Our institutions and established social mechanisms are not prepared to take on the challenges of the world’s ongoing “poly-crisis”—the multiple, overlapping global crises of our times. To meet these challenges, we need radical transformation: a post-growth understanding of the economy, post-industrial education, and a fundamental evolution in how organizations and philanthropy work towards change. We need to critically reflect on our own roles and develop new practices and cultures of collaboration. We need to find the courage to reshape our current structures into a new modus operandi.

In exploring new forms of collaboration, we and our partners have found great potential in “relational approaches.” This concept focuses on building trust-based relationships that create space for emergence: unplanned effects resulting from interactions within complex systems. These effects could provide us with the innovative means needed to advance transformation.

While there is currently no commonly acknowledged definition of what relational approaches are in philanthropic practice, some characteristics seem to endure the discourse.

Relationships before impact

The basis of relational approaches is formed by two interlinked concepts. The first concept is that collaboration is essential to creating impact—especially at a societal or system level—and trust is essential for collaboration to thrive. Although the direct link between trust and impact has long been recognized in the field of philanthropy, there is still much room for development as many philanthropic organizations still adhere to a controloriented approach to impact and its measurement.

The second concept is less established. It links the importance of trust with the belief that building trusting relationships is in itself an impactful endeavor. Thus, rather than investing in a predefined outcome, investment should be made in building trust and the infrastructure needed to sustain it. In this way, outcomes can emerge from the interactions of stakeholders on a given issue. In line with systems thinking and complexity science, this approach creates the potential for constellations that not only respond to the initial challenge but also to the interdependencies that are connected to that challenge.

Relational approaches can range from investing a substantial amount of time into trust-building before entering a formal partnership, to nurturing a network of relationships within an ecosystem. Relational approaches also suggest that the power needed to act on the poly-crisis can be better achieved in trustful relationships rather than linear ones, with emergence leading to more effective outcomes over time.

Acting within a system

If philanthropy were to fully embrace this logic, it would ignite a thorough process of change as it would mean for organizations to understand themselves as actors within the system they are trying to reshape—not outside of that system. The ambition to reshape a system would also require the philanthropic organization to reposition and change itself as well—in response to what the system feeds back. Thus, both the structure and culture of philanthropy as we know it would become a dynamic field of development.

Another consequence of adopting relational approaches would be a shift in power-sharing. From both a relational and a systems thinking perspective, decentralizing decision-making around the allocation and use of resources would strengthen a system’s ability to adapt as it undergoes a process of change.

The growing experiences, practices, and outcomes around relational approaches have the potential to be applied to all areas in the field of social change. At iac Berlin, we have been engaged in this exploration, experimenting with relational approaches with our partners for a few years now. For our Activity Report 2023, we have invited in perspectives, learnings, and stories to provide you with a diverse collection of how colleagues in philanthropy currently apply and experience relational approaches.

Insights from our partners:

Impact through relationships

For us, relational approaches not only mean "relationships before impact," but "impact through relationships”. This refers to the foundation's approach of funding with trust and flexibility. We are increasingly investing considerable time and resources in building trust and relationships with our partners, which for example involves an explicit initiation phase in which we get to know better the needs of the organizations we support. These changes lead to a shift in our role: from a traditional asymmetrical power structure to a real partnership.

In our opinion, this conscious investment leads to better project outcomes and greater outreach to organizations and partners we don’t always work with. And it enables the sharing of power and responsibility as well as cooperation on an equal footing. In the end, it is our partners who bring about social change—and they know best what needs to be done. If our partners can do their job well, we can achieve our own goals as well.

Working with relational approaches is not always easy as the positive effects are not immediately measurable. It requires patience and trust in the shared process and a change in our own attitude as a foundation: we need to consciously take a step back. A challenge is the—often incorrect—assumption that power-sharing in relational approaches means a loss or a reduction of a foundation’s influence. But there are a lot of gains: reputation and network growth, increased impact by reaching the right target groups, and most importantly more legitimacy.

