive to examine it at all.

I have sat on both sides of this. I designed processes that demanded weeks of effort from applicants and reviewed the submissions that resulted. I tracked down counterparts who had moved on to satisfy requirements I had once written. I now work in a system that has dispensed with much of that machinery - where the judgment happens earlier, more quietly, and with less documentation demanded of potential applicants.

The process changed more than the judgment did. The burden shifted. The visibility decreased. The person making the call remained.

Program officers hold more power than the language of strategy usually acknowledges. We decide who is worth a conversation, whose framing of a problem is legible, whose past performance is credible enough to warrant an invitation. Those decisions are made with partial information, shaped by networks and familiarity, and rarely examined with the same rigor we apply to the work we fund. The system does not require us to examine them.

That is not an argument for returning to formatted CVs and reconstructed project histories. It is an argument for honesty about what replaced them and what didn’t.

We had prepared slides, rehearsed our narrative of progress, anticipated the questions we might be asked, and organized our update into something legible and defensible. When we joined the call, they glanced at the deck and suggested we set it aside. Not because the work didn’t matter, but because they wanted to understand it differently.

They asked what was challenging us, what questions we were surfacing, and what connections would be useful. I remember the slight disorientation of that moment, the mental gear-shift required when the meeting you prepared for turns out not to be the meeting you’re in. We had organized ourselves for inspection, they had come for a conversation.

It took me a moment to realize those are not the same thing. And that, in most funding relationships, they are rarely confused.

Over the months that followed, our check-ins were rarely about deliverables. They were about the work beneath the work, the questions we were navigating and the things we were learning that did not yet fit neatly into a progress update. Their role, as they seemed to understand it, was not to oversee but to strengthen.

I did not fully appreciate at the time how unusual this was. I assumed, with the naivety of someone who had not yet seen enough of the philanthropic sector, that this was simply how thoughtful funders showed up.

I was wrong.

The next program officer I worked with requested slides ahead of our first meeting. The agenda was clear: introductions, progress update, working norms, including meeting cadence and communication expectations. It was organized, professional, and entirely normal. I did not experience it as a warning sign. I recognized it as standard practice, because I had practiced it myself.

Earlier in my career, I worked for a bilateral funding agency where directive behavior was simply how things were done. We set agendas, requested updates, and asked grantees to justify their approaches and account for slow progress. I did not experience this as controlling. It was the culture I had absorbed, the professional language I had learned to speak. And so when the second program officer requested slides and proposed weekly check-ins, nothing felt wrong. It felt like the sector, because it was the sector.

What the first program officer had given me, without my fully appreciating it at the time, was a glimpse of something different. Not a radical departure from philanthropy as it should be practiced, but a quiet demonstration of what becomes possible when a program officer uses their latitude differently.

The question I have been sitting with since those interactions is not why the second program officer behaved the way they did. That behavior had a logic I recognized from inside funding spaces. The harder question is what produced the first one and why what they did felt like an anomaly rather than something I should have expected.

Philanthropy is unusual in that almost nobody trains for it directly. People arrive from government, academia, implementing organizations, consulting, bringing habits shaped by different incentives, relationships to power, and definitions of good performance. Without deliberate onboarding into a different way of working, those habits tend to persist.

It would be easy to conclude that the solution is hiring people with experience on the implementing side. But experience alone is not enough. The second program officer had worked for a grantee organization before joining their foundation. They had sat on the other side of the table. And yet the habits they brought into their funder role were indistinguishable from those of someone who had never examined what that experience taught them about power.

Moving from implementer, consulting, government, or academia to funder is a significant shift, and without deliberate attention it can produce its own distortions, including a desire to demonstrate value in a role where the most valuable thing you can often do is step back.

What the first program officer had, and what their institution seemed to cultivate, was not a different background but a different set of questions: What do I actually know about this work compared to the people doing it? Where is my judgment useful and where is it a liability? What does good support look like from the other side?

Those are not questions the sector tends to ask systematically. They tend to surface, if at all, in institutions that have chosen to build a culture around them, treating humility not as a personality trait but as a practice. Most foundations have not made that choice explicitly. In the absence of deliberate culture, inherited habits fill the gap.

None of this absolves individuals.

Institutional culture shapes behavior, but it does not determine it. Program officers always have latitude, in how they open a meeting, what questions they ask, how they respond to slow progress, and whether they treat a grantee’s judgment as something to interrogate or trust. What they do with that latitude is a choice, even when the culture around them is not asking them to examine it.

This matters more than it might appear. Most organizations experience a foundation less as an institution and more as a person. Two grantees working with the same foundation, under the same guiding principles, can have entirely different experiences depending on who their program officer is. Culture sets the conditions, but what happens in the room still depends on the individual who walks into it.

I know this from personal experience. At the bilateral funder where I worked earlier, the culture was directive and the practices were constraining. I enforced them, even when I knew some were limiting the impact of the organizations we funded, partly because that was what the institution required, and partly because I had not yet developed the habit of asking what my choices cost the people on the other side.

That is harder to admit than pointing at institutional culture. It is also more honest.

What the first program officer demonstrated was that the default is not inevitable. Their institution had built a culture that asked different questions and rewarded different behaviors. But they still had to choose to practice it, to arrive curious rather than evaluative, to set aside the slides, and to ask what connections would be useful. Culture creates conditions, individuals still act.

