How Cultural Funders Can Collaborate To Let Go
Farhad Ebrahimi and Cate Fox
Sunsetting a foundation isn’t just a financial decision; it’s relational and strategic. In this GIA podcast episode, Cate Fox (Center for Cultural Innovation) and Farhad Ebrahimi (Solidaire Network) share candid insights from their (completed and/or currently active) spend down journeys, unpacking how funders can collaborate to avoid funding cliffs, align resources, and strengthen the cultural ecosystem. This conversation tackles the tension between strategic clarity and trust, what it takes to foster vulnerability with grantees, practical steps funders can take to begin a spend down journey, and the importance of civic positionality.
This podcast was recorded on January 21, 2026.
L to R: Farhad Ebrahimi and Cate Fox
Jaime Sharp:
Hello and welcome to a podcast by Grantmakers in the Arts. My name is Jaime Sharp, and I'm the senior program manager here at GIA. I use she or any pronouns, and I'm a light-skinned Black person in my 20s with naturally curly hair.
Sunsetting a foundation isn't just a financial decision; it's relational and strategic. In this GIA podcast episode, Cate Fox and Farhad Ebrahimi share candid insights from their completed or currently active spend-down journeys, unpacking how funders can collaborate to avoid funding cliffs, align resources, and strengthen the cultural ecosystem. This conversation tackles the tension between strategic clarity and trust, what it takes to foster vulnerability with grantees, practical steps funders can take to begin a spend-down journey, and the importance of civic positionality. I hope you enjoy.
Hello everyone. This is Jaime Sharp. I'm the senior program manager here at Grantmakers in the Arts. I use she or any pronouns. I'm based here in Chicago on the land of the Three Fire peoples. I'm a light-skinned Black person. Right now I have my braids in a very messy bun, and I'm very excited to be joined today by our guests to talk about strategic frameworks around sunsetting foundations. I will let them introduce themselves. Cate, if you wouldn't mind going first.
Cate Fox:
Sure. Thanks, Jaime. My name is Cate Fox. I use she/her pronouns. I'm also on the land of the Three Fires, unseated Potawatomi lands, presently called Chicago. I am a middle-aged white woman, and my curly hair is pulled back in a bun, and I'm wearing a gray sweater and blue earrings. I am the senior program director for the Center for Cultural Innovations, Ambitious Initiative, which I can talk a little bit more about as we get into it.
Jaime Sharp:
Awesome. Thank you.
Farhad Ebrahimi:
Hey y'all, this is Farhad Ebrahimi, he/him, joining y'all from Tongva land in Los Angeles. I'm a middle-aged Iranian man with salt and pepper hair, more salt than pepper these days, glasses, and a little bit of stubble, in a black t-shirt, and I am the philanthropic transformation strategist, one of the philanthropic transformation strategists at Solidaire. Relevant to this conversation, prior to this role, I also ran a private foundation called The Chorus Foundation, which spent-down in 2023.
Jaime Sharp:
Wonderful. Thank you both. And if you could just provide some context about your relationship, not just with philanthropy, but how spend downs are a part of your work. So Cate, I know you touched on ambitious a little. Maybe you can tell us more about that.
Cate Fox:
Sure. Yeah. I love this question. Philanthropy is such a funny idea for many of us growing up in our communities. This idea was very present in my growing up, but we thought about it as care for each other and our responsibilities to each other. I wasn't necessarily aware that this was a field that had a fancy name. But eventually philanthropy became part of my career path, and I spent almost a decade with the MacArthur Foundation before shifting over here to the Center for Cultural Innovation to work with Ambitious. The overall goal for Ambitious is to ensure that diverse identities survive and reproduce in collective, community-based and localized ways.
There were two things that were really interesting to me about this particular line of work that made it attractive to me. One was that it was explicitly focused on systems change work. It had a root cause analysis, and the interventions were tied to that root cause. And as somebody who spent a career in nonprofits, my exposure to systems change work was a lot more about symptoms work than it was about actually changing systems. And the other thing that made it really exciting was that it was time-limited, that we were really working to put ourselves out of business.
So we are in year eight of no more than 10 years, which means we are three years away from sunset. We're going all the way through year 10. And it's really pushing us to think about, going back to that core question of growing up, what is our responsibility to each other? How can we leave this world in a better place than what we found it?
Jaime Sharp:
Wonderful. Thank you. And Farhad, could you tell us a little bit about your experience with the Chorus Foundation, which is completely sunset now, and then how you got to where you are now?
