Foundations and Advocacy: New Focus in the Wake of Supreme Court Ruling?
February 1, 2010
Will the Supreme Court ruling giving greater political voice to corporations have the effect of focusing the minds of those funders who support policy advocacy?
Many foundations now appreciate that the impact of policy advocacy is not as hard to measure as once thought. Less clear, according to papers in the most recent issue of the Foundation Review, is how fully foundations appreciate the importance of their support for advocacy as part of a larger social change strategy, and how much investment they are willing to make in its evaluation. The recent Supreme Court ruling allowing corporations to spend more money on political campaigns may change their perspective.
The latest issue of the Foundation Review offers a number of research papers with insights for foundations working in the public policy realm. In particular, one paper from Innovation Network’s Johanna Morariu and Kathleen Brennan notes that three-quarters of advocacy organizations have not evaluated their work, and more than 80 percent of them have never worked with an outside evaluator. What advocacy strategies are appropriate in what contexts? What combinations of organizational capacities are most important? What are the most meaningful interim indicators in the journey from grassroots organizing to sweeping social change? The authors say these and other critical questions can’t truly be answered without greater support from foundations for advocacy evaluation. Morariu and Brennan go on to identify the key qualities of an effective advocacy funder, which include the usual suspects of offering extended grant cycles, support for program evaluation, and general operating support to enable grantees to respond flexibly to changing circumstances.
Another paper in this issue of the Foundation Review offers specific insights for foundations working to influence policy across the U.S. Ann Whitney Breihan of the College of Notre Dame of Maryland focuses on a multi-state program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that has impacted national policies on care for developmentally disabled adults. Among her suggestions: To build momentum for a particular policy, resist a temptation to fund states scattered across the country and instead focus funding in a region. Her study bears out that states are more likely to “follow the pack” in their own region. She also says funders should focus funding in those states that have already demonstrated interest – by spending their own funds – in a particular policy area. They’re more likely to consider further innovation in the area.
In general, philanthropists may be less hesitant about helping to define the voice of the social sector. Noting the success of highly strategic politically conservative foundations, other funders across the political spectrum have come to believe that nonprofits and foundations need to gain a greater voice when it comes to public policy. Many have taken concrete steps to do so by hiring more communications and policy specialists and more frequently collaborating and engaging with politicians and government agencies. As borne out in the Foundation Review, evaluation of these efforts is necessary in order to gauge how effective the current strategies and programs are and what can be done to improve them. With the recent Supreme Court ruling, the need for these steps has become ever more apparent.
For further reading, the book Seen but Not Heard: Strengthening Nonprofit Advocacy (published by the Aspen Institute) presents the findings of a multi-year research project called the Strengthening Nonprofit Advocacy Project (SNAP), conducted by OMB Watch, Tufts University, and the Center for Lobbying in the Public Interest and offers specific suggestions that nonprofit leaders can take to strengthen their organization's advocacy work.
Jane Wales
Vice President, The Aspen Institute
President and CEO, The World Affairs Council
Foundng President, The Global Philanthropy Forum
Enlisting Trustees as Communicators: A New Model for Foundation Communications?
January 28, 2010
Might trustees be the solution to the woeful lack of knowledge civically engaged Americans have about foundations?
That’s the hypothesis of an experiment underway from the Philanthropy Awareness Initiative. PAI is the foundation-funded organization that has reported in study after study that very few engaged Americans, those who represent the 12 percent of the adult population active in their communities as civic or business leaders, could cite even one example of a foundation benefiting its community or addressing their concerns. As I noted in a post about PAI’s latest survey, it is the culture of private foundations to shun the spotlight and direct attention to the issues they advance or the grantees they support. This notion is seconded in another recent survey, this one from the Council of Michigan Foundations. According to this survey, foundation trustees tend to focus on their role as investing, growing and distributing foundation resources, not in communicating with other non-foundation leaders.
But what if that changed? Building on its survey, the Council teamed up with PAI to launch a pilot project with 14 members through which they have offered “message training” to trustees, focused on the value of foundations, well beyond their grantmaking role. The goal is to encourage trustees to engage peers in their personal and professional networks – in essence, enlisting trustees as strategic foundation communicators. In a Jan. 20 post for the Communications Network blog, the Council’s Rebecca Noricks offered details about this Philanthropy 3-D-Michigan (3D) pilot, noting that its goal is to develop a new communications model for the field. It has the potential to radically change traditional foundation communications and the heavy reliance on press releases about grants, she said, as well as to boost understanding about the work of foundations. The organization is currently testing and evaluating the pilot, with plans to release a report this spring on its progress and adapt it for use among grantmaking affinity groups in Indiana and Wisconsin.