I am not a model program officer. I am not sure such a thing exists. What I try to do is simpler: to learn, unlearn, and improve, aware that the habits I carry from earlier in my career do not disappear simply because I now sit on a different side of the table.

In practice, this means discouraging slides as much as I can. It means making myself available for check-ins without imposing them, which sometimes feels uncomfortably close to dereliction of duty in a sector that tends to equate visibility with engagement. It also means spending time before conversations thinking not about what I need to know for accountability, but about what connections might be useful and what questions I am genuinely curious about.

The conversations that result are less about updates and more about what is proving harder than expected, what is being learned, and what sits beneath the surface of the funded work. What I did not anticipate is that this has produced more regular check-ins than a structured cadence would have, not because I required them, but because the relationship created space for them. Grantees reach out when something is worth discussing, not because a calendar demands it.

I still notice the pull of old habits, the instinct to ask for an update, the discomfort of not knowing exactly where things stand, the pressure to demonstrate that oversight is happening. I do not always resist these instincts perfectly.

But I have seen what the alternative can look like. I sat across from it in that first check-in, when someone set aside my slides and asked what was challenging us instead. At the time, it felt unusual. I did not yet have a language for why. I do now.

Over the past few years, a growing ecosystem of advice has emerged to help organizations become more “fundable” and “findable.” This ecosystem spans a wide range: grant writers and fundraising consultants who help organizations craft competitive proposals; capacity builders funded by grantmakers themselves to strengthen grantee practice; coaching and training programs that teach nonprofit leaders how to cultivate funder relationships; and a growing cohort of online educators and LinkedIn influencers who have built audiences around demystifying philanthropic language and culture. Others run established firms with foundation clients on both sides of the relationship – advising grantees on how to navigate systems while advising funders on how to design them.

In some ways this ecosystem resembles a class of whisperers: people who have learned to interpret what funders mean rather than what they say, and whose fluency is treated as expertise. Some of the most sought-after advisors in this space are former philanthropic insiders – people who accumulated interpretive knowledge on one side of the table and now sell access to it from the other. That their expertise is in demand tells us something - not about the skill of the practitioners, but about the system that made the skill necessary.

Because the scale of this advice economy is itself a kind of evidence. When entire careers are built around translating what funders really mean - what they value, how they assess risk, which signals matter - it suggests that ambiguity is not incidental. It is structural. And the question that is worth asking is not how to navigate it more skillfully, but who decided the burden of navigation should fall here in the first place.

The dominant framing places responsibility squarely on grant seekers. If funding is elusive, the assumption goes, organizations need to improve their strategy, sharpen their messaging, or better understand what funders want. Adaptation is treated as a core organizational competency.

But this framing quietly normalizes something else: the idea that grantmakers do not have a corresponding obligation to be legible.

Much of the advice offered to organizations assumes that funders are fixed. Their preferences are treated as neutral facts, and the task is to align with them as effectively as possible. But funders are not static audiences. They are institutions that design processes, choose language, and shape incentives, sometimes without seeing how these choices are experienced from the outside.

Ambiguity is sometimes defended as flexibility. Silence is framed as openness. But in practice, both tend to advantage those with proximity and prior exposure.

The result is a quiet asymmetry. Organizations are expected to learn how to interpret funders, while funders are rarely expected to learn how they are being interpreted. When being fundable becomes a primary skill, organizations begin to optimize for legibility rather than insight. But adaptation should not be a one-way obligation.

There is a particular irony worth naming. Some of the same funders who sustain this advice economy – paying consultants and capacity builders to help grantees navigate philanthropic language – are the same institutions whose ambiguity made that navigation necessary in the first place. The intent is generous. But funding the translation of a language you wrote is not the same as writing it more clearly.

Funders who treat ambiguity as flexibility are making a choice about who carries the interpretive burden. That choice may be unconscious. It is rarely examined. But it is still a choice - and it has a cost that does not show up in any grant report: the work that never got proposed, the risk that never got taken, or the question that stayed unasked because it couldn’t be translated into language the system would recognize.

When I worked at an organization dependent on philanthropic and government funding, we were selective about which competitive opportunities we pursued. We won some and lost many. Looking back at the wins, one pattern stood out: we had either worked with the funder before, or we were a sub-partner on a larger bid - contributing technical ideas while a bigger organization, with existing contracts and years of relationship history, led the proposal.

At the time, I read this as a question of organizational capacity. We were smaller, newer to certain spaces, still building our track record. But over time I came to see it differently. The larger organizations weren’t just better resourced. They knew how to read the system. They understood which parts of a requirement were fixed and which were negotiable, which risks a particular agency would tolerate, and how to frame ideas in language that felt native to that funder’s way of thinking. We contributed the substance. They supplied the fluency.

That asymmetry has a name, though the sector rarely uses it. I now think of it as philanthropic literacy.

Not literacy in the conventional sense, but the ability to interpret how funders think and decide. It includes recognizing which questions matter most, how risk is interpreted, and how particular phrases signal alignment even when they appear neutral on the page. A line like “strong leadership” or “a clear theory of change” can carry very different expectations depending on how a funder has used those terms before and whether an organization has learned, through experience, how they tend to be read.

