 So, this topic is, I think, certainly relevant today, you know, given the tension that a lot of us see if you're in the industry, whether you're coming from the impact space, the business space, government space or philanthropy, you know, this tension and certainly lately with the headlines of Sandbank Retreat on effective altruism, this tension between effective giving and the paradigm, which has been the paradigm of the last couple of decades and this shift that we're seeing more prominently now to the paradigm of equity, right, equity-based, and the trust-based approaches being, you know, centered in that equity. So that's what we want to explore today. Our position, you know, we have terrific leaders that I will introduce shortly that are going to share candidly why we think trust-based is effective and what that means for blended vehicles and looking across sectors, not just one particular sector. And we look forward to exploring this with all of you. So wherever you're coming at this from, please join us. Think of your questions. Be participatory in this conversation. We need more of it, so I appreciate that SOCAP gives us this opportunity to do this today. So, we, like I mentioned, we have a stellar group of global thought leaders and innovators who are driving change in their own way. They've all agreed to be very candid and share what they're learning and their best practices. Again, how we look at the world at Forward Global is, you know, that best practice today is not common practice, so we want to work with others to really ensure that best practices are becoming more common and that each of us has a role to play in our mindset and behavior change as part of that. So with us today, Tricia Levesque, Managing Director of the Decolonizing Wealth Project, which I'm sure many of you know, a non-profit focused on disrupting wealth and capital flows and redistribution, redistributing that wealth through a reparative framework. She is an experienced lawyer, storyteller, entrepreneur, and works globally to advance social change. Fun fact about Tricia. She has four-year-old twin daughters named Honor and Justice. Beautiful names. And she loves the comment section of social media. Everything. Clay Colombe, a citizen of the Sikangu Lakota Ayote First Nation. He is CEO of Sikangu Co., which is a place-based ecosystem revitalizing the economy and culture of the Sikangu Nation. Through business, community development, and asset transfers. He is utilizing all of his skills as a former banker in this new role. And despite fun fact about Clay, despite being from the prairie and living in South Dakota, he loves all things beach and ocean. And then we have Hamdia Ismayela, general manager of venture capital, the venture capital trust fund, a government-backed fund of funds where she oversees investments and operations. Hamdia is also leading the design of a new blended finance vehicle, the Sikaba fund, to unlock pension funds in West Africa. Fun fact about Hamdia, her favorite music. Any guesses? Country. Don Williams is a favorite, yes? All right. On to our questions and the discussion. The first one I'd like you to view to address. And maybe we'll start with you, Tricia, and then go to Clay and then Hamdia. What does trust-based mean to you and your work? Thank you, Renee. And hi, everyone. For trust-based philanthropy, the Colombe Zemouth Project has a reparative philanthropy framework that we like to use. And that framework looks at the history of sources of wealth in philanthropy, the extraction exploitation that we saw with Black and Indigenous communities here in the US, the colonization, enslavement, and how that related to the accumulation of wealth. And we offer a perspective of healing through using money as medicine to try to bring repair to that whole space. So we would say that it's absolutely untethered resources and restricted funding, but we also need to look at the heart. Sorry, Mike. We need to look at the heart and make sure that when we are showing up in decision-making situations that we're healed, right, we've looked at our histories of wealth. We understand why our organizations have this much. And we want to do something to return that back to the communities from which it was extracted. Thank you, Tricia. Clay. Thank you, Renee. Appreciate all your comments that you've made. For us, trust is a huge thing on this, especially my tribe, Szechonga Lakota, Rosebud Sioux tribe. We have a long history of people coming in not trusting us, putting huge restrictions on anything we do. Anything that we try to do is ultra-risky. And it's usually somebody would come in with an idea for us. Say, here's how we need to solve your problems. Me, a person who's been here for five minutes, let me tell you what you really need to do. And that, for decades, went nowhere. With our corporation, and my fabulous team, my predecessor, Wiesi Paul Little-Elk, making relationships. But having people come in and trust, which kind of defined that on a few different things. One, coming in and listening to us, making sure you're not coming in doing all the talking, telling us what we need, but being able to listen to what we want to do. Not afraid to be the first one in. There's, I don't know, how many times you see people come in. Well, this looks good, but nobody else did it. So maybe we should wait until somebody else does it. Don't be afraid to be the first person to do it, or first group to come in and do it. Help do that. And obviously, don't be the last either, I think, could be a big one. But on top of that, just coming in and listening and being able to do that and allow whoever you're going to invest in, especially if it's an indigenous community, to do it their way, and not just you'll restrict it. My banking background is always trust, but verify. And there's a