After Philanthropy: Kataly’s January Newsletter
Para la traducción al español, haga clic aquí.
Dear community,
In these times of tumult and chaos, we are committed to both understanding how we need to evolve and shift in order to support our partners, and to maintaining practices aligned with our values. This newsletter remains a space for us to answer your questions about philanthropy with radical transparency, and a space to reflect on what our society could look like after philanthropy. To that end, one question we received about spending out seemed particularly timely right now:
How are you modeling and possibly calling-in other foundations and funders who are sunsetting without integrity? As grantees, we’re in such a vulnerable place to even ask what can be deemed as prickly subjects. Where is the space to have these intra-sector conversations that hold each other with loving accountability?
To learn more about our plans for the final years of our spend out, as well as our grantmaking in 2024, please RSVP for our upcoming State of the Spend Out webinar on Thurs, Feb 27 at 10 am PT.
Spending Out with Intention
In our first newsletter, we responded to a question we get asked a lot, which is: why are you a spend-out foundation?
In response to the above question shared with us, we’d like to dive deeper into the “how” of our spend-out process, and share some ideas for how other funders who are spending out can do so without causing greater harm to social movements.
Kataly is in a position that is somewhat unique, in the sense that we were founded as a spend-out foundation. This gave us the opportunity to manage expectations from grantee partners from the start; although at the beginning, we didn’t know exactly when we would make our final grants and investments (by 2028).
Along the way, we’ve made some mistakes and learned lessons, which has led us to prioritize abundance, clarity and transparency, and relationship-building in our spend-out process.
Some questions we regularly ask ourselves, which we would encourage other funders engaging in spending out to consider as well:
- Are we sharing as much information about our timeline and final years of grantmaking as possible?
- Are we being vague or unclear out of a desire to avoid uncomfortable conversations?
- Are we supporting grantee partners by connecting them to new funders? Are we gate-keeping any relationships?
- What are we proactively doing to set our grantees up for financial sustainability after we are gone?
Abundance:
Kataly has had a grantmaking strategy of making big grants early on, rather than starting small and then expanding in scale. By making big bets on organizations in the early stages of their work, we hoped to provide catalytic, seed funding that could set them up for success, instead of holding them back by making them prove themselves first.
As we move into the second half of our spend-out we are also considering how to expand our capacity building offerings for grantees, particularly in ways that will support them to sustain their work when Kataly closes.
Clarity and Transparency:
In 2022, we published a series on our failures as a foundation, and how we’ve learned from those missteps. One of those posts was about being as clear and specific as possible with grantee partners about our spend-out timeline and process. It’s one thing to tell grantees that we are a spend-out foundation and will not be a long-term funder. But that does not communicate the full picture of what our partners can expect from us. We learned that clear communication also means proactively sharing that one multi-year grant is the full extent of what many grantees will receive from us.
When funders disburse large grants to organizations, it can lead to the expectation that more is likely to come from that funder. Because that is often not the case with Kataly, we explicitly name that large grant awards are unlikely to be renewed. We also try to emphasize our spend-out timeline at multiple points in our communication with grantees: in grant award letters, during calls and check-ins, and in our public-facing communications.
Relationship-Building:
An essential part of spending out with integrity comes from building authentic relationships with our grantee partners that are grounded in radical honesty. Our hope is to build a dynamic where our grantees can openly share the challenges they are facing in their work, including challenges regarding resourcing.
Our goal is to be both responsive to the needs our grantees share, as well as be proactive about connecting grantees to new funding sources. This can look like participating in funder briefings, introducing grantees to different funders, and actively organizing within philanthropy to encourage more funders to invest deeply and at scale in community power-building work led by Black, Indigenous, and all people of color.
As always, we welcome feedback about how we can do better, and most effectively serve our social movement partners.
What do you want to know about Kataly and philanthropy?
For the next issue of our newsletter, please share a question with us. Ask us anything about philanthropy — how it works, why we make certain decisions — and we’ll do our best to answer as transparently as possible.
Climate Justice Alliance
In December last year, the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) won a major victory when they mobilized environmental justice movement leaders to successfully beat back a dirty climate deal that would have slashed environmental safeguards, gutted the National Environmental Policy Act, and made it easier for big oil and gas to build new projects that would accelerate harmful climate impacts. CJA was formed in 2013 to unite frontline communities and organizations to build resilient, regenerative, and equitable economies. Since its founding, CJA has challenged extractive economic practices that are harming people and ecosystems, exposed false “solutions” to the climate crisis, and demanded that the government and private industry take bold action on climate change. Their defeat of policies, like this recent dirty climate deal, takes months of organizing environmental justice groups and members of government to stand united in support of vulnerable, overpolluted communities. If you would like to learn more, please reach out to hailey@climatejusticealliance.org.
Kensington Corridor Trust
The end of 2024 represented a major milestone for Kensington Corridor Trust (KCT): 30 properties collectively owned in 5 years! As an organization that works with residents and small business owners to increase community-driven development in Philadelphia’s Kensington area, KCT seeks to build stability and shared economic prosperity on Kensington Avenue. The properties developed by KCT include 57 units of permanently affordable housing, and 20 affordable commercial spaces for small business development. In addition to housing and businesses, KCT has also stewarded the development of a community garden in the neighborhood. In the face of predatory business practices, and the threat of rapid development driven by external corporations, KCT has used a neighborhood trust model to maintain local control of property so that profits are reinvested for the benefit of the existing community, and to preserve the culture and affordability of the area. If you would like to learn more, please reach out to adriana@kctphilly.org.
Somos Espejos
Somos Espejos, an agroecological and ceremonial retreat center in Puerto Rico, officially became a community land trust with partner IALA-PR (Instituto para la Investigación y Acción en Agroecología) in 2024 and built their ceremonial retreat space in Trujillo Alto. The work of Somos Espejos focuses on imagining and building with healers, farmers, and intergenerational organizers to change the material and spiritual realities of their communities. Over the past year, Somos Espejos has hosted healing justice and strategic trainings for social justice movement partners in Puerto Rico, the United States, and internationally. They have also begun developing agroecological youth brigades where youth are able to connect to the land and earth based medicines and practices for collective healing and liberation. Their work is rooted in ancestral wisdom of communities across Puerto Rico and the Caribbean archipelago, and they are committed to liberating land out of the extractive economic market to preserve it for the healing of their people. If you would like to learn more, please reach out to somosespejospr@gmail.com.
Will the Revolution be Funded? Upstream podcast episode featuring Zac Chapman and Nairutri Shastry
Report on the Black Trans Policy Convening, hosted in October 2024 by Lavender Rights Project