Like many forms of literacy, it is rarely taught directly. It tends to accumulate slowly through repeated interaction. Organizations develop it after years of engaging with the same institutions, observing which proposals advance, how feedback is framed, and which trade-offs are rewarded. What once felt ambiguous becomes easier to interpret. Silences and omissions begin to speak.

Unfortunately, this kind of literacy does not accumulate evenly. Organizations that have worked with a funder before often develop an intuitive sense of how that institution thinks. Signals that might appear vague to others become legible through familiarity. For organizations encountering the same funder for the first time, the experience can be very different. Ambiguity may feel like openness. Silence may appear neutral. Decisions that seem predictable to some appear opaque to others.

What looks like experience, however, is often proximity. What looks like intuition is often repetition.

None of this is usually intentional. The conditions that produce philanthropic literacy - risk aversion, the myth of flexibility as openness, the simple fact that grantmakers can afford to be misunderstood - are worth examining on their own. What matters here is what they produce.

Funding processes are often designed to be fair by treating all applicants the same. But when interpretive knowledge is unevenly distributed, equal procedures do not necessarily create equal footing. What appears neutral on paper can quietly reward familiarity. Organizations with prior exposure are better positioned to read between the lines - not because they are more capable, but because they have learned how this particular system speaks.

And so something subtle begins to happen. Organizations become skilled not only at understanding the systems they are trying to change, but also at understanding the institutions that fund the work. Success begins to depend partly on interpretive skills - knowing how to respond to what is said, and just as importantly, to what is not.

Quietly, the field becomes fluent in philanthropy's silences. Once that language exists, it begins to shape behavior. Organizations learn which signals matter and how to respond to them. Certain risks are avoided. Some questions remain unasked. Proposals grow more careful, sometimes more cautious.

The danger is not simply that some organizations learn this language better than others. It is that the field gradually begins to reward fluency in it. A sector organized around solving complex problems can end up directing a surprising amount of collective intelligence toward interpreting funders rather than understanding the systems those funds are meant to change.

The document contained draft responses to questions submitted by potential applicants to a request for proposals I had helped prepare. At the time, the exercise felt routine. Applicants had asked dozens of questions, and our job was to respond clearly and consistently before the submission deadline.

Reading the document again years later, I noticed something I had not fully appreciated then.

What I was seeing had a name I did not yet have at the time. I have since come to think of it as philanthropic mystique: a condition in which the real criteria for funding decisions remain only partially visible - implied through tone, emphasis, and omission rather than stated directly. It is not the same as simple opacity because opacity is a closed door. Mystique is a door left slightly ajar, inviting interpretation while withholding enough that only some applicants can read what lies beyond. It rarely emerges from indifference. More often, it is caution - a desire to be fair, to avoid steering, to preserve the appearance of openness. Sometimes it is something more structural: foundations operate under reputational pressures, board scrutiny, and concerns about being seen as endorsing the wrong actors or ideas. In that context, specificity can feel like exposure. Broad, elastic language preserves discretion. Ambiguity becomes a protective layer - not because funders want to mislead, but because clarity carries its own risks. But its effects are real, and they are not evenly distributed.

The questions themselves clustered into predictable categories. Some asked about scope -geographies and target populations. Others sought clarity on programmatic boundaries or approaches. Some focused on monitoring, learning, and adaptive management. Others addressed application structure and compliance. A final set tried to understand how proposals would actually be assessed.

In many ways, our responses were strong.

We were administratively clear. We explained page limits, eligibility rules, annexes, and geographic flexibility with authority. Applicants could easily see what would make a proposal non-compliant. We also emphasized flexibility and co-development, signaling that technical approaches and geographic focus could evolve through collaboration after selection.

But another pattern became visible on rereading the document.

Many answers were careful but they were also non-answers. When applicants asked practical design questions, we often referred them back to earlier responses or general sections of the RFP. We avoided signaling strong preferences about how proposals would be judged or which trade-offs mattered most. Even when questions touched on substantive issues, such as the role of nutrition-sensitive agriculture or the meaning of district saturation, our responses stayed high level.

At the time, this restraint felt responsible. It preserved procedural fairness and avoided steering applicants too directly.

Looking back, I see something else.

Organizations with prior experience working with us - those who had been through earlier rounds, who had relationships with program staff, who had absorbed the same unstated preferences in other spaces - would have recognized the signals. For them, our responses were incomplete in ways they knew how to complete. For organizations newer to the field, or to this institution, the signals were largely unreadable. They were left to optimize for what felt safest rather than what they truly believed. The playing field was not level, and our commitment to procedural neutrality had done little to change that. If anything, it had obscured the tilt.

This is where mystique takes hold. When expectations remain only partially visible, organizations begin to optimize for interpretation rather than insight. They try to decode what the funder might reward: which phrases feel safest, which approaches carry the least risk, which uncertainties are better left unspoken. Proposals grow more cautious and dissent softens. Learning is reframed as success. Energy that could be spent grappling with complex systems is redirected toward guessing how decisions will be made.

