The Wellbeing Project (TWP) is launching the Funders + Wellbeing Group, a global learning community for foundations and grantmakers to together explore the link between inner wellbeing and sustainable social change, experiment with ways to put it into practice, and ultimately contribute to culture shift in the philanthropic ecosystem. The Group is in partnership with the Robert HN Ho Family Foundation Global, and is co-facilitated by Jessamyn Shams-Lau and Ramsés Gómez Molina.

THE NEED

Changemakers at the forefront of solving the most complex social and environmental issues facing humanity often simultaneously experience deep personal struggles, which have far-reaching implications for their lives, relationships, organisations, and outcomes they drive for. Funding and resources are commonly cited as barriers to making inner wellbeing a sustainable and institutionalised practice for leaders and their organisations. 

While there is growing interest and pressure to move away from business as usual in philanthropy, new approaches like trust-based philanthropy and grantee-centred practices don’t quite address inner wellbeing head on. There is a great need to raise awareness and build a community of practice of committed funders that can lead by example and help bring peer funders into this movement. 

This is an opportune moment for this work. Through engaging a critical mass of social change organisations TWP is catalysing a large-scale culture shift. By bringing philanthropic actors into this growing movement we can unlock the necessary resources to accelerate systems change.

FWG SHARED PURPOSE

Increase organisational:

❏ regard and communication of wellbeing as essential to sustained, effective social change

❏ comfort and confidence to acknowledge and address complex intersecting topics such as power, equity, justice, trauma, healing

❏ demonstration of practices that purposefully increase wellbeing for stakeholders

❏ actively take steps to influence and shift the field of philanthropy in similar ways

HOW TO JOIN

Interested in learning more?
To learn more about FWG, contact Brie Costello at brie@wellbeing-project.org.