Rethinking What Equitable Grantmaking Looks Like

Equitable grantmaking might start with who gets funded. But it doesn't end there.

The Challenge

The conservation sector has historically been shaped by inequities in who receives funding, whose knowledge is recognized, and who influences decisions about land, water, and other natural resources.

These inequities are particularly significant because Indigenous communities and communities of color often hold deep cultural connections to the places they seek to conserve, along with traditional knowledge and longstanding practices of environmental stewardship. Yet organizations led by these communities have frequently been underrepresented in conservation philanthropy and face structural barriers, including chronic underfunding, operational strain, and funder expectations that do not always align with the realities of grassroots organizations.

The Conservation Alliance (TCA) created the Confluence Program in 2021 to address some of these inequities by directing resources to grassroots conservation organizations led by historically marginalized communities and creating connections across TCA's wider network.

My Contribution

I partnered with TCA staff on a formative evaluation of the Confluence Program designed to understand how the program was working, what barriers organizations continued to experience, and where there might be opportunities to strengthen the grantmaking model.

Together, we developed a theory of change that articulated the outcomes the program sought to achieve and explored how grantmaking structures, relationships, community knowledge, and different approaches to conservation might contribute to those outcomes.

The formative evaluation drew on multiple sources of evidence to explore participants' experiences, barriers to conservation funding and project implementation, and opportunities to strengthen the program. Data collection did not unfold quite as we had planned, but the evidence we gathered still surfaced important insights and prompted valuable conversations with TCA staff about what we were learning, what questions remained, and where new opportunities for impact might exist.

I learned a great deal from this engagement. Some of the most important lessons I took from this work came from seeing TCA put equitable grantmaking principles into practice. Others emerged through the questions and tensions surfaced by the evaluation and the conversations that followed. Together, they pushed me to think differently about resources, relationships, capacity, how we recognize success, and the role evaluation can play in supporting learning and change.

What began as an evaluation of a particular grantmaking program became an opportunity to reflect more broadly on what equitable grantmaking asks of funders, what capacity strengthening can mean, how we recognize success, and what evaluation is ultimately for.

Equity Is About More Than Who Gets Funded

One of the clearest lessons I took from this work is that equitable grantmaking isn't achieved simply by expanding access to conservation funding while leaving the structures and expectations surrounding that funding unchanged.

Who receives resources matters enormously. But so does how those resources are provided.

Multi-year commitments and flexibility can give organizations breathing room to do their work. Reporting expectations can support learning—or consume scarce organizational capacity. Technical support, connections to businesses and other funders, and the legitimacy that can come from association with an established conservation funder can create opportunities beyond the monetary value of a grant.

Equitable grantmaking therefore requires attention not only to the distribution of resources, but also to the conditions surrounding those resources and whether those conditions enable organizations to pursue their work effectively.

That places responsibility on funders to examine their own performance and practices, not simply the performance of their grantees.

Capacity Strengthening Can Be Reciprocal

The work also highlighted the different resources funders can bring to these relationships—financial resources, technical support, networks, visibility, and institutional influence. At the same time, funders have opportunities to strengthen their ability to listen, learn from different approaches, recognize different ways of knowing, and consider how their own practices affect the organizations they seek to support.

Looking at these different contributions helped me think about capacity strengthening as reciprocal rather than one-directional. Neither enters the relationship without capacity. They bring different capacities, resources, and ways of knowing to a shared challenge.

Making Room for a Broader Definition of Success

Conservation funders can, and do, examine important outcomes. Are grantees achieving their planned objectives? Are projects advancing conservation priorities? Are the benefits likely to be sustained?

In the case of TCA, one longer-term marker of progress might even be that a separate funding stream intended to address inequity is no longer necessary because the inequities that prompted its creation have meaningfully diminished.

But reading the stories of Confluence-funded projects made something else clear to me: success can be much broader than conventional indicators alone can capture.

The Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative, a Confluence grantee, offers a powerful example. Its work on the Wind River Indian Reservation brings together buffalo restoration, habitat protection, land rematriation, and the restoration of relationships between people and buffalo. As that work progressed, the Eastern Shoshone's annual Sun Dance included buffalo meat for the first time in 139 years. And the meat was harvested on the reservation.

We could measure buffalo populations, acres restored, land reacquired, or project milestones reached. Each would tell us something important. But none, on its own, could fully represent the significance of buffalo returning to a sacred ceremony after an absence spanning generations.

The change is ecological, but it is also cultural, historical, spiritual, and communal. It reflects relationships among people, animals, culture, and land that conventional conservation measures can struggle to represent.

Indicators help us examine the changes we expect to see. Stories can help us recognize changes we didn't know to look for. We need both.

