Trust-Based Philanthropy and Racial Equity Are Not the Same Commitment

Trust-based philanthropy has gained real traction in the field, and its core practices- multi-year unrestricted funding, simplified applications, reduced reporting burden- are worth adopting.

But trust-based practice and racial equity practice are not interchangeable, and a foundation can implement one without meaningfully advancing the other.

The conflation is understandable. Both emerged into wider adoption around the same period, both use the language of power and relationship, and both position themselves against the same traditional grantmaking norms. Foundations frequently announce them together in the same strategic plan. But they answer different questions, and a foundation that treats them as one commitment tends to end up with the easier of the two.

Trust-based Philanthropy Can Exist Without a Racial Equity Analysis

A foundation can simplify its application process and extend multi-year grants to every organization in its portfolio, regardless of the racial makeup of its leadership, and call this trust-based reform. That is real progress on process. It is not automatically progress on equity, because it does not ask who has historically been excluded from funding relationships in the first place or whether the current portfolio reflects that history.

This is where the distinction gets practical. Trust-based practice improves the experience of organizations already inside the portfolio. It does little for those that never made it in. If a foundation's grantee list was assembled through the networks its program officers already had, and those networks were largely white, then reducing reporting burden makes an inequitable portfolio more pleasant to be part of without changing who is in it.

Racial Equity Work Requires Trust-Based Practice

The mechanics of trust-based philanthropy- less paperwork, more flexibility, longer funding horizons- matter enormously for BIPOC-led organizations that have carried disproportionate reporting burden and shorter funding cycles for years. Research has consistently found that Black-led organizations receive less unrestricted funding than comparably sized white-led peers, which means the flexibility trust-based practice offers lands on an uneven baseline.

But racial equity work also requires a foundation to examine who gets funded at all, at what size, and with what strings, which trust-based practice alone does not guarantee. It requires looking at sourcing, at who sits on review committees, at whether the criteria used to assess organizational readiness reward infrastructure that some organizations have been systematically denied the resources to build.

The Two Commitments Reinforce Each Other When Done Together

At their strongest, trust-based philanthropy and racial equity practice combine into something more powerful than either alone: funding relationships that extend real decision-making power to grantee organizations, paired with a deliberate analysis of who has been shut out of that power historically and what it takes to change that pattern going forward.

Done together, they also protect against each other's failure modes. Trust-based practice without an equity lens can entrench an existing portfolio under friendlier terms. Equity commitments without trust-based practice can bring new organizations into a relationship that still burdens them with reporting requirements designed for institutions with development staff.

A Foundation Serious About Both Should Measure Both

Trust-based philanthropy has its own field-recognized practices to measure against. Racial equity requires its own separate accounting: demographic data on grantees and leadership, analysis of grant size and duration by race, and honest evaluation of whether decision-making authority has actually shifted.

That last measure is the hardest and the most revealing. Simplified applications and longer grant terms are visible and reportable. Whether a foundation has changed who holds power over funding decisions is neither, and it is the question a serious equity commitment eventually has to answer. A foundation doing this work should be able to speak to both, not conflate one for the other.