Early comments from participants suggest the pilot is on to something. Noricks quotes Joseph M. Stewart, chair of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, saying that trustees should be “educating others to the important role that foundations play in society today and letting other leaders from other sectors know we want to work with them. Together we can make a difference. Better communication methods and techniques is one way that can be achieved.”
Given the renewed interest in collaboration across sectors, Stewart makes an important point. Leaders throughout society need to know that foundations are transparent, open and willing partners. Foundation trustees are often employed by or have close ties with for-profit or nonprofit organizations. There could be substantial, long-term payoffs if trustees were to directly talk to others intheir networks about foundation missions, programs and successes. Foundation leaders worry that the story of philanthropy is not well told. Awareness of PAI’s project may spur some to discuss the idea with their trustees now.
Jane Wales
Vice President, The Aspen Institute
President and CEO, The World Affairs Council
Foundng President, The Global Philanthropy Forum
Haiti Inspires New Givers--Will those in Philanthropy’s “Long Tail” Have Long Memories?
January 26, 2010
Americans have been donating in record numbers through new means—from phone texting to social media links—to provide relief to the victims of Haiti’s earthquake. The outpouring has been impressive, as revealed by the combination of on-line giving, the response to George Clooney’s global telethon (including iTunes sales) and the Council on Foundations’ list of its members’ grants.
Ultimately, Haiti’s recovery will be enabled by a similar mobilization of dollars and talent on behalf of Haiti’s long-term needs, for this is a country that has suffered from generations of mismanagement, endemic poverty, political instability, a weak civil society and autocratic governance. Its citizens deserve a better future. Perhaps new donors, inspired by this tragedy, will not only represent the “long tail” of philanthropy’s graph, but will have long memories as well and will be there ten year’s hence.
Our own country’s stance toward the small nation, which in 1804 produced the world’s first successful slave rebellion, has been wary and ineffectual, according to Mark Danner in a January 21 op-ed in The New York Times. A very different future for Haiti requires not only strategic philanthropy, but also sound U.S. policy, including the opening of our markets to Haitian agricultural produce and manufactured goods, and aid that translates into jobs for the Haitian people rather than patronage for its government.
Private philanthropy can complement good policy if the initial outpouring of support for relief efforts is matched by a longer-term commitment to sustainable development, a need most recently identified by Haiti’s Prime Minister. But re-imagining Haiti is more easily said than done. The U.S. is engaged in state-building in Afghanistan and Iraq. Each offers its own opportunities for public-private partnerships. And each offers is own best practices, and discouraging lessons. Philanthropists point to remarkable and courageous social entrepreneurs, especially among women, such as Afghanistan’s Dr. Sakena Yacoobi, who secretly taught girls throughout the Taliban’s rule. But the enterprise of poppy growing continues to outpace that of schooling young girls. Corruption not only precedes crises. It often follows as well.
How to pivot from immediate disaster relief to a long-term plan for what Secretary of State Clinton refers to as a Haiti that has come back “stronger and better” than before will be on the minds of “new philanthropists” as they gather for their ninth annual Global Philanthropy Forum from April 19-21 in Silicon Valley. This year’s focus on global health, food security and access to safe drinking water and sanitation seems especially apt in the wake of the earthquake’s shocks. Each represents a particularly crying need in Haiti. The philanthropists’ focus on results will likely make them sympathetic in the near-term to the argument made in a post to the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy blog, which called for support of organizations offering impact, rather than low overhead, as their metric for success. As for the medium-term, the recommendations in Arabella Philanthropic Investment Advisors’ Haiti Emergency Update, stressing the importance of the later stages of disaster recovery may resonate. And the Inter-American Development Bank’s President, Luis Alberto Moreno, will surely make the case for investing in Haiti’s water and sanitation infrastructure, education system, housing and building stock, access to healthcare and other needs identified by the Bank over the years. Former High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour of the Crisis Group, will speak to the linkages between civil conflict on the one hand, and state failure on the other. Peter Gleick will shed light on the role that water management or mismanagement can play. Actor Jim Carrey will speak to breakthroughs in sustainable agriculture. David Aylward of mHealth Alliance will speak to new ways to deliver heath care in stressful conditions where infrastructure is lacking. And former Ghanaian President, John Kufuor, will speak to the responsibility of neighbors and regional organizations to strengthen societies before crises occur, so that those societies are able to prepare for or rebound from inevitable shocks.
As they consider the opportunities available to them, the gathering’s new philanthropists and political office holders will consider ways to partner with more recent entrants into the world of giving—the on-line donors, cell phone texters, twitter followers, iTunes purchasers—who are now part of the world of philanthropy. If those who represent the long tail of the giving graph also have long memories, then the tragic past of Haiti, and countries that are similarly weak, need not be their future for generations to come. Instead they can be among those societies that have the resilience to absorb and overcome the shocks that nature has to offer.
