Trust-based philanthropy goes further than shortening applications or providing unrestricted dollars. It asks who controls decisions, who absorbs the administrative cost of a grant, and how much freedom a nonprofit retains to respond to conditions it understands better than its funder.
Executive summary
A trust-centered model attempts to correct funding relationships in which donors retain most of the decision-making authority while nonprofits absorb applications, reports, restrictions, and uncertainty. Its best-known practices combine multiyear unrestricted support, funder-led due diligence, streamlined paperwork, transparency, meaningful feedback, and assistance beyond the grant itself.
It is not an argument against accountability. Instead, it challenges a system in which accountability flows almost exclusively from grantee to funder.
The movement toward greater flexibility is visible in U.S. grantmaking. GEO’s 2025 national study found that 87 percent of responding grantmakers provide multiyear funding, while median general operating support has increased to 38 percent of grantmaking budgets.
For Roberto Isaias, the more useful question is not whether a funder says it trusts nonprofits, but what nonprofits can actually decide, adapt, and improve because that trust exists.
What is trust-based philanthropy?
It is a grantmaking approach designed to share power with nonprofits and communities, reduce unnecessary burdens, and build relationships around flexibility, transparency, and mutual accountability. The Trust-Based Philanthropy Project translates the concept into six core grantmaking practices.
Trust-based philanthropy works when trust changes more than the restrictions attached to money. Funders also examine their applications, timelines, decision-making, communication, and ability to receive criticism. Nonprofits retain greater autonomy while both sides continue to meet appropriate fiduciary, legal, and learning responsibilities.
Five ideas that define the approach
- Trusting an organization does not mean funding without judgment.
- Multiyear unrestricted support matters, but it is only one part of the model.
- Streamlined grant processes can return meaningful staff capacity to nonprofits.
- Transparency should work both ways rather than being demanded only from grantees.
- The strongest evidence of trust is a measurable change in who holds power and who carries administrative work.
- Executive summary
- Five ideas that define the approach
- Useful oversight versus compliance by habit
- Restrictions can carry costs even when no invoice exists
- Why the practices operate as a system
- A favorable case is not a universal rule
- With an established grantee
- With a first-time grantee
- When restrictions serve a real purpose
- 1. Flexible money, rigid relationship
- 2. Less paperwork, the same opacity
- 3. Trust without learning
- Verified sources
Trust does not eliminate accountability; it redistributes the burden
A shallow interpretation treats this approach as replacing oversight with goodwill. That collapses two different issues into one: necessary accountability and administrative demands created by a funder.
A foundation can conduct reasonable due diligence, document a charitable purpose, learn from outcomes, and satisfy applicable rules without requiring every dollar to remain tied to activities designed years in advance.
Useful oversight versus compliance by habit
The six practices identified by the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project include multiyear unrestricted funding, funder-led homework, streamlined paperwork, transparent communication, acting on feedback, and support beyond the check.
Those practices do not override U.S. law. Certain grants by private foundations may trigger federal expenditure-responsibility requirements depending on the recipient and transaction. IRS guidance can require pre-grant inquiry, commitments from the grantee, reporting, and other procedures in specific circumstances. Grants to many organizations classified as public charities are treated differently.
The distinction matters: law determines some requirements, while funders determine how much additional process they place on top of them.
Why the issue is especially relevant in the United States now
The debate is unfolding while many U.S. nonprofits face significant financial pressure. The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s State of Nonprofits 2026 found that 57 percent of nonprofit CEOs said foundation grants had become harder to secure since January 2025. Forty-four percent reported reduced foundation funding, and 66 percent expressed concern about their organization’s financial stability.
Nonprofit Finance Fund’s national research provides another view. Its 2025 survey included 2,206 nonprofits. Eighty-one percent said raising money that covers the full cost of their work was difficult, while 36 percent finished 2024 with an operating deficit.
These figures do not prove that one philanthropic model can solve nonprofit financial stress. They do show why grant duration, restrictions, administrative costs, and predictability deserve closer scrutiny.
Restrictions can carry costs even when no invoice exists
The real cost of a grant includes more than the amount awarded. Nonprofits also spend staff time finding opportunities, completing applications, restructuring budgets, attending meetings, and producing information that may or may not influence a funder’s next decision.
A 2026 practice note by Katy Adams examines how funder power and funder choices can shape the administrative burden placed on nonprofits applying for support.
The relevant question is therefore not whether funders should collect information. It is whether the value of each requirement is proportionate to the work it forces applicants and grantees to perform.
