What a Decade of Community Partnership Reveals for Philanthropy Today

Between 2014 and 2024, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation invested roughly $77 million in the Starting Smart and Strong Initiative (S3I), a decade-long effort to strengthen early learning systems in three California communities: East San Jose, Fresno, and Oakland. Rather than dictating strategy, the Foundation committed to a 10-year investment and left communities to chart their own path toward the shared goal that all children will arrive at kindergarten healthy and ready to learn. Over the decade, S3I became a live test of what it means for a funder to genuinely share power with grantees: working through disagreements over data and timing, evolving its equity commitments mid-course, and treating evaluation as a resource for community learning rather than upward reporting.

In this Foundation Review article, we draw on a decade of embedded evaluation work, along with new interviews conducted in 2024 and 2025 with grantees and technical assistance partners across all three sites, to share a grantee-centered account of what it takes to build, sustain, and stress-test authentic power-sharing in philanthropy. At a time when there is mounting political and legal pressure against DEI and equity-focused grantmaking, the article argues that sustained power-sharing isn't a fair-weather practice but core infrastructure for helping communities navigate uncertainty.