Why action matters more than perfect vision

Summer is here and with it, a new milestone we worked on for the past few months: the new website you’re reading this blog post on. As a significant step in our transformation journey, we wanted our website to reflect exactly where Tudor is at in this moment: mapping and funding an ecosystem of grant partners who are, together, building the conditions for a more just future where communities thrive.

Our ecosystem map is at the heart of our vision of a world as it should be, one that moves away from scarcity and division to one that is rooted in community self-determination. Just like a living organism where each cell has a vital function and depends on others to thrive, the partners making up our ecosystem all work on laying the foundations of a new system and depend on each other to achieve their mission.

We see this map as a strategic tool making our ecosystem visible so that it can operate more collectively. Tudor has constantly evolved over the decades to respond to different social and economic contexts. The world is always in motion, which means that our role and mission as a funder must always evolve too. Our map and partners enable us to work in emergence and continuously discover what is needed to build a world that works for everyone, as well as refocus our efforts as we go. 

This is what it means for us to resource power within communities: learning from their ambitions and acting accordingly. Communities on the ground know they cannot wait for funders to perfect their strategies, they are already working to live their ambitions. Our role is to keep up.

Learning and sharing our resources in public is still an essential part of our strategy as a way to resource our ecosystem and to invite others to join us on our journey. This essential work has enabled us amongst other things to rethink the way we fund. We have understood that long-term change necessitates more than just short-term funding and have adopted a new approach where we enter a learning relationship with each of our partners. As part of our relational approach, we offer support in the form of funding, as well as time, capital, and resources our partners can use to meet their long-term goals.

Racial justice also remains the lens through which we want to effect change. While the long-standing Board that exited in 2020 understood the importance of a racial justice remit, the first iteration of our grant-making enabled us to understand racial justice as the pathway to community, power, and abundance that benefits everyone. Reflecting on how we choose to make our investments and redistribute our capital has been critical to ensure we live up to this principle.

The majority of our endowment is currently invested in an ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) screened public equities portfolio with a smaller proportion of it invested in impact investment. However, this strategy is not enough yet for the kind of justice we are seeking. We are currently exploring how to deploy our capital so that all our assets work in service of community and transitioning to a new system where care and reciprocity are centred.

The care and reciprocity we are seeking also start with us. Over the past few years, we have worked on aligning our internal culture with our values and collectively developing a behaviours framework, so that we can practice embodying the change we seek.

This new website is a reflection of what we are becoming – a collective journey, committed to learning together so that we are developing an ambitious approach. We don’t have the answers to everything and don’t know yet where the journey with our partners will lead us. But we are here, listening and actively taking steps to bring a world where everyone can flourish. This is what this website is meant to show: that action matters more than a perfect vision.