Community-Driven Philanthropy – 2025 Remote Learning Series

This highly interactive, six-session online learning series gives grantmakers in the GEO community the opportunity to learn from their peers about Community-Driven Philanthropy grantmaking approaches. Expert guest speakers will also be on hand. Participants will explore the practices that matter most to nonprofits through a combination of in-depth learning, practical examples, and thought-provoking discussions.

In this six-part series, participants will:

• Build capacity for having difficult conversations around the historically rooted relationship between philanthropy and community distrust.
• Understand the conditions necessary to build and sustain trust with community members and the need for building the capacity for long-term social change.
• Start to map and analyze power at the individual, organizational, and community levels to create plans to identify ways in which philanthropy can equitably cede power to communities and with nonprofit partners.
• Plan current and future community-driven actions by understanding and using tools such as the Community and Nonprofit Participation Spectrum* and Philanthropic Processes for Participation.
• Apply high-quality feedback loops as a critical way to inform community-driven philanthropy and to center practices in equity.
• Analyze various toolboxes in the sector, including resources from key partners such as Fund for Shared Insight, Feedback Labs, Engage R+D, National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, to enhance future community-driven philanthropy efforts.
• Lean into current diagnoses, analyses and interpretations of our roles and the sector of philanthropy; and envision a future of community-driven integration and systems change.
• Connect and build relationships with other GEO community members who can be a resource and support in implementing community-driven philanthropy in their work.

This is not your average “online webinar” series! Sessions are active and the curriculum is delivered using a variety of modes including chat activities, breakout room discussions, full group discussion, polls, white boarding, Padlet, and other tools. Every session includes assigned homework and readings.

This series is highly interactive and active participation is required to gain the most from this course.