What is Flow Funding?
Kinship Earth’s Flow Fund is devoted to advancing Marion Rockefeller Weber’s Flow Funding Model, a revolutionary and trust-based approach to philanthropy. Deploying her own “Flow Funds” since 1993, Marion pioneered the field of trust-based giving designed to efficiently flow starter grant donations to grassroots initiatives and activists. Her initial trust in a select few has grown into a global network of organizations, extending her legacy of power-sharing and entrusting people to utilize flow funds for the greatest possible impact.
The Flow Funding approach involves deploying funds through a network of changemakers, chosen for their acts of service and deep engagement with grassroots initiatives. These local heroes distribute the funds they receive to whomever they trust to be the next step in utilizing them for the greatest possible impact on our collective future.
In the Spring of 2024, Kinship Earth is launching a campaign to establish its own unique Flow Fund, which will include distributing funds to a network of aligned 501c3 practicing this approach to philanthropy today. We’ll also be educating organizations on the benefits of adopting Flow Funding as well as informing individual donors on how they can make DIRECT non-tax deductible gifts to our network of Ambassadors - trusted grassroots leaders - per the IRS' 2024 gift tax exemption. Learn more here.
Current Global Flow Funding Initiatives
Marion’s work has influenced hundreds of individuals in organizations around the world to apply this streamlined process to more efficiently distribute money to where it’s needed most.
Philanthropy of the Future: A Vision
By Marion French Rockefeller Weber, founder of The Flow Fund Circle
As the degradation of this Earth continues, ‘catalyst philanthropists’ will realize that they need to empower the earth’s visionaries and initiators to be philanthropists. They will realize that they must quickly increase the number of catalyst philanthropists in the world.
The large foundations will begin to decrease as the number of walking philanthropists increase. Rather than responding to elaborately crafted grant proposals, the new form of philanthropy will flow from the knowledge and experience that nurture intuition. Grassroots needs all over the world will be seen and watered by this huge explosion of philanthropists. Gifts will constantly move and trust and generosity will flower beautifully.
Soon these newly empowered visionary philanthropists will begin to be magnetized together into different groups. Some of these groups will become "pounce teams" where philanthropists of great diversity will come together to alleviate pain, pollution, and emergencies. Other groups of new philanthropists will be drawn together to bring about tipping points and the emergence of needed initiatives.
The isolation of philanthropists that existed in the past one hundred years will be no more. To be a philanthropist will be common and seen as just one form of extending generosity. At least one half of the world’s population will begin to see with the eyes of the catalyst philanthropist. A great healing instead of hoarding of money will begin to happen.
Philanthropy will become relationship-based instead of paper-based. There will be no need to finance offices. There will be no overhead. There will be no need for people to write proposals because all the philanthropists will be constantly initiating help where it is needed. Former philanthropists will be seen as visionaries. Visionaries and healers will be seen as philanthropists. In fact a new world will emerge which combines these qualities all together.
On the Nature of Flow
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Author of “Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experience”
If you follow these three steps, namely you are always setting goals, you are always paying attention and you become immersed in whatever you do, the outcome is that you learn to enjoy whatever you are doing and that produces a sense of high energy, liveliness and flow.
The great gift of flow is that if you have learned to achieve this state you will have outcomes that match the best that we can dream of having in this life.
First of all, you will enjoy every minute of your life.
Second, you will achieve personal growth, your skills will expand, your goals will become more and more important to you and to others.
And the third outcome is, that it is through flow experiences that culture evolves: it is through flow that we can build new forms of art, new technologies, new science, new and better relationships among people, so the evolution of personal abilities, the development of personal skills, is the energy out of which the evolution of culture is made.
If there is one legacy we can leave to the future, knowing that we have contributed something positive to it, it is to live our lives as a constant source of flow.