How trust-based philanthropy becomes visible in practice
The easiest way to prevent the concept from becoming a branding label is to look for observable changes. The field’s six practices can be translated into operational signals such as these:
| Relationship lever | What changes for the funder | What it enables for the nonprofit | Sign of performative trust |
|---|---|---|---|
| Duration | Uses multiyear commitments when appropriate | Longer planning horizons | Constant uncertainty about renewal |
| Use of funds | Removes unnecessary restrictions | Reallocates resources as conditions change | “Flexible” money with project-grant controls |
| Due diligence | Does more research before asking the applicant | Less time proving public information | Long forms requesting easily verified facts |
| Reporting | Matches requirements to grant size and risk | More staff time for mission work | Reports that never affect decisions |
| Communication | Explains criteria, timing, and changes | Better planning and fewer surprises | Long silences and opaque priorities |
| Feedback | Responds to what grantees communicate | Safer disclosure of problems | Surveys with no visible follow-through |
Why the practices operate as a system
A shorter application paired with a one-year, heavily restricted grant may improve efficiency without meaningfully shifting power.
The reverse is also possible. Unrestricted funding combined with opaque decision-making can provide financial flexibility without producing a genuinely reciprocal relationship.
The broader test must therefore include money, time, information, voice, and decision-making authority.
The reciprocity test: ten signals to examine
As an editorial framework for Roberto Isaias, ten questions provide a practical way to test whether a funding relationship is actually becoming more reciprocal. They are not a certification standard and should not be treated as universal requirements.
- Who performs the initial research? Applicants should not repeatedly reconstruct information a funder can reasonably verify elsewhere.
- Can funding respond to changing conditions? A grant should have a proportionate way to accommodate legitimate changes.
- Does the funding horizon fit the problem? Long-term missions are difficult to manage exclusively through very short funding cycles.
- Is reporting proportionate to grant size and risk? More documentation does not automatically generate better insight.
- Can the nonprofit deliver bad news safely? Fear of punishment encourages less accurate information.
- Does the funder explain its own decisions? Transparency should not be a one-way obligation.
- Are decisions and renewals reasonably predictable? Uncertainty creates management costs of its own.
- Can feedback lead to visible changes? Listening without response eventually becomes ceremonial.
- Does the funder measure the burden it creates? Application and reporting hours are resources consumed by the funding process.
- Are legal requirements separated from internal preferences? Not every administrative demand is legally required.
That last distinction is especially useful for Roberto Isaias as an editorial positioning principle: trust becomes credible when it changes behavior rather than merely changing vocabulary.
What the evidence supports and what remains uncertain
There is growing evidence in favor of flexible funding, but it would be misleading to say that every element of the broader model has been proven to the same standard.
Pamala Wiepking and Arjen de Wit reviewed academic and practitioner literature and conducted 20 in-depth interviews with recipients of substantial multiyear unrestricted funding. Their conceptual model identifies seven capacities that flexible resources may influence: financial management, operations, staff management, adaptability, strategic planning, mission orientation, and innovation. The authors also emphasize that the academic literature remains limited and fragmented.
The Center for Effective Philanthropy provides another significant body of evidence through more than three years of research on MacKenzie Scott’s large unrestricted gifts. Nearly 90 percent of nonprofit leaders surveyed said the grant had moderately or significantly strengthened their organization’s long-term financial sustainability.
A favorable case is not a universal rule
Those findings matter, but Scott’s gifts are unusually large and do not automatically represent all six trust-centered practices.
They also do not demonstrate that unrestricted funding will always produce superior outcomes. Leadership quality, reserves, revenue concentration, organizational capacity, and external conditions still affect results.
The evidence supports a narrower and more defensible conclusion: fewer restrictions can expand an organization’s ability to decide and adapt; what happens afterward depends on how that capacity is used.
A realistic path for U.S. funders
Organizations do not need to redesign every grantmaking practice at once.
GEO’s national study shows that 87 percent of surveyed grantmakers already provide multiyear funding and that median general operating support has reached 38 percent of grantmaking budgets. Yet 80 percent require grantees to evaluate their work, while 38 percent do not provide funding to pay for those evaluations.
That gap illustrates a central concern in the Roberto Isaias framework developed here: a legitimate accountability tool can still transfer an unfunded cost to the nonprofit.
With an established grantee
A strong history and demonstrated alignment can justify gradually extending duration, flexibility, or simplified renewal requirements.
