By Mia Reilly, Director of Engagement Strategy

If you've been following along with this blog, you know we're committed to sharing honest stories as Tara Health Foundation spends down. This commitment stems from the belief behind our mission: in order to help build a just and thriving world, philanthropy needs to fundamentally transform how it operates. Never before has this been more true.

But before advocating outward, integrity requires us to look inward: How well have we embodied the transformations we seek in philanthropy, and where may we have fallen short?

Through ongoing internal reflection, we’ve come to see ourselves as building relationship-centered philanthropy, centering racial justice in principle and practice, and challenging philanthropy’s traditional power dynamics. That's the image in our mirror—but do others see the same reflection?

To find out, we partnered with the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) to gather feedback from grantees spanning all portfolio areas and funding years through a Grantee Perception Report. To help making meaning of what we learned, we’re sharing:

CEP's memo and slide deck detailing their key findings and recommendations
Our reflections on learnings and takeaways (below)

We extend our deepest thanks to all who took the time to share their candid feedback. Your insights are invaluable to our growth and learning, and we're immensely grateful for your willingness to help us see ourselves more clearly.

What We Learned

The results showed encouraging alignment between how we understand ourselves and how our grantees experienced us, a resonance that affirms our planned approach as we spend down: to share our authentic experiences through honest storytelling, maintain deep relationships with grantees, and to convene funders around issues and approaches we care about. Here are some of the key themes that stood out to us:

Reporting: The “Trust vs Structure” Paradox

While grantees rated our reporting process as exceptionally easy and straightforward (top 3% of funders in CEP’s dataset), they also ranked us in the bottom quartile (13th percentile) for how helpful these processes were for learning and reflection. Fascinating!!

To be candid, we never emphasized reporting as a particularly important part of our grantmaking. Early in our journey, we concluded that measuring external "impact" wasn't our focus and grew increasingly skeptical of the concept itself. We viewed reporting primarily as a fiduciary requirement, with relationships as our true learning mechanisms.

But this feedback illuminates an important tension that’s been emerging in other parts of our work as well: eliminating reporting requirements to reduce burden and demonstrate trust may inadvertently eliminate structured opportunities for mutual reflection and accountability. This challenges the simplistic notion that “less reporting = better practice”.

This year, we’ve been working with our anchor organizations to design a fundamentally different approach to reporting, aiming to create structured space for mutual accountability and learning while honoring our value of transparency. We'll share our learnings from this new process later this year!

The Lasting Value of Human Capital

Our non-monetary assistance proved particularly valuable to grantees (top 10% of funders), and when asked how we could improve our work, 40% of suggestions related to assistance beyond grants, particularly connecting them with peers and funders.

This validates what's becoming one of our most significant learnings through our spend-out: the human relationships, connections, and knowledge held within a foundation may be as valuable as—and often outlast—the financial resources. For other funders on their own spend-out journeys, we encourage you to consider planning early on for how your foundation’s non-financial assets —especially your people and their relationships—can continue supporting your mission even as your grantmaking concludes.

We are looking forward to incorporating this feedback into our planning for 2025 and beyond, as we increase our focus on leveraging our relationships, networks, and convening power to support grantees and funding ecosystems.

External Engagement: Sharing our Stories

Grantees were clear: they want us to be more vocal about our work, approaches, and learnings – particularly with other funders.

This feedback energizes us! In this moment of chaos and upheaval, we're more ready than ever to double down on our values, stand firm in our language, and champion the joyful, vibrant futures we envision. The conversations we need to have in philanthropy aren't just about what's broken—they're about the world we're building together, led by communities of color and grounded in justice and equity.

We invite you to join by subscribing to our blog or following us on LinkedIn. Together, we can reimagine philanthropy's role in creating the world we know is possible—one where power, resources, and joy are shared abundantly.

Again, we extend our deepest thanks to all who shared their insights and feedback. We look forward to integrating these learnings and the broader findings into our work as we spend down. For those interested in exploring the complete dataset, the raw report data is available here.