The Baldwin Fellowship at the Lancaster County Community Foundation began, like many good things, with someone walking down a hallway saying hello to everyone he passed.
That is how I first heard John R. Baldwin coming, before I ever saw him. I was Vice President of Programs at the Foundation, and John had been introduced to me by a semi-retired marketing colleague from Armstrong World Industries, then working at a small education foundation that had once funded an initiative I ran. That is the kind of chain philanthropy moves along: not org charts, but people who liked each other twenty years earlier and never stopped saying so.
John was in his eighties then. He walked into my office, and I stood to gesture toward the boardroom, because that is what you do when a donor of John's standing arrives. He waved it off.
"No, those days are over here for me."
I did not know what he meant. My prospect research had told me a great deal about John: his years at Armstrong, his Navy service, his ordination as a permanent deacon at St. Thomas Episcopal. But it had missed one important thing. He had chaired the Lancaster County Foundation, the Community Foundation's precursor. He had spent fifteen years serving the organization I now worked for, most of them before it merged into its current form.
He had sat in the exact chair I was now offering him. The boardroom belonged to a version of his life he had already given.
We sat across my desk instead, and John did something I have thought about many times since. He essentially said, "Let's skip the philanthropic sales pitch." That was his phrase, and one he was entitled to, because John had been a fundraiser himself for years. He was the Planned Giving Officer of the Diocese of Central Pennsylvania. He had made his living at that point in his life by doing to other people what my prospect research packet had prepared me to do to him.
"Tell me," he said, "what nonprofit leaders need these days."
I want to be careful how I describe what happened next, because I think it explains a great deal about how giving works when it works.
John did not ask me for a pitch, a proposal, a list of funding opportunities, or a strategic priority. He asked me a question that assumed I would know the answer. He was, in effect, saying: I have done my homework on you, and I trust that if I ask you what is needed, you will tell me something true.
I told him what I had been thinking about a lot at the time: that we had recently completed a capacity-building initiative, and I had watched exhausted executive directors try to absorb its lessons on top of everything else they were carrying. I said I wished more nonprofit leaders had space to step back from the work and do cool things. I remember using exactly that phrase, embarrassed by how imprecise it was even as it left my mouth.
John leaned forward. "What cool things, Shanon?"
"I don't know," I said. "I would have to ask them."
"Good," he said. "I'll fund it."
"Fund what?"
"Whatever they say they want to do."
That was the entire conversation. There was no proposal. There was no strategic framework. There was a donor and a program officer who had, in the space of maybe forty minutes, understood something together: that nonprofit leaders deserved to be listened to, and that a small amount of money and time given without conditions might do more for their leadership than any curriculum could.
The John R. Baldwin Fellowship was built from that. Five thousand dollars, granted to selected nonprofit leaders to take a break from their day-to-day and pursue whatever they said would make them better leaders. I designed and facilitated the program, held dialogues with the fellows about what leadership asked of them, and hosted a multi-day retreat at a bed-and-breakfast in my hometown to give them an escape from Lancaster that the exhaustion demanded.
The Foundation now calls it the Baldwin Leadership Program. John, until the end of his life, called it the John R. Baldwin Fellowship. His obituary asked that memorial gifts be directed there under that name.
The first cohort was especially fortunate, because John was there. He arrived as a ‘surprise guest’ at one of our meetings and spoke briefly about leadership. He talked about the Navy. He said the officers he had followed most willingly, and remembered most fondly, were the ones who led quietly. They knew their people well. They cared. They also knew when to step back, and when everyone needed a break.
The fellows sat with that for a long moment. Then someone laughed, because the entire premise of the Fellowship John was funding was that the leaders themselves needed a break. He had built the program he was describing.
I have thought about that conversation for almost twenty years now. I did not know it at the time, but John was showing me the practice I would eventually build a business around. He walked into my office prepared to be listened to, and when I turned the question on him, he turned it right back on me.
Here is what I have come to believe, and what John was teaching me all along.
Giving that lasts begins with listening. Not with a strategy. Not with a theory of change. Not with a program area or an impact metric. With a conversation between two people who have decided to trust each other with what they think.
John did not need to be sold to. He needed to be asked. And once he was, he gave the way he lived: quietly, generously, and trusting the people who would carry the work forward without him.
That is the practice at the heart of Giving Without Grasping. I learned it, in large part, from John, a man who walked down a hallway saying hello to everyone he passed, and then sat down across from me and taught me how to hold my own work by refusing to let me sell it to him. I’m so grateful for John, and the many generous folks that have shaped my thinking around philanthropy to this day.
About the Author: Shanon Solava is a Certified Impact Philanthropy Advisor and the author of Giving Without Grasping. She advises families, family offices, and foundations on the human side of philanthropy: purpose, values, family dynamics, and long-term stewardship. She holds two facilitation certifications from the Interaction Institute for Social Change and works with clients across the country from her home in Pennsylvania.
If this piece resonates and you'd like to talk, you can reach her at [email protected].