place for that in a lot of this, but if you're coming in and we're gonna dictate everything, how you do it, and make another job just to monitor what you're doing, I think you're gonna do more harm than good. So having that trust, allowing the people to do it, and there's gonna be some failures in there, and that's just gonna be part of it. Yeah, and we'll have each of these speakers talk about their examples next, but it reminds me of that also the kind of misconception that trust-space or unrestricted funding, isn't as measurable or effective. When we know unrestricted funding by the research is far more effective, and yet that's, again, not a best practice or common, it's a best practice, not common practice today. Unrestricted funding is still the norm, knowing that the trust-based approaches and the unrestricted funding has far better outcomes because of that exchange and transparency, so that both of you just spoke about. Hamdya, what does it mean to you? Thank you, Rene, and thank you, Tisha and Mark. I think just to piggyback on what the two of them had said, to me, trust is taking that leap of faith, and believing, and giving unbiasedly, and trying to understand, move with a mission that you have because I come from Africa, and it's like it's the most riskiest part of the world, and sometimes I wonder whether the thinking of risk is really what people have seen or just what people have heard. So is it a perception or is it a reality? And so it's like sometimes, as he said, you'll be there and the program is just designed and damp on you because someone has passed by two, three days, spoke to three, four different people, and assume that they understand the problem, and so they can solve it. And I think that's a challenge, and that's why we haven't been able to really move the needle a lot more that we should be doing because although we are given, we are not given to really solve the real challenge because if you don't look at a problem deeply and you look at it more on a superficial way based on how you understand it, it becomes a challenge for you to really be able to resolve it. So for me, it is really giving unbiasedly, and also having that leap of faith to believe and move on a mission that this is really what I want to achieve and this is how we think that it could work and trust people who don't look like you who didn't go to the same school with you but knowing that they can get the things done. For me, that is how I look at it. Yeah, breaking through the perceptions that I think all of us in philanthropy have been humbled around thinking that you know the answer and then going in and looking and working and listening to community organizations that if they're honest will tell you that what you thought or what your solution is is actually not going to work but we rarely spend that time, right? Very few people ask the question or are ready to listen. Thank you for highlighting that. Can we move on to the examples that each of you have seen that work? So proving the point that trust-based approaches can actually be more effective. What is, you know, what's an example that you would each highlight here for folks to look to that has been successful? Want to start with Amdia? Thank you. So for us, especially when we look at the field of social enterprise supporting also small and medium enterprises, small and growing businesses, if we really need to solve poverty and we want to scale impact, we need to begin to look at how do we support these businesses to be more sustainable? And so grant as in just given grant, it just becomes a visual cycle where at any given time you are still waiting for the grant to come in. And so what we are doing is that we are working with organizations that support enterprises to have a standard of supporting these companies to be more sustainable. So we work with them to ensure that the training, the kind of training they are given to these enterprises are the training that they need. Because sometimes it's just a program that says you are going to train 2,000 women and it's just taking the boxes that we've trained them and we take the boxes and we get money and we are gone. And it is not sustainable. I mean, we've seen companies go through training and sometimes actually feel they are over-trained. So we want to have standard of training and making sure that these companies are sustainable, that they are profitable to be sustainable, that they don't rely on donor fund and grant funding for good. So that's what we are doing with building capacity of CSUs and also ensuring that standards are met in making sure that these companies are being trained to do the right things. How do you keep accounts? How do you ensure that you manage your inventory? How do you ensure that you get the right people to help you grow the business? Because the business, if you need it to grow, you have to have people who have the talent to help you grow. So that's what we are doing. Another thing that we are doing is to say that why are we always looking for grant money to come in to solve problems? So we want to use grant money to actually unlock more local funding. So that's what we talk about about Chigabah. So Chigabah essentially means progress. And we set up a fund, which is a fund or fund vehicle. And what we are doing is that we are looking for concessionary capital to be able to unlock pension money, to be able to put pension money in productive sectors of the economy. And I started by saying that we need to give unbiasedly and also trying to be a bit more We should take a leap of faith because sometimes the question is that why are we bringing money to cushion commercial investors? So why should we do that? The reason is that you are able to build and bring more money into the pool than ordinarily it would be. So we are looking at