What the Work Taught Me

When I started on this social impact path seventeen years ago, I thought I understood what it meant to help. I had good intentions. I believed deeply in the power of community, in the resilience of people who had been overlooked, in the possibility of change. I showed up with energy and a willingness to learn. I thought that was enough. I have learned that there is so much more.

Fast forward nearly two decades, after volunteering in my Local School Council, fundraising for community-based organizations, leading nonprofits and now a family foundation, I find myself holding a different set of beliefs. Not because the original ones failed me, but because proximity has a way of teaching what distance cannot.

Being embedded in community, I have learned things I could not have read in a report or understood from a site visit. I learned them by staying. By listening. By being present long enough to see what happens after the check is written, after the program launches, after the spotlight moves on.

As we mark ten years of grantmaking at Julian Grace Foundation, I am helping the organization reflect on the past as we make plans for the future. Reflection has a powerful way of illuminating new ways of seeing. In my own introspection, I have come to recognize lessons learned and share them here in the hopes that they will serve others navigating the space between funding and programming:

I have learned what it means to walk alongside.

There is a version of philanthropy — a version I have been part of, if I am honest — that operates like a tollbooth. You pay, you pass, you move on.

Early in my career, I wanted to be more than that. I wanted to be present, to be in relationship, to matter beyond the transaction. But wanting and actually doing are separated by a gap that only time and trust can close.

Walking alongside someone means something specific. It means being there not just at the moment of the grant or the ribbon-cutting, but in the months that follow — when the program shifts, when a leader departs, when the community the organization serves faces something no one planned for. It means knowing the names of the people doing the work, not just the name of the organization on the letterhead. It means being reachable, not just responsive.

At JGF, we call this our high-engagement approach. But I did not invent it. It was taught to me, slowly, by the grantee partners who showed me what it felt like when a funder actually showed up, and what it felt like when they did not.

I have sat in rooms where nonprofit leaders confessed they were afraid to tell their funders the truth. Afraid to say the program was not working. Afraid to admit they needed help with something outside the scope of the grant. Afraid that honesty would cost them funding. That fear is a failure of relationship. And it is a failure I have contributed to, even when I did not mean to.

Proximity is not proximity unless you stay. And staying means being someone people can tell the truth to, even when the truth is hard.

I have learned that the most powerful thing I can offer is not money.

This one surprised me.

I work at a grantmaking foundation. Grants are what we do. And the grants matter -I will never pretend otherwise. For an under-resourced organization that larger funders routinely pass over, an unrestricted grant can mean the difference between survival and closure. I know that. I take it seriously. But over seventeen years, I have watched something else become equally true: the connections I can make, the doors I can open, the conversations I can facilitate- these often outlast any grant itself.

A grantee partner introduced to the right peer organization. A program director connected to a policy table they did not know they could sit at. A small nonprofit whose work suddenly becomes visible to a larger funder because someone said their name in the right room. I started calling this “support beyond the check,” and it has quietly reshaped how I think about my role.

This requires something from me that writing a check does not. It requires me to be genuinely embedded in the communities and fields I serve. It requires me to listen more than I speak. It requires me to use my position without centering myself in the story. That balance is not always easy to strike, but it is the work. And here is what I have noticed: when I do this well, the people I connect often forget I was involved. The introduction becomes the relationship. The door I opened becomes the room they now belong in. That invisibility used to bother me. Now I understand it is the point.

I am not just a steward of capital. I am, at my best, a connector, someone with enough trust in the field to move people, ideas, and opportunities toward the places they are most needed.

‍I have learned that caring for the people on the front lines is part of the mission.

Justice work is heavy.

The organizations we fund at JGF- working on immigration rights, health equity, environmental justice, cultural preservation, education- are staffed by people who have often chosen this work because the issues are personal. They are not just advocates. They are, in many cases, members of the communities they serve. They carry the weight of that proximity every single day.

For a long time, the sector treated this as a given: of course the work is hard. Of course people are stretched. That is the nature of the work. Move on.

I believe we can do better than that.

I have seen what burnout costs. I have watched gifted, committed people leave organizations, and sometimes leave the sector entirely, because the weight of the work accumulated without enough support beneath it. I have funded programs and watched the programs succeed while the people running them quietly fell apart.

I have also been that person. I have run on empty. I have worked weekends, skipped meals, answered emails at midnight, and told myself it was fine because the work mattered. And it did matter. But the cost was real.

So, I have started asking different questions. Not just: is the program effective? But: are the people doing this work being cared for? Are they resourced not only for the work, but for themselves? Is there room, in how we fund and how we engage, to say to a grantee partner: I see you, not just what you produce?

This is still evolving for me. I do not have a complete answer. But I am committed to holding the question, because I believe that sustainable justice work, the kind that outlasts any single grant cycle requires people who are not running on empty.

And if I am asking that of our grantee partners, I have to ask it of myself too. Seventeen years in, I am not the same person who started this work. I am more cautious about what I claim to know. I am slower to assume I understand someone else’s experience. I am quicker to admit when I have gotten something wrong. But I am also more certain about a few things.

I am certain that proximity matters. That staying matters. That the relationships we build are as important as the resources we move.

I am certain that the people doing the hardest, most essential work in our communities deserve more than our funding. They deserve our care, our attention, and our willingness to see them as whole people, not just as the vehicles for the change we want to see.

I am certain that my job is not to rescue anyone. My job is to show up, to listen, and to use what power I have to open doors that should never have been closed in the first place.

Seventeen years is a long time. It is also just the beginning of understanding what it means to do this work well. I am grateful to every person who stayed with me long enough to teach me that. And, yes, I am still learning.