Conversations about where Open and Trusting sits strategically and how far it’s taken often happen at senior levels – where decision-making power over processes, timelines and outcomes tends to sit too. Yet early career funding staff are frequently the ones doing the partner-facing work: managing relationships, communicating decisions, administering grants. In practice, they are tasked with embodying Open and Trusting while operating within frameworks they did not design and often feel they cannot change.
In February 2026, IVAR convened two Community of Practice sessions on going further with Open and Trusting for early career staff, in partnership with The Grant Givers’ Movement. We wanted to understand what gets in the way, what sits within people’s power to shift, and where more support is needed. Across both sessions, tensions around position and power surfaced quickly.
Being early on in my career myself, new to both IVAR and to working life more generally, I left with a clear takeaway: going further with Open and Trusting may not only be about how funders relate to grantees. It is also about what funding staff experience internally, especially those at the interface between organisational intent and day-to-day delivery. IVAR’s US partners at The Trust-Based Philanthropy Project capture this notion in advocating for ‘a holistic commitment to trust-based philanthropy [which] invites practitioners to apply trust-based values across four key dimensions of their work: culture, structures, leadership, and practices’.
Even where feedback is possible, there is an emotional dilemma: wanting to be honest and direct, while worrying that being too candid could harm relationships or cause distress. Because early career staff are often closest to applicants, they can end up absorbing the emotional impact of organisational ambiguity.”
Holding the tension: intent vs practice
That interface role is where gaps become visible. Several attendees described a disconnect between internal aspirations to be more open and trusting and what is actually possible in practice. They encounter the points where good intent meets procedural constraints and often hold the relational strain that follows.
One theme that made this especially concrete was feedback.
Attendees highlighted the challenge of giving timely, meaningful feedback to applicants. In principle, there was a shared commitment to transparency and respect for applicants’ time: communicate clearly, avoid unnecessary delay, do not leave organisations in limbo. But in practice, high application volumes, limited capacity, and long or uncertain decision-making timelines can make personalised feedback hard to sustain. Early career staff may field follow-up emails and calls without clarity on when decisions will land, or what precisely shaped them.
Even where feedback is possible, there is an emotional dilemma: wanting to be honest and direct, while worrying that being too candid could harm relationships or cause distress. Because early career staff are often closest to applicants, they can end up absorbing the emotional impact of organisational ambiguity.
Hearing this raised my own reflections as a newer, addition to the workforce. Being new can bring fresh perspective, but also vulnerability: you are still earning trust and learning what is expected. Challenging established ways of working can feel risky when you are still trying to integrate and prove yourself. In deeply relational roles, that tension is amplified.
Early career funding staff sit between internal managers and external partners, responsible for maintaining trust on both sides. As such, they juggle a dual accountability: maintaining trust with external partners while staying aligned with internal expectations. That can make difficult conversations – be it externally delivering an unsuccessful application outcome or raising internal concerns about burdensome processes – feel extra high stakes.
Several attendees also shared how hard it can be to even think about reshaping grant-making practices when capacity is stretched and most energy goes into doing the day-to-day work well. Reflective and change-making work can become deferred and pushed into the category of later: when there’s more breathing room to think, or when one’s progressed enough in the organisation to have more authority to shift things.
But this left me with a question: If early career staff are most exposed to the friction between Open and Trusting intentions and on-the-ground reality, can organisations afford to wait for that “later” to come?
The conditions for Open and Trusting: What early career staff need
Engaging in an open and trusting way is not only a matter of individual ability. It depends on internal conditions: what information people can access, where authority sits, how disagreement is handled, and whether staff feel secure questioning and re-envisioning established ways of working.
Attendees named practical shifts that could reduce pressure on early career staff while improving funded organisations’ experiences:
- clearer timelines, criteria and (where possible) success rates
- more transparency around decision-making, so outcomes can be communicated consistently
- delegated authority where appropriate, enabling timely updates without multiple layers of sign-off
- support for difficult conversations, including shared language and peer learning
Open and Trusting asks funders to rethink power, transparency and relational practice externally. But when openness and trust aren’t reflected inside organisations through delegated authority, transparency, and inclusion in decision-making, early career staff often can’t fully enact these values externally. These aren’t just workflow tweaks. They’re the internal conditions that make Open and Trusting possible in practice.
A reflexive internal culture is a crucial part of this foundation: for Open and Trusting to show up consistently in external relationships, learning needs to run vertically too. Early career staff often have a close-up view of how policies and processes land in real interactions, and may be well placed to notice patterns that have become normalised. For those insights to shape practice, there needs to be openness upward as well as outward: routes for insight to travel, and safety to question without jeopardising belonging or progression.
Perhaps, then, going further with Open and Trusting is not only about how funding organisations distribute resources. It is also about how trust, authority and openness are distributed within funding organisations themselves. If early career staff are expected to embody Open and Trusting at the interface, it’s worth asking what would need to shift internally for them to experience that same openness and trust.
Engaging in an open and trusting way is not only a matter of individual ability. It depends on internal conditions: what information people can access, where authority sits, how disagreement is handled, and whether staff feel secure questioning and re-envisioning established ways of working.”
IVAR is looking to offer more sessions for early-career funders, in partnership with The Grant Givers’ movement.
To register your interest, please contact Lara at lara@ivar.org.uk