raising 100 million and we have pension funds and we are looking at getting 70% money from the pension funds. But the pension funds are looking at liquidity issues when they happen. The pension funds are looking at returns. The pension funds are looking also at their pensioners in the future. So we said, okay, why don't we get the pension funds to come in and out? Whilst any time there is a liquidity situation, they should be able to go because they are dealing with pensioners. So we need people who are more patient, who can stay more longer and then get these people who are a little bit impatient and want the money as and when it happens to be in and out as and when they come. So we want to unlock more money using philanthropic capital and that's what we've been doing. Yeah, fantastic. Godspeed. Again, another common practice is that short term thinking of a grant and the volatility that any of those of us who've been in the non-profit space experience with these grants where you may get them for two or three years and then there's a drop-off, you may get them for one and then they're not necessarily renewed and then you're back to fundraising. So this blended approach I think has real opportunity for and how do we think about the models and amplify in those that are actually working? Trisha, yeah, thank you. Thank you, India. Again, we're in a philanthropic intermediary. So we have the unique position of having grants, we receive grants to do our work and then we give grants out as well. And so for my examples, one of the ones at the top of mind is a Bush Foundation. The Bush Foundation in I think it was 2021 decided to give out $100 million to Black and Indigenous communities, 50 million each. And a lot of that came from a conversation with our founder and CEO, Edgar Villanueva. They had read the book Decolonizing Wealth which is where organization is based from and went through there's seven steps to healing. They're non-linear and that's what informs our reparative framework but through conversations ultimately the board understood the importance of doing this type of reparative work and decided to make those types of large sum grants which has been really amazing and is starting to roll out. So that's one hallmark example. Another one that takes it down to more of the individual space is we have a giving community called the Liberated Capital Giving Community. And that's about 600 odd folks who give mostly on a monthly basis and a lot of them come in. It's predominantly white folks who are participating and a lot of them come in and they name that they want to learn a little bit more about how to give from a reparative framework and mindset. And we've had some folks share their money story and some have come from, have amassed a lot of wealth through their family histories and they'll say my family came here and they were given land. They were given land from Indigenous communities, right? Or that they realized through some research that their family had enslaved Africans, right? And so what they're wanting to do when they're giving is have it as an act of repair to go back to these communities. And for our giving community, there are giving circles that everybody votes when the money goes and it's very democratic. And that's not how we run Liberated Capital and that's intentional because you're giving it to this black and Indigenous-led organization that's us and we're giving it back to the communities and we're using and letting the community decide so our advisory committee is based with community members. Even our team doesn't make those decisions. And so that's related back to that trust-based philanthropy framework of engaging the community and with the repair element for us is we invite folks in to go through workshops to understand their relationship with money and to make sure that they know their own histories. Because again, we see it time and time that if we don't do our personal work, then that's going to impact the organization. And so as much as DEI and all those things are so important, if you don't look at what your narratives are about certain communities, if you don't understand the deep narratives that exist that are anti-black, anti-Indigenous, anti-brown, anti-immigrant, those are at play and have been at play in our society for years and those are going to impact your decisions. And so we invite people in to participate in a learning journey and to understand how they can use money as medicine. Money as medicine. That's an awesome phrase by the way. I know it is, it's just like, yeah. An example we have is a project that we did back home on the reservation, the Wollicota Buffalo Range. Really started out the idea of my predecessor, of Wheezy Paul Little Oak, and through a relationship he made with the World Wildlife Fund. And kind of those three examples I gave in, they came in, they listened, they were the first, they thanked, sure weren't the last because they helped us raise this, but came in and the idea of, Wheezy always wanted to do something to bring Buffalo back. The Wollicota people, that was our economy, was the Buffalo, we're nomadic, we followed them around, they provided everything, our food, our shelter, our tools, everything. So US government systematically destroyed those, to help defeat us, which weren't pretty dang good, but they're still there. So it was important to us, to our relatives of Buffalo Nation to help them out. They were there for us for centuries and millennia probably, now we can do some. But that common thing with WWF, wanting to do something to help with that, then we do, okay great, then it was, how do you want to do it? Not again, oh you guys want to do it, cool, here's some that we can give to you and you can do that. No, it's how, what does that success look like for you? What's important? What's