01: We began trusting people whose hands are directly on the work to guide us.Field knowledge is smarter than foundation frameworks.

Seems obvious now, but we didn’t always think that way. Let’s go back in history for a minute. (Or a few decades.)

In 1945, a 20-year-old soldier was killed by a sniper while serving in Italy during World War II. His wealthy parents, Dorothy and Randolph Compton, responded to this loss by starting Compton Foundation with a mission of promoting peace and preventing another war. Ten years in, another child died — this time of polio — and the foundation’s focus expanded to address a wider range of conditions that make families vulnerable to loss.

Like a lot of mid-20th-century donors, the Comptons treated the foundation as a highly personal resource, managing it informally and enjoying the social standing that came with being known as philanthropists. With that said, they also set a tone of serious commitment to their charitable mission by engaging in anti-nuclear and anti-war work.

This way of operating went on for more than 30 years until the late 1980s, when Dorothy and Randolph’s two surviving children adopted a more structured approach. They moved the foundation from New York to California and hired Edith Eddy as its first executive director. They widened the foundation’s focus to address population growth and environmental degradation, developing strategies meant to prevent conflict over scarce resources.

Looking back on the ’80s and ’90s, it seems Compton Foundation followed a predictable route as philanthropy expanded into a full-fledged industry sector and more 501(c)(3) organizations began to employ professional fundraisers. Hindsight sheds an unflattering light on the then-standard funding approach of issuing grant guidelines, requiring proposals in triplicate, making site visits, replying at a board’s convenience (rather than when funds were needed) and expecting lengthy follow-up reports. Many of these practices were irrelevant to how decisions were actually made in the board room. They were burdensome for nonprofit organizations, whose leaders were routinely treated as supplicants rather than advisors.

But over the three decades of Edith’s leadership, Compton Foundation began to move away from the traditional “apply, perform and prove your impact” grantmaking model, to resist fleeting philanthropic trends, and to use capital differently. Proactive investments were designed to help emerging and expanding movements gain traction. Beginning in the early 2000s, the foundation created pooled funds supporting efforts to stop the Iraq War and launched a five-year initiative to make emergency contraception more accessible and affordable worldwide.

Compton Foundation’s second executive director, Ellen Friedman, began her term when Edith retired in 2010. By then, the foundation had defined three official programs: peace and security, climate action and reproductive justice.

Continuing to engage proactively, the foundation promoted civic engagement and public art for climate action and led an effort advancing women’s leadership in foreign policy, helping set the stage for passage of the Women, Peace and Security Act.

The foundation’s new strategies of “transformative leadership” and “courageous storytelling” — including all forms of art — followed that era’s philanthropic trends. These strategies ended up sharpening the foundation’s effectiveness by softening the boundaries around its interest areas.

Along with Ellen, Program Directors Jennifer Sokolove and later Hanni Hanson embraced these approaches for their ability to cut across any topic. For a while the foundation funded storytelling and leadership quite literally — grants for arts organizations, public art installations, professional development programs such as Rockwood Leadership Institute and others. But the more the foundation delved into these concepts, the more their relevance to what was happening among community-based organizations and movement leaders began to emerge.

Gradually, Compton Foundation focused less on overt leadership training and storytelling initiatives, and devoted more energy to funding organizations like Forward Together and Just Vision that were actively leading in transformative ways — working across institutional, issue and identity boundaries. It began seeking grant partners who were able to uncover the cultural stories and understandings needed for meaningful relationships and lasting change. Along the way, the foundation’s staff and board began stepping back from structured programs in favor of letting communities lead its strategies. At last, we began putting faith in the deep, community-based, movement-informed, trust-building, lasting partnerships required to provoke and sustain profound change.

That doesn’t mean we were great at it right away. Thoughtful staff leadership and initiatives such as Trust-Based Philanthropy influenced how this shift was made within Compton Foundation, gradually and for the better.

Trust-based philanthropy promotes mutual accountability between funders and nonprofits. It models ways to streamline processes and relieve the burden on grant partners. In practical terms, Compton Foundation became more transparent and responsive over time. We gave more and longer multi-year, unrestricted grants; eliminated written proposals and reports; solicited feedback about our own actions; and flexed the purpose and amount of funding as conditions changed.

While still holding specific interests in peace, climate and reproductive justice, the foundation began to approach this work as weaving a bigger ecosystem. New grants supported fundamental visioning efforts such as the Beloved Economies campaign — a conceptual and practical framework designed to inform inclusive strategies across all kinds of organizations, including Compton Foundation itself.

As more grant partners began to pay attention to the overall health of U.S. democracy, the foundation did too, expanding support for issue-based civic engagement and pro-democracy efforts. Over time, we shifted more money to “intermediaries” such as the Black-Led Movement Fund, Piper Fund, and Groundswell Fund. These institutions pooled funds from foundations and other donors. They played a critical role because they were led by, and directly accountable to, movement organizers. They possessed both democracy-building expertise and a deep awareness of important grassroots efforts that Compton Foundation would have been unlikely to discover on its own.

In 2023, as we prepared to wrap up nearly 80 years of operation, we surveyed our nonprofit partners about their priorities. Their requests included time to rest, bridges to others doing similar work, and support to strengthen operational capacities.

We decided to gather these partners in New Orleans, Louisiana, for a closing celebration. Recognizing how the philanthropic industry (including Compton Foundation) taxes nonprofit leaders’ time, energy and resilience, we designed the event around their priorities. Every agenda element was optional, from attending at all to each scheduled activity. Because the organizations already knew how much grant money to expect in our final year, we got as close as possible to releasing participants from any sense of obligation.

Seventy-five grant partners accepted our invitation. For us, the event was a chance to thank some of the leaders who had guided us so generously with their strategies and lived examples. For them, it offered time to rest, connect with one another, seek professional advice around operational issues, and discover relationships that could last long after Compton Foundation was gone. And — of course — we danced and laughed our asses off in celebration of so much collective knowledge, determination, brilliance and joy.