We are living in a time of immense uncertainty and accelerating change. People who study the long arc of history and macro trends describe this moment variously as a time of cascading crises, shifting paradigms, and civilizational transformation akin to the scientific and industrial revolutions. Change of this magnitude — no matter how it is described — is inevitably disruptive.
Such disruption can enshrine a mythical past, tear down entire systems, or usher in something new and better. It’s up to leaders in philanthropy, civil society, government, and business to think and act in a manner befitting this critical moment. Collectively they can shape which disruptions eventually rule the day and how change is managed across society and its institutions.
This requires dispensing with a business-as-usual mentality that lulls people and institutions into falsely believing that the future will look like the present — that we have time to kick the can down the road on any number of issues. With immense problems to solve, including climate change, mass migration, technological challenges, rising inequality, and ascendant authoritarianism, the societal response must be commensurately immense.
What all this means for philanthropy is clear: The field must mobilize its resources, capture the public’s attention, and work together toward a better version of the future.
A Learning Journey
The contentious 2020 election and the nearly successful January 6 insurrection two years ago convinced me and many others in philanthropy and civil society that the American democratic experiment was under grave threat. Our governance system was showing signs of fragility, and legitimate questions were being asked about whether it was still up to the task of solving the problems before us and still deserves the trust of the American people. But on both the left and right, the focus was on critique rather than promise — on preserving the status quo instead of imagining America’s next chapter.
Seeking an alternative to the negativity, I started looking for examples of what a superior future version of America might look like. I wanted to know how people were already building more sustainable and equitable ways of being with one another and nature. I searched for governance systems that enshrined these values and looked ahead in ways that engaged a public increasingly mistrustful of institutions and political processes. I studied literature, art, games, and entertainment that helped people visualize and experience living in a better America.
This was the genesis of the Better Futures Project, a learning journey I embarked on last year in collaboration with the Democracy Funders Network — an ideologically diverse community of donors concerned about the health of American democracy. The work included interviews with 64 visionary thinkers and doers, including futurists, activists, religious leaders, artists, and philanthropists, to learn why envisioning a positive future for America mattered. Those insights were summarized in a recently published report, “Imagining Better Futures for American Democracy.”
It was a transformational experience. But that transformation came with the painful realization that my thinking had become small and atrophied by living in today’s America — a nation that’s low trust, high drama, polarized, and dystopian. The silver lining is that atrophy can be reversed with the right kind of exercise and stimulation. Like me, philanthropy needs a new exercise program that stimulates its collective imagination about what’s possible.
At a basic level, that means learning to behave like good ancestors. It involves thinking about the impact actions have on future generations, not just those living now. Grant making as practiced today, including a focus on specialization and measurement, often runs counter to such thinking. Five-year strategies and well-articulated theories of change can be useful, but they rest on a set of foundational assumptions that may not hold in the future.
The need to measure grantees’ outcomes may also inadvertently lead to activities that can be accomplished and measured in a year or two, creating a false sense of control and predictability and cementing a short-term orientation. Such an orientation is less problematic if it’s balanced by grant making that is more expansive, experimental, and forward looking.
Long Time Horizon
How can donors develop a future orientation and ensure they don’t impose the tyranny of the possible on their grantees and civil society more broadly?
They can start by examining their own cultures. Experts on developing a future-oriented mind-set recommend a range of techniques to encourage creativity and expansive thinking, identify longer-run threats and opportunities, and connect aspirations for the future to core values.
They suggest, for example, developing strategic-planning scenarios with time horizons of at least 20 to 30 years. This process should include taking note of ways that events and facts may no longer fit neatly with long-held assumptions and could be early indicators of changes that challenge accepted wisdom. Confronting these changes with an open mind allows organizations to think through how their grant making might affect the future.
Democracy Fund, part of the Omidyar Group, experimented with the use of such scenario planning through its project Democracy TBD, which brought together authors, economists, musicians, journalists, urban planners, technologists, and others to imagine alternative futures and build a more positive vision for the future of U.S. democracy. Efforts such as these aim to counter the predominantly defensive posture in recent years of the country’s pro-democracy movement following the January 6 insurrection and other dire threats. This understandable protective response has inadvertently crowded out more aspirational thinking about what America’s next chapter could and should look like.
Futurist Techniques
The use of scenario planning and other futurist techniques is relatively rare in philanthropy, but a few organizations are leading the way. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneering Ideas program, which includes employing a “futurist in residence,” instills a future-oriented mind-set into its grant making. And the Rockefeller Foundation supports the development of institutions “that can shape the future rather than react to the past,” including coordinating global gatherings of the types of institutions needed to tackle issues such as climate change and technological challenges.
Beyond instilling a futures orientation in their own organizations, grant makers should consider how to develop a similar outlook in the larger culture. They should fund experimental projects, especially those that aim to strengthen and invigorate U.S. democracy. This could include investing in innovative approaches to governing, such as supporting the creation of “commissioners for the future” who work with government officials, community leaders, and the public to consider the impact of policy decisions.
Donors can also look for ways to spread positive narratives about the future that counter pervasive negativity in the media and elsewhere. They could fund media platforms such as Reasons to be Cheerful, the Good News Movement, and Upworthy, as well as journalism projects like Solutions Journalism Network that spotlight promising solutions to complex problems. They could even support efforts to elevate more optimistic films, TV shows, and literary genres as an alternative to dystopian narratives based on conflict and hopelessness.
In this New Year, donors, and civil society more broadly, should approach pressing generational challenges with curiosity, openness, flexibility, and hope. They must become the ancestors that future generations will thank for their responsible stewardship and bold action. They must remake themselves as grant makers for the future.