your values? Why are you doing this? Okay, great, we like that. Then there was some initial grant money to help get a feasibility study. What can we do to ensure this project has success? Bringing us some technical assistance on that of what you can do while still listening to us. We still don't have it all figured out. But then, okay it's a viable project, we'll do that. Here's some land we can secure, leasing it from the tribe. Here's the first year's payment, it was $270,000, I mean not a small investment. And then going out, making introductions, helping us raise enough money to have it funded for the first five years. That gets us to 1500 head, which we're at right here in year three. It gets us the fencing, the infrastructure, the water, the equipment, everything that we need out there and the operating funds to do this. So again, fully funded for five years, we're three years into it, it's going great. There's some bumps in the road, like there always is, but good learning experiences. But this project, especially if it would have been where you have to come in and okay, we'll fund the first year and see how it goes from there. It never would have worked. We couldn't have given that commitment to our tribe of we will lease this for five years. That's a significant source of income for the tribe. They're not gonna wait for us to maybe every year, they have people lined up to do it. But now we're controlling it, we're doing what we wanna do with it. But just all the help of being, I'd say a true partner of what WWF was, again, coming in, listening, we can reach out to them for anything. Not afraid to fail on that, we're all taking a risk here, but it's been working out great. And is there anything different you're doing, Clay, around the communication of that, like ensuring on the transparency side as you're working through those things? Oh yeah, the plan of the thing was, obviously get started, have that runway to do it, become profitable. We're also doing a lot of cultural activities. Traditional harvest, bringing our immersion school out there. So keeping that public, but with our funders, yeah, anytime you wanna come, come take a look at it. People, we get requests all the time for, can we showcase this? Like, yes, absolutely. Again, but come and talk to us, not write a story and through your version, we want our people to tell that story, which most people are good with, but yeah, we highlight it all the time and you'll want it to be a model for other indigenous communities and be on funders to see this is what's possible. Fantastic. We'll move to the Q and A in just a little bit. We thought we would do one more question from here. As we think about the calls to action, again, given all of you maybe working in coming at this from different sectors or a particular perspective, what would you say to those folks that are here, obviously committed to trying to do more best practice and often the sense of urgency, balancing the sense of urgency with the long-term view can be tricky, but what would you say is one call to action you would each offer for those of us here and then hopefully that we can be sharing with others moving forward? Trisha, can you start? Sure, no surprise here. I would say go deeper and look at using repair as a lens in what you're doing. Do the healing that's necessary. We have a reparative philanthropy framework, as I've mentioned, that's gonna be public soon and would be available for folks in really 2024. But yeah, my prompt would be to really sit with community, to understand what they need. We learn all of the time as a funder. Again, we're learning as our grantees are reporting back to us. We're adjusting our practices. We're all in this together on this space and with humility and with the healing that we all are embarking on, it becomes a joyful practice. And it's something that brings us a lot of fulfillment and just knowing that with transparency, with the communication and with engaging with the folks who are actually doing the work who actually know what's best for their communities that it's very liberatory. It's liberatory for the folks who support us, our institutional funders and our individuals, but it's also liberatory for those who are receiving the funds to know that they've been trusted and that we know that they're not more risky because they might be communities of color. And that's so ridiculous. And so I just encourage you to look past those, again, those deep narratives that might be popping up in minds before you make decisions and realize that if there's ever any inequity, it's because those communities have likely been extracted from way back anyway. So it's time to repair things and it's time to do better. Thank you. Clay, you want to go next? Yeah, I mean, if you're not doing it, get out there and do it. Jump in, it was the leap of faith, as you said, it has to be there. But it's not to say that you just have to go find somebody and start giving money and start doing it. It's got to be a good fit so that trust can be there for both ways. I mean, that's extremely important. But if you can't give money, is there anything else you can give? Can you give non-monetary support? Can you make introductions? Can you be a good sponsor for somebody to help get that done? I think that's, there's a lot of things to do that. But again, go in there. When you have a conversation, you think you find a right fit. I would say go in that you have an idea of what you want to do. But don't go in there thinking that you already know what success looks like. That needs to be found within the community. They're going to know what does success look like? Not, hey, here's our standard KPIs or metrics that we want to see out of investment. Don't come in with any of that. Maybe they'll fit, maybe they won't. But sitting down and