With a first-time grantee
Initial due diligence may reasonably be deeper. That does not mean the same information needs to be collected repeatedly for years.
When restrictions serve a real purpose
Some grants are restricted for legitimate strategic or regulatory reasons. The better question is not whether every restriction should disappear, but whether each one is necessary, proportionate, and adaptable.
Three ways funders can fail while talking about trust
1. Flexible money, rigid relationship
What happens: The nonprofit receives operating support but still faces unilateral decisions and limited communication.
How to spot it: Spending is flexible, while renewal criteria and strategic changes remain opaque.
How to avoid it: Pair financial flexibility with explicit expectations and reliable communication.
2. Less paperwork, the same opacity
What happens: The form gets shorter, but the decision process remains impossible to understand.
How to spot it: Applicants do not know how choices are made or when they will hear back.
How to avoid it: Make criteria, stages, timelines, and real limitations clearer.
3. Trust without learning
What happens: Useful reporting disappears along with unnecessary reporting.
How to spot it: After several grant cycles, neither side knows more about outcomes, risks, or emerging needs.
How to avoid it: Replace documentation volume with evidence and conversations that actually inform decisions.
For Roberto Isaias, this is where the model becomes more demanding, not less: bureaucracy should decline without allowing meaningful learning to disappear with it.
Measuring trust without rebuilding the bureaucracy
Measurement should examine the funder’s behavior as well as the grantee’s experience.
Useful indicators can include the share of general operating support, average commitment length, application-to-decision time, estimated reporting hours, predictability of renewals, the proportion of feedback receiving a documented response, and the frequency with which grantee insight changes a funder practice.
None of these necessarily requires another nonprofit survey. Much of the information already sits inside grant-management systems.
From the editorial perspective developed for Roberto Isaias, one especially useful metric is the amount of productive time a process change returns to the nonprofit. Trust has greater operational value when it releases capacity that can move back into staff, programs, planning, and learning.
Frequently asked questions
The decisive signal: who can act better because the funding exists
Trust-based philanthropy should not be judged by how often a foundation uses the word “trust.” Its real test lies in the design of the relationship: funding duration, freedom to respond to change, clarity of decisions, administrative burden, and the ability to disagree without automatically jeopardizing support.
Current evidence provides strong reasons to examine flexible funding more seriously and documents meaningful costs associated with overly restrictive systems. It also calls for restraint. Some parts of the broader model still need more research, and no philanthropic practice overrides legal or fiduciary responsibilities.
The standard proposed in this analysis for Roberto Isaias is therefore concrete: a funding relationship moves closer to genuine trust when it retains necessary accountability while no longer converting the funder’s power into avoidable work for the people carrying out the mission.
Verified sources
- Trust-Based Philanthropy Project. “Six Practices of Trust-Based Grantmaking.” Used for the field’s six-practice framework. It is a sector resource and advocacy initiative, not independent causal evidence. Six Practices of Trust-Based Grantmaking
- Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. “2025 National Study of Philanthropic Practice.” 2025. Based on responses from 765 grantmakers and used for multiyear funding, general operating support, and evaluation data. 2025 National Study of Philanthropic Practice
- Center for Effective Philanthropy. “State of Nonprofits 2026: What Funders Need to Know.” 2026. Used to establish current U.S. nonprofit funding conditions. State of Nonprofits 2026
- Nonprofit Finance Fund. “2025 State of the Nonprofit Sector Survey.” 2025. National survey of 2,206 nonprofits used for full-cost and operating-deficit findings. 2025 State of the Nonprofit Sector Survey Findings
- Wiepking, Pamala; de Wit, Arjen. “Unrestricted funding and nonprofit capacities: Developing a conceptual model.” Nonprofit Management and Leadership. Academic research used to assess both possible effects and limitations in the evidence base. Unrestricted funding and nonprofit capacities
- Adams, Katy. “Challenges, Choices and Common Applications: Funders’ Exercise of Power and Its Consequences for Nonprofits’ Administrative Burden.” 2026. Academic source on funder power and administrative burden. Funders’ Exercise of Power and Administrative Burden
- Internal Revenue Service. “IRC Section 4945(h) – Expenditure Responsibility.” Official source used to define relevant requirements for certain private-foundation grants. IRS: Expenditure Responsibility
- Center for Effective Philanthropy. “After Three Years of Study, the Transformative Effects of MacKenzie Scott’s Big Gifts are Clear.” 2025. Used as specific evidence on large unrestricted gifts; findings are not generalized to all grantmaking. CEP research on unrestricted gifts