Farhad Ebrahimi:
Yeah. So my entry point to the philanthropic sector was as a member of a high-net-wealth family trying to organize my own family members around our giving. I was definitely, still am definitely, the lefty straight out of central casting in my family in terms of being the one who's always agitating to talk about class and capitalism, and so much love for my entrepreneurial father, and also deep political conviction that you don't get as wealthy as he has unless you benefit from a system that keeps other people poor.
And I also want to say that I really owe the seeds of my political trajectory to my parents, who are both refugees. My dad's Iranian, my mom was born in Cuba. The ways that they talked about the respective refugee experiences really emphasized not just displacement and loss of home, but that community self-determination was undermined in the places that they grew up. Undermined in no small part by US foreign policy, which is a whole separate conversation we can have. But I really took that value of community self-determination to apply it to the project of trying to redistribute the wealth in my family. And so Chorus Foundation was the vehicle to redistribute all the wealth that was under my direct control.
Early in Chorus's trajectory, I think I tried to engage with some sort of more mainstream notions in philanthropy around what's the best way. If you're a living donor, what's the best way to move those resources? Long story short, a lot of that conventional wisdom doesn't really line up with community self-determination as the goal.
And so pretty early on in Chorus's 17-year trajectory, we always knew we were going to sunset because I always had a personal commitment to moving the resources, but we didn't have what I would call a coherent political strategy around spending down until we started to look at philanthropy less as a question of issue areas, or what are the movable outcomes, but a fundamental question of power. Not just in what we fund, funding organizations that are building and shifting power in communities that have historically had power wielded against them, and not just how we fund, which I would describe as the line of inquiry around trust-based philanthropy or participatory grant making, democratized decision-making, but ultimately to question the legitimacy of private philanthropy as even the way that we should be thinking about the allocation of resources in the first place.
And so Chorus's spend-down journey was in many ways an effort to try to model what it looks like to decommission a private philanthropic institution in a way that didn't just make grants to our grantees until we ran out of money, but hopefully left them in a better position in terms of their relationship with philanthropy, in terms of their need to even receive grant dollars in the first place than when we started. And as part of that spend down, I got involved in a lot of funder organizing work. Being one of the co-founders of Solidaire back in 2012, 2013, was one of those early experiments. That experiment was successful enough that I could later apply for a job to work there full-time.
And so now in Solidaire, I support our members to be better grant makers, but what we're all really interested in supporting our members to be more effective organizers, building and shifting power within the philanthropic sector around things like spending down, also around things like participatory grant making, also around things like getting resources to particular kinds of organizations doing particular kinds of work. So it's been a pretty continuous through line for me.
Jaime Sharp:
Yeah. As you've navigated spending down, this is a question for both of you: how have you approached the decision and process strategically? So maybe can you speak a little bit on what collaboration has looked like with other funders and cultural sector partners? What approaches have really helped you align things like your goals and resources so that your spend down doesn't create unexpected gaps, while intending to hopefully, of course, strengthen the broader ecosystem?
Cate Fox:
Yeah, I could go. Yeah, it's interesting to think about this question of approaching the decision and process strategically because I think a lot of foundations, this is not a criticism, just sort of an acknowledgement of what happens, a lot of foundations don't even think about this as an option.
The initiative that I'm responsible for stewarding was started with the acknowledgement that we were going to time limit ourselves. We were going to say 10 years. And that was really in response to a very cool report that CCI commissioned and was a part of with the NEA and a number of other funders that looked at the root causes of artists' precarity. And looking at that kind of report, we could see that the kinds of interventions, even that we were engaged in, did not go far enough upstream, and going further upstream was really important if we were serious about the kind of changes we wanted to see in the field.
And the time-limited part was really an acknowledgement that number one, there was an anticipation, this is in 2016, that there were going to be a lot of disruptive events, including major demographic changes, and other kinds of world events that we couldn't predict at the time, but that things were changing at a really rapid pace, and an initiative that was looking at systems change really needed to have a fine point focus on what the intervention was and for how long.
It was also an acknowledgement that funders don't want to fund initiatives forever. Because when you're funding something forever, what is the measure of success? It's sort of to the next grant moment.
And so this was really a bold choice that a lot of folks probably looked askance at, but it really has been very motivating. We couldn't have predicted the pandemic. We couldn't have predicted all the kinds of things that have unfolded since then. It's only made this work more urgent.
