Reimagining Philanthropy: What We’re Learning from the Community Leaders Resilience Network

Earlier this spring, Rx Foundation had the privilege of convening the Community Leaders Resilience Network (CLRN) inaugural gathering in Nashville, Tennessee. It brought together leaders from across the country who are doing some of the most essential, and often most invisible, work advancing health justice in their communities.

But CLRN wasn’t built to train, direct, or extract. It was built to listen, affirm, and hold space for the humans behind the work.

Too often, funders support frontline leaders with expectations for impact, scale, and sustainability, without investing in the people behind the outcomes. What if we redefined support to include rest, reflection, and relational repair spaces?

The CLRN is one answer to that question. Designed in direct conversation with our grantee partners and community advisors, the Network prioritizes rest as a leadership practice and community care as a form of infrastructure.

Participants weren’t asked to present outcomes or deliverables. They were invited to be present — to reconnect with themselves and each other, outside of urgency and performance. We believe that centering healing is not ancillary to movement work; it is essential to sustaining it.

The two-day gathering in Nashville wove together storytelling workshops, embodied practice, political education, and peer exchange across issues and geographies. Attendees reflected on the challenges of working in under-resourced communities, the toll of racialized and gendered expectations, and the deep wisdom carried by those closest to harm.They also shared laughter, movement, and quiet moments of recognition. They reimagined what it looks like to be together, not in competition or isolation, but in solidarity.

It’s important to note that we intentionally designed these to be different from typical  “breakout sessions.” Instead, they were containers of trust, where people, too often asked to show up as professionals first, could instead show up as whole.

At Rx Foundation, we’re learning to prioritize presence over performance and recognize that resilience isn’t an individual trait—it’s a communal resource. The Community Leaders Resilience Network is a multi-year learning journey rooted in mutual support, healing, and shared leadership.

We believe this kind of infrastructure — relational, reflective, and reparative — is vital to the success of any effort toward health equity and community transformation. And we believe philanthropy must play a role in making it possible.

Let’s move beyond check-writing toward long-term accompaniment and accountability. Let’s meet the people doing the work without more demands, but with deep trust, flexible resources, and radical care.

If you’re a funder curious about building something similar — or just rethinking your own approach — we’d love to be in conversation. Reach out at [email protected].

As Dr. Michelle Morse, Acting Health Commissioner and Chief Medical Officer of the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and Rx Foundation board member, reminds us, philanthropy has the opportunity to reshape how we show up and a responsibility to move beyond indifference and into reparative action.

We hope you will join us as an ally and accomplice as we do just that.