Five Lessons from Ten Years of Power Sharing

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NCG's Practice Lab is a resource space to share great experiments and learnings in philanthropy. The Lab focuses on actions that experiment and takes risks, fails forward with lessons learned, and lifts up equitable best practices.

Among funders and nonprofits, power sharing is a hot topic. Ten years ago, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation began our own experiment with the approach. We learned that power sharing is challenging, requiring compromise from funders and grantees alike. But in the end, it holds potential to reimagine grantmaking relationships and unlock profound impact.  

In 2014, the Foundation launched Starting Smart and Strong, a ten-year place-based initiative partnering with three California communities – Fresno, Oakland, and East San Jose – to ensure that every child from birth to age five grows up healthy and ready for kindergarten. Recognizing the different contexts, demographics, and goals of these communities, we knew that a traditional top-down approach wouldn’t lead to lasting success or equitable outcomes.

That’s why we decided to try power sharing, adopting an approach called “co-creation,” a form of stakeholder engagement that prioritizes mutual trust and respect, shared decision-making responsibility, and the inclusion of diverse perspectives.

As the concepts of power sharing and trust-based philanthropy were gaining traction across philanthropy, co-creation was new for us – exciting, innovative, and full of potential. Over the next decade, we began to learn what it truly means to share power.

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Ultimately, the impact these three communities achieved across ten years is remarkable:

• Fresno’s Language Learning Project has become a model across California. The California State Preschool Program had adopted elements of this professional development approach designed to equip teachers and caregivers to support young dual language learners, and both the California Department of Education and Department of Social Services have supported the project’s expansion.  
• Oakland Starting Smart and Strong scaled multiple interventions districtwide including coaching, developmental screening, and kindergarten transition programming, while also developing and spreading practices that support young boys of color and their families and promoting trauma-responsive, healing-centered early learning practices; and
• Franklin-McKinley School District’s focus on social emotional learning started in preschool classrooms before spreading to the early elementary grades and ultimately transforming the district’s K-8 grade system. Today, teachers and administrators across all grades understand that social emotional learning is foundational to all learning.

None of this happened overnight or by accident. Over ten years, there were bumps in the road – big and small – and getting to the destination required all the partners in Starting Smart and Strong to communicate openly, problem solve collectively, and focus continually on our shared goal.

How did you center the communities you hope to serve in your experiment?

Centering communities was the point, from the beginning. We knew that a top-down, funder-driven approach wouldn’t succeed in three communities with unique challenges and opportunities, and it wasn’t going to support us sharing power. Stepping into co-creation gave us the framework we needed to formally center the experiences and needs of the communities themselves.

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We intentionally gave each community space to choose their own areas of focus (Fresno chose to focus on dual-language learners, Franklin-McKinley focused on social-emotional learning, and Oakland focused on trauma-informed care) and offered individualized technical assistance tailored to their needs.

This was a strong start, but our intention to share power was impacted by a common pitfall in funders and grantee relationships – assumptions. Our assumptions around how we could best support grantees, how the three communities would progress at a similar pace, and how communities would scale their innovations widely – led to challenges.

Our initial approach to scale innovations made some grantees feel pressured to pursue statewide scale even though their innovations were uniquely tailored to their community’s context. Similarly, our assumption that each community would progress at a similar rate put pressure on grantees facing vastly different challenges and opportunities. And even things that seemed simple – what resources the Foundation would provide or how frequently we would hold in-person convenings – proved capable of causing friction.

Assessing these questions helped us to lean even more into power sharing. Ultimately, this is what enabled us to address these challenges effectively – without it, we might have continued moving forward, the Foundation believing that we were giving grantees what they needed and grantees believing they had to go along with it to satisfy us. Power sharing gave us the framework to center the experiences of communities – through surfacing issues, addressing them, and getting back to working toward our shared goals.

What risks did you take in service of equity?

In one sense, experimenting with power sharing was a risk in itself. Like all funders, we have constraints we must work within – expectations about how we'll show impact and progress. And our grantee partners, too, assumed risk by trying this new – uncertain – approach. The traditional funder and grantee relationship is structured to minimize that type of risk and ensure things go smoothly.