asking, this is what you want to do. Where do you want to go? What does success look like? What does a home run look like? What's a double look like? You notice, no, what are there? But being willing to learn that and to maybe even help them find that, but let them lead the way to what success looks like. Yeah, that's fantastic. I think the other, just add on, we know works given the research is over time, if there's that relationship of transparency, the outcomes are better given that because the nonprofit or the community organizations can be honest if there's not a defined, if they're mutually defining that outcome, they can be honest about when it doesn't work, pivoting quicker. Not having to stick to that restricted or that upfront designed outcome top down that then limits them from being able to be flexible. So I appreciate both of you coming in. Go ahead. Yes, I was just going to say, yes, flexibility is important with a long-term view because you certainly will not be able to solve a long-term problem with a short-term fund. And so you realize that we've done so much in trying to solve problems, but the problems don't get solved because we looked at the problems and have very short-term solutions to them. And in solving problems, we have to have a long-term view and have a long-term funding plan for it and be very systematic about it and be flexible. As you said, us and when there are, I mean, and situations happen, we all didn't expect COVID in 2020 and it happened. So situations happen. So we have to be more flexible and being more adjusting to things as we move on. And this you will be able to do if you have long-term view. If you don't have a long-term view and it's a two-year funding, there are all these KPIs, you need to take the boxes. You are in a hurry to take the boxes in such a way that you don't even see where challenges are for you to be able to resolve. So I think we should be a bit more long-term in our views and be flexible. And there will be nuggets that come out of those that weren't on the box that they missed or we get missed, right? We're thinking that way. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, a couple questions from all of you. First one, how do you get donors to let go and trust? And maybe if you have an example specifically that you could offer, that would be great. Anyone wanted to have it? Please, you give a very good example. You know, with us and with me, personally, a lot of it, it's just part of that sitting down and let's have that talk. Let's just communicate and get to know each other. I mean, there's no magic way to do that. You have to just be honest and do that. And part of that being honest is just setting those expectations, I think, right up front. That was one good thing with the Wolocota project, kind of getting that coaching from WWF and others of you're not asking for enough. We're kind of constraining ourselves to these other investments or things that we felt we were lucky to get in the past. And like, oh, but we have to jump through all these hoops, you know, and then you start doing it and like, God, it's kind of a pain in the ass. You know, I wish we didn't have to do this or, you know, this would be better. But, you know, for the entity being invested in to just be completely honest with that. So if you're going in and they're not, just set that expectation. What would work for you? What's the best here? And again, that getting back to, you know, short-term funding for long-term answers. You know, just again, being realistic about that. A lot of the other stuff was, yeah, we really like that. 10 years would be great. Here's a year, you know, money. Like, okay, you know, six months in, you're looking for more money and not actually doing the work. So, you know, again, just, you know, being able to identify that and work on that, you know, is just open it up. Just having that honest conversation of, again, we, you know, we don't need to do monthly reporting on this. We're out doing the work, you know. Anytime you want something cool, but not, you know, make it a job for us to have to to report back to you and manage it. And so often in the nonprofit space, right, we're operating from a scarcity mindset of coming in, I just need this money and I need it and I need it. And sometimes taking that or starting with that can, you know, we have to shift our own behavior of coming in as equal partners, right. We're a partner in this work and to be a partner, I need to be honest with you. Here's what I need. I understand what you're wanting to do if we're gonna do this better. So that expectation, power setting, you know, conversation and being able to have support with that, if you don't know how to do that, I think it's a really interesting challenge for those of us in the space that we need to overcome. Renee, I think that that's just a really good point. Again, we do the same. We, most of our funders understand our perspective and have been really great and respectful that we are hopeful that as we are giving out to our communities in this untethered way with minimal reporting, low burden, low lift in terms of the application process. And a lot of them try to near it as best as they can. And I would say that so many institutions are also on their journey to try to simplify things. And I do think that there is an awareness about the burden that has been placed on so many nonprofits and the amount of time and money that has been put into grants that sometimes don't even yield how much time it's spent to do it. So I do think that there is a shift happening, particularly in the philanthropic space. And I do find that a lot of funders are open to that type of discussion of just kind of decreasing the burden. Yeah, so a shared view, you know, a shared vision, actually, trying to, when your vision is