Black Lives Matter, the ice-bucket challenge, the National Rifle Association, and ISIS don’t, at first glance, appear to have much in common. But all are highlighted in an important new book by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms for their ability to harness what the authors have dubbed “new power” — a power that is “made by many ... open, participatory, and peer-driven.”
New power, they argue, operates “like a current and, like water or electricity, it’s most forceful when it surges.” Contrast that with “old power,” which is “held by few ... closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven,” operating “like a currency.”
Their rich and deeply researched book — filled with business, government, and nonprofit examples — is called New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World — and How to Make It Work for You. It describes a fundamental shift in the way people get things done in an age in which our devices connect us wherever we go — and in which expectations for participation and engagement are high, especially among millennials.
It’s a phenomenon every nonprofit and foundation leader needs to understand and that I believe has particular applicability to the much discussed — and fraught — power dynamic between grant makers and grantees. It also extends to the dynamic between both these groups and those they ultimately seek to help, whether it be foster youth, artists, or homeless people.
The Center for Effective Philanthropy (the organization I lead) and many others have urged grant makers to elevate the voices of those on the front lines — and then to act on what they learn. These are necessary, crucial steps. Efforts such as the Fund for Shared Insight, which has supported the work of my organization and also that of our YouthTruth project to get feedback from high school students, have helped to encourage this behavior. But new power goes further and is more radical. It is a way of working in which power is genuinely shared.
Making a Movement
New power has allowed Black Lives Matter, for example, to grow out of a social-media post written by Alicia Garza — in the wake of George Zimmerman’s 2013 acquittal in the killing of Trayvon Martin — into a national movement.
To choose a very different and less serious example, it’s also a phenomenon that allowed Lego to expand its business when it embraced “adult friends of Lego” — grown-ups who love to play with Legos — and empowered that network to help design products.
And, although it’s not mentioned in the book because it is too recent, we can see the new power dynamic in the organizing that has occurred in the wake of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting in February, including last month’s March for Our Lives.
New power is about the power of people: their ideas, their sense of engagement and agency, and their connection to each other and a larger purpose.
Heimans is co-founder and CEO of Purpose, and Timms is executive director of the 92nd Street Y (and one of the co-creators of Giving Tuesday, itself a great example of new power) — and someone I have known professionally for several years.
They first laid out their ideas in a 2014 Harvard Business Review article; Timms shared a draft of that article with me, and I immediately invited him to speak at the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s 2015 conference. When he told me he had a book contract, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I have read more than a few books that started as Harvard Business Review articles that made me wish I’d just stuck to the article. But this is not one of them.
New Power reaches new depths of nuance and insight that the article didn’t touch. The book is a guided tour through examples of new power used for good and ill, or sometimes both simultaneously. Although Heimans and Timms are hopeful about the potential of new power, they are also refreshingly sober about the ways in which it can be unleashed to accomplish evil (see ISIS) or hijacked for achieving and exercising old power (see the Trump campaign and presidency).
Evangelize ... and Educate
They’re hardly the first to write about the ways technology has enabled and empowered the masses, of course. But their book goes further in charting the shift and in connecting it to leadership and organizational dynamics. Further, to their credit, they avoid the hyperventilating and breathless cheerleading that has plagued much of what has been written about the potential of new technologies. Rather than only evangelize, their aim is to educate about the phenomenon of new power.
The smart use of new power is about knowing when to deploy it. Heimans and Timms describe organizations like the NRA and TED that are adept at “blending” new power and old power depending on the circumstances. These organizations sometimes operate in a top-down manner, whether by punishing candidates who oppose them in the case of the NRA or tightly controlling its flagship conference in the case of TED. But, in other cases, both organizations cleverly step into the background and let their extended communities shape messages or content.
Heimans and Timms also describe exceptional individual leaders like Ai-jen Poo of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, who reports to a board whose majority is domestic workers, which collectively she calls “my boss.” She has, Heimans and Timms write, “structured the NDWA to make domestic workers protagonists, not mere beneficiaries.”
Let me say that again: “protagonists, not mere beneficiaries.”
Given my role at the Center for Effective Philanthropy, I kept asking myself, as I read, how many grant makers could say the same of either their grantees or those they seek to help?
There are some, for sure. I can think of environmental grant makers, for example, that have encouraged their grantees to organize together and chart shared strategies, ceding power and control while providing the enabling connections and funding.
I can think, also, of community foundations that have engaged community members in shaping grant-making goals and strategies and making grant decisions. The New Hampshire Charitable Foundation’s regional advisory boards of citizens in different parts of the state help identify community needs and make grant decisions, for example. In all, the foundation estimates it engages more than 200 volunteers in grant and scholarship decisions.
But I can think of many other grant makers that operate in a way that is top down and inaccessible — pure old power.
The Power of Co-Creating
Some know this is a problem. Many grant makers I talk with struggle with the recognition that, while top-down power works well in some situations — for instance, when you’re sure you have the right answer and are merely seeking to implement it — most contexts, especially when working on vexing social challenges, call for something different.
Some recent discussions, for example, have focused on “participatory grant making” — in which a grant maker shares or hands over decision-making power to those closer to the issues, as in the New Hampshire example. This approach is the topic of a recent report by consultant Cynthia Gibson commissioned by the Ford Foundation.
Thoughtful donors recognize the limits of many “solutions” that aren’t co-created. Think, for example, of education funding, where approaches largely conceived within the walls of foundations — from small schools to rigorous teacher evaluations — have failed to live up to expectations.
“We haven’t seen the large impact we had hoped for” in education, Bill Gates concedes in his and Melinda Gates’s 2018 annual letter regarding their foundation’s efforts. Melinda Gates describes the approach they are seeking to take now: “Everything we do in education begins as an idea that educators bring to us. They’re the ones who live and breathe this work.”
This candid self-critique and accompanying recognition of the expertise of those closest to the work is laudatory (though I’d add students to the potential sources of great ideas). But for the Gates Foundation — which of course has contributed to much good in education and in other areas, especially global health — and other grant makers to fully realize their lofty ambitions for change, they will likely need to do much more.
They will need to adopt some of the elements of a new power approach, with all the radical transparency and loss of control that such an approach implies.
I hope they try.
Phil Buchanan, a Chronicle columnist, is president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy.