Jane Wales
Vice President, The Aspen Institute
President and CEO, The World Affairs Council
Foundng President, The Global Philanthropy Forum
McKinsey and IFC add Cost Curve Analysis to Water Debate
January 15, 2010
Water scarcity is damaging livelihoods, human health and ecosystems around the world – both in urgent situations, such as Haiti, and in long term crises in the making. But strategies are at hand according to a report from McKinsey & Company, undertaken in partnership with the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation. Charting Our Water Future finds that in just 20 years, demand for water will be 40-percent higher than it is now. Unless local, national and global communities come together and dramatically improve the way water is managed, increasing efficiency and productivity, there will be many more hungry villages and degraded environments, according to the report. And it will be very difficult to meet related resource challenges, such as providing sufficient food or generating energy for the world’s population.
The report was developed as part of the 2030 Water Resources Group, a consortium of public and private-sector actors working to advance solutions in presentations to governmental, commercial and philanthropic decision-makers. It offers a “cost curve” as a means of analysis—one which demonstrates the long-term costs associated with failure to make near-term investments in infrastructure or conservation. And it demonstrates that multiple interventions are needed at all levels of investment and at differing stages, which is a reminder that we can each play a role within a larger strategy.
The report is meant to provide a means by which to compare the impact, cost and achievability of a range of measures and technologies that address water scarcity by boosting efficiency, augmenting supply and lessening the water-intensity of a country’s economy. Through case studies of India, China, Brazil’s Sao Paulo state and South Africa, the study reports that while improved efficiency in industry and municipal water systems is critical, enhanced agricultural productivity – increasing “crop per drop” – is essential to closing the gap between demand and supply. Agriculture today consumes 70 percent of the world’s water.
As the report makes plain, business as usual on the issue of water is not an option for most countries. Philanthropists and foundations that work in the area of international development are similarly committed to increasing awareness and promoting policies that address this issue. Family foundations have been key players in this space, and the Global Philanthropy Forum will feature access to safe water and sanitation as among its major foci at its annual conference in Silicon Valley, April 19-21. This gathering will include foundation executives, key officials from governments, private sector leaders and such expert voices as Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute; Atiq Rahman of the Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies; Barbara Frost of WaterAid; Gary White of Water.org; Monica Ellis of the Global Environment and Technology Foundation; Gebisa Ejeta, recipient of the 2009 World Food Prize Award; as well as an author of Charting our Water Future.
Jane Wales
Vice President, The Aspen Institute
President and CEO, The World Affairs Council
Foundng President, The Global Philanthropy Forum
December 21, 2009
In a reminder that philanthropy’s story goes untold, a recent survey of civically engaged Americans reports that only 19 percent had heard or seen anything in the news about philanthropy’s response to the economic downturn. Reflecting previous surveys from the foundation-funded Philanthropy Awareness Initiative (PAI), very few respondents could cite an example of how a foundation had benefited the community or an issue about which these citizens care. Yet PAI reports in High Expectations, High Opportunity that these engaged Americans, who represent the 12 percent of the adult population who are active in their communities as civic or business leaders, are looking to foundations to find solutions to society’s problems. Specifically, they think foundations should voluntarily shift funding priorities to ease the pain of this economic recession. Given the fact that many foundations are already taking such steps, there is an information gap that needs to be filled, according to the PAI report. PAI notes that nearly 90 percent think foundations should be more open with the public about their activities, mistakes and lessons learned.
Points taken….I think.
Although they acknowledge the significance of PAI’s findings, it is deep within the culture of most private foundations to shun the spotlight and instead direct attention to the issues that concern them or the grantees they support.
Among the topics on the agenda of the Aspen Philanthropy Group is the question of whether foundations can be truly effective in advancing the public good while falling silent on the strategies that guide and the unique role that foundations play.
As this and previous PAI surveys demonstrate, it is a conversation that is overdue.
Jane Wales
Vice President, The Aspen Institute
President and CEO, The World Affairs Council
Foundng President, The Global Philanthropy Forum
‘Change Philanthropy’: Book Highlights 10 Funders Engaged in Social Justice Philanthropy
December 18, 2009
A new book sponsored by the Center for Community Change and written by nonprofit and foundation consultant Alicia Epstein Korten, Change Philanthropy: Candid Stories of Foundations Maximizing Results through Social Justice, provides the inside stories of 10 funding organizations that have leveraged grant dollars, and in many cases endowments and influence, to transform systems in all sectors of society. The profiled funders, a mix of national, regional and small, from the Ford Foundation to the Global Fund for Women to the Jacobs Family Foundation, have moved beyond a focus solely on services, such as homeless shelters and hospitals, to one aimed at helping people influence the context in which they live. According to the book, they ask why a social problem or need exists, not just how a foundation can help – and then focus their grantmaking on the answers uncovered. All told, Korten writes, echoing others, foundations must be particularly strategic in the deployment of their various resources to have greatest impact: analyzing problems effectively, choosing partners and paths wisely and continually evaluating benchmarks along the way to assess progress. Korten writes that many foundation trustees and staff she interviewed shared information and stories publicly for the first time, offering a rare glimpse into the “often soundproof halls” of foundations.
