A Leadership Program & Community of Practice for Grantmakers to Advance a Thriving & Just World
The Harmony Initiative equips grantmakers with the community, skills, and resources to transform philanthropy into a force for equity and social justice. Inherent to this is building the capacity of grantmakers as funder organizers to advance a Just Transition for the field. Through a combination of retreats and peer groups, participants solidify a vision for their leadership and the field, strengthen their grantmaking practice, and build deep relationships with peers.
Harmony’s curriculum is grounded in Resonance, a framework for philanthropic transformation. Over a period of 8 months, participants examine transformation on three levels:
- Personal: To lead effectively, Harmony engages grantmakers in the “inner work” of understanding their personal beliefs, values, and purpose. Through diverse frameworks, practitioners consider power–their relationship to it, how it shapes their work, and how they want to use it; vision- how they define it and how it fuels them; resilience – how to cultivate it and thrive; and more.
- Interpersonal: Building on this, participants identify opportunities to seed transformation in their teams, organizations, and their relationships with communities. Harmony introduces grantmakers to strategies and resources for power mapping, conflict literacy, negotiation, and culture transformation. During retreats and peer groups, participants serve as partners and coaches to one another, as they experiment with a variety of tools.
- Collective: Lastly, the cohort looks at philanthropy as a field and system. Together, the group reflects on the history of philanthropy and its present day implications; maps a new vision for the field in which communities lead and thrive; and co-create frameworks to incrementally shift the system from within. As part of this, grantmakers learn about movement building, funder organizing, and systems change.
