Author’s note: In recent essays, I have been reflecting on the role of funders in systems change. In my previous essay, I wrote about authorship and the importance of allowing those closest to a system to define problems and shape solutions. This essay explores a related idea. If authorship belongs to practitioners and communities, what does that mean for funders? One answer, I think, is humility. Like many of my recent reflections, this one began in my kitchen.
I enjoy hosting. It is one of the small pleasures of my life - preparing food for people I care about, watching a meal come together, and making space for conversation. But enjoying something is not the same as being good at it, a distinction I learned the hard way when a guest, at my invitation, expressed a preference for chocolate cake.
I had never made one before, but I agreed anyway.
What emerged from the oven was not a cake. It was something between a brownie and a cookie - dense, flat, structurally confused. I had overmixed the batter and left it in the oven slightly too long. Two mistakes, compounding each other. I could have frosted it, covered the evidence with a generous layer of cream cheese, and called it intentional. Instead I served it as it was: a chocolate mess, presented honestly, reframed as fudge.
What I did not yet understand was that chocolate cake resists the baker in ways that other baking does not. I could make banana bread without much trouble. Carrot cake came together reliably. I assumed competence in one area would transfer cleanly to another. It did not. Chocolate cake required something different, a more patient attentiveness to what the ingredients actually needed rather than what I expected them to do. Cocoa, I later learned, is stubborn. It does not reveal much about itself until it meets the right conditions.
I have thought about that cake often in my work in philanthropy. Not because the stakes are comparable (they are not) but because the mistake is familiar.
Philanthropy has placed increasing emphasis on identifying “what works.” The impulse is understandable. Resources are certainly limited. Funders want to know that their money is making a difference. Experimentation, randomized trials, and cost effectiveness analyses emerged as ways to make aid more accountable and grounded in evidence. In many ways, this has been a healthy shift.
But like many good ideas, it can create blind spots. When the focus becomes identifying clear, replicable answers, we start to assume complex problems will yield to the right experiment or model. “What works” subtly suggests that solutions are hidden in plain sight, waiting to be discovered, measured, and scaled. Yet systems rarely behave that neatly.
Cocoa does not reveal itself in isolation. It needs fat, acid, and heat, contact with the right conditions, before it blooms into something with depth and complexity. Examined on its own, sitting in a bowl, it offers very little information about what it is capable of.
The same is true of systems change. The most important shifts - in how decisions get made, how institutions adapt, how communities experience policy in practice - become visible only in contact with real conditions: in the relationship between a practitioner and a government counterpart, in the slow accumulation of trust that makes a difficult conversation possible, and in the way a room changes when the right people are in it.
Extract them from their context and measure them in isolation, and you lose precisely what makes them meaningful. Yet that is often what funders ask for: evidence that travels cleanly, that can be reported upward, and that confirms progress on a timeline the work itself does not keep.
The deeper problem with the results obsession is that it privileges what can be counted over what really counts. Things that are easy to measure get funded. Things that are harder to measure - trust, relationships, narrative change, the quiet shift in what a community believes is possible - get undervalued, or translated into proxies that never quite capture them. The proxy becomes the goal. Eventually, the goal recedes.
This is not a problem that tighter measurement solves. It is a problem that only humility addresses, the willingness to accept that some of what matters most will not be visible on your terms, on your timeline, through your instruments. Understanding may arrive in fragments. Evidence may be partial. The change you funded may be real and significant and entirely resistant to the dashboard you built to capture it.
Like cocoa in a bowl, what a system is capable of cannot always be seen from the outside. It requires the right conditions, the right contact, and enough patience to let the process unfold before drawing conclusions.
Even after I learned how to bake a proper chocolate cake, how to handle the batter with care, and how to read the signs that the process was working, I still do not eat it. I am lactose intolerant.
I bake it for others. My reward is entirely in watching them eat it. Sometimes the cake is gone before I have looked closely at whether it rose the way I intended. I learn what worked from the response of the people at the table, not from my own experience of the thing I made.
Funders operate in much the same way. We provide resources, shape opportunities, and sometimes influence design, but we rarely live with the outcomes. The practitioners and communities closest to the work experience the change most directly. Our understanding of whether it worked comes secondhand, mediated by reports and site visits, and the accounts of people whose experience we can never fully inhabit.
That distance is uncomfortable. It generates the anxiety that produces too many metrics, too many requests for reassurance, and too much pressure on grantees to confirm that progress is happening on a schedule that suits the funder rather than the work. The discomfort is real. But the response to it - tightening control, demanding visibility, or extracting evidence on your own terms - does not close the distance. It just makes the cake worse.
Our satisfaction cannot come from owning the outcome or from certainty that our fingerprints are visible on the final product. In that sense, the funder is not the hero of the story. At best, we are partners in it. The work itself belongs to the people who live with the system day to day, the practitioners, public servants, and communities who must interpret ideas in real conditions.
Humility in philanthropy may mean accepting that this distance is not a design flaw to be engineered away. It is the nature of the role. Our satisfaction has to come from knowing that the conditions were right, that the people closest to the work had what they needed, that their judgment was trusted, and that the process was given space to unfold.
Chocolate cake taught me that some things resist the baker until the baker learns to resist themselves. The same may be true of systems change and of the funders who are asked, in the end, to support work they will never fully see and outcomes they will never directly taste.
That is not a consolation. That is the job.
Thank you for being here. If you just found my Substack, this essay is the latest in a series of reflections on philanthropy, systems change, and power, drawing on personal experience to examine the roles funders and practitioners play in shaping change. Here are the rest of the articles in this series:
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