In 2024, Sonya LaCoute-Dana, a citizen of the Passamaquoddy Tribe at Sipayik, became the first full-time leader of the Wabanaki program at the Elmina B. Sewall Foundation and, to her knowledge, the only staff person dedicated to tribal communities at a Maine foundation.
For LaCoute-Dana, the draw to the position was immediate. “Philanthropy has existed in tribal communities forever,” she says. “That sense of reciprocity is part of our culture.”
Given that she and her family live in a Wabanaki tribal community, as do their extended family members, “Listening is an obligation,” she says. “Everything I do is directly impacting everyone around me.”
Listening is also what led the Sewall Foundation to create her position. Through a series of listening sessions in 2021, Wabanaki leaders and community members shared insights on how Sewall could be partners in good relationship with members of the five Wabanaki tribal communities, as well as Native people living across the state. What they shared and the relationships that were formed through the process have shaped Sewall’s philanthropy since, which has included providing multiyear grants to Wabanaki organizations and tribal governments and creating a rapid-response fund to contribute funding to land return and rematriation work.
Notably, says LaCoute-Dana, who handled grants and contracts for the Penobscot Nation before coming to Sewall, the power imbalance present with federal grants was absent from the support Sewall provided.
LaCoute-Dana’s experience points to changes Sewall has been working on for a decade. M. Gabriela Alcalde, executive director of the Sewall Foundation and a Listen to Community Ambassador, says that the foundation has been on a journey to transform its work with a focus on power dynamics. Founded in 1982 by Elmina Brewster Sewall, the granddaughter of a founding trustee of the Standard Oil Company, the foundation has moved, she says, from being a largely traditional and hierarchical organization to practicing “power with” people rather than “power over” people.
The foundation has moved ... from being a largely traditional and hierarchical organization to practicing 'power with' people rather than 'power over' people.
When it was time to hire a new executive director in 2019, the foundation’s board leaned into its articulated commitment to advancing social equity and its stated values of community empowerment and changing systems that don’t work. They hired Alcalde, a leader shaped by her work in public health and her experiences as a Peruvian immigrant — “raised in a way that made living in alignment with my values non-negotiable,” as she describes it. Through her leadership, the foundation started taking steps to shift power to the communities in Maine most affected by colonialism, structural racism, and patriarchal ideology.
This goal, Alcalde says, is particularly important now, in a moment when communities and organizations are facing existential threats. “Philanthropy should not just be protecting what exists right now,” Alcalde says. “We need to be seeding and nurturing what will hold our communities for the next hundred years or more.”
With that aim in mind, Sewall is currently working through how to support struggling organizations closest to communities, while also resourcing grassroots efforts to grow new systems. And, Alcalde says, navigating the complexity of living into the foundation’s values in challenging times is allowing the team to deepen their relationships within the community.
Transforming the culture of governance
Sewall’s transformation has been fueled by bringing community into its work at every level. In 2021, Sewall made an open call for board membership, meaning anyone in Maine could apply to be a trustee, and the emphasis was on attracting people from the communities the foundation prioritizes. Six new members joined five trustees already in place, significantly diversifying the community perspectives represented on the board.
There was a challenging period of transition. The new members noted that the board took a hierarchical approach to discussion and decision making that limited their ability to support efforts to center communities and advance equity. “We had so much work to do,” recalls Jono Anzalone, one of the new members who now serves as board chair.
At the same time, some of the original members were having difficulty finding their footing as the board transitioned from its previous role as a working board involved in grant decisions and other day-to-day operations to being a strategic board with an advisory role.
While the board could change its bylaws and form new committees, adjusting to the new dynamics was trickier. For her part, Alcalde says she underestimated “the grief and loss of changing the roles of the board and shifting power.”
Alcalde’s experience reflects a common refrain about the work of culture change: it is both easier than you think and harder than you think. On one hand, Alcalde notes, there are many “self-limiting beliefs” about what is possible as a board “or what you should even be willing to try.” On the other hand, she says, “We’re human. So anytime we try to say, ‘I’m going to do this framework or this model or these 10 steps,’ you’re forgetting that you’re dealing with humans.”
Sewall board members turned to a number of tools and approaches that supported their efforts to change the foundation’s culture of governance over time, including working on shared language and analysis around equity; creating agreements on norms and acceptable behaviors; and engaging in a collaborative process to develop the foundation’s theory of change.
“It’s important to pay attention to your culture, how it affects everything you do, the governing structure, how it affects the way you allow for and draw out a variety of perspectives and ask people to listen,” says board member Leslie Hill, who as chair of the equity committee has helped the board develop shared understanding of their role. “What are you hearing? How does it comport with the way you think about doing things?” (Read more from our conversation with Sewall foundation board members.)