It is like trying to cook from an incomplete recipe. The ingredients are listed, but key instructions are missing. How long should something cook? What texture are you aiming for? What trade-offs matter if time or ingredients are limited? Experienced cooks may infer the answers from context while others are left guessing. And only the cook bears the cost if the dish falls flat, while the author of the recipe remains elsewhere, tasting only the final result.

Over time, this shapes behavior across the field. Innovation becomes cautious. Proposals begin to resemble one another. Organizations learn, quietly, that success depends as much on interpreting funders as on understanding the realities they are trying to change.

The irony is that much of the philanthropic and development sector now speaks openly about shifting power. Yet mystique quietly preserves it. When expectations remain implicit, it is grantees - not funders - who absorb the cost of uncertainty. And the cost falls hardest on those with the least accumulated knowledge of how a particular funder thinks.

Funders hold power because they control resources. Humility does not require pretending otherwise. In fact, humility may require acknowledging that power openly and using it responsibly.

One way to do that is through clarity - though not the kind that scripts answers or narrows the range of acceptable ideas. Clarity in this sense means reducing unnecessary guesswork about how power is exercised. It often appears in small, specific choices: naming which questions matter most; being explicit about trade-offs; explaining how decisions will be made, not just who will make them. It means distinguishing between flexibility in design and silence about how power will be exercised. Flexibility can coexist with guidance. When preferences remain entirely implicit, flexibility becomes something only the experienced can use well - and what looks like openness quietly becomes another form of advantage for those who already know how the game is played.

Clarity also involves narrating power rather than pretending it is absent. Funders can acknowledge real constraints - board mandates, risk tolerance, time horizons, budget limits - instead of allowing them to operate invisibly. When constraints are named, organizations can design accordingly. When they are hidden, organizations compensate through speculation.

None of this guarantees better ideas. But it does change where effort is directed - toward the substance of the work rather than the decoding of signals.

I have since come to think of philanthropic mystique in simple terms: it is what happens when organizations spend more time interpreting funders than understanding the systems they are trying to change. The cost is not just wasted effort. It is a field that learns, slowly and without quite noticing, to prize legibility to power over honest engagement with the problems it set out to solve.

Humility in philanthropy begins with recognizing this dynamic and choosing clarity instead.

When I look back at that old document now, I can see the care we took to be fair and compliant. I can also see the ambiguity we left behind - and who it left behind with it. The organization we eventually selected had worked with us before. They knew how to read the silences. I am not sure that is a coincidence.

Like an incomplete recipe, the choices we leave unspoken shape how the work unfolds - and who bears the taste of success or failure.

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I enjoy hosting. It is one of the small pleasures of my life - preparing food for people I care about, watching a meal come together, and making space for conversation. But enjoying something is not the same as being good at it, a distinction I learned the hard way when a guest, at my invitation, expressed a preference for chocolate cake.

I had never made one before, but I agreed anyway.

What emerged from the oven was not a cake. It was something between a brownie and a cookie - dense, flat, structurally confused. I had overmixed the batter and left it in the oven slightly too long. Two mistakes, compounding each other. I could have frosted it, covered the evidence with a generous layer of cream cheese, and called it intentional. Instead I served it as it was: a chocolate mess, presented honestly, reframed as fudge.

What I did not yet understand was that chocolate cake resists the baker in ways that other baking does not. I could make banana bread without much trouble. Carrot cake came together reliably. I assumed competence in one area would transfer cleanly to another. It did not. Chocolate cake required something different, a more patient attentiveness to what the ingredients actually needed rather than what I expected them to do. Cocoa, I later learned, is stubborn. It does not reveal much about itself until it meets the right conditions.

I have thought about that cake often in my work in philanthropy. Not because the stakes are comparable (they are not) but because the mistake is familiar.

What Cocoa Needs to Bloom

Philanthropy has placed increasing emphasis on identifying “what works.” The impulse is understandable. Resources are certainly limited. Funders want to know that their money is making a difference. Experimentation, randomized trials, and cost effectiveness analyses emerged as ways to make aid more accountable and grounded in evidence. In many ways, this has been a healthy shift.

But like many good ideas, it can create blind spots. When the focus becomes identifying clear, replicable answers, we start to assume complex problems will yield to the right experiment or model. “What works” subtly suggests that solutions are hidden in plain sight, waiting to be discovered, measured, and scaled. Yet systems rarely behave that neatly.

Cocoa does not reveal itself in isolation. It needs fat, acid, and heat, contact with the right conditions, before it blooms into something with depth and complexity. Examined on its own, sitting in a bowl, it offers very little information about what it is capable of.

The same is true of systems change. The most important shifts - in how decisions get made, how institutions adapt, how communities experience policy in practice - become visible only in contact with real conditions: in the relationship between a practitioner and a government counterpart, in the slow accumulation of trust that makes a difficult conversation possible, and in the way a room changes when the right people are in it.

Extract them from their context and measure them in isolation, and you lose precisely what makes them meaningful. Yet that is often what funders ask for: evidence that travels cleanly, that can be reported upward, and that confirms progress on a timeline the work itself does not keep.

The deeper problem with the results obsession is that it privileges what can be counted over what really counts. Things that are easy to measure get funded. Things that are harder to measure - trust, relationships, narrative change, the quiet shift in what a community believes is possible - get undervalued, or translated into proxies that never quite capture them. The proxy becomes the goal. Eventually, the goal recedes.

