It’s rare that a single piece of writing can profoundly alter your mind-set.
It happened to me in 2013 when I read the Harvard surgeon Atul Gawande’s New Yorker article “Slow Ideas.” Gawande gave me a novel way of thinking about the unsexy cause I had been struggling to advance for decades: encouraging grant makers to dispense with conventional practices that undermine their own grantees.
Gawande describes the uptake curve for two critical innovations in surgery: anesthesia and sterile surgical fields. Anesthesia proved to be a “fast idea”; surgeons around the world adopted it within months. In contrast, sterilizing hands and surgical equipment was a “slow idea”; even in the most sophisticated teaching hospitals it took decades to adopt. Why? Because anesthesia conferred big, clear, immediate benefits for surgeons, and antiseptic techniques did not. “Anesthesia changed surgery from a brutal, time-pressured assault on a shrieking patient to a quiet, considered procedure,” Gawande wrote. Antiseptic techniques didn’t improve the surgeon’s experience in the operating room at all, even though they sharply improved outcomes for patients.
These insights are the driving force behind Funding Performance: How Great Donors Invest in Grantee Success, a quick-read book from the Leap Ambassadors Community, a group of top social-sector leaders dedicated to helping nonprofits and foundations learn and improve, in collaboration with the Ford Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, Tipping Point Community, Bridgespan, and FMA.
In the book, my fellow essayists and I lay out this call to action for grant makers:
- If you want to empower grantees rather than hamstring them, provide more of what nonprofit leader Vu Le cleverly calls “Mygod” support — multiyear, general operating dollars.
- If you’ve made the decision to give your precious resources to an organization, then give that organization the benefit of your trust and respect as well.
- If your website trumpets your concern about inequality, don’t perpetuate it with funding decisions that always favor pedigrees over lived experiences.
- If you’re moved by the suffering in your community, then show the courage to give more money when the supply of funding from governments is down and the demand for nonprofit services is skyrocketing.
Thanks to Gawande, we understand that these are quintessentially slow ideas. They have big, clear, immediate benefits for grantees and the communities they serve. But the benefits for grant makers themselves are harder to see and slower to materialize.
That’s why our essays emphasize what’s in it for foundations to change their practices, not just their grantees.
In the book and in a series of accompanying Funding Performance profiles, we describe philanthropists whose focus on effective giving provides them with greater meaning, purpose, and joy. For example, we share the story of Rose Letwin, one of the first dozen Microsoft employees and the quiet donor behind the Seattle-based Wilburforce Foundation. A passionate wilderness conservationist, Letwin has invested deeply in learning from and with her grantees — not just in office suites but also in the remote corners of the globe. Her through-thick-and-thin approach to helping her grantees build their organizational strength and performance has given her significant influence in her field, a string of world-changing environmental wins, and her life purpose. “As a child, I never believed I’d ever be doing these things. … It just seems impossible for a poor kid from southern Indiana.”
Philanthropist Duncan Campbell, who also had a poor and painful upbringing, started a very successful timber-investment firm in Portland, Ore. His business accomplishments allowed him to achieve financial freedom beyond his wildest imagination. But it was his philanthropic work in support of neglected children that allowed him to scale the peak of Maslov’s pyramid, to self-actualization. As Campbell put it: “The last 15 years of my life have given me more meaning, satisfaction, and contentment than I ever could have imagined.”
Peer Pressure
In our essays, we also emphasize what’s in it for foundation staff. In her essay “If Not Now, When? From Virtue Signaling to Hard Self-Examination,” Ford’s Hilary Pennington says that Ford program officers “are benefiting from more candid and authentic relationships with the leaders and organizations they fund.”
That’s because Pennington, a former grant seeker, has helped Ford’s grantees — and its program officers — step off the “treadmill of short-term thinking.” Starting in 2015, Ford shifted to offering more grants in the form of general support, paying a minimum of 20 percent overhead on all project grants, and launch a five-year, $1 billion effort to strengthen key institutions that focus on ending inequality in all its forms. Today Ford program officers have more time and encouragement to use their talents to help grantees navigate complex challenges rather than making them jump through hoops.
Our essays also tap into the power of positive peer pressure. Hoping to spark a little constructive jealousy, we highlighted the plaudits that positive outliers are receiving as a result of improving their practices. Bridgespan’s Jeff Bradach and Jeri Queenan Eckhart, for example, highlight the work of the Libra, Weingart, and Mulago foundations to “make flexibility and equity a North Star.”
In my essay “Rising to Our Times: Five Habits of Highly Effective Funders,” I passed along the praise that grantees rain on their most enlightened funders, such as this quotation from an anonymous grantee of the Einhorn Collaborative: “We have an honest, authentic relationship with each other. I trust that they care about my success as much as I do. We have had challenges, but I have not felt judged because of that. I’ve experienced empathy.” What funder wouldn’t get an endorphin hit from hearing feedback like this?
We also harness the power of negative peer pressure. We’re not out to shame grant makers, but we’re not averse to planting thought bubbles such as, “Ouch. Are we causing more harm than good?!” To this end, our preface offers this tough-love message: “The vast majority of you are starving your grantees rather than nourishing them. When your grantees get a chance to speak freely — that is, anonymously — about the way you treat them, they express resentment that you’re not listening to them or giving them what they need for success.”
And then we hold up real-life examples of grant maker misbehavior:
- Sam Cobbs, CEO of Tipping Point Community, a grant maker that fights poverty in the San Francisco Bay Area, recalls that when he was leading a nonprofit, his group received a critical audit of how it handled its finances. He shared it with Tipping Point’s then-leader because it was one of the nonprofit’s supporters. The CEO asked, “What can we do to help? Let’s have a conversation about it.” Cobbs adds: “Tipping Point decided to double down on its support for [my organization], which allowed us to fix every problem the auditors found. Meanwhile, another funder had the opposite reaction. That foundation, which uses the term ‘partnership’ all the time, pulled out of its previously announced $2 million commitment to us. The loss of that $2 million gift was devastating.”
- I reported on a donor who hosted a discussion of lessons from family foundations that have had the most success in addressing community needs. At least a dozen times during the session, he extinguished lively discussions with some version of, “We just don’t do it that way.”
Most important of all, Gawande’s “Slow Ideas” article influenced the way we’re sharing our book. We’re not wasting a single minute trying to sway grant makers who have never shown any interest in learning and improvement; we’re only targeting those who have seemed open to the kinds of approaches we’re advocating (often because they have leaders who previously sat on the other side of the grant-making table). And we’re using what I call a Faberge shampoo strategy for reaching receptive leaders; we’re enlisting hundreds of ahead-of-the-curve leaders to share these ideas with those who look up to them as models and mentors. When it’s a slow idea, low-touch, arm’s-length approaches just don’t work.
Gawande’s article made no comparison between surgeons and philanthropists. But you have to admit the analogy fits well. Surgeons and grant makers are powerful figures with tremendous opportunity to do good in the world — and so used to calling their own shots that they’re not known for their humility. But both can and do change and adapt when people they respect help them see the light.