STEP FOUR

Relate

My favorite book as a child was How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. I’ve read it dozens of times because I was clear at an early age that whatever I ended doing in life would involve the world’s more precious resource: people. We are all in the people business! However, every institution and process dealing with money I’ve experienced has this in common: they focus on transactions rather than relationships.

To prioritize relationship means that cultivating strong, authentic, caring human connection is valued over and above returns on investments and measurable results. It means recognizing that rather than the cash, relationships are an institution’s greatest asset, even for one that is focused on money. It means that those with wealth are not reduced to cash machines and those seeking funding are not reduced to gold diggers. There are real people hiding inside the business suits.

To create an atmosphere in which relationships come first, we need to start with the location and design of the space. No more ivory towers. If it’s serious about connecting to the communities it serves, a foundation shouldn’t be set off in the woods surrounded by deer, with the offices occupying buildings that resemble plantations and the rooms filled with antiques that look like they belonged to royal families. How can you serve disabled people if your rooms are not accessible to them? How can you serve trans people if your restrooms are not welcoming to them? And why don’t the windows open in these places, when the fields of philanthropy and finance so desperately need a breath of fresh air?

Banks and investment firms don’t have to feel like they were carved from a block of ice, intimidating with their angular slick surfaces and long rectangular tables with “VIP seating” on either end. Funders’ offices don’t have to look like yurts, either, but there’s compelling evidence that spaces that encourage relationships have rounded edges and warm textiles, with the kitchen central. When people sit in circles they feel like they’re on more equal footing with one another. When people can cook and eat together, they connect on a human level. When people are physically comfortable, they are more likely to be themselves.

The influential architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander began critiquing contemporary architecture for creating lifeless, impersonal spaces way back in the mid-1970s, publishing a series of books in which he calls instead for structures that possess a quality of aliveness and wholeness, “beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive.”¹ These qualities impact the social interactions that can happen in those structures. As he writes elsewhere: “The structure of life I have described in buildings—the structure which I believe to be objective—is deeply and inextricably connected with the human person, and with the innermost nature of human feeling.”² There are literally certain kinds of spaces that make people feel welcome, that make visitors feel on equal footing with those already in the building, that encourage people to interact and relate. Those are decolonized spaces.

“We have this belief that everything is about relationships,” Pamela Shifman, the executive director of the NoVo Foundation, told me. “So we actually spend almost no time on the written applications and we try to make things super easy. Often the best work is happening in places where people aren’t writing the best applications about the work. That’s also really true outside the U.S., like a million percent. We’re also trying to have meetings not only at our office but to go to others. These things may seem small, but they create the opportunity for different kinds of conversations and relationships to emerge.”³

Founded by Peter Buffett and his wife, Jennifer Buffett, NoVo’s mission is to “foster a transformation from a world of domination and exploitation to one of collaboration and partnership.” Pamela continued:

It’s good for both sides. As funders, we can tell when someone treats you as an ATM machine, just figuring how they’re going to get the money out of me and don’t see anything about me and who I am. So much shifts when we make space for real relationships. We really get to know each other and go deep. We share on a personal level. When you’re with someone, you have to be able to really be with them. And know each other. And love each other. And to have real tension. You have to be able to disagree and even fight, and then say, It’s okay. We’re still on the same team. I feel like we have to find ways to be able to develop meaningful relationships with people so that you actually can talk about what’s actually going on and figure out how to move forward together.⁴

It’s true that relationships are more complicated than transactions, as Pamela points out. There’s a reason why folks vow to stick together for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health. Real, complex relationships are necessary not only for whatever the present entails but also to face challenges in the future. Relationships create resilience; transactions don’t.

Transactions are superficial. It’s like the difference between dating and relating in this day and age, where dating apps are like marketplaces, and you create profiles to sell yourself. It’s about selling: making yourself attractive to someone else. You’re trying to pass a test and at the same time you’re judging someone else’s presentation to see if they’re good enough for you. Relating, on the other hand, is about authenticity and vulnerability. You let yourself be seen for who you are and you accept the other person for who they are. You allow the other person the benefit of the doubt. Mutual trust, respect, and appreciation deepen a relationship. We commit to supporting the success of the other person. We develop a sense that we are in this together.