This is not a problem that tighter measurement solves. It is a problem that only humility addresses, the willingness to accept that some of what matters most will not be visible on your terms, on your timeline, through your instruments. Understanding may arrive in fragments. Evidence may be partial. The change you funded may be real and significant and entirely resistant to the dashboard you built to capture it.

Like cocoa in a bowl, what a system is capable of cannot always be seen from the outside. It requires the right conditions, the right contact, and enough patience to let the process unfold before drawing conclusions.

The Baker Doesn’t Always Eat the Cake

Even after I learned how to bake a proper chocolate cake, how to handle the batter with care, and how to read the signs that the process was working, I still do not eat it. I am lactose intolerant.

I bake it for others. My reward is entirely in watching them eat it. Sometimes the cake is gone before I have looked closely at whether it rose the way I intended. I learn what worked from the response of the people at the table, not from my own experience of the thing I made.

Funders operate in much the same way. We provide resources, shape opportunities, and sometimes influence design, but we rarely live with the outcomes. The practitioners and communities closest to the work experience the change most directly. Our understanding of whether it worked comes secondhand, mediated by reports and site visits, and the accounts of people whose experience we can never fully inhabit.

That distance is uncomfortable. It generates the anxiety that produces too many metrics, too many requests for reassurance, and too much pressure on grantees to confirm that progress is happening on a schedule that suits the funder rather than the work. The discomfort is real. But the response to it - tightening control, demanding visibility, or extracting evidence on your own terms - does not close the distance. It just makes the cake worse.

Our satisfaction cannot come from owning the outcome or from certainty that our fingerprints are visible on the final product. In that sense, the funder is not the hero of the story. At best, we are partners in it. The work itself belongs to the people who live with the system day to day, the practitioners, public servants, and communities who must interpret ideas in real conditions.

Humility in philanthropy may mean accepting that this distance is not a design flaw to be engineered away. It is the nature of the role. Our satisfaction has to come from knowing that the conditions were right, that the people closest to the work had what they needed, that their judgment was trusted, and that the process was given space to unfold.

Chocolate cake taught me that some things resist the baker until the baker learns to resist themselves. The same may be true of systems change and of the funders who are asked, in the end, to support work they will never fully see and outcomes they will never directly taste.

That is not a consolation. That is the job.

Thank you for being here. If you just found my Substack, this essay is the latest in a series of reflections on philanthropy, systems change, and power, drawing on personal experience to examine the roles funders and practitioners play in shaping change. Here are the rest of the articles in this series:

• When the Funder Doesn’t Fit the Image

• Let the Cake Bake

• Whose Role Is It Anyway?

• Who Holds the Pen

• What Lived Experience Means to Me

For me, lived experience is not a credential and it is not a performance. It is memory. It is contrast. It is the accumulation of how policies actually land in a household.

I grew up in rural Malawi. My mother was a small-scale farmer. In the early decades after independence, President Hastings Kamuzu Banda introduced subsidized farm inputs coupled with a credit facility, designed to help farmers like her grow enough food to feed their families and sell a surplus.

On paper, it was transformative.

I remember the conversations at our dinner table about fertilizer and seed before the start of every farming season. I remember the expectation that this was what government was meant to do. Support those who worked the land. Provide a bridge between effort and security.

But my mother never received the financing. Her name was submitted for consideration. She was clearly eligible. The promise by the state was public. And yet, the credit never arrived.

She received no formal explanation. Just the quiet understanding that something, somewhere in the chain, had failed. As a child, you do not call it a delivery failure. You simply learn that sometimes help that is meant for you does not reach you.

Years later, I encountered a different version of the state.

A government student loan program was operating effectively. I applied. My paperwork was processed. The funds came through, enabling me to attend college.

I still remember the relief in that moment. Not just financial relief, but something steadier. A sense that the system, this time, had worked as described. That eligibility had translated into access. That the distance between intention and impact had narrowed enough to change a life.

In one generation, in one family, I experienced both exclusion and access: a policy that dissolved before it reached us, and a policy that arrived and altered my trajectory.

Those two experiences, exclusion and access, both vivid and instructive, eventually pulled me toward the work itself. I spent years inside public systems and later moved into philanthropy, in both cases trying to close the distance between what policies promise and what they deliver.

I have seen how complex implementation is. I understand budget constraints, political tradeoffs, administrative bottlenecks. I know how fragile delivery can be.

Lived experience, for me, is the combination of these vantage points. It is knowing what it feels like when your family qualifies but is left out. It is also knowing what it feels like when the state functions and opens a door.

That dual awareness follows me into the closed rooms I have written about before. In those rooms, roles are often assigned implicitly. The technical expert. The strategist. The funder. The skeptic.

Rarely do we name the quiet role some of us carry: witness.

Witness to when systems fail. Witness to when they function. Witness to the fragile chain that connects policy to person.

When I sit at long tables discussing strategy and scale, I am not only evaluating frameworks and evidence. I am carrying the memory of my mother waiting for financing that never came. I am also carrying the memory of a loan officer who processed my application correctly and quietly altered my future.

Those memories change the questions I ask. They make me probe how eligibility will be verified, who holds discretion, and what recourse exists when delivery falters. They make me wary of celebrating commitments without interrogating implementation.