And so, having that time-limited element to it has forced a lot of conversations about what's most important at this moment, what can we look at ... the Overton window. What does this moment offer us that other moments would not offer us? And it gives us the encouragement to act boldly and to do it in a way that isn't tied up with perfectionism, which is, I think, an area that a lot of funders find themselves in wanting to get it just right. This is mostly about experimentation and being willing to get in there and to iterate.
And so this question about collaboration with other funders and cultural sector partners, it's an ongoing one for us. We are constantly out there partnering with other people, talking about our experiments, what's worked, what didn't. We don't have the luxury of holding all of our knowledge until that beautiful white paper at the end of the ... It isn't going to translate into the kind of change that we really want to see in this world. And it can't just be us; it's got to be other people. And we can only do that when we are looking for ways to work together, to collaborate, when we're accompanying people in movement as the people who are experts in birthing worlds.
And our job is really to support them in the work that they're doing. We're looking at the kinds of intermediating structures that are not there right now to support these new worlds, but we can't do that by ourselves. We have to be in conversation, because we're not a big endowed foundation. We're this teeny, tiny, mighty intermediary that's really trying to push in the time it exists for a better set of circumstances for all of us.
Farhad Ebrahimi:
I am really vibing, Cate, off of what you were sharing about experimentation and it not being around this philanthropic culture that fetishizes the perfect articulated thing. I just think building trust is such a big part of this work to begin with. But I think particularly, when we start talking about things like spending down or democratizing decision-making, and in many cases, institutions are doing both, the institution is spending down while also democratizing governance.
And that was part of what we did at Chorus. And it's just the way that people talk about building trust is sometimes so idealistic. It's like we're like Babe Ruth, and I'm going to hit the ball, and it's going to go exactly over there. And I mean, I think it's great to have a track record of building trust because I said what I was going to do, and I always did it, but I think a really important way to build trust is to say what I think I'm going to do and then totally fuck it up and then hold that with integrity with the folks that I'm trying to build trust with.
And so, I think for us, that was part of this process of conversation around what it would look like to spend down, around the implementation of it, particularly as it intersected with these questions around democratized decision-making.
To back up for a moment, Chorus started with this personal commitment from me as the living donor that we're going to sunset at some point. This isn't supposed to be in perpetuity, but that really came, I think, from, again, a personal commitment to redistribute wealth, and then a sense of not wanting something to become in perpetuity and ossified, and then people later on have to scrutinize the Rosetta Stone of donor intent and all these weird things. But that didn't mean we had a strategy or a timeline, and that conversation developing that strategy really started with conversations with our grantees.
And so the idea of moving resources in a particular timeframe was something that was co-developed and co-embraced. Which is not to say that all of our grantees were 100% like, yes, we love the idea of you doing this, but the energy was towards this making sense. So many of our grantees were working on things like climate with big tipping points, that the idea of a newer foundation that was always going to go away anyways, really focusing on a 10-year spend down to give a series of organizations who existed in ecosystems with each other a boost at a critical point in their development, at a critical point in their work, that really resonated. And there were folks that shared the perspective with us openly and honestly, and I think vulnerably, like, "Hey, I've been doing this work for a long time. Somebody's going to be doing this work after me for a long time. There's things to be celebrated about Chorus spending down, but there's also things to be mourned."
And so we had to be in a lot of conversations about what is the way to spend down that for our grantees is more of a party and less of a funeral at the end. And for us, that really came down to two criteria. One is, I think, the highest criteria, did we support our grantees in a way that allowed them to be that much less dependent on philanthropy moving forward? So supporting the kind of community-led economic development work, land acquisition, endowing organizations, buying the means of production, all those kinds of things make our grantees that much less dependent on folks like us in the future. And then the slightly less ambitious version of that, but I think still really important is, did we fund our grantees in a way that at least improved their overall relationship with the philanthropic sector? Do they have more relationships with other funders?
I mean, I think with spend down, we tend to talk about it like it's this one-to-one like, "Okay, you're going away. Do you fundraise from somebody else to make the exact same size grant to fill that hole?" And we were very intentional about not promising that to our grantees because we didn't think we could in good conscience, but we could promise that we would collaborate with them throughout our entire spend down to support their funder organizing capacity, to support their relational fund-raising capacity.
And then the other thing I'll say is in terms of collaboration with other funders, making any of these decisions about to spend down, to not spend down, to experiment with this particular approach to decision-making, to fund in this geography versus that geography, to emphasize long-term versus flexible rapid response, all of that is about us being in an ecosystem with other funders. So I think our first layer of collaboration was with grantee organizations, but that second layer was making sure that we were part of an ecosystem of aligned funders that were building relationships, deepening that alignment, and able to try to fund as a team in as much as our respective institutions would allow us to do. And so for Chorus, that allowed us to pick four geographies to focus on. As a national foundation, we really became four place-based foundations in our spend down in part because we were in relationship with funders who were interested in taking a similar approach, and other geographies.
