Everyone Wants to Shift Power. Why Does the Money Still Move the Same Way?
The language of community-led development has become fluent in philanthropy.
Trust-based giving. Authentic partnership. Shifting power. Moving resources toward frontline leaders. Participatory grantmaking.
The vocabulary is everywhere.
The capital often is not.
Most funding architecture was not designed around community-led solutions.
Due diligence processes often assume the organizational infrastructure of established nonprofits. Grant timelines favor predictable programs over adaptive, community-driven work. Risk frameworks can struggle to recognize community trust, relationships, and local knowledge as assets. And the distance between a foundation board, family office, or investment committee and a grassroots organization creates a gap that good intentions alone cannot close.
But simply telling funders to “trust communities” does not solve the problem either.
Fiduciary responsibilities are real. Boards expect accountability. Institutions need safeguards against fraud and misuse. Investment committees have mandates. Staff have to justify decisions. And the people trying to change these systems often operate inside structures they did not design.
So what does shifting power look like when it reaches the actual machinery of capital?
This session is for people on the capital side who are already trying to answer that question.
Foundations are experimenting with multi-year unrestricted funding and participatory decision-making. Family offices are exploring place-based strategies and community wealth building. Impact investors are questioning whether their own processes reproduce the power dynamics their investments are intended to change. Advisors and intermediaries are developing ways to align values, governance, risk, and strategy without requiring communities to reshape themselves simply to become fundable.
The interesting work begins when those experiments collide with institutional reality.
What would due diligence look like if it assessed community legitimacy as seriously as organizational infrastructure? Which risks are funders genuinely required to manage, and which have simply become habit? Who gets to define whether an organization has “capacity”? What changes when communities participate in allocating capital rather than simply applying for it?
And what becomes possible when capital invests not only in programs, but in the economic, cultural, and relational infrastructure of a place?
The challenge is no longer persuading philanthropy that community leadership matters.
It is redesigning the structures through which money moves so that the capital can finally catch up with the language.
Discussion Group Leaders
- Christa Lane Hooper is Director at Geneva Global, helping families, individuals, and foundations deploy philanthropic capital effectively to advance more just and equitable communities.
- Natalie Montecino is Executive Director at Climate Democracy Initiative, advancing participatory approaches to climate action that elevate community voice and build more inclusive systems of leadership.
- Willis Ochieng, PhD is Executive Director at Creats International, Inc., advancing sustainable agriculture, food security, and resilient livelihoods for smallholder farmers.
- Iana Barenboim is Executive Director at MUVA Consulting International, advancing inclusive economic development and opportunities for underserved young people across Africa and Latin America.
- My Tam Nguyen is CEO & Founder at làmdi, mobilizing capital for climate solutions and regenerative outcomes in historically underestimated communities through philanthropy, impact investing, and systems change.
What to expect
A candid working conversation among philanthropists, investors, advisors, intermediaries, and other capital allocators who are genuinely trying to change how money moves.
This is not a conversation about whether community-led solutions are important. That is the starting assumption.
Instead, participants will bring real constraints and real experiments into the room: due diligence requirements that exclude the organizations they want to fund, boards struggling with different definitions of risk, participatory processes that have worked or failed, investment structures that need redesigning, and place-based approaches attempting to build community power alongside economic value.
The aim is to get beyond principles and into institutional practice.
Who this is for
This session is for philanthropists, foundation leaders, family office principals, impact investors, wealth advisors, philanthropic intermediaries, and other capital allocators actively trying to redesign how they partner with community organizations and frontline leaders, and who want a more candid conversation about what that requires.
What you will get out of it
- A framework for identifying the structural barriers inside philanthropic and investment institutions that make authentic community partnership difficult
- Practical perspectives on redesigning due diligence, risk, governance, and partnership models around community leadership
- Examples of how place-based approaches can connect economic development, cultural vitality, and community power rather than funding each separately
- An honest examination of the gap between the language of trust-based giving and the architecture through which capital actually moves
- Practical questions to take back to your own institution about where its structures enable community leadership and where they quietly undermine it