Books like these are valuable resources, offering concrete examples of what it takes for foundations to make significant change. We would all benefit were foundations and donors to share more often their most effective programs and strategies, including reporting the steps, even mistakes, made along the way. Not only can this potentially improve the work of other organizations, it instills hope that no matter how daunting a challenge, change is possible.
So as to practice what we preach, the Global Philanthropy Forum has partnered with Foundations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Humanity United and Fundacion AVINA for just this purpose—so that these experienced grant-makers will reveal their strategies, successes and failures with principals of family foundations choosing to pursue a similar path.
Jane Wales
Vice President, The Aspen Institute
President and CEO, The World Affairs Council
Founding President, The Global Philanthropy Forum
December 9, 2009
For philanthropists seeking to help meet the needs of lower-income Americans falling into poverty, the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy argues that investing now in preventing foreclosures, sustaining primary and preventive health programs and ensuring access to food can prevent enormous costs and suffering later.
Philanthropists can get “the biggest bang for their (charitable) bucks” in the current economic recession by helping with these three basic needs, according to High Impact Philanthropy in the Downturn: Focus on Housing, Health & Hunger. The Center’s guide puts dollar figures on the aid that will, for example, help feed a family ($50 a week), prevent a family from losing its house ($300), or deliver health care to a newly uninsured person ($600). It also estimates how much more it would cost society if such aid were not to materialize now, arguing, for example that billions would be saved by greater investment in community health centers, avoiding more costly hospital- or ER-based care.
The Center’s work was informed by direct interviews, site visits, academic research, data from nonprofits, and statistics on the nation’s economy. The goal is to provide independent, practical advice. To this end the guide includes examples of nonprofits working in these three areas, and follows on a preliminary “Action Agenda” the Center had released in April.
With sustained strategic philanthropy, donors seek to address the underlying causes of poverty, and to find sustainable ways of ensuring that each person can reach his or her potential. The Global Philanthropy Forum focuses its agenda on these long term solutions worldwide. In these times of extraordinary need here at home, there is an opportunity to leverage increased government investments. And, the Center would argue that the time to act is now.
Jane Wales
Vice President, The Aspen Institute
President and CEO, The World Affairs Council
Founding President, The Global Philanthropy Forum
December 7, 2009
Some of the best nonprofits have been prevented from growing as large or becoming as capable as they should be. What’s needed, according to Steven Goldberg, a consultant to nonprofits and social entrepreneurs, is a new nonprofit capital market that would take the form of a prediction, or information, market, akin to political polls. In a new book, Billions of Drops in Millions of Buckets: Why Philanthropy Doesn’t Advance Social Progress, Goldberg argues that such a market, while not a silver bullet, would increase social impact by fundamentally restructuring the sector, turning philanthropy from being loyalty-based – guided by fundraising and relationships – to merit-based – guided by performance. The idea of a nonprofit capital market has been mentioned by many thought leaders in the sector, Goldberg acknowledges. Nonetheless, he feels it has not received sufficient attention to date. Such a virtual stock market or “Impact Index” would allow philanthropists to know what various nonprofits accomplish, through evaluation and transparency, and not just what nonprofits are trying to accomplish, through anecdotal reporting. Such data will help make the most promising nonprofits, with the greatest likelihood of “transformative social impact,” stand out from the “weeds,” he writes.
Goldberg is not alone. Most established foundations are making the case for improved impact assessment -- and for a decision-making process that is based on objective measures. And most organizations that study or support the sector -- including GEO, FSG, Independent Sector, the
Before detailing his plan for this Impact Index, Goldberg writes about the problems of the current financial structure governing the sector. Traditional fundraising takes too much time and offers too little money, as foundations offer too many small, short-term grants with lots of strings attached. This practice reduces foundations’ risks of failure, he writes – but may also lead to less significant achievement. The sector’s most critical flaw, he says, is the fact that funding is tied to relationships, not performance.
The release of Goldberg’s book is timed to take place when the discussion of metrics and evaluation is taking place in all corners of the sector -- but has not yet exhausted us. Superb work has been done and is being undertaken by many organizations on both the local and the national levels. For some, this is the time to take the discussion the last mile, from thought and successful experiment to field-wide change. But, in trying to do so, we might want to bear in mind the resilience of human nature. Both performance and relationships will surely play a role.
Jane Wales
Vice President, The
President & CEO, The World Affairs Council
Founding President, The Global Philanthropy Forum