And that's an easy example, but I think also the more complicated example is we were spending down as we existed in relationship with foundations that were not spending down. That allowed us to spend down in a way that our grantees felt was strategic and support for them, but also in relationship with funders who they knew would be consistent through this period of time. And really trying to figure out our grantees are so clever at the way they are able to weave together all these disparate and dissonant resource streams that we were like, we need to take on some of that labor with them to try to organize our peers who move different kinds of resources so that we're actually playing coherent lanes.
Jaime Sharp:
Yeah. Thank you. And that actually transitioned us really nicely into the next question that I have. And I'll start Farhad with you, but balancing your values with the strategic focus during a spend down. So you mentioned a challenge that you really faced was trust with your grantees and in being able to foster vulnerable relationships with them. Could you talk a little bit more specifically about how you overcame that, the trust on the side of the folks working the spend down within the foundation, but then the trust on the grantee side, and a little bit more about navigating democratized decision-making, what were challenges that you maybe anticipated or didn't anticipate and how you worked through them?
Also, it's kind of a loaded question, but you mentioned mourning. I don't know. I am just curious to hear more about that. What led you to the acceptance of the mourning and grief of closing it out and knowing that this was still, at the end of the day, what you wanted to do. Like you were on the right path ... I don't know. What did that look like for you, I guess, as a leader, especially at Chorus Foundation, and having to be like, "No, this is the right decision." Did you have those moments of being like, "Oh, maybe this isn't the right way to go?" What led you to seeing it towards the end?
And then Cate, I have a different question for you after this, but ...
Farhad Ebrahimi:
No, I love these questions. Thank you so much. For the first half of the question ... This is coming back to what Cate said about experimentation. I cannot overstate how much iteration and emergence was really important. I think there's a way of talking about this gold standard spend down by supporting the regenerative spend down. I'm a big fan of justice funders and the way they articulate regenerative spend down. But that's this idea of taking the economic power of private philanthropy and putting that economic power directly under community control, not just making grants until we run out of money, but something that feels like a transfer of economic power.
And if we, as funders, or folks who are in the investment side of the ledger as well, walk into community, and we can say things like participatory budgeting or whatever. And it's not like everybody's going to come running to us because they trust us. In fact, nine times out of 10, most of their experiences with funders, with investors, with banks, has been horrible.
And so, what we found at Chorus is that it was important for us, before we're trying to share power or hand power over, we need to start with holding power accountably. And to me, trust-based philanthropy, which really means different things to different people, but I really appreciate the way the folks at Trust-Based Philanthropy Project articulate it. That, to me, is the approach to philanthropy that, at minimum, we are holding the power that we have in this sector. Even if we never ought to have had it, even if this power comes out of a history of extraction and exploitation, we're going to hold it accountably.
And so for Chorus, that meant that in each of the geographies in which we were funding as part of our spend down, we started by making a bunch of decisions ourself. We started by making traditional philanthropic decisions where it was staff or board deciding, these are going to be our anchor grantees in this place. We were very consultative. People gave us a lot of advice, but at the end of the day, they left the room; we made the decisions who our anchor grantees were going to be.
But when we made those decisions, we made it to fund those folks for 10 years until we ran out of money. Not renew them several times during those 10 years, but tell them upfront, "We're going to fund you at a very high level general operating until we've run out of money and then start to build trust from that. Those anchor grantees know where they stand with us. So we can start to have conversations with them about what does it look like to democratize decision-making for the rest of the resources that we're going to be moving into this geography during our spend down?
So this idea of holding power accountably; we start to move into experimenting in sharing power, inviting community members, inviting community organizations into decision-making to exercise those muscles. But here's where one of the points of tension comes in. Because, as you might imagine, some community organizations, some community members are like, "Yes, we want to be stewards of capital. This is where we see ourselves. We see this spend down as an opportunity to do that." Other folks in the same movement ecosystems doing amazing organizing work are like, "Yeah, I don't want to make decisions about how money moves. I do not want to be a gatekeeper. I don't want that discomfort. I don't want any of that."
