From the Inside Out: Transforming Philanthropy, Sustaining Communities

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Thanks to your support, Wildflowers Institute’s most recent work is coming to fruition. Through our work and discoveries in the Tenderloin, we have developed a powerful and effective “inside-out” strategy for its sustainability. We have discovered the community’s way of organizing itself and solving problems to the challenges it faces.

A Self-Organized Enclave: Our poll of more than a thousand Chinese residents revealed how they are building in real time their community in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. Guided by their culture, they are weaving a social fabric and forming a spiritual refuge for their family and friends. They feel protected and safe in the neighborhood.

Humanistic Elders: We discovered that the elders are one of the most powerful forces in community building. They embrace their family and friends, providing a haven of nourishment and guidance. Elders in the neighborhood continue to uphold their moral virtue—the guiding light for all—of striving for unity by blending differences in humanistic goodness.

Food as the Keeper of the Culture: Our survey also pointed to food as an important keeper of the culture. It illuminates traditional beliefs, values, and practices in the cultivation, preparation, and making of meals. Food is the nexus that refines and intertwines traditional and contemporary cuisines with love, inspiration, and creativity. The table is the commons where the extended family members and friends come together to be nourished and to solve problems and heal one another. The kitchen table serves as a catalyst for uniting, maintaining a continuity from the past while adapting and growing.

Survey Data Is Informing Our Approach: In the winter of 2024, the institute staff identified eleven elders of the community who are engaged in actualizing their life’s purpose. They identify themselves as the Radiant Lights of the Setting Suns. We have invited them to come together in a Flow Funding Circle. Flow Funding was developed by Marion Weber as a way of giving direct gifts to community projects. Traditional forms of philanthropy use a top-down, outside-in approach to funding, whereas Flow Funding works from the bottom up, from within the community. Their role as community-based philanthropists has been to organize and conduct a survey in their neighborhood and to convene focus group sessions. They are identifying salient challenges facing their neighborhood and developing community-generated solutions.

Given the centrality of food for the physical and cultural strength of the community, the Radiant Lights—along with hundreds of other elders—have expressed deep concern about food instability caused by increasing prices from tariffs, skyrocketing rents (forcing out mom-and-pop grocery stores), and reduced food stamp benefits. The elders have identified the following three programs that Wildflowers will be supporting:

• Farm to Kitchen Table

• From My Heart Cooking Club

• Family Nights Together

For more information about these three programs, we invite you to read our newsletter 7 and to view an eight-minute film entitled Uniting at the Kitchen Table.

The amount of funding for each of the three programs will be decided at community assemblies. Thousands of Tenderloin residents will be invited to vote on which of the three projects they prefer. While all three projects will be funded, the voting will clarify the community’s priorities. This process of neighbors making the decisions on the funding of community-generated solutions empowers them and democratizes philanthropy.

Our inside-out approach to philanthropy means community-generated change: philanthropy listens, supports, and strengthens what is already working from within rather than imposing solutions from the outside. Through our partnerships and collaborations with the Radiant Lights of the Setting Suns, the Chinatown Community Development Center, the Lao Iu Mien Culture Center, the Aspen Institute, and FOOD: Friends, a network of more than 150 home chefs, we continue to work from the inside out: transforming philanthropy and sustaining communities.

We look forward to your contributing to this very exciting endeavor.

Yours truly,

Hanmin Liu Jennifer Mei