September 15, 2010 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The Council on Foundations Fall Conference for Community Foundations is under way in Charlotte, and several community-foundation leaders are offering reports from the event on Kris Putnam-Walkerly’s blog, Philanthropy411.
Ms. Putnam-Walkerly, a consultant to foundations, has agreed to allow The Chronicle to post selected items from the event.
Below is a post from CJ Callen, program director at CFLeads:
I am struck by how much I am surrounded by stories of success. We all need inspiration and exposure to models of doing business that might strengthen our own. But what about when things go horribly wrong?
When a community foundation takes on the challenge of community leadership—taking on complex roles in a complex community-change process—all may not go smoothly. Whether or not the bump in the road is just that (a temporary obstacle) or something more has to do with how the foundation processes failure.
Does the foundation take time to reflect on the incident, surface the key lessons, and use them to revise strategy and tactics? We all know that the insights we acquire through our so-called “failures” tend to be the most