And so part of our role, and I think this comes to the question of the morning, I came into the project of Chorus with 100% political clarity, as did the rest of the staff team, that private philanthropy is a false solution. Now it's an organizing opportunity, but it is not the world we're trying to build is not better family foundations. And so because of that, we could engage in political education with ourselves, with peers in philanthropy, but also with grantees about what would it look like for ownership and control of capital, resource allocation, all those things to be handled differently, which is why we are inviting folks into this discomfort of making decisions about money in their community because at the end of the day, no matter what the experiment is, no matter what's challenging about, it's an improvement from me as the living donor making those decisions.
It's an improvement from a foundation staff, however lovely we all were who are not from those communities making those decisions. And one of the few ways in which Chorus Foundation was like a stickler who was pushing our grantees was around this. Now, we were doing this in partnership with other grantees who did feel very comfortable with these concepts, but it was part of supporting their work to organize their communities to be able to hold this kind of power. And then that moves us from sharing power to handing power over entirely.
That's when we really started to look in the trailing years of the spend down, we've practiced trust-based philanthropy, we've experimented in community-led philanthropy, but now we're trying to spin out infrastructure for resource allocation or investment that will outlive the foundation. But we had to build the trust to then exercise the muscles of collective decision-making to then have communities feel ... and I wouldn't say they felt 100% comfortable ... but to feel comfortable enough where they're like, "All right, the foundation was the training wheels. Take them off. We're going to continue to move this."
And so the things that I mourn personally, I mourn having the context where I was getting to see some people I really love and respect really regularly because I was one of their biggest, longest term funders. I do not mourn the power that I personally had in that institution, and I do not mourn that institution as the container, as the particular form for a set of functions that can really be better held in a lot of community built and community controlled ways.
Jaime Sharp:
Yeah, thank you. Thank you. And Cate, I saw you nodding your head in agreement for a majority of his response. So I'm curious now, how are you balancing your values as you are actively still in the spend-down process, and what challenges have come up for you? And now, thinking in terms of arts and culture, of course, a majority of our audience is focused on arts and culture. There's that element of creative risk and community-led practices. And so what does that look like in those funder-grantee relationships?
Cate Fox:
Great. How much time do we have? Just kidding. Just kidding.
Farhad, thanks so much for all that great insight. And one day after Ambitious has wound down, I look forward to having all of the wisdom that comes to you once you've been able to look back at the arc of things, but just really double down on that idea of trust and how critical it is to have trust in the beginning of the relationships.
One of the things that I think was really so smart about the way that this portfolio started up, and it was before I got there, was really viewing it as an investment in people as well as the structures that they were leading. The investment of people and their ideas, an investment in people who experience the most extraction and harm in the current economic system, as being the people who are best positioned to design systems that are better for them and better for all of us.
It was intentional in the beginning, and I think over time we've really tried to think about investments in people as the longest and perhaps most impactful investments that we can make in the field. People develop relationships. Those relationships outlast wherever they go. They're built on in various capacities. I know I'm still building on the relationships that I made in other careers.
And so, thinking about what we think of as this relational infrastructure, the trust that people develop, both people inside the movement and helping those folks get better connected to each other. We've done that by employing these learning journeys where funders and builders and academics and the team go together, not in a position of we're going to show you all of the things that we know. We're going to talk about all the things we don't know. And we're going to look at the roots of our economic systems together. We're going to struggle together. We're going to look at the potential for scaling mutualistic economic structures, and we're going to have a lot of questions, and we're going to ask them in front of each other, and we're going to learn and struggle together.
So when I think about the work, some of the most exciting pieces of it are really how people are connecting with each other, how they're accelerating their own movement, their own learning, their own growth. What's that going to manifest? I don't know. I think funders often get obsessed about the things that they can measure. We get stuck in these measurement traps, and it's important to know the kinds of impact and to embrace a lot of unknowns. The things that we can't possibly know, especially when we're funding in this trust-based way, especially when we're funding really big ideas that don't have that kind of tangible timeline with a whole bunch of marked milestones that are easily recognizable.
A lot of the work that we're funding is ... This is the part where it's great to be a culture funder, an arts person, because it is all about the experimentation. It is about the unfolding. Looking at the intersection of economics and the arts, it's amazing to see how much they have to offer each other about relationality, about experimentation and inevitable failures, about adjustments, about how to value a thing or an exchange, how to change that, the truth about power. Farhad appreciated all your reflections on power. All of that's at play.
I don't know. When I think about the way in which we're spending down, a number of our grantees have been like, "Don't do it. Don't spend down because we know you, we trust you, we've got a good relationship." The goal isn't to stick around forever, and they don't want to necessarily all be dependent on philanthropy either. And so I think for us at this moment, it's how we're communicating with the grantees and investees in the portfolio to co-create.
