I’ve long been professionally interested in how education philanthropy thinks about systems change, and how it thinks about funding that informs and organizes parents and communities so they can exercise their innate power — individually and collectively — to create and sustain change. 

I periodically find myself catching up with funders in the education sector, and our conversations naturally lead to their current funding portfolios. There’s a common theme: About 90% of any given portfolio funds district or charter schools, curriculum, professional development, or other educational innovations happening in or out of school. The remaining 10% of funds are typically committed to parent/community power and systems change (10% may be an optimistic estimate for some funders). 

The conversations then generally turn to the frustrations that these funders have about how the education programs they support aren’t achieving greater scale and success within education systems. 

But what if those funding allocations were flipped? Imagine 10% being invested in demonstrating strong programs and 90% in building an infrastructure of parent/community power to drive change so that these innovations are fully embraced, funded, and implemented at scale by systems. 

At this point in conversations, there’s sometimes a pause. And some head-scratching. Ceding control to parents and communities doesn’t usually come naturally to philanthropy. A common response is, “But what if the community wants something else — what if they have an agenda that’s different from ours?”  

What if they do?  

As Maya Martin Cadogan, founder and executive director of Parents Amplifying Voices in Education (PAVE), counsels, “If education funders let go of controlling the agenda, they’ll find that what parents and communities want often aligns with what they want in creating educational equity over the long term, and parents and communities often have the most innovative solutions for how to get there.” 

It’s certainly legitimate for funders to have an agenda. Further, if a community has an agenda that a funder believes is wrong, I don’t think they’re obligated to invest resources in supporting it (although I hope philanthropy would stop and consider a community’s vision for themselves before dismissing it).   

But what funders cannot do is then turn around and impose some other alternative, oppositional agenda on a community. 

Given that, what options do funders have? 

If parents, communities, and philanthropy want fundamentally different things, it’s a chance for funders to pause and reexamine their agendas. In doing so, funders have an opportunity to consider how they want to position themselves relative to a community across “three Ds”: Deference, Decide, or the middle ground of Dialogue. 

1. DEFERENCE. The first rule in community organizing is listening and putting aside your agenda (which doesn’t mean you don’t have one). 

Ideally, philanthropy would start by listening to a community and being responsive to their agenda — to make sure the pace and priorities of a change agenda are parent/community-led and philanthropically followed. Good listening starts with respectful deference to a community. What’s the change they require? What’s their shared definition of success? What programming do they believe would achieve this? If funders don’t understand a community’s definition of success, there’s a good chance they will — even if with good intentions — impose their own definition.  

This level of deference requires a big shift in mindset and a recognition that this work is not about how we in philanthropy invite communities to our table. Rather, it is the investment and effort we need to make to earn trust and credibility so that communities invite us to sit at their table and contribute to a locally driven agenda for change.

2. DECIDE. At the other end of the continuum from deference is deciding on behalf of a community — essentially, how the bulk of philanthropy has historically operated. 

This impulse partially manifests out of the implicit and explicit bias that philanthropic institutions can, at times, have toward the communities they serve, despite the good intentions at the core of their funding portfolios. But I also think something deeper drives the default to a focus on deciding. 

In my seven years in education philanthropy, I observed that many high-net-worth individuals, whatever their starting privilege, became high-net-worth individuals because they are smart and adept at data analysis that creates value (particularly financial value). Not surprisingly, they tend to approach a social problem as something they can successfully analyze to a solution because that’s their talent — and they have a whole bunch of zeroes attached to their net worth that demonstrate how good they are at it.  

They then hire like-minded people to be on their foundation staff. These people are also smart and experienced at analyzing their way to a proposed solution, and deeply committed to creating measurable social value. 

Asking funders and their staff to cede decision-making and power must come with an acknowledgment that this is really, really difficult. It forces them to question, at a deeply personal level, the core of their identity and their perception of how others value them. Their self-worth may be grounded in how successful they are at creating answers, which can make it difficult to internalize that their real role may be to ask questions so that they can then hear a community’s answers. 

Is ceding decision-making necessary? Yes.  

Is it easy? Not at all. 

3. DIALOGUE. A middle ground between deference and deciding exists: dialogue. If funders can’t fully relinquish control of the agenda, they can at least begin by engaging with a community in a conversation about what the agenda should be.

For example, instead of deciding that a community’s school system needs high-dosage tutoring, philanthropy could first approach that community to introduce the concept of tutoring, how it works, and its proof points of success in similar communities. Philanthropy could then begin a dialogue around how to help students in this specific community catch up to pre-COVID-19 pandemic learning levels.  

As one funder reminded me, this is an opportunity for “those in philanthropy, with their ability to analyze, see patterns, and draw on expertise, to bring valuable insights to the dialogue that might not always be immediately available to communities.”  

True dialogue means information flows in both directions. However, it must be a genuine process. It can’t be a performative exercise after a decision’s been made — that’s deception, not dialogue.  

If done honestly, a funder can pitch a proposal to a community so that they can understand it, interrogate it, shape it, and decide if they as a community support it.  

In the case of tutoring, a community might say (and this isn’t a stretch) that mental health and social-emotional support are as important to them as academic recovery. The well-intentioned philanthropist proposing tutoring can then think about what providing mental health support should look like within a tutoring context from a design perspective. They might respond to the community’s priorities by demonstrating how their proposed tutoring model is grounded in deep, authentic relationships and mentoring support to address mental health needs as well as academic needs (though the community will then expect that tutoring model to deliver on it). 

Funders’ eyes frequently light up when I discuss the dialogue option — it’s easier to cede control of a decision if you still get to make a recommendation. 

But don’t forget Deference. Dialogue is a good middle ground in the short term, but in the long term a community will be more receptive to philanthropy’s expertise if funders have first done the hard work to earn credibility by showing respect for and prioritizing a given community’s agenda. 

Starting with deference can be daunting. It begins with appreciating that many communities may be (rightly) skeptical if they’ve experienced a history of people who control the agenda disenfranchising them from decision-making. Their history matters, including a history with education philanthropy. If a community has experienced funders not listening to or respecting them, they have no reason to reciprocate. Doing the hard work of earning a community’s trust and developing credibility with them should be the core focus of what philanthropy does. 

As a parent leader in the District of Columbia once said as a critique of outsiders:  

“You don’t know who we are; 
You don’t understand our history; 
You don’t understand what’s important to us; 
You don’t understand what makes us different; 
You don’t ask us what we want; 
So why should we trust you?” 

Philanthropy has been and continues to be catalytic in developing innovations that create more effective, efficient, and equitable educational opportunities. Funders will be even more successful in getting systems to embrace these innovations by building authentic support from communities who decide that the change in question meets their needs.

For more on parent power, click here.