Our Commitment to Transparency & Accountability
We want to build a more effective, efficient, just, and open funding ecosystem.
While many have talked about Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) in the funder ecosystem, funders hinder their own effectiveness when acting as opaque institutions. At Shockwave, we’ve made a commitment to transparency and accountability.
We believe that our transparency helps foster trust and creates stronger relationships between us, our action-partners, and other funders. We want our potential partners to know what we value and how we think. We want them to know, ahead of time, if we’re a good fit for their work.
As a first step, we’ve published on our website our operating resources, a set of living documents describing our strategy, grantmaking priorities, funding criteria, and decision-making processes. Our material is “open source”– we encourage others to review it, discuss it, and use it to inspire their own work. We invite feedback; we have much room to improve.
Long-term impact requires trusting, respectful relationships. We hope to establish an open conversation around funder transparency and accountability so we can all learn from each other. We encourage other funders to consider the same strategy, as well as encourage action partners to critique it. Let’s work together to build a more effective, efficient, just, and open funding ecosystem.
Paul