Heeding Heather Gerken's Call for Candor

From May 31st – June 3rd, I had the opportunity to attend GEO’s 2026 National Conference in Boston.

The first Plenary Luncheon, titled “Leading Democracy Forward,” included a panel with Michael McAfee, CEO of PolicyLink, Kica Matos, President of National Immigrant Law Center, Peter Martin, Strategic Partnerships Director of Heartland Fund and Rural Democracy Initiative, and Ford Foundation’s new President & CEO, Heather Gerken.

Heather Gerken comes to the Ford Foundation following an esteemed career in academia, including the previous eight years as the 17th dean of Yale Law School.

During her remarks, Heather highlighted differences she was noticing in philanthropy vs. academia. Namely, how polite philanthropy can be. Heather shared that in academia, you show respect by giving and receiving critique – using candid feedback to partner together toward higher quality scholarship. In philanthropy, however, we miss this opportunity. While candid feedback could help us partner together toward more philanthropic impact, instead, we’re typically polite.

In my work with Philanthropic Action Lab (PAL), we diagnose this as a lack of psychological safety in the philanthropic sector.

The pioneer of psychological safety, Harvard University professor Dr. Amy Edmondson, defines team psychological safety as “a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking” (Edmondson, 1999). In a workplace with psychological safety, employees can share their thoughts, actively seek input, offer candid feedback, collaborate, embrace risks, and experiment without fear of negative consequences (Edmondson, 1999). Research shows that psychological safety substantially impacts performance at both individual and team levels, as it fosters increased knowledge sharing, engagement, creativity, innovation, and overall performance (Newman et al., 2017).

In philanthropy, we choose politeness over candor because our sector lacks psychological safety. While highly skilled nonprofit and funder leaders can and do transcend this dynamic, individual cases of candor are not the same as what a sector workplace with high psychological safety would feel like.

As I walk away from the GEO 2026 National Conference, I’m reflecting on Heather’s call for philanthropy to be more candid and less polite – and how candor can actually be a way we show respect for our colleagues.

Fortunately, there’s good work already happening in our sector to increase candor:

• CEP’s Grantee Perception Report is a powerful tool for funders to receive anonymous, actionable feedback from their grant partners.
• Community-Centric Fundraising challenges fundraisers, with their 6th Principle: “We treat donors as partners, and this means that we are transparent, and occasionally have difficult conversations.”
• Listen to Community, a joint effort of seven organizations committed to community-centered philanthropy grounded in listening, is encouraging more leaders and staff in foundations to engage in listening practices that shift power to impacted communities.
• Philanthropic Action Lab (PAL), which I co-founded with Jake Wild Crea, creates spaces for nonprofit and funder leaders to strengthen the sector together – environments with enough psychological safety to cultivate empathy, practice collaboration, build lasting trust, and co-create processes, structures, and partnerships that unlock philanthropy’s potential.
• Trust-Based Philanthropy challenges funders to “be transparent and responsive” and “solicit and act on feedback.”

...the list goes on.

If you work in philanthropy or nonprofits, reflect on the following:

• In your work, in what relationships and environments do you find yourself leaning more towards politeness or candor - and why?
• Where could you increase impact in your work by being candid about something?
• What can you do to cultivate more psychological safety in the sector?