How does your personal history with money shape how you deploy it professionally? For me, the power gap that I felt during my first on-the-ground site visit as a grantmaker was palpable. There were smiles on every face, but tension in all the shoulders.

The moment I stepped out of the car, and walked down the block, power and authority seemed to flow toward me and away from them. I immediately thought about the power dynamics described in Edgar Villanueva’s book Decolonizing Wealth, and the imbalance that people in power often cling to.

Capital carries memory.

Whether forged by systemic scarcity, generational privilege, or positional power, people’s history with money determines how risk is priced, who is empowered, who is resourced, and who waits. Yet due diligence and fiduciary checklists rarely, if ever, ask about any of that.

Money, Mental Models, and Emotional Resilience in Philanthropy

“Working with money is emotional work. We all have a complex relationship with money,” Deb Nelson, executive director of the Just Economy Institute, told NPQ, regarding personal histories with money and emotional resilience in philanthropy.

Nelson leads a network of some 130 financial activists, who seek to “shift the flow of capital and power to solve social and environmental problems.”

If our relationships with money are complex and connected to our emotional state, then fiduciary duty for impact must measure more than basis points. Recalibrating how people in power assess risk and share control takes more than new term sheets; it demands emotional intelligence, cultural context, and care integrated into governance norms.

Mission alignment, site visits, and due diligence tools are necessary and important to grantmaking. But those mechanisms don’t quite get to the heart of what it takes to have a positive impact. One of the most underacknowledged assets in this field is emotional resilience, not as a private virtue, but as sector-wide infrastructure.

It is the governance capacity that supports decision-makers in aligning money with values, whether they come from lifelong scarcity or generational stability. So, what are some of these mental models that govern the deployment of capital, and how does that relationship show up in philanthropy and impact investment?

Read the full article about emotional resilience in philanthropy by Nyia Hawkins at Nonprofit Quarterly.