Rebuilding Trust in Philanthropy: The Power of Design
Philanthropy, once widely regarded as a force for good, is facing a crisis of trust. In 2025, this distrust has reached a critical inflection point, with high-profile foundations and wealthy donors coming under intense scrutiny. The Open Society Foundations, funded by George Soros, has faced allegations and a reported investigation by the U.S. Justice Department, while the World Health Organization (WHO) Foundation and ClimateWorks Foundation have been questioned about their accountability and transparency. For many, these headlines confirm suspicions that philanthropy wields significant political and cultural power without a mandate.
Simultaneously, broader structural pressures have accelerated, with shrinking public aid and volatile donor funding reinforcing the perception that philanthropy deepens inequality and concentrates power. The withdrawal of government aid in 2024 and 2025 has exposed the precarious dependence of many civil society organizations on private giving. Regardless of their politics, people don’t trust philanthropy, with progressives viewing it as private power shaping public priorities and conservatives seeing it as wealthy activism without accountability.
The Role of Design in Rebuilding Trust
The problem isn’t that philanthropy lacks design, but rather how design is used to protect institutions, optimized for preservation, opacity, and gatekeeping. To rebuild legitimacy and trust, design must be reimagined as a civic necessity, enabling institutions to confront assumptions, redistribute voice, and make power visible. This requires a fundamental shift in how power is surfaced, making decisions legible, processes intelligible, and relationships accountable.
Transparency tools, such as reports and compliance frameworks, can provide some insight, but design is essential in making these tools effective. It turns accountability into agency, shaping legitimacy by helping people see, understand, and locate themselves within systems that have historically excluded them. The announcement by MacKenzie Scott of $7 billion in giving, made through a quietly updated blog post, demonstrates the importance of design in signaling a shift toward shared authorship and redistribution of narrative power.
Design in Action: Redistributing Power and Narrative
For philanthropy to endure, the real work lies in redesigning how power is seen and shared. Design must move from being a tactical layer to functioning as civic infrastructure, shifting meaning, visibility, and voice into public hands. This can be achieved through visualizing grant portfolios, stakeholder ecosystems, and community narratives, making blind spots visible and gaps tangible. Design becomes a form of civic diagnostics, exposing patterns of power that institutions have been structurally conditioned not to notice.
Philanthropy often funds programs and pilots, but investing in imagination is crucial for building futures that communities can envision. Design invites participation by turning abstract strategies into shared understanding, returning narrative power to the people most affected by philanthropic decisions. This redistribution of narrative power is both symbolic and structural, as seen in projects like Thought Matter’s redesign of the U.S. Constitution, which made a foundational civic document accessible and resonant for a new generation.
The New Era: Culture as Infrastructure
Philanthropy’s legitimacy problem is no longer a secret, and while some foundations have updated their governance practices, the 2025 Independent Sector report makes clear that good governance is now table stakes. The deeper challenge lies in confronting philanthropy’s imagination deficit, taking culture as seriously as capital. Culture is the infrastructure that shapes how institutions see themselves and how communities experience them, as seen in organizations like the Obama Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies, which leverage founder identity, collective memory, and cultural symbolism to make their operations feel personal, accessible, and intelligible.
MacKenzie Scott offers a radical example of high-trust, low-bureaucracy philanthropy, stripping away traditional gatekeeping mechanisms and signaling a redistribution of narrative and decision-making power. Through subtle but consequential cultural and structural choices, legitimacy flows outward, from communities themselves, rather than inward from donor identity. American philanthropy has long shaped public life, yet it has rarely built the cultural conditions for the public to shape it in return.
Restoring Legitimacy
To earn back its social license, philanthropy must shift from secrecy to visibility, from perfection to honesty, and from patronage to partnership. Design is the civic medium through which institutions learn to see their own power, share authorship, and expand imagination. If philanthropy hopes to shape the next century, it must invest in the imagination of the people who will live in it. The real work – the redesign of legitimacy itself – starts now. Read more about the role of design in rebuilding trust in philanthropy Here
Image Source: observer.com