We could think about it as a wind-down. We talk about it in our structure as a wind-up or as a supernova. How do we create space together and an exit that works for everyone knowing that, as Farhad was saying, it's not we're going to hand this funding off to this funder; it's like how can we unleash the excitement for other funders to invest in these kinds of systems that are inevitably culture systems? These are systems that require culture to hold big ideas and to enact change. So how do we help funders see that as a calling? And then how do we help funders look across sectors?
This isn't going to be solved by a single sector coming on board. This is really about donor organizing, and it's about the relational infrastructure that gets built across this field that's not even really a field. It's like all these fields. It's all these fields together. How do we come to some sort of understanding about each other's roles and about the possibilities, and how do we work really differently in the future?
And so for us, it's about creating those intermediating structures that can help hold some of the pieces that we've been holding, but ultimately we're all going to step out, and it has to be the communities really holding up and a redistribution of capital.
Jaime Sharp:
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much. So we'll close on this question, but I'm just curious, practical steps for other funders to even begin to have a conversation around spend downs. Cate, you mentioned, which I really like this, folks need to see it as exciting and see it as a calling. And also noting that a lot of our membership, or at least the folks that engage really heavily with our programming, sit at that program officer role, so not necessarily folks that are at the helm of the strategic decision-making.
So I'm just curious what advice or resources you would have to offer them. And Farhad, please feel free to plug Solidaire, of course, as a network that exists for a space for people to connect on spend-down strategy. I'm curious what other resources you have to offer.
Farhad Ebrahimi:
Oh, I just really quick want to name two things you shared, Cate, that really resonated for me. I mean, when you were talking about the measurement traps versus the embracing unknowns, the philanthropic sector has such a culture of everything is going to be known and linear and things like that.
There was a point in time where I used to really fly the banner of systems theory, systemic thinking, because I felt like one of the great projects in philanthropy is getting folks to think of the interconnectedness between different issue areas, between different geographies, between different sectors. But I realized that for some folks, systems theory can still be ironically a very rigid, almost linear, like we're going to take everything, and we're going to put it in this big map, and it's going to be to the point that any of us look at it, and it's just like our eyes glaze over and realizing that like, "Oh, maybe that my banner is not systems theory, maybe it's complexity theory," which embraces that the ecosystems that we're trying to engage with are complex. They are not lists of things. They are sets of relationships that the thorough mapping and quantifying of is maybe not our highest goal because it becomes this wonky exercise that loses all that excitement. But if we can embrace that, it's complex, but we have instincts.
And sometimes I feel like our best strategies, what we call strategies, it's just what we name our instincts when they start to pay off. And so, having that level of not that we lack of strategic rigor, but that we're not trying to measure everything and that we're willing to take long-term big decisions based on strategic instincts rather than a bunch of little incremental little decisions. Because, I mean, what is the decision to spend down itself if not a big gut instinct decision?
And the other thing that you said that I thought was really great was to get folks excited to invest in these kinds of systems as a forward-looking, get in on the ground floor kind of thing. I just feel like that's a very smart strategy as a spend-down foundation to we're going down, but when our peers look at our grantees, they see something that's going up, and it's a different way of thinking about it.
But on this last question, I'll just say really quick, and you both have already said it, but underlining the role of organizing, that to move this or any other kind of transformative agenda through philanthropy, it's not a question of knowing what the right thing is to do. It's a question of how do we build and shift power? How do we change culture, change processes, change structures within our institutions or within our consolations of institutions so that the right thing will be done?
I feel like I end up talking to a lot of folks, through my work at Solidaire and prior at Chorus, people who are not the decision-makers in a given philanthropic institution, but have had through some combination of instinct, experience, political education, training, you name it, are like, they know what they want to do. And so for us to spend more time in our sector supporting folks to do that kind of organizing, which also involves professional risk for people.
We have to acknowledge that philanthropic workplaces are contested workplaces. The contestation doesn't always have to be ugly, and also, sometimes it's ugly. Sometimes philanthropic institutions make big decisions to do amazing things, could be around their relationship to perpetuity and endowment, could be around decision-making, it could be around a variety of things. And it's a very sanitized version of that story that usually gets shared out, which means that some of our best organizers in the philanthropic sector, you have to know them and have a drink with them for them to be like, here's what really happened because it was messy inside. But here is how we built an internal coalition. Here is how that coalition made strategic decisions. Here's how some of us took professional risk, and maybe at some point that story will be more broadly known, but right now the credit is being given to the decision-makers, and it's being treated like it was everybody was always for it, those kinds of situations.