In our experience, investing in relational approaches is a learning process that eventually leads to improved collaboration and, as a result, more effectiveness and impact.

Silke Breimaier
Senior Manager Future Issues and Foundation Development, Robert Bosch Stiftung

Markus Lux
Senior Vice President Global Issues, Robert Bosch Stiftung

Culture of relational approaches

The American baseball player Yogi Berra once said: “Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours.” I sometimes think about this quote when I’m heading to a community event on weekends or at night. Community life doesn’t happen 9-5, Monday to Friday. People have their existing interests, and meeting people where they are at is critical to forming strong relationships.

At the Inner North Community Foundation, we support 32 suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. It’s a bustling place of approximately 500,000 people, 45,000 business, 898 charities, 142 schools. There are pockets of advantage, and places where people are working hard to get out of tough situations. For the Community Foundation to be relevant, people in our community need to know us, like us, and trust us.

Getting to relationships of trust means to focus on a culture of relational approaches. This includes:

• How we communicate with the world: We are real people wanting to have real conversations. Artificial barriers delay getting to authentic relationships.
• How we show up: To understand our community means being open to the breadth of activity happening. This means that we can triangulate data points and try and see new ways forward.
• How we arrange governance: Like the community groups we fund, we are part of civil society.
• What we do: It is not enough to just know someone and hold them in positive regard. Trust comes from saying what you will do and doing what you say.

It’s these relationships—built on trust—that accelerate our common progress.

Ben Rodgers
Executive Officer Inner North Community Foundation / Chair, Community Foundations Australia

Relational infrastructure as strategy

At the Equality Fund, relational infrastructure, as a path to lasting social transformation, is both a strategic choice and a tactical practice. As a strategy, we’re choosing to fuel movements. As a result, we’re not building offices around the world. Neither are we leading from the front.

With the choice to pursue a relational strategy, we are also learning (and unlearning) how to put this into practice. We’re ceding power and control. We’re working to fuel the incredible wisdom, creativity, and experience of people around the world. And we’re seeing individuals lead change inside of their own communities that can have lasting impact.

Traditional ways of working can be incremental and siloed. We need new, catalytic strategies that have an exponential impact trajectory. We believe relational strategies and the practice of relational approaches are one of the few levers we can deploy to help society move faster than the pace of the problems we face.

Susan Snider
Vice President, Strategy, Innovation and Impact, Equality Fund

New capacities for collective action

“How do we practice new paradigms in philanthropy?” This is the purpose of PEX, a community of over 350 practitioners in the field of philanthropy infrastructure. Future-fit, diverse philanthropy that paves the ways to regenerative societies and always raises to the challenges of our times is the vision of Philea’s Futures Philanthropy initiative. Both focus on creating a new culture centered on relationships and shared leadership—moving away from traditional notions of hierarchy and power to embodying leadership through ideas and responsibility.

Fostering relational approaches in professional settings means showing up as you are, sharing vulnerabilities and challenges. We are not used to talking about these in professional settings, which can open up opportunities but also create tension. Personal encounters that focus on getting to know each other and building deep relationships, without the pressure to deliver results, can become the seeds of transformative change in the future—if we are patient and let go of control.

To get there, we need to redefine what we mean by "action" and "results”. Our established ways of action have not produced the results we wanted to see, while today's times of uncertainty and complexity, where cause and effect are often unclear, force us to radically rethink how we learn, work, and collaborate.

We need to create new capacities for collective action, and that starts with a new culture that allows for imperfection, humility, and the acknowledgement that sometimes we don't know.

Hanna Stähle
Head of Foresight and Innovation, Philea

This article was orginally published in the iac Berlin Activity Report 2023. The entire report is available as free download:

Contact

Join us on this journey into a new way of working. We'll be happy to hear from you.

Darius Polok
darius.polok@iac-berlin.org