There’s a list of 36 questions developed by a psychologist named Arthur Aron who studies intimacy; it became a viral sensation after appearing in the New York Times “Modern Love” column in 2015. The questions are designed to bring two strangers along the path of relationship, breaking down barriers gradually by revealing people’s concerns, hopes, dreams, and secrets. Twenty-five questions in, after quite a bit of territory has been covered, each person is asked to make three true “we” statements that refer to the two of them together—in other words, at this point, they’re in a relationship. Aron’s 36 questions been used in studies to explore cross-race relationships and prejudice; they’ve been used to reduce tensions between police officers and community members.⁵ How great would it be if, alongside asking for your business plan and your unique proposition and your rate of return, funders asked the 36 questions, or at least a selection of them, until both sides could make three true “we” statements?

Jennifer Buffett explained what relationships looks like in the context of NoVo’s connection with their grantees: “If you want trust, then you have to give trust and the benefit of the doubt. We give them a commitment of seven years’ funding or five years’ funding . . . a nice timeline. And we say, you come back to us at the end of the year, and you can be totally honest, you’re going to get the money through the whole seven years no matter what. So tell us what you did, what did you find out? What problems emerged? And then give them the second and the third year, and keep asking and keep giving, give it freely with no preconceived mind conditions, or stipulations and no fear. Mistakes will be made. That’s okay. Everyone learns.”⁶ It’s about patience and unconditional care and trust.

There are a lot of vibrant conversations happening in the field of organizational design that explore what it looks like when an organization is structured horizontally: when the people who used to be powerless, at the bottom of the old pyramid model, are empowered and have a sense of agency. There are a lot of conversations about purpose-driven organizations and workplaces where the whole person is welcome.

Many industries and businesses have begun experimenting with moving toward open, participatory, and transparent processes. They are moving toward seeking and incorporating wisdom from all levels of the organization as well as from users or “the crowd.” The functions of decision making, goal setting, creation, implementation, and evaluation are being distributed among all these stakeholders as well, with the recognition that important insights and innovations come from those who were previously not included.

Many are exploring the benefits of sharing power, for example in new forms of cooperative ownership or shareholding. The barriers between designer and consumer, expert and user are dissolving. There is more role fluidity. In the words of Jeremy Heimans, who writes about the distinction between “old power” and “new power”: “New power operates differently, like a current. It is made by many; it is open, participatory, and peer-driven. It uploads and it shares. Like water or electricity, it’s most forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it.”⁷

What if funders moved from hoarding resources and operating in obscurity to becoming transparent, accountable, and participatory? Rather than the formality of professionalism, it would rely on the wisdom of the community. Rather than dinosaur-style “command-and-control” methods that are based in scarcity and separation, funders would embrace abundance and trust.

What if the question became “How can everyone be powerful?” rather than “How can everyone have equal power?” In his book on organizational design that adopts a framework of organization-as-organism rather than organization-as-machine, the Belgian scholar of human behavior and management Frederic Laloux writes: “[P]eople can hold different levels of power, and yet everyone can be powerful . . . [as] in an ecosystem, interconnected organisms thrive without one holding power over another . . . the point is not to make everyone equal; it is to allow all employees to grow into the strongest, healthiest version of themselves.”⁸

In fact, what if funders no longer assumed that disadvantaged communities and individuals needed to be empowered at all? What if we acknowledged how powerful they inherently are? The irony of a project of empowerment is that it requires victims: if you need someone to give up power and make space for you, then you are a victim of the power dynamic. Transcending the Drama Triangle roles of perpetrator, victim, and savior involves everyone being allocated with agency and responsibility.

We don’t see a lot of these human-centered, horizontal, holistic models being adapted in the institutions along the loans-to-gifts spectrum, but there’s no reason we can’t start.