I just think that's such a big part of it. And then from there, I feel like there's all these provocative questions that folks can try to get their institutions to wrestle with, but I don't want to go into a rant about all those. I want to hear what you have to say, Cate.
Cate Fox:
Yeah. I would just say that the conversation about perpetuity is whatever, blanketed with discomfort, both about philanthropy just existing and the ways in which money gets hoarded and held, but also it's people's careers. It could be a really scary thing to question, and I think it's so important to ask some of those questions. And as somebody who worked in an institution where my positional power was very limited, I wasn't in a place where I could push the foundation in any particular way, and it is helpful to sit with some of the discomfort of the questions for yourself to understand where you sit, where you feel called, the problems that you see with perpetuity, or the advantages that you see with perpetuity.
I mean, getting clear for yourself about where you stand is a really important first step. And then finding other people who you want to have a conversation, this is a place maybe GIA could offer a space, a safe space for people who are not in those decision-making structures, who are a little bit less senior to talk about, here are the things I'm struggling with, to start having conversations across structures about the struggle with perpetuity versus not perpetuity. That could be a really interesting place.
Lots of people talk about it one-on-one, as Farhad was saying. People are willing to share, and I certainly would make myself available if there were people who wanted to talk about this idea. And it shouldn't be just people who know me or know how to reach out to me. What are some of the other ways that we could create these little release valves, pressure release valves where people could come together and talk about it? I'm a big fan of book clubs. I'm interested in wind-down book club material, but I also know that there are people like Farhad, folks like Jamie Bennett in our ecosystem, who wound down Art Place, the Link folks.
There are a lot of people who have wound down things, and maybe there's an opportunity there for us in the GIA space to have a collective ... And I know you had another podcast where other folks spoke, and it was awesome, but maybe there are other places too where we could file away some of the learnings and experiences and provide spaces for other people who want to enter into these kinds of conversations to do it with people who understand the emotional complexities of winding down something that you really love. I don't know, just some thoughts.
Jaime Sharp:
Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. I do want to give y'all just a minute if you had anything else to share before we conclude.
Farhad Ebrahimi:
Yeah, I wanted to share two things. One is, just wanted to add a little bit to Cate's, because what you're saying about where are the places where people can have these conversations? One is, just want to give Grantmakers in the Arts y'all's flowers for the work that you've been doing on this. Obviously, Solidaire is a space where we talk about this. We do cohorts on spend down, but we also try to find other ways to just keep our spend-down members in community with each other. Want to shout out to Justice Funders and their spend-down and regeneration, a community of practice that they've got.
And then both with some particular conversation around endowment and perpetuity, but also, broader conversation just about this internal organizing, want to give some love to Neighborhood Funders Group, because I think they, like Solidaire and Justice Funders, have some really specific offerings about spend down, but it's got to be in the context, and we try to do it this way. And this is one of the reasons that we love being in partnership with folks like y'all and NFG. It's got to be in partnership with just like, how do we change stuff in general in our sector?
The other thing I wanted to say, just building off of Cate, what you're saying about it has to start with us knowing individually where we stand. One thing that has been really important to me in the last year and a half is to try to maintain my own clear through lines between this project of being an abolitionist with respect to private philanthropy, deeply believing in a just transition for the philanthropic sector with the current political moment we're in, where we are also trying to defend this sector warts and all so that we can continue to fund social movement organizations, grassroots organizations that are currently under attack from a fascist government.
At one point, early in my not so new job at Solidaire, I was like, "Oh, I've done a real pivot." I came into this job because I was going to organize people around what's our strategy to really intentionally ... however many decades we imagine it taking, how many generations to have a strategy to dismantle this sector, and now here I am doing coalition building to try to defend this sector. But I think there's a really clear through line for me, and it has to do with what Cate was talking about. Our personal clarity on where we stand and what we understand our role to be.
I think something that is a fundamental challenge around this political moment is that funders are thinking about risk with a very narrow understanding of their own role. If my own role is just to cut checks and really at the end of the day, that's all anybody needs me to do, then when push comes to shove, I'm going to protect my ability to keep cutting checks tomorrow, even at the expense of my grantee's ability to do their work or even survive today, because I'm not seeing myself as important because of my political alignment, because of my relationships, because of my other skills. All of those things can be thrown under the bus because I got to keep on cutting checks.