aligned, it's easier to be able to come out with these things, to agree on things that I want to support healthcare. Yes, I want to do something in healthcare. What are the metrics that we need to agree on going forward in the next five years? What we want to see, then you agree. But when it's like, we think you have a problem and this is it, so we are giving you money for a year or two to get all these things done, then that is where the problem is. So I think a shared vision and alignment of interest, I do investment, so I'll bring alignments of interest. So alignment of interest is really what is key to get us all on the right path. Thank you. I think one practical thing I would offer, Forward Global, which is formerly TPW, we launched our new brand in Mondays, if you're just FYI, where the artist formerly known as TPW on Monday, the one practice we have, so we represent a community of 400 individuals and families who have committed to a set of values. So we are very clear about the values that we adhere to. One is unrestricted, looking at root causes, understanding the benefits of unrestricted trust-based practices. A really practical thing we've seen work for some of non-profit organizations or communities is to bring a peer, bring a donor that is representing of the values and the practices and approach. The number one influencer still for donors is other peers. So we know that matters. So if you can amplify or elevate those that are really are doing best practice in the donor space, we are trying to do a better job ourselves of that. I think all of us showcasing who those folks are, it's not that ideally then that becomes more of a ripple effect. Thank you. Okay, next question. Trust is hard to build and easy to lose. How do you sustain that trust in tough situations or challenges? Do you want to go first? Yes, I think transparency is very key. And having the belief that, you know, nothing is, you know, cast in stone, you know, we can agree on things. And then six months from today, it will not look the same. So we must have that level of transparency to know that, no, this is not working. And sit down and have a conversation. I think that is very, very important. I think transparency is what is important. And it all starts right from the one, how you have these discussions, everyone on the table, alignment of vision, alignment of mission together, and the agreement on what to do. So that the way there are issues immediately, you'll flag it. But then if it doesn't happen, then it becomes a reporting, you know, situation. And because it's short term funding, you need to meet this target to be able to unlock further money. So you have two years funding, but every six months, you have to meet this target so that you can unlock further money. So then people don't want to really come out to say what really the challenges are. And so then you begin to lose trust. But I think transparency is key. And it is that you can't, whatever you agreed on is not cast in stone and things change, and we should be able to move with the times and be able to be more transparent. And for me, that's what I would do. I would just come back and say, well, we agreed we're going to do this and that. But given the situation that we are now in, this cannot be attained, but this can be attained. But if you're able to look at it in the next two, three months, maybe we can also achieve this. So that you're on the right, you know, you are on the right path. But having that pressure of always needing to meet that requirement is how it is so easy to lose that trust. And so transparency for me is what is key. Oh, that was great. Plus one. Oh, I agree. Just setting those expectations up front. I mean, then it's back to transparency and communication on that. You know, again, I think when you have too many, you know, restrictions or whatever on that, it makes it very clear. But then it's like, okay, this is only money I'm going to get. I'm going to do it just, you know, to get it. Maybe for this, not a right fit. But just, yeah, I don't know. So much of my life to see that, especially when I'm being a father, managing expectations of everybody involved, but what's it's going to look like? Again, how do we handle things when they come up? If you're, you know, doing somewhat of a cookie cutter project or something that's been done for us there, but you know, like with Volocota, that's really never been done before. So, hey, we, you know, we're going to stay in communications. It's not, hey, are you meeting ABC and D? It's just, what's happening? What's going on here? Are we on the right path still? Do we need to, you know, do we need to adjust, you know, us knowing that we had that freedom or, you know, to do that was great and, you know, key on it. Like, okay, no, we need to do this or some came up. None of us saw, okay, let's get together. Let's, you know, bring in, you know, WWF brought in a lot of partners. Hey, we got somebody that knows all about that and sit down, okay, problem fixed, you know, but we weren't, you know, afraid to, oh my God, we can't say this, you know, or else we might lose funding. It was, you know, it was a true partnership. So. How do you recommend connecting and pitching this kind of catalytic funding to funders who are mission aligned but aren't advertising these kinds of opportunities? So like, and then also a subset of that is, how do you get past the gatekeepers? Do you have experience with that? Any best practices you could offer? That's hard. That's double the problem because you need to get a gatekeeper convinced before you even get to the actual person. And so it's been a lot of challenges. Sometimes you need to find someone within the organization and begin to speak with. And then, so let me give you an example. We deal with pension funds and the pension