Foundations of Freedom and Dignity
How might a foundation more deeply root itself in values of freedom and dignity?
For three years, I’ve dedicated my work at Mazon towards answering that question. We've been busy distributing funds while putting equity at the centre, strengthening networks, connecting needs and offerings, and improving accessibility across the board.
That work is now most visibly bearing fruit through Full Table Grants, Mazon’s new flagship food security grant program launched earlier this month. I'm excited to share with you what Full Table Grants are all about, why Mazon is introducing them now, and how we can live into a future where everyone shares and accesses resources more freely.
Full Table Grants
The purpose of Full Table Grants is to strengthen food security across the country by funding and supporting frontline, community-led initiatives.
This program builds on the success of Mazon’s earlier "Grocery Grants" program. Grocery Grants were generally one-year grants, averaging $3,300, for the purchase of food or grocery gift cards.
In determining the possibilities for this new model, we engaged in an active listening process with all parts of our ecosystem, including partner organizations, community leaders, food security workers, board members, our staff team, and Mazon’s broader community.
Designed around the insights that emerged, our Full Table Grants are three-year grants, most of which are $10,000 annually, to be used towards any aspect of community food security programming – no budget or receipts necessary.
We’re excited to share more about how Full Table Grants unfold in the months and years to come - and we'll soon be announcing the complete list of 2026 - 2029 Full Table Grantees (so stay tuned!).
The introduction of Full Table Grants is reflective of a deeper transformation happening at Mazon. As we've been restructuring our grantmaking, we’re learning how our work to support freedom and dignity in food security is inextricably tied to a practice of freedom and dignity in all our work, including (especially) in our funding practices.
Pressures on Grantees
The inspiration to change Mazon’s funding approach was sparked by two observations about how funding can diminish freedom and dignity in the movement:
1. Funding can turn interdependent cultures into transactional cultures.
When the transactional culture of Big Philanthropy enters communities, it can erode pre-existing community self-sufficiency and deep relational practices. In places where organizations previously sourced resources from within their community networks, dependencies on outside wealth quickly become central to their operation.
And while influxes of financial support can allow for organizations to scale and meet more people’s needs, moving from mutual care to transactional care has external consequences. I’m increasingly hearing of the countless instances of funders restricting organizations’ freedom of speech, funders’ imposition of high reporting requirements to the detriment of the organizations’ goals, and funders’ money often coming from exploitation of the very people the foundation seeks to support whether by their donors or what their endowments are invested in. When foundations lack meaningful relational accountability with the communities they support, they can actually reduce communities’ capacity to solve their own problems over time and they may be more likely to make unethical investments.
2. Funding can distort communities’ ability to prioritize what they know their community needs most.
Funders shape which community initiatives are uplifted, as well as what kinds of items are funded within those initiatives (e.g., staff, food, rent, etc.). When interviewing Mazon’s grantees, I asked:
“Consider: if you weren’t catering to your funders, donors, and grants on offer, what would be the highest leverage, most impactful work your organization could do. How often do you find funding, grants, or donations that you’re able to use in service of that work?”
The answer was consistently “very rarely”. Funders too often fail to prioritize – or even seek out – the insights of communities they might fund while doing their grantmaking design.
Pressures on Funders
With these insights in mind, is there still an ethical role for foundations to play today? If not, how do we think about what comes next? If so, what’s holding foundations back from stepping into a more ethical place, and how might we begin to take that step?
At Mazon, we’ve experienced firsthand some (certainly not all) of the barriers that hold foundations back:
1. Foundations must abide by strict legal and tax compliance requirements.
As charities distributing funds to other organizations, foundations are beholden to guidelines and requirements set by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) and, of course, by federal and provincial law. As Mazon reduces reporting requirements, increases grant spending flexibility, increases grant amounts, supports grassroots organizations, and offers 3-year grant cycles, each of these must be done very diligently so that we properly uphold our obligations to the CRA.
2. Donors and trustees have great sway over a foundation’s financial future.
As a community foundation, Mazon fundraises primarily from the generosity of individual Jewish community members. Donor interests change over time and may not always align with the needs of our grantees or what our mission calls for. We must find our own way of responding to these misalignments.
3. Foundations must navigate diverse - sometimes diverging - experiences, perspectives, leadership styles, and knowledge bases among their stakeholders.
I’m referring here primarily to board members and staff, but also partner organizations, donors, movement activists, and more. This diversity of perspective can be a great strength, but it can also lead to ever more meetings, discussions, bureaucracy, and a stall in the work, resulting in a milquetoast version of the foundation’s vision. This diversity can instead be used to build freedom and capacity for all.