At the same time, they anchor my belief that public systems can work. I have lived both outcomes.

None of this gives me a monopoly on insight. Others in those rooms carry histories just as formative, different vantage points, different forms of witness. What I am claiming is narrower: that certain experiences, when brought into contact with technical and institutional knowledge, generate questions neither alone would produce. That is the intersection I try to steward.

I carry it as witness, and it disciplines how I do the work: in the questions I won’t let drop, in the discomfort I feel when implementation is treated as a footnote, and in asking not whether a policy or program exists, but whether it arrives.

I first took an interest in baking while living in Malawi. Like many beginners, I relied on recipes I found online. The problem was not commitment or skill. It was that most of those recipes were not written for my kitchen.

Measurements were in cups and tablespoons. Temperatures were in Fahrenheit. Ingredients were assumed to be readily available. Even the language used to describe techniques was unfamiliar.

Malawi uses the metric system. Many ingredients common in US kitchens are hard to find. I spent a lot of time converting units, substituting ingredients, and looking up what instructions actually meant in practice. I could usually make the recipe work, but only by translating it.

Now that I live in the US, those same recipes feel effortless. The ingredients are there. The units make sense. The ovens behave as expected. The recipes did not change. The environment did.

That experience reshaped how I think about systems change: our attempts to shift how things work day to day - how governments make decisions, how public money is managed, how policies move or stall, once they leave the page. For those of us who fund, design, or implement this kind of work, that distinction matters.

Many reform ideas are written as if they should work anywhere. When they do not, we often point to poor execution or lack of skill. We ask whether people followed the plan. We ask whether capacity was sufficient. We ask less often whether the idea itself assumed a very different setting to begin with.

Adaptation is the work

When baking in Malawi, I constantly had to adapt.

I could not find certain ingredients. I converted measurements from cups to grams. I adjusted oven temperatures. I watched videos to understand unfamiliar terminology. I interpreted the recipe at every step. That interpretation was not a failure to follow instructions, it was how I made the recipe usable.

Changing how systems work follows the same pattern. New ideas rarely arrive ready to plug in. Practitioners reshape them to fit how decisions are made, how authority is exercised, and how work gets done day to day.

This kind of adjustment is often invisible, but it is also where real change happens. Too often, we treat adaptation as drifting away from the plan rather than as the work itself. Practitioners get judged against blueprints that never quite fit. Funders can mistake visible compliance for meaningful progress.

Systems do not change because people follow instructions religiously. They change because people exercise judgment in real conditions.

From adaptation to authorship

My baking only really changed when I stopped treating the cookbook as authoritative. Not in a reckless way - I still paid attention to ratios, to technique, to why certain things work. But I started asking different questions. Not “how do I make this recipe work here?” but “what do I actually want to make, with what I have, for the people I’m cooking for?”

That shift was small in practice but significant in effect. I started noticing which local ingredients added something the original recipe hadn’t anticipated. I stopped apologizing for substitutions and started making them deliberately. The recipes I developed from that place were not adaptations of something else. They were mine - shaped by my kitchen, my context, and the particular tastes of the people eating at my table.

That shift is possible in systems change too, but it is rarer than it should be. Most reform ideas are still written far from the systems they seek to change. Practitioners do remarkable work translating them - reading the context, adjusting the design, making things work in conditions the original authors never imagined. But translation, however skilled, starts with someone else’s question. It begins inside a frame that was built elsewhere, often by people who have never worked in that kitchen.

The difference that matters is not whether local people are involved, but at what point they enter the process. There is a meaningful gap between being invited to execute a design and being present when the problem is first named. Who decides what is broken? Who determines what a good outcome looks like, and for whom? Those are the moments where the recipe gets written - and they happen long before implementation begins.

For funders, this means something more demanding than allowing flexibility. It means resourcing the work that happens before the proposal: the local reading of what is going wrong, the conversations that surface what people already know, and the slow process of building a design from the ground up rather than importing one and hoping it travels. That earlier work is rarely funded because it is hard to evaluate and does not resemble a deliverable. But it is where authorship either becomes possible or gets foreclosed.

For practitioners, it means something different too. The judgment embedded in adaptation is real expertise and a form of knowledge - not a workaround. The step from adaptation to authorship is claiming that knowledge openly: not just adjusting the imported design but saying what you would build if you were starting from your own kitchen.

Recipes are always written for someone. The work of systems change is deciding who gets to hold the pen.

I was reminded of this in a recent discussion among funders and practitioners about locally-led approaches to improving education and policy outcomes in Africa. The language was collaborative. The intentions, by most accounts, were good. And then one participant spoke openly about their hesitation.

They affirmed the importance of supporting proximate scholars, but questioned whether there was meaningful research capacity in Africa. Another participant echoed the concern, suggesting that African scholars were not equipped to use advanced research methods and therefore could only be fully trusted to lead research that informs major education policy reforms within their own countries in collaboration with their northern peers.

In another conversation, different room, similar tone, a collaborator spoke just as confidently about African governments. All 54 of them, they argued, did not have the interests of their people at heart. The most responsible role for external actors, in their view, was to support efforts that counter governments and keep them in check.

