In a moment of uncertainty and upheaval, America’s foundations face big challenges. As a result, it’s more important than ever that they focus with renewed intensity on the most promising ways to achieve results.
With President Trump in the White House, some foundations are fighting against rollbacks of past accomplishments in areas such as the environment and health care. Others may be seeking to take full advantage of a moment in which their goals might be easier to reach, such as foundations that promote charter schools and education vouchers. Still others may believe they are more affected by the results of local elections than anything happening at the federal level.
But, regardless, effectiveness will be an imperative. No matter how different from one another foundations declare they are, grant makers agree to a surprising degree about what it takes to maximize their impact.
That’s not necessarily what we expected in May when the Center for Effective Philanthropy, which I lead, surveyed chief executives of private and community foundations that make $5 million or more a year in grants.
We asked these leaders about 24 potentially promising approaches to increasing foundation impact, including expanding proven nonprofit programs, impact investing, and spending all of a philanthropy’s endowment in a set time. Despite all the interest in those three ideas, they didn’t rank anywhere near the top. Among the ones that did:
Learning from those they serve. “Foundations seeking to learn from the experiences of those they are trying to help” emerged as the practice most widely viewed as promising. Nearly 70 percent of the 167 foundation CEOs who responded to the survey saw this type of learning as holding “a lot of promise” for increasing foundation impact, more than any of the 23 other practices we asked about.
“Truth is, large private foundations sometimes operate in an unintentional, self-imposed bubble,” wrote Judy Belk, CEO of the California Wellness Foundation, in one of eight companion essays by foundation leaders published alongside our research. It’s worth noting that her essay was written before the election and the resulting national discussion about the bubble in which the “elite” are said to reside.
To be sure, there has been progress in recent years, from the establishment of the Fund for Shared Insight — a collaborative of 35-plus grant makers encouraging more listening to intended beneficiaries and greater foundation openness — to the progress of YouthTruth, a student survey designed to inform education-focused foundations (and their grantees) that is run out of the Center for Effective Philanthropy. But there is a long way to go.
Foundation philanthropy at its best amplifies the voices of those who are least empowered and is informed by their perspectives. This is especially crucial now, in a moment of uncertainty, vulnerability, and fear for so many (both on the left and the right). Foundations need, in the perhaps clichéd phrase of the late self-help guru Stephen Covey, to “seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
Tapping the knowledge or experience of grantees. Just over two-thirds of the CEOs we surveyed agreed that learning more from the nonprofits they support holds “a lot of promise” for increasing foundation impact. Here we have seen significant progress in the past 15 years. My organization, for example, has worked with some 300 foundations, many on multiple occasions, to provide candid, comparative feedback by surveying grantees. Yet here, too, there is still a long way to go.
“Foundations currently hold an inordinate amount of leverage in any grant maker-grantee relationship,” Darren Walker, the Ford Foundation’s president, observed in another of the essays responding to the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s findings. “This imbalance forces many organizations we fund to focus on short-term projects, to spend valuable resources accounting for how they use our support, and to hold our priorities above their own.”
Ford has shifted its focus to the “overall institutional health and durability” of its grantees in order to address what Walker calls “lopsided power dynamics.” The hope is that shifting the structure of the relationship will open lines of communication and that discussions will focus on the work rather than the transactional details of getting money from the foundation.
That communication will be especially crucial now. In many areas of foundation work, strategies being pursued by grant makers and grantees that made sense in a different political climate are either suddenly obsolete or need to be dramatically rethought. Grantees and foundations need to begin that conversation right now (if not yesterday) to be as prepared and agile as they will need to be.
Taking more risks. We were struck in our survey results, and in a set of 41 in-depth interviews with foundation CEOs, by the clear sense that grant makers need to better take advantage of the unique opportunity they have to experiment and innovate. One CEO told us, “The unique role philanthropy plays is that it can try things and can fail. But it can also try things and succeed and then look for bigger funders, bigger pockets to fund something that really works.”
But many CEOs don’t see foundations as fully taking advantage of this opportunity. “Surely, with the future of the planet at stake, we shouldn’t be playing it safe,” wrote Kevin Jennings, executive director of the Arcus Foundation, in another of the essays accompanying our research. “The stakes are too high to ‘fail small’ with safe grants that may make incremental change at the margins but barely move the needle when it comes to advancing real solutions to the many challenges we face as a society.”
Collaboration. Foundation leaders said they believed it was important to collaborate with other grant makers, as well as with business, government, and nonprofits. Fifty-nine percent named “foundations collaborating with one another” as a practice with “a lot of promise,” and the same percentage selected a separate item related to broader collaboration with nonprofits and other spheres of society. Collaboration — both the difficulty of doing it well and the frustration that more don’t embrace it — emerged as a cross-cutting theme in our research, coming up in our survey results and in our interviews.
Foundation leaders recognize that no single institution acting alone can make meaningful progress on the toughest challenges. In responding to our survey, CEOs noted the “complexity and diversity of agencies and programs that require coordination” to effectively solve problems.
But some also lamented an attitude among their peers that impedes collaboration. One cited an “I want you to collaborate with me, but I don’t want to collaborate with you” mentality. Another said “ego” and “competition” get in the way — “people stuff.”
Transparency about what has not worked. This is a perpetual theme in research we have conducted over the past decade and a half. Foundation and nonprofit leaders desperately want to know what hasn’t worked so they can zero in on what does work.
What gets in the way? To be sure, a lack of candor or a desire to protect reputations is sometimes the explanation. But so, too, is the difficulty of assessing progress when problems are interdependent and stubbornly resistant to even the most elegant “theories of change.” Knowledge gathering precedes knowledge sharing, after all.
As a report we released last year on foundation transparency put it: “Foundations can’t share information they don’t have — and part of the explanation for the current state of practice may be the challenge of doing foundation work in such a way that it is possible to identify successes and failures. ... Even with clear goals and strategies, assessment is exceedingly difficult, and foundations may not be devoting the necessary resources to understand success, failure, and lessons learned.”
No simple formula can make any foundation more effective, and every grant maker needs to put in context its own resources and ambitions. But at a time when we need our foundations to be at their very best, focusing on these basic steps could make a huge difference to society.
Phil Buchanan is president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy and a regular columnist for The Chronicle of Philanthropy. Ellie Buteau, the center’s vice president, and her colleagues wrote the report “The Future of Foundation Philanthropy: The CEO Perspective,” from which the research findings in this article were drawn. This article originally appeared in “What Will Matter in 2017,” a report on key trends for nonprofits and foundations released in January by The Chronicle.