Together, these pressures on grantees and funders alike paint a picture of the massive limitations of traditional funding paradigms, and why foundations so often fail to meet the moment.
What We Came Here For
How would Mazon even begin to find our role in what comes next, in understanding what our role in the ecosystem might be? Inspired by reflection questions (rephrased for this context) from friends at HealAurt, I ask the following questions of myself, and of each of us involved with Mazon in any way:
Who are we?
Who, or what, did we come here for?
What do we need, for what we came here for?
How do we need to be, so everyone (including us) can be free?
To try to answer who and what we are for: Mazon is for a society where dignity is deeply valued, where everyone can afford and eat nourishing, culturally appropriate food.
We are for the organizations and leaders striving to increase that dignity in relationships, in community, and in our whole society.
We are for people with any knowledge, skills, or resources, whether financial or otherwise, who want to stand up and share in this struggle as another human being who cares, who believes in a world of dignity for all people.
We are for the Jewish people and for a culture in Judaism of caring for all people who are hungry.
We are for the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
If that is who and what we are for, then we are called to ask what might support us in devoting ourselves even deeper, even better, to this service work. And we are called to find the others asking themselves these questions too, and to ask them together.
Freedom in Funding
So how can funding be a freedom-building activity? Freedom in what it enables for the recipient, in the process of distribution for the funder, in the decision-making practice, in the life forces it strengthens for each, and in all of these relationships.
Increasingly we encounter funding practices that aim to offer an exercise in learning or personal growth for donors - but for many of these, they don’t ultimately transform anything in the giver’s relationship to the recipient.
In order to be truly transformed through giving, I must transform how I relate to the recipient. If I want to truly transform myself in understanding the resources I’m holding, and why I have resources that others do not, I must pursue freedom for the recipients and pursue freedom in our relationship – in fact, in all my relationships. We must not stop at backdoor, sometimes even self-congratulatory, discussion about the merits of who or how to fund.
And this is the crux of the matter. There is no way for a freedom, peace, and justice seeking funder to fully separate out the pursuit of freedom for themselves, from the pursuit of freedom for the recipient, from the pursuit of the mission we’re accomplishing together, and from the pursuit of freedom in our relationships with one another. So how do we pursue these all together?
We Are Not Alone
One answer, for me, has been trying to connect with others also asking themselves these questions. So, in addition to Mazon’s team, and our grantees, I’m also learning from other funders and organizers in the philanthropic sector. We are not alone.
The Jewish Liberation Fund distributes grants to Jewish initiatives in the US pursuing justice and liberation. Through my experience as one of their Brick-by-Brick fellows, I learned how to center adaptive leadership, ecosystem-thinking, and equity in decision-making structures.
The RoundTable Youth Fund engages with funding as a social practice, to not only fund young people’s projects around the world, but to cultivate the relationships that help them grow.
The Guerrilla Foundation convenes an Activist Council as the primary decision-making body for their grants, which fund social movements across Europe.
Thirty Percy funds people, not projects, and has already set an end date of 2030 to use their resources as boldly as they can now, rather than for an always-later later date.
CIVIC SQUARE and Dark Matter Labs have shared clarifying calls to actions for the philanthropic sector, including the unique opportunity philanthropy has to rapidly endow the future, to seed “just, regenerative, and distributive futures”.
My ancestors practiced their own forms of distribution work such as pe’ah, which I’m increasingly connecting with.
Wealth and Trust-Based Philanthropy
I’m also learning from the many good intentions, and limits, of “Trust-Based Philanthropy”: a philanthropic movement practicing a model of giving while minimally burdening the grantee. This approach is growing quickly; several funders – most prominently Mackenzie Scott, one of the wealthiest women in the world – have adopted the model in an attempt to resolve some of the most outwardly manifest problems posed by Big Philanthropy (read more analysis in The Whole Social here).
If we understand conventional philanthropy as a top-down approach where those with financial capital decide which projects receive resources, then we may understand Trust-Based Philanthropy as an attempt to bring progressive elements in (e.g., streamlined applications, multi-year granting, unrestricted funds) while still fundamentally preserving the top-down dynamic of conventional philanthropy. Trust-Based Philanthropy, then, continues to centre wealth as the kingmaker of cultural, economic, and political change.
But perhaps, for all of Trust-Based Philanthropy’s limitations, these trust-based changes can be the necessary next steps for foundations. Is it possible that small doses of trust into funder/grantee relations can, over time, deepen funders’ relational accountability, and transform their relationships to extractive financial capital? I can pray that this trust-building becomes a practice of learning how to begin pursuing freedom together, towards a truer democracy and wiser decision-making.