trustees have the pension managers to advise them. And some of the pension managers would not do alternative asset. They would do government securities because it's easy. And so they wouldn't go and advise the trustees to actually allocate. And so when you speak to the pension funds, they would tell you, oh, the trustees don't want to hear it because they don't want to do it. So what we did was that we spoke to the trustees and then we said, well, these are the issues we need to be able to put some of the pension money into the productive sectors of the economy. And some of the questions I had asked some of the trustees is that I understand that you need to protect pensions money, but have you also had a thought about the environment in which the pensioners are going to be retired in? Because if you retire and you get your pension, you know, money coming in every month and you have two kids who are unemployed in their home, that money may not be enough. So speaking to the trustees, we realized that actually they also wanted to do something, but the advisors are not advising them to do that. And so now they started asking the advisors to bring alternative assets to them to take a look at. So sometimes you have to do that. It's risky, because when we did it, we were like, okay, how about if they send back fires, but we were lucky, it worked. If you have the gatekeepers also get, if you are not the gatekeepers, then you are done because they are blacklisted. It never happens. So you need to take a chance, but that's what we did. And we've been successful with that. For sure, Clay, you want to weigh? Yeah, I would add that, and it's similar to what you've just said is understanding the concerns and fears that even if you can determine that, whether it's talking to the gatekeeper or someone who's, you know, working in that same space, we've certainly understood that there's kind of an unknown, particularly when we talk about unrestricted funding, it's like, well, how do you know what's gonna happen? And it's how will we ever know if this was successful? And just understanding the perspective, I do think that there's a good bit of empathy and remembering our humanity here. And if we're doing things differently, then of course we can expect that there's gonna be a period of leveling up to that and just knowing and trying to offer what you do know. But then I think also being explicit, there are things that we don't know. And that's also okay. Yeah, on our side, we've had some, our leadership, myself, predecessors before, able to go out and make introductions and speak in this world. There are a lot of indigenous-led, I know, organizations that aren't doing that, one, because they're doing the work. They're not, you know, want that money, but getting those introductions is key. So I put a lot of that back on the foundations, people coming here, coming to these conferences, you're getting exposed to this stuff. You know, you're meeting groups like yours that are actually getting there, you know, just, you know, don't be afraid to take that first step to try to reach out, try to find some people and engage in those conversations. Again, knowing that a lot of this, you know, depending on where they're at, there's gonna be trust issues of people come in. But if they're willing to sit down and speak with you, that's good, but you, again, let your guard down, just have open conversations, be honest, and you know, that's the way it'll get there, but you know, then if it's not a good, make a referral, you know, help make it easier for the people doing the work to get the money, I guess, I'll put that out there. Take barriers down, make introductions, you know, do whatever you gotta do to help them, because you know, again, we've really invested in our development team, because we were successful at it, but they got to the point where a lot of our, you know, the people doing the work again had to do this, okay, we need to build that back off the support, which you know, again, not everybody can do, but so if somebody doesn't have that, do whatever you can to help make it easier for them. One question we ask that some of our members have been responsive, because a lot of our members obviously work through wealth advisors. So wealth advisors can be amazing and very supportive and proactive and willing to take some risks or not, and very fear-based and wanting to preserve the money, not deploy it, because they're incentivized to do that. So one question some of our donors tend to ask is, and what we encourage is, you know, as you're sitting down or trying to get through a gatekeeper, you know, really understanding, so what are they incentivized? How are they being measured? You know, can you ask some questions of what their goals are, and then you can start to say, okay, how can I meet and align with those versus feel like I'm counter or trying to convince you of something? Well, here's how I can help you. You know, it's a simple change, but you know, but again, it's a mindset shift of being open, like I'm a partner here, I wanna help you, and I think there's a way we can do this. Again, the other thing that we've seen is, there are examples within those organizations or systems or institutions, if it's a bank, that are really doing good work and are succeeding using these practices, how can we as a sector or multi-sector elevate those people, those change agents within the system? They deserve the attention, and I don't know that we often do that enough. So sharing, being able to think about what they're doing and the characteristics they're showing and how we can grow that. Okay, trust-based philanthropy approaches seem objectively better for grantee organizations. Are there any new challenges that emerge from it that you might not have anticipated when you were looking for long-term