It’s important to pay attention to your culture, how it affects everything you do, the governing structure, how it affects the way you allow for and draw out a variety of perspectives and ask people to listen.
Developing leadership in proximity to community
Along with significant changes in governance, Sewall has overhauled its staff positions and roles. Shortly after Alcalde’s arrival, she worked with staff to replace a hierarchical structure with “pods” that carry out the foundation’s grantmaking and operations and distribute leadership. There are pods for equity, for operations and culture, for beyond-the-grant supports, for learning and evaluation, and more. Staff members are part of multiple pods, and each staff member holds a leadership role in at least one of them.
The foundation’s programs are now spearheaded by staff members known as community partners who, like LaCoute-Dana, bring deep personal and professional ties to the communities they work with. Lucy Van Hook, the Rural Partnerships community partner, grew up in a town of “2,000 people and 10,000 cows.” Amie Hutchison, the Animal Welfare and Nature-Based Education community partner, grew up in a rural coastal town in Maine and traces her work to the “life-changing experience” of having a first dog in her 20s. Kristina Kalolo, the Food Systems community partner, grew up spending time at her grandparents’ fish market, and continued working for small family food businesses as her interest in food justice grew.
Recently, because of her connections, a community member knew to reach out to Kalolo, alerting her to an organization in need of funds to avoid eviction. “Just having those trusted forms of communication, it feels good when people know that they can reach out and make those asks,” Kalolo says. (Read more from our conversation with Sewall Foundation community partners here.)
Sewall community partners navigate the complexity of working with different communities, including immigrant, refugee, and U.S.-born groups, that sometimes have different perspectives – within them as well as between. They balance the value of their personal connections with the need to prevent unfair access to people who make decisions over resources. They look for opportunities to show up and listen in places where people are gathering, while being conscious of power dynamics that can occur when funders are in the room. They also work through disagreements as a staff.
“We’re all very different people,” Alcalde says. “We didn’t just hire a bunch of people who are the same and we all get along and that’s why this works. We’re all profoundly different people. That makes it more complicated, but also makes it richer. We’re trying to practice that communities are not monoliths and we need to have that complicated different experience, different perspective, different ages, different identities represented.”
Creating resources to support pivots
Changes in the Sewall board and team have improved the foundation’s ability to listen and pivot in response to developments on the ground and in its own learning. In Maine’s Katahdin region, following the closure of two paper mills that were the area’s largest employers, a community coalition brought in a consultant to help create a community plan with Sewall’s support. When the community expressed concern that the consultants were more corporate than responsive, the foundation also supported the coalition to find a Maine-based replacement, which proceeded to facilitate a robust engagement process, resulting in a plan with community backing.
Van Hook, now at Sewall, served at the time as community development director for the volunteer organization Our Katahdin. She recalls being struck by how “Sewall was willing to go multiple steps backward in order to go further.”
Sometimes, the need to pivot comes as a result of having authentic relationships and inviting honest feedback, even when it’s critical. In the foundation’s Lewiston–Auburn program area, the Sewall team received feedback that the meetings the foundation convened were too focused on what the foundation should do rather than the community’s needs. Compounding the challenge of re-envisioning their engagement with the community, the Sewall staff member who anchored the program retired. It was a moment, Alcalde says, when the foundation realized, “Right now requires something different.” She reached out to the people they’d been engaging with to acknowledge the missteps, and the foundation is providing multiyear grants to community organizations while they explore new ways of resourcing community-led efforts in ways that shift power to the community.
Sewall’s pivots and exploration sit inside a larger framework: a foundation-wide theory of change that is an enunciation of approach rather than a traditional linear and time-limited strategic map. Developed through a process of co-creation with the board and staff, it is a visual representation of the foundation’s values, beliefs, and vision overlaid on artwork created by Sewall team member Laura Dover evoking Maine’s coast, towns, fields, forests, and mountains.
In addition to anchoring the decisions of the foundation’s board and staff, this visual theory of change facilitates conversations with people coming from a variety of perspectives, and it focuses the foundation’s evaluation on the quality of the foundation’s interactions with communities and partners.
“It doesn’t really matter what we’re working on; it’s how we work on it that really matters,” says Alcalde, adding that if Sewall is working in alignment with its values, power shifting, accountability, and being in deep relationship with community will follow, because those are core to the foundation’s approach.
”We wanted to create a culture so these are not things we impose,” she says. “It’s not like ‘Remember, we have to listen to community.’ That’s just how we move.”