Stories aren't simply illustrations used to add context or enrich quantitative findings. They are a form of evaluative evidence, helping us recognize outcomes, relationships, and meanings that predefined measures may not have anticipated. As evaluators, we need to remain open to evidence as it emerges—even when it takes forms we did not anticipate—and be willing to reconsider what counts as evidence when the work calls for it.

It also reinforces for me that who participates in defining success shapes how success is ultimately understood. Consider what indicators might surface if grantees and communities participated more directly in defining outcomes and indicators from the beginning. Their perspectives don't need to replace the measures a funder requires for accountability and decision-making. They can broaden them, creating a more holistic understanding of what progress looks like from multiple perspectives.

From Attribution to Contribution

A broader understanding of success also requires humility about who gets credit when change happens.

Funding is critical. It can enable work that otherwise might not happen, might not happen as quickly, or might not happen at the same scale. But funding alone does not drive social change.

Organizations and communities do the complex work of creating change. Their staff, knowledge, relationships, histories, partners, other funders, and surrounding conditions all contribute to what becomes possible.

Trying to attribute an outcome to a single funder, as we often do in evaluation, can turn that complexity into an overly simple chain of cause and effect. It can also position the funder as the protagonist of a story in which communities and organizations did the difficult work.

TCA showed me a different perspective: a shift toward contribution, where the focus moves from proving that a funder caused an outcome to understanding what its support helped make possible, how that support interacted with other influences, and what can be learned from the process.

For an evaluator, that means looking beyond individual grant metrics to understand the larger system surrounding an outcome, considering alternative explanations for change, and taking community accounts and qualitative evidence seriously alongside quantitative measures. It also means creating opportunities for funders and grantees to make sense of evidence together rather than treating evaluation primarily as an accountability exercise.

From Grant Reporting to Collective Learning

That brings me to the larger issue this work has prompted me to think about, which is also my home away from home: what happens to what we learn?

Philanthropy generates an extraordinary amount of information. Organizations complete applications, track indicators, prepare progress reports, collect stories, and submit final reports. Bring an evaluator to the table, and chances are, we'll ask for even more.

But information isn't necessarily learning.

Across philanthropy, when that information remains within individual funding relationships, is seldom examined across grants, or is disconnected from opportunities for collective reflection, a sector can generate enormous amounts of data without necessarily becoming better at understanding what is working, for whom, and under what conditions.

If evaluation ends with a report submitted to a funder, we may have satisfied an accountability requirement without strengthening anyone's capacity to learn.

This is where I think capacity strengthening needs to extend beyond individual organizations. Organizations need the capacity to evaluate, learn, adapt, and make good decisions. Funders need the capacity to listen, synthesize learning across investments, question assumptions, and adapt their practices. And sectors need ways to connect learning across organizations.

That is how I increasingly think about collective capacity: a sector's ability to learn across its work, understand how its many efforts contribute to shared outcomes, and use that knowledge to adapt.

Learning from one organization's experience can inform another's. Patterns can be identified across investments. Gaps and opportunities for alignment can become more visible. And knowledge can inform decisions about where strategies, relationships, and resources may need to change.

Taken together, are our collective efforts contributing to the change we want to see?

What I'm Taking Forward

I began this work thinking about how to evaluate a grantmaking program designed to address inequities in conservation philanthropy. It left me thinking more broadly about what equitable philanthropy—and evaluation in service of it—can look like.

Equitable philanthropy isn't only about redistributing resources. It also asks us to examine the relationships surrounding those resources, recognize that expertise resides in different places, create room for communities to shape how success is understood, and be appropriately modest about the contribution any single institution can claim.

Evaluation can support accountability. But it can also create opportunities for learning, make assumptions visible, reveal outcomes we didn't anticipate, connect knowledge across organizations, and help us understand how individual efforts contribute to larger patterns of change.

For me, the question I am carrying forward is: how do we create the learning infrastructure that helps organizations strengthen their own work while also helping a sector understand whether, collectively, we are moving toward the change we seek?

Sources & Further Reading

• The Conservation Alliance. Confluence Program. — Program purpose, eligibility, and grantmaking approach.
• The Conservation Alliance. Five Years of Investment in Community-Led Conservation and Philanthropy. (2026) — Retrospective context on the funding inequities that contributed to the program's creation.
• The Conservation Alliance. Buffalo Restoration and Land Rematriation on the Wind River Reservation. — Confluence grant profile for the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative.
• Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative. About the Initiative. — Mission, land rematriation, community revitalization, youth education, and buffalo restoration.
• Roque Planas. How A Dream To Bring Back Wild Buffalo Is Slowly Decolonizing Tribal Land. HuffPost, March 24, 2024. — Reporting on the return of buffalo to Wind River, including the Eastern Shoshone Sun Dance example discussed in this note.
• InDEEP Initiative. Closing the Gap. — Research on the funding gap between white-led and BIPOC-led environmental and conservation organizations.