Failure often happens in secret. But what is possible when we share our failures in public? This year, Kataly committed to answering that question by offering reflections on our failures, mistakes, and unlearnings in this blog series. Our goal with this series was to practice radical honesty and transparency, hold…

By: Nwamaka Agbo, CEO of the Kataly Foundation and Managing Director of the Restorative Economies Fund Power and failure. These words seem incongruous at first — people with power rarely acknowledge their failures. But upon deeper reflection, power and failure are closely intertwined. Once you have power, what happens when…

In the wake of major climate disasters in Puerto Rico and Alaska, the Environmental Justice Resourcing Collective (EJRC) at the Kataly Foundation awarded $257,000 in rapid response funding to nine groups in both areas. The grassroots leaders of the EJRC were entrusted by the Foundation to distribute resources based on…

Within an institution, fear of failure can originate from leadership. If people at the top of an organization are averse to failure, or projects turning out differently than expected, a culture of fear trickles down to the rest of the team. Alternatively, embracing experimentation and letting go of an attachment…

There is a lot about the world of philanthropy that is not discussed enough with regards to programmatic decisions — but even less information is shared about how finance and operations teams carry out their work. Part of what may be seen as silence is a measured release of information…

In our latest Q&A from our series of reflections on failure, our Grants and Program Associate, Danielle Royston-Lopez, shares reflections about separating the personal from the systemic, rejecting white supremacist frameworks, and contending with the discomfort of having power. What have you needed to unlearn in your role at Kataly…

To conclude Kataly’s series of reflections on failures, we are asking team members to offer their thoughts on what they are unlearning, how philanthropy can uphold inequities, and how they have failed. In this Q&A, our Director of Knowledge and Grants, Ray Holgado, offers insights on fighting the urge to…

By: Donna Bransford, Iris Garcia, and Larry Yang There’s a saying in philanthropy: “If you’ve worked at one foundation, you’ve worked at one foundation.” It’s a fairly obvious observation: no two funders are alike, which also means that none of our failures are exactly alike either. For Kataly, our context…

By: Shaena Johnson and Marni Rosen The Environmental Justice Resourcing Collective (EJRC) at the Kataly Foundation is a group of nine women of color movement leaders who have a long history of engagement in intersectional environmental and social justice work. After being established at Kataly in 2020, the nine leaders…