Neither statement was framed as controversial. Both were offered as realism. And in both spaces, there was a pause - the familiar kind that follows when the quiet part is said out loud and lands among the people it describes. That pause is the moment a familiar burden appears, when someone in the room is implicitly tasked with defending a people, a continent, or a set of institutions against claims so broad they barely register as claims at all.

That burden is rarely formalized and rarely acknowledged. It shows up in the extra calculations required: who among the Africans in the room will speak next, what can they safely say, and how much context should they provide to prevent misrepresentation. It arrives as mental labor - the effort to translate sweeping judgments into the realities of lived experience. As emotional labor - the quiet management of tension in a room where critique is framed as truth and dissent carries risk. And it arrives as ethical labor, a constant weighing of whether to respond, how strongly, and to what end - because defending a people or a continent is work that often falls on those closest to it, even when they did not choose the assignment.

This burden is not confined to one meeting or one conversation. It appears in different rooms, with different people, under different pretenses. Sometimes in donor roundtables, sometimes in project workshops, sometimes in casual hallway conversations at conferences. The claims shift - scholars’ capacities, governments’ competence, institutions’ integrity - but the effect is the same: someone in the room is quietly tasked with absorbing, translating, and responding.

These moments reveal a deeper structure at work in philanthropic and development spaces. Candor is at times celebrated when it reinforces preexisting hierarchies, while trust, proximity, and local knowledge are repeatedly questioned. Skepticism about African scholars or governments is treated as realism while trust in African scholars or governments is considered naivety. The burden of defending a people, a continent, or a set of institutions falls quietly on those who are closest to them, creating hidden labor that sustains the system.

It also raises a difficult question: what is the role of the African in the room? Am I there to defend the continent, to correct sweeping assumptions, to absorb the statements without disrupting the conversation? And if so, what does that say about the value placed on my presence? When we treat lived experience as an obligation rather than an asset, we reduce participation to a form of labor, one that quietly reinforces the very hierarchies the sector has been trying to challenge.

I have often heard a version of the same request: you should educate me on Africa. It is usually offered with good intentions. But it raises an uncomfortable question about role and value. Am I here to provide context, or to contribute judgment? To fill gaps in others’ understanding, or to help shape the substance of the conversation? Because when education becomes the primary expectation, my lived experience risks being reduced to explanatory labor, rather than recognized as a source of insight, strategy, or authority. Resisting this framing is not about refusing to share knowledge, but about asserting that my presence is best used in contributing analysis, critique, and perspective, not simply background information.

There is also a quieter cost to this constant reframing. The effort to stay generous while redirecting expectations, to remain engaged without becoming defensive, and to assert value without seeming unhelpful. Each adjustment is small and often unnoticed, but over time they add up, shaping how one enters these rooms and what it takes simply to stay present in them.

Chatham house rules and similar spaces have value - they allow candor we rarely see in public, and they reveal what people are truly thinking. That honesty is important. At the same time, these spaces also create a quiet burden: someone in the room is often left to absorb, translate, and defend the people, regions, or institutions under discussion. Recognizing that burden is not a critique of candor itself, but a reminder that presence and authority are unevenly distributed, and that the labor of defending often falls where it is least visible.

I love how it rewards patience and attentiveness more than intervention. Good baking asks you to respect the process: choose ingredients carefully, adjust for the conditions you are in, and then know when to step back. Once the cake is in the oven, constant intervention does not improve the outcome. It usually ruins it.

I have found myself returning to this lesson again and again in my work supporting systems change in African governments, and in how philanthropy chooses to engage with that work.

Earlier in my career, I worked as a funder in a large development institution. We controlled the bake almost entirely. We dictated the ingredients, the temperature, the timing, and the final product. We visited project sites regularly, but those visits were carefully choreographed events. Partners arranged every detail, polished every piece of evidence, and presented a version of the work designed to be “oven-ready” for inspection. The kitchen was curated for us, not lived in.

Later, I found myself leading systems change work at a nonprofit funded by a philanthropic organization. The donor wanted weekly check-ins. Each check-in required preparation: slides, written updates, careful internal coordination to present progress in ways that aligned with expectations. We also reported quarterly.

The donor cared, that was never in doubt. But caring showed up as constant oversight rather than thoughtful restraint. Some of my staff were spending most of their time preparing updates instead of doing the work itself. The kitchen slowly reorganized around inspection rather than baking.

Eventually, we moved to monthly check-ins - not because we wanted less accountability, but because the work needed uninterrupted time to cook. Even monthly, it was often difficult to tell a meaningful story of progress. The work was complex and nonlinear, and the pace of change didn’t neatly align with a calendar. Weekly interruptions had been worse: they not only let heat escape from the oven, they forced us to manufacture evidence of activity rather than capture the real shifts happening inside the system.

Supporting systems change requires a different approach to evidence. It is less about compliance or neat reporting and more about learning and adaptation. Systems shift through relationships, timing, and feedback loops, not linear plans. Much of what matters happens slowly and unevenly, often outside any single intervention.

Evidence should help make sense of these shifts, not just prove performance. Funders need to tolerate ambiguity and trust grantees to highlight what is meaningful, even if it doesn’t fit neatly into a dashboard. Trying to manage systems change with rigid reporting is like judging a bake by the ingredient list instead of whether the cake rises.

