A new podcast from Listen to Community initiative partner Fund for Shared Insight features a powerful conversation about shifting power in family philanthropy.
Eileen Farbman, co-founder and board co-chair of the Kolibri Foundation, sits down with consultant Molly Schultz Hafid for an open and detailed walk-through of Kolibri’s journey from a traditional family foundation to one intentionally designed to share decision-making power with movement and community-rooted leaders.
Farbman’s father, Robert Price, was an early investor in cell phones, ultimately selling a majority of his telecommunications company to Verizon in 2000. After he died in 2017, Farbman and her brother split the Price family foundation, creating the opportunity for her to develop a new grantmaking entity from the ground up. Farbman had spent decades working as a philanthropist and in the nonprofit sector on women’s issues, gender racial justice, and with youth impacted by the criminal justice system. Now, she says, she was ready to scale her philanthropy and “really think about what I could do differently.”
With her husband and son joining her as initial board members, Farbman and her family began what she calls a “learning and listening journey” to create what she now describes as “a movement-led family foundation.” They brought on Schultz Hafid — who says her “philanthropic DNA is to move money and power as close to movements for social change as possible” — as a consultant, and invited three leaders in movements at the intersections of gender, racial, and economic justice to round out the design team.
“We wanted to transform philanthropy by having movement be on the same side with us.”
Kolibri officially launched in 2021 with a commitment to “resourcing those closest to the issues” and bylaws requiring that family represent a minority of the number of board members. The three Farbmans were joined on the board by the three community leaders they were already working with and two more movement folks. Together, supported by three staff members, they have launched three major multi-year grant cycles, and plan to spend down all their assets — a total of $35 million over the life of the foundation — by 2027.
The New York City-based foundation has created a fund focused on reimagining safety, supporting organizations addressing “the root causes of systems and cultures of violence that perpetuate interpersonal, communal and state harm, and abuse,” and another focused on reimagining power, supporting organizations building organizing, governing, narrative, cultural, and economic power. It has nearly 80 active grantees around the country, including organizations building women’s leadership in Puerto Rico and Mississippi, and harm-reduction and violence-prevention groups in Washington, D.C.
For the Insights for Change podcast, Farbman and Schultz Hafid discuss the path to centering movement leadership, which includes understanding power dynamics, and formalizing shared power in governance structures. They also talk candidly about the importance of creating “family agreements,” setting out shared values, commitments to one another, and an open, supportive space for communication even before involving non-family members
Farbman explains in an additional interview that the agreements are a set of guidelines, a written list created with a consultant that the family has reviewed regularly over the years. “Work with family is beautiful and tricky and should be taken with care,” she says.
But the real work of creating Kolibri, she says, started after the movement leaders, some of whom had no experience in philanthropy, joined the effort: “We wanted to transform philanthropy by having movement be on the same side with us.”
Figuring out the balance wasn’t always easy. In one of the podcast episode’s many revealing moments, Farbman describes a realization — that while she was intent on “minimizing the family voices,” the movement leaders building Kolibri with them wanted a structure where everyone led together. At the same time, there was some pushback from the foundation’s lawyers. Says Schultz Hafid: “Most lawyers that work with private foundations … would advise you against having the family be outvoted and having the provisions in your bylaws in that way.”
But for Farbman and what she calls the “Dream Committee” of movement leaders who helped design Kolibri’s structure and grantmaking, shifting and sharing power was the point. For other philanthropists interested in taking a similar path, she offers encouragement and some advice: Slow down, build trust, name insecurities, and ask for help. Learning from one another, she says, is “the most joyful part of the journey” — one she is proud to be on.
“I think the idea of letting go, shifting power has been just a huge, life-changing lesson.”
