The inauguration of Barack Obama as president next week offers clear lessons and opportunities for philanthropy. Looking back to the campaign, what can grant makers learn about mobilizing social change? And looking ahead to the president’s first 100 days, how can foundations and nonprofit groups work together to seize this moment of opportunity?
Five lessons stand out from the campaign and the transition.
President-elect Obama did not start out with the kind of resources major foundations have. Yet in little more than two years, the Obama campaign built one of the most successful grass-roots organizing efforts in history, recruiting more than eight million volunteers and raising a record $750-million to win an election that defied all odds.
Perhaps the greatest lesson from the Obama campaign is the power of local ownership in building any movement for change. The campaign set clear goals but ceded much of its control over how to achieve those goals to volunteers working on the ground, encouraging them to develop their own messages based on local needs and priorities. Anyone could make calls or organize events on their own initiative and in their own way.
Contrast that with the many foundation projects that dictate a solution without any allowance for local adaptation. President-elect Obama’s success suggests that foundations seeking to build movements for social change must remain focused on their goals, yet paradoxically surrender much of their control if they are to gain broader support and deeper commitment within the communities they hope to influence.
Mr. Obama’s path to the White House — unpredictable and with many setbacks — also suggests that movements require multiple routes to success. In both the primary and the election, Mr. Obama seeded campaigns in all 50 states, mapping out several alternate paths to victory. By contrast, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, during the primary, counted on Super Tuesday as her single plan for success — then was left scrambling when the results were indecisive. Similarly, within philanthropy, overreliance on a single path to the foundation’s goal often proves inadequate to making a lasting difference.
Above all, Mr. Obama responded quickly and nimbly in the face of changing events. Just hours after Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, commented that the “fundamentals of the economy are strong,” the Obama campaign produced and distributed a video that portrayed his rival as out of touch. And in the face of negative news-media coverage about the incendiary comments of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Mr. Obama quickly put the conversation in a new light by delivering a major speech on race.
Imagine instead if Mr. Obama had been a typical grantee, restricted by program-specific grants in a cycle that averages from six to 18 months. Grant makers truly intent on creating change must ensure that their grantees are able to respond quickly to changing events, whether by adopting a rapid approval process or offering more flexible unrestricted support.
The transition offers lessons, too. President-elect Obama has chosen a cabinet, often lauded as a “team of rivals,” that ensures vigorous debate. Yet how many foundation boards encompass such divergent views rather than the polite acquiescence more consistent with a “club of colleagues”? And the boldness of Mr. Obama’s legislative plans, proposing the largest economic stimulus package in history even before he is sworn in, stands in sharp contrast to the cautious trials and seed grants with which foundations so often test the waters.
Would local autonomy, more flexible approaches to pursuing change, rapid response times, greater diversity in perspectives, and bolder action really make foundations more effective agents of social change? Mr. Obama’s success in mobilizing change suggests that those principles are worth serious consideration.
And what of the opportunities that lie ahead? At a time when the economic crisis has severely strained foundation grant making, we have the unexpected blessing of an administration that is planning to spend huge amounts of money on the very problems the nonprofit world most often seeks to solve: improving education, promoting alternative energy sources, expanding access to health care, and creating employment opportunities.
How much room is there yet to influence the estimated $700-billion avalanche of federal funds soon to be allocated to state and national spending programs? Are foundations actively working alongside their grantees to ensure that that money — more than the assets of all American foundations combined — will focus on needs in their own communities? And are they rethinking their grant-making strategies to embrace a role for government that was unimaginable even a year ago?
Yet today we face an even greater opportunity.
John W. Kingdon, the renowned political scientist and professor emeritus at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, writes that major policy change occurs in rare moments when three independent events converge: a “focusing event” that creates a sense of public urgency (such as an economic crisis); an alignment of political power that enables action to be taken (such as a Democratic president and Congressional majority); and an available solution, already proven by solid evidence, that advocates can quickly propose.
Foundations and their grantees have been grappling with these very same challenges for decades. They know of proven solutions — programs that work to improve educational results, increase health care access and reduce its cost, conserve energy, revitalize communities, and create economic empowerment — but they could never get them financed on a national scale.
Now is that rare moment of convergence — the time to come forward with our very best evidence of success and advocate as strongly as we can for the policy changes that we know will work. And it may now be feasible for the first time in our lives. If we can combine this moment of opportunity with the movement-building lessons of the campaign, we have the potential to enter a whole new era of creating social change.
As we approach the inauguration, Dickens’s words have never rung more true: Foundations and nonprofit groups alike have understandably been caught up in the trauma that has been our “winter of despair.” This inauguration is our opportunity to focus instead on the extraordinary lessons and opportunities of the “spring of hope” that lies ahead.
Mark Kramer is the founder and managing director of FSG Social Impact Advisors, in Boston; a senior fellow at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government; and a co-founder of the Center for Effective Philanthropy. Amber Johnson is a consultant at FSG Social Impact Advisors.