Guiding Principles

Wend’s team and work was organized around three principles. These were not aspirational statements kept separate from operations. They were active commitments that shaped hiring decisions, grantmaking practices, and how the organization was structured and run.

Nature as Our Guide

We are not separate from the world that sustains us. Life has been at this far longer than humans. Nature does not operate by the logic we have projected onto it: not competition as primary driver, not scarcity as a baseline condition, not the individual as the unit that matters. Darwin never said survival of the fittest — he said survival of the fit, meaning survival goes to the organism that fits its context. This is a claim about relationship, not dominance.

But the separation runs deep;  even the word “nature” enacts it. The moment we named the living world as something outside ourselves, we’d already reduced it to an object: something to study, control, and selectively interpret. A tree is shaped by two flows — the flow of sap and the flow of wind. Form follows flow. Wend applied this lens to its own work: attend to what is actually moving through a system, inside and out, and you begin to see why it takes the shape it does.

This principle was an invitation to follow nature in whatever way called to you, to enter the wild and refuse the separation, to attend to what is actually flowing, and to bring what you find there back into the work.

Transformation Through Relationship

Change is constant — and the transformation our world needs will not come from better strategies imposed from above. It will come from relationships.

This is not simply a claim that relationships matter. It is a claim about how reality works. We experience an objective world, a subjective interior, and — often overlooked — a relational domain that is distinct from both. A thought held alone in your mind flickers and fades; the same thought held in dialogue can be explored for hours, expanded, challenged, understood. Relationships are not just where change happens — they are the medium through which new possibilities become real.

Wend’s work was grounded in five primary relationships: self, other, community, nature, and spirit. We believed that attending to the health of these relationships — not optimizing for metrics or scale — was the most reliable path toward a more vibrant world. Data matters. Strategy matters. But both fail when not hosted in joyful, trusted relationship.

Dignity and Wholeness of Each Individual

This principle begins with love — not as sentiment, but as orientation. The dignity we speak of is not limited to humans, or even to what science calls “life.” It extends to all that has been created: the cosmos and the grain of sand, the elephant and the clump of grass. If everything is deserving of dignity, then dignity came long before humans and remains connected to mysteries we cannot fully name.

Applied to humans, this expansive dignity raises serious questions about status and power. It asks us to meet people not as means to an end, but as whole — which is to say, as containing multitudes. Wholeness is not a state to achieve but a lifelong practice: learning, reconnecting, and integrating physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being.

And here we encounter paradox. Humans are capable of tremendous beauty, goodness, and love — and we are also the most violent species on this planet. Dignity does not erase this. It asks us to know ourselves fully, including the parts capable of harm, and to extend that same complex recognition to others. Transformation begins when we hold this tension rather than resolve it.

What follows is structured as permission slips — not for what Wend did, but for what we imagine the future of philanthropy can be. Each one names a departure from convention, the bet Wend made, what that bet produced, what it cost, and what we’d tell you if you were about to try something similar.

These are not endorsements of every choice Wend made. They are honest accounts of what happens when you push far enough from the conventional to learn something new. The hope is that naming them explicitly, as permissions you can consciously choose to grant yourself, makes the work of experimentation more legible, more intentional, and less lonely.

Before we begin, two threads are worth naming because they run through everything that follows.

The first is that Wend’s strategy was relational. Not relational as a modifier on top of something else — relational as the thing itself. The bet was that relationships steeped in care, rather than transaction, could be the ground from which a different kind of philanthropy grew. That bet produced real and lasting things. It was not wrong.

Awareness of power is not the same as a mature relationship with it.

The second is that Wend and its leadership did not have an accurate orientation towards relations of  power. Power — the ability to make things happen or prevent them from happening — runs through every organization, no matter how it is structured. Wend was deeply aware of this. It saw the distortion that money creates, named the dynamics of proximity, and built real experiments to distribute decision-making more broadly.

But awareness of power is not the same as a mature relationship with it. Much of Wend’s design was also a reaction to power — a belief, often unconscious, that power itself was the problem. You can be looking right at a power dynamic and still miss what it’s doing. Care alone was not enough to hold what Wend built. What was missing was the willingness to claim power honestly and the skill to steward it well.

You’ll find both of these threads run through the eight distinct “permission slips” that we subsequently explore.