Contradictions in Giving
Putting aside models and frameworks for a moment, I want to just consider: what would it look like to live in a world where we all shared our resources more freely? I find this vision to be one that takes worthwhile effort in me to really imagine and feel into. And what comes, is the understanding I am only able to affirm and animate my own dignity as a human being, when I fully affirm and animate the dignity in you as a human being! That by de-othering others, by humanizing others, I become more fully human myself. I become a truer member of the whole human society. And I’ve strived for my work at Mazon to be part of a movement towards that mutual dignity and affirmation.
I feel such deep gratitude to all those who give - something I feel personally too, as a person who has been a beneficiary of grants, donations, and others’ financial generosity. And, as I know from experiencing it as a donor myself, it is also sometimes the case that donating to a cause is rooted less in generosity than in the egotism of the donor, a way for the donor to activate a feeling that they’re doing something impactful, or innovative, or creative, etcetera, regardless of whether the reality of their donation is truly as such.
In some of these cases, the individual may even donate to a cause that aligns with their values, like building food security infrastructure, and at the same time invest in an opposite-values cause, such as corporate grocers who profit by increasing food prices for consumers and lower wages for producers! It is even easier to imagine a philanthropist invested in fossil fuel production while donating to an environmental charity, or a foundation that supports affordable housing while having an endowment in Real Estate Investment Trusts.
So how are we to understand the aspiration towards generosity of this donor or funder, in the wider context of their seemingly contradictory impact? Where do we even start?
It Is When You Give Of Yourself That You Truly Give
I’ve heard before that ‘money is the cheapest way to give’ – or as Khalil Gibran wrote in The Prophet, “You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.”
There is of course no doubt that donating money is often a deeply generous act. I am so incredibly grateful to those who choose to give, to share in service of our communities and our world. The question for me is, how can we strive to root our giving so deeply in relationship, that giving money is but an extension of our overall human generosity? I suspect many of us already strive for this: showing up for people in need as our full selves, ready to be in relationship, ready to meet each other’s needs, whether that’s a hot meal, a seat at the table, or clarity on our path forward.
For myself, it has become so important to remember that, without dignified relationship, a purely transactional funding dynamic can not only fail to serve the needs of the grantee, but also hamper the growth of the donor, and limit the depth and breadth of their sense of community.
“Mostly our culture views the capacity to give based upon having more than enough - whether that is money or time. I would propose that the opposite is true- when one gives, one experiences the reality that ‘enough’ does not exist without giving. That is, giving makes us whole.” – John Bloom
So the question arises: how can foundations, such as Mazon, facilitate these broader kinds of giving? How can there be opportunity for increasing the dignity of all parties in the act of giving, while efficiently and effectively facilitating the distribution of funds? Can it be done in ways that are not purely self-serving? Can it be done in ways that do not add burden to grantees, that expand their freedom rather than contract it?
I don’t know all the answers. But I am mightily inspired by the questions, and by all the people inspired by them too, among our community, our donors, our partner organizations, the philanthropic groups I’m learning from. And what gratitude I feel to all those who are along for the journey; for the donors, the volunteers, the workers, the leaders, who are supporting the ushering in of a more generous and just world.
Listening For What Comes Next
For the time being, you might notice that Mazon’s tangible actions towards that freedom look a whole lot like Trust-Based Philanthropy’s calls to action: Full Table Grants reducing reporting requirements, increasing spending flexibility, increasing grant amounts, partnering with several small grassroots organizations, offering 3-year grant cycles, and making a deeper commitment through supports beyond financial.
These moves, however, come less as a download of the tenets of Trust-Based Philanthropy, and more from our active listening to the needs of food security partner organizations, of food insecure people, and of people across the wider network. They are the first outgrowths of something else at Mazon that is growing too. A culture shift, of rooting ourselves deeper in our values, of increasingly asking ourselves these questions, and so many more.
Who are we?
Who and/or what did we come here for?
What do we need, for what we came here for?
What is the wider ecosystem calling us to do now?
How can we stay attuned to our hearts and minds, to the hearts and minds of all that's around us?
How can we practice active listening to the whole field? How can that active listening continue to shake us and move us?
I’d love to hear from you. What is your listening practice? And how can we crack open our hearts together in the pursuit of freedom and dignity for all?
If you give to Mazon, in any form, please know that your giving has been a critical support to building food security in Canada. And I invite us to be curious, too, about how our giving to Mazon has impacted our own dignity. And how giving, for all of us, can become even more relational. I’d love to hear any reflections that might arise from you; you can email me at robbie@mazoncanada.ca
Thank you for your caring, for your building up of the dignity in all of us.
