The Advocacy Work of Grant Makers Doesn’t End When Policy Battles Are Won

Pushing for changes in the policies that govern social services, education, criminal justice, health care, and other big systems that have sweeping impact on society has become the holy grail of strategic grant making.

About a dozen years ago, grant makers large and small began to focus on such long-term and ambitious changes because they were frustrated that so much of what they were trying to do to improve lives wasn’t making enough difference.

Making single grants to nonprofits with great ideas for innovation wasn’t sufficient, they realized, and the inability of organizations to spread proven projects on a wide scale was stymieing widespread change. Instead, foundations realized it was probably better to look at their grant making over the long haul and to aim more efforts at changing destructive public policies that often led to the need for philanthropy to put a band-aid on so many of society’s biggest problems.

To push their policy agendas, foundations embarked on efforts that go well beyond grant making, including communications campaigns to inform policy makers and the public on key issues, encouraging collaboration among grant makers and others, and holding gatherings of key players to discuss public-policy ideas. Today, this type of strategic philanthropy has become the industry standard that many grant makers use to judge whether they are making a difference.

Two notable “wins” emerged from this movement: the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the adoption of Common Core public-education standards in the majority of states.

Although neither policy victory occurred solely because of philanthropic action, it is fair to say that neither could have come to pass without the substantial support of organized philanthropy for research, advocacy, and pilot projects.

In the case of the health-care law, numerous health foundations around the country, most notably the California Endowment, Commonwealth Fund, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, individually and collectively for at least a decade worked systematically to align all of the forces that needed to come together to pass such landmark legislation.

The missing piece for many years was the political will without which the health-care law would never have been passed. When the Obama administration made a comprehensive health-care overhaul its main priority after the first election, nonprofit advocates were poised to mobilize and ride the moment to victory.

Adoption of the Common Core academic guidelines for what children should learn in math and reading did not result from Congressional action ,as the health-care law did (contrary to widespread misperception). Instead, it was based on the efforts of the national Council of Chief State Schools Officers and the National Governors Association to increase the number of students graduating from high school.

Starting in the 1990s, those associations, along with significant support from corporate America, began to suggest that cross-state standards and assessments were crucial for improving the nation’s education system.

With the support of grant makers like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Lumina Foundation, this effort evolved to become the Common Core State Standards Initiative introduced in 2009. Forty-four states initially adopted the standards and were provided additional incentive to do so by the Race to the Top funds available through the Department of Education in 2010.

The Affordable Care Act and Common Core are arguably the largest overhauls of such major social systems undertaken in the past generation. Putting both policy changes into action has also been very troubled; so much so that at various points it wasn’t clear if they would stand the test of time.

In the case of the health-care law, the acerbic political climate fueled by the early and, in some places, persistent incompetence of the enrollment websites almost led to repeal.

And with Common Core, teachers were not adequately trained on the new curricula, and the new assessments of student progress and teacher performance were administered too early, before parents were prepared to understand the results.

Wed those factors to the divisive election season already under way, and a perfect storm has developed in which the states that previously adopted the standards are pulling back their support. And it’s now unclear how much we will do to improve the schools.

This, however, is where their fates diverge. It is also where two big lessons are to be gleaned for philanthropists engaged in building movements that push for long-term change in the key systems that undergird our society.

Lesson No. 1: It’s not enough to win the policy; you also have to win the implementation. Books and dissertations are likely to be written cataloguing all of the ways the implementation of health and education reform failed. Governments, foundations, and businesses put vast resources into fixing the problems of the new health-care law, and those efforts have now paid off in growing support. Common Core, on the other hand, is still in jeopardy, and its future looks bleak.

Foundations, along with government agencies, were so focused for decades on just winning the policy battles that they didn’t think past them to understand all of the ways the implementation could undermine the wins. It is difficult to plan for how a new policy will be carried out when the policy itself seems distant enough. But systems change, and big reforms are actually quite delicate operations and need as much, if not more, support from philanthropy and elsewhere.

Lesson No. 2: We have to better understand how market forces influence the delivery of social goods. Perhaps the biggest difference between the health and education overhauls lies in the role of the market. Health insurers, health plans, and service providers all have a big stake now in the success of the Affordable Care Act.

The expansion of the pool of insured people and the incentives built into the law to focus on getting people to take steps to prevent disease are going to change the scale as well as the scope of the entire health system.

Whether it will become the most cost-efficient system, the easiest one to navigate, or one that achieves better outcomes for patients all remain to be seen.

Regardless, the role of the for-profit health providers clearly was crucial to fixing the problems that occurred when the enrollment phase started. “Patient capital,” literally and figuratively in the form of new consumers and long-term investments in health-care services, has ensured the long-term viability of the policy and its continuous improvement.

Business has a stake in Common Core, too, if it is to have a skilled work force to make its products and consumers with enough income to purchase its goods and services.

Unlike health care, however, a for-profit market does not primarily drive delivery of education itself. I am not arguing that it should (and I wouldn’t for health, either), but clearly the need to prepare our students for the work force is not a market failure we can afford to ignore.

We need a better understanding of how and when to apply market-driven incentives to the school systems that educate our work force to override the politically and ideologically charged context in which Common Core, and education reforms generally, have failed for nearly a half century.

Philanthropy, especially liberal and social-justice philanthropy, has historically put its energy into pushing for change in social policies.

As the cases of the Affordable Care Act and Common Core are showing, though, that’s not enough.

Instead, grant makers need to understand what it takes to make change happen once lawmakers or other officials vote for change—and how economic systems and market forces can help promote change or get in the way.

And we need to rethink how we award money and support our grantees with that knowledge at the ready if we really hope to make a difference.

Gwen I. Walden is a senior managing director at Arabella Advisors and a member of the boards of trustees at the Surdna Foundation and the East Bay Community Foundation.