You cannot see the inside of a cake while it is baking. You rely on signals. You trust the baker’s experience. You accept that two cakes made with care may still turn out differently because conditions are never identical.

Now, in my current role, I feel a different tension. I sometimes worry about finding the balance between being helpful and giving space for real work to unfold. Organizations often reward visibility and constant activity, so stepping back can feel like disengagement. Letting go can feel uncomfortable, but I’ve learned that restraint is not neglect.

Caring shows up in how funding is structured, not how frequently updates are demanded. It shows up in flexible, multi-year support. In space for adaptation. In whether grantees feel safe saying, “This is not working, and here is what we are learning,” rather than performing success against indicators that no longer reflect reality.

Trust-based philanthropy does not mean abandoning standards or purpose. Recipes still matter. But it does mean letting go of the illusion that tighter control produces better outcomes.

If we want better systems change, especially in complex and politically charged environments, we have to stop confusing proximity with effectiveness. Sometimes the most responsible thing a funder can do is step back, trust the baker, and wait. The real test of trust is not what we ask for when the cake is rising. It is whether we can resist opening the oven door when our own discomfort, not the work itself, is what is making us anxious.

After the presentation, I walked up to congratulate the head of the host organization. They smiled and asked what I thought of the snacks. That was it. No question about my work, my purpose for being there, or the perspective I might offer. Just snacks.

It wasn’t offensive. But it was revealing.

Moments like these illuminate how perception continues to shape philanthropic practice - how assumptions about who represents institutions influence whose perspectives are sought out, whose questions are engaged, and whose presence is treated as incidental.

This was not an isolated encounter. It reflects a broader pattern in the sector: inherited expectations about what a “funder” looks like and who is presumed to speak for organizations. Even as philanthropy articulates commitments to equity and inclusion, many professional spaces continue to rely on visual and cultural cues - race, gender, age, accent - to infer significance. These cues remain deeply informed by a long history of white, Western leadership.

I, like many other funders of color, do not conform to this expectation. I am Black. I speak with an accent. And I am African.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu offers a useful lens here: influence often operates through shared social recognition rather than formal roles alone. In philanthropic spaces, this shapes whose presence alters the conversation, whose observations redirect discussion, and who is assumed to be there primarily to observe rather than engage. These dynamics are rarely explicit, but they are widely understood.

They also shape how nonprofit leaders and practitioners navigate philanthropic environments. Through long experience, many have learned to scan the room for a particular profile when trying to identify the person who speaks for the money. When someone does not fit that profile, they may be met with warmth, but not inquiry.

For a long time, I accepted this invisibility with ease. I am naturally inclined to listen first, to make space, to avoid centering myself. Those instincts come from good places: respect, humility, and a belief that proximity to money should not eclipse proximity to the work. In a field where power has so often been overperformed, not being immediately legible as a funder sometimes felt like a relief.

But I have come to see how this dynamic can also constrain impact. When assumptions go unchallenged, opportunities for learning, connection, and strategic partnership are missed. Silence, in these settings, does not remain neutral; it reinforces existing patterns of engagement.

As a result, I am learning to approach these spaces differently.

For me, being more forward does not mean performing status or dominating conversation. It means naming my role early and plainly. It means offering a perspective even when it has not been explicitly invited. It means asking questions that signal shared inquiry rather than evaluation. In short, it means making myself legible in rooms that are not yet practiced at recognizing legitimacy in all its diverse forms.

This shift is uncomfortable. It runs counter to both my temperament and my critique of how influence has traditionally been exercised in philanthropy. Yet I have seen how small acts of visible engagement - introducing myself as a funder, connecting people who should know one another, offering a strategic reflection - can change the quality of interaction. Curiosity increases. Conversations deepen. New possibilities emerge.

Still, the responsibility for change cannot rest solely with those rendered invisible.

For those of us working in fields that engage with philanthropy, there is a collective responsibility to question how legitimacy is assigned in practice. Too often, significance is inferred from familiar markers - bodies, accents, passports - rather than from lived experience, analytical insight, or relational commitment. These habits are learned, reinforced, and rarely examined. Interrupting them requires deliberate curiosity: asking who people are, why they are present, and what perspectives they bring before assumptions quietly structure the exchange.

Funders, in turn, play a decisive role in shaping these cues. Through everyday choices - who opens meetings, who is introduced as speaking for the institution, whose reflections are publicly named - philanthropic organizations signal which voices merit attention. Greater intentionality in these moments can shift expectations and broaden who is engaged as a thought partner. When funders attend to how their presence is interpreted, not only to how resources are allocated, they help create conditions for more genuine partnership.

Most importantly, we need to normalize a broader imagination of what a funder looks like and how a funder shows up. One that makes room for multiplicity: for listening and speaking, for visibility and restraint, for legitimacy expressed through relationship rather than performance.

I do not aspire to be the most visible person in the room. But I do want to be fully present and to be engaged as a thought partner, a connector and a co-learner. Not because my voice should matter more, but because the work is better when fewer perspectives are quietly filtered out.

Invisibility can feel comfortable. But impact, I am learning, sometimes requires being seen on my own terms, and with the field evolving alongside me.

These reflections represent my personal observations and experiences in philanthropy. They do not reflect the official positions or policies of my organization.