And so when we think about philanthropic institutions that are capitulating in advance, I think a lot of times it's because they're doing that math in a different way than I would, where I would say, "Oh, what's most important about who I am in my role is not that I'm cutting checks. It is my relationships. It is my political alignment. It is the skills that I've developed over time. I should do everything I can to support those relationships in that political alignment. And if it means I'm risking my ability to keep on cutting checks, that's still the right risk to take. That's a strategic risk."
I think the spend-down conversation is the same thing. I think some folks really wrestle with spending down because they're like, "But my big thing that I'm adding to the movements I believe in is that I give them financial resources. I cut checks. If I spend down, I'm not doing that anymore." And they're always going to need somebody to do that. So I'm not comfortable with a plan that pulls me out of what I feel is my true most important role. But if we can help folks see that all of our roles are so much more multifaceted than that, then I think the obstacles that this is for decision-makers, the obstacles that decision-makers have around spending down, I think are actually very similar to the mental and emotional traps that folks are getting into around this political moment.
And that, to me, that's been very clarifying, where I'm like, it's the same work that I was doing a few years ago. It's just in a different, really super not awesome context, but it's the same work.
Jaime Sharp:
Yeah. Thank you so much. Cate, did you have anything else you wanted to add?
Cate Fox:
I mean, we'll be here forever if I comment on what ... Because there's so much there to talk about, but that's exciting. Let's get engaged in those conversations. Let's each do our work. Let's not measure our risk solely focused on the reputation of the organization, but really on the delivering of the kind of change.
I think there's also this very emotional tendency, as you mentioned, Farhad, about this: if I'm not here to fund this, who's going to fund this? But maybe we're not funding the right thing then if we're not creating a different reality for those folks, and we're kind of holding them in the same place while feeling maybe better about ourselves.
So I just want us to get real with ourselves, myself included. There's a lot of introspection that is required, and I'm excited that GIA is inviting these kinds of conversations, and I guess look for the good trouble that Farhad and I get up together.
Jaime Sharp:
Awesome. Thank you both so much. You probably saw me furiously taking notes on this whole conversation. Just even for myself at GIA, we've been trying to engage more with that element of how do we teach people how to organize? We introduced this cultural organizing community of practice this year on this workshop series. So these are all really great things that I'm excited to bring back to our folks, and hopefully everyone that's listening is taking something away from this conversation as well. So Cate and Farhad, thank you so much for your time today.
Farhad Ebrahimi:
Thank you so much for having us.
Cate Fox:
Thank you.
Jaime Sharp:
Thank you so much for listening to a podcast by Grantmakers in the Arts. To explore more of our podcast episodes, please visit garts.reader.org. We'll catch you next time.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Farhad Ebrahimi (he/him) is a Philanthropic Transformation Strategist with Solidaire Action, bringing well over a decade of experience as an organizer, trainer, and strategist in the philanthropic sector.
Prior to joining the Solidaire staff, Farhad’s primary role was as the Founder and President of the Chorus Foundation, which worked for a just transition to a regenerative economy in the United States, and which spent down its entire endowment in 2023. He is also a co-founder and former board member of Solidaire, a member of the Center for Story-based Strategy’s trainer network; and a current board member of the Center for Economic Democracy, the National Committee For Responsive Philanthropy, and The Forge.
Farhad is a musician, a lover of film and literature, and an occasional bicycle snob. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002 with a bachelor's degree in Mathematics with Computer Science, and he lives in a housing cooperative with thirteen adults and five children on Tongva land in Los Angeles.
Cate Fox (she/her/hers) is the Senior Director, AmbitioUS. AmbitioUS is CCI’s national pooled fund program that invests in alternative economic paradigms and fresh social contracts in ways that artists and cultural communities can achieve financial freedom. Prior to joining CCI, she spent nine years at the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation leading and co-leading arts and institutional grantmaking; participating in and advising interdisciplinary initiatives that center artists and creatives as change-makers (such as Envisioning Justice); and supporting the Foundation’s racial and economic justice work. Additionally, she brings more than a decade of experience in nonprofit consulting, strategic planning, and fundraising. She has served as an advisory board member of the Center for Cultural Policy (University of Chicago) and Arts for Illinois Relief Fund. Cate is a creative writer, trained mediator, mother of three, and nonprofit nerd.
Cate has an M.A. in peace and development studies from the University of Limerick (Limerick, Ireland) and a B.A. in interdisciplinary studies from Hollins University (Roanoke, VA).