unrestricted funding? Question again. Yeah, so are there any challenges given the unrestricted, the trust-based approaches over the long-term that don't work? You know, we've been espousing that it does work. Is there anything that's been unexpected that hasn't worked? Well, I think that's, there again, I mean, the issue of transparency. I think it is when it doesn't work, is when you are not forthcoming and transparent about issues as they come along. Because issues will come along. It's necessary because we live in a human environment that things will change, market forces will change, something will happen, but you have to be more transparent and accept the failures when they happen. Because some of the strategies may not work. So you have to think about what else could we do? So always make sure that there's a plan A and there's a plan B to be able to meet some of these challenges as they come because they all come. So speaking about it, having, the fact that it's unrestricted and it's long-term doesn't mean that you should just give it and wash your hands. There should be a way of collaborating, I mean, having conversations, having meetings and then encourage transparent discussions. So you did this, it didn't work. You should be comfortable to say, look, this didn't work. We want to move on to this. And we think that from the lessons learned from this failure, this strategy may work. And then move on and move to it. So pivoting quickly, accepting failure and pivoting quickly and having a founder who is like your backbone and able to support you to make those decisions moving. I think sometimes some of these things happen because you are afraid of losing the money. So you don't want to tell the truth. I mean, that's so, so we need to learn to tell the truth about issues when they happen. And then find solutions because sometimes you, the implementing organization, may not even have the solution. The founder may have solutions for you. So we should be able to have this transparent discussion and setting us as partners on the table to have the conversation. The moment is becomes a relationship that is not very, how do you say, if you don't have a relationship, a linear relationship, right? So it's like a master and a subordinate. So anytime they come, you have to report, then you are hesitating to say things that you need to say. But these things happen. So you should be able to have that conversation. So for me, I always say that continuous engagement, continuous reporting, continuous partnership building, collaboration and say that this is what is going to work. Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? Have you looked at this? Maybe as a founder, sometimes you find three, four different projects in three, four different continents. And so you see some of these things coming up. Sometimes the funders actually have their answers. You know, they do. So we should encourage that level of partnership where it is not a one-way street, but it's a two-way street, so that we can talk about the challenges and be able to find solutions to them because the solutions are there. So I think for long term, that is how it has to be. If we really have an aligned mission to achieve an objective, we should work towards that and be ready to have challenges, to have difficulties and resolve them as we go, as we move on. Clay or Trisha, do you want to add on to that? That was beautiful. I would say offer creative solutions. Sometimes we practice a trust-based reparative framework, so that means our grantees benefit from that, but not all of our funders necessarily are leaning in that way. So we can find ourselves in a predicament where we do have to report quite rigorously back and we're not always asking for all of the meat and details, so we've learned into storytelling, we've learned into what the community is, how they naturally talk about their work and successes and offering that as a way to meet the requirements from the institution as well. So I think if you're a funder, I would encourage you to open up your mind to other ways of receiving information and reporting and measurements and impact. Those are all so important, so we don't want to discard those. Those are key and they can come in different forms and I think that's been really helpful for us as well. Yeah, we haven't had a whole lot of any, I guess, unintended consequences or anything with the unrestricted funding other than you don't make sure it's meaningful in the length of time that it's needed. That long, getting back to putting short-term money into a long-term solution, so you have that and again, it gets back to that setting expectations and the whole panel here on trust-based, when I think of trust, then I think of relationship. So when you trust each other, there's a relationship there and you got to be able to have those hard conversations. You got to just open and honest both ways and that's gonna lead and get to, I think the best outcome for everybody. We're all on the same page. We know what we're going here. We know what's working. We know it's not working, but we're open, honest and that's gonna help on these things because in a lot of these issues, especially in indigenous communities, it's these issues that you're trying to solve have been developed over a century or decades at least. So to think, hey, we're gonna come in, give a quarter million dollars to this group and in six months, they're gonna fix it. Like, well, if it was that easy to fix, it'd been fixed a long time ago. So being able to have that patience of this is gonna take hard work, but with that in that hard work, it's gonna create more opportunities. It's gonna do a lot more even. Again, if you have to pivot to where you thought you were gonna go on that, but just being able to have that relationship is the key.