But in another sense, the real risk would have been approaching this work as “business as usual.” Once we knew the unique nature of each community’s needs and challenges, we felt power sharing was the approach that would lead to lasting impact and therefore easy to prioritize.

As it turned out, power sharing opened us and our partners up to more conflict, more course correction, and more humility than any of us were used to in traditional funding relationships.

But it’s crucial to remember that conflict and complexity are features, not flaws, when it comes to power sharing. A prescriptive, controlled process might be easier but won’t achieve the same impact as a co-created approach.

Identifying and overcoming challenges together strengthened our relationships and created space for grantees and partners to speak up and make their voices heard.

What advice or call to action do you have for other funders?

Each funder will have to decide if co-creation is the right approach for their work with grantee partners. But I think more funders should consider it – it's a powerful tool to have in the grantmaking toolbox, and in our experience, the reward was well worth the risk.

Here are five key lessons that capture the major learnings and themes from a decade of power sharing. We hope they inspire and inform funders and grantees in embracing these strategies.

1. Be patient. It takes time to build trust. Power sharing cannot happen without strong, trusting relationships. And those don’t form overnight. If we could do it all over, we’d build in more time at the beginning to allow us deeper engagement in a collaborative planning process and to allow time for those relationships to grow organically without knocking the initiative off course. And we’d recognize that trust is an outcome on its own – establishing it will set you up for success.
2. Put all your cards on the table. Power dynamics are inherent in any relationship between grantees and funders. But that doesn’t mean navigating those dynamics has to be awkward. Being willing and able to name your limitations or constraints can go a long way toward building trust and setting an example for open communication. For example, maybe your organization’s board has strong feelings about how you’re measuring impact. Knowing this will help your grantee partners understand your perspective – and you can work together to find a solution. Embrace this vulnerability. It will be the most direct path to trusting relationships.
3. It will get messy, and that’s the point. You’ve cultivated trusting relationships, and you’ve set a tone for transparent, open communication. Now, expect things to get messy. Embrace this messiness as the very essence of power sharing. It’s inclusive, collaborative, and complex, and that’s the point. Trusting relationships and clear communication will ensure all partners have a voice, and navigating challenges collectively will strengthen relationships.   
4. Let the community lead. No, really, let the community lead. There’s real momentum behind the practice of power sharing. It’s a common refrain: trust the communities you hope to serve – they often know exactly what they need to overcome challenges or solve complex issues. And yet, it can be hard for funders to relinquish control, even if they have the best intentions. All funders have constraints they must work within. Examining those constraints honestly can help identify where limitations might be self-imposed and where you might be more flexible. If we truly believe that communities hold the solutions to the problems we seek to address, then it’s incumbent on us to act like it – to embrace the fact that as funders, we might be most helpful in a supportive role rather than driving every aspect of the work.
5. Practice! Embracing power sharing leads to more – and more effective – power sharing. The process of sharing power with grantees and partners is iterative. You won’t get everything right the first time, especially if it’s new for your organization. But with each iteration, you’ll continue to build a kind of muscle memory for the approach

Now, as the Foundation’s investment in Starting Smart and Strong comes to a close, we’re applying those same lessons to our new initiative, which finds us working in new geographies, where we will need to dedicate enough time to build those relationships as a strong foundation for future impact.

Looking back at what we learned throughout this journey, it’s clear that there’s no substitute for experience. It was essential for us to learn these lessons the way we did. And yet, knowing to expect a long, sometimes messy, iterative process might have prepared us to further lean in and trust the process.

Learn more about Starting Smart & Strong

About the Author

Katie Harkin is a Children and Families associate program officer at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. She leads community-based work in California, focused in Fresno, Oakland, and Monterey County, to improve equitable outcomes in maternal health and support healthy development for children in their earliest years. Katie’s role involves collaborating with grantee partners to support their work to advance maternal and child health, and co-creating solutions to develop a connected system of care that equitably serves families with children prenatal to age three. She joined the Packard Foundation in 2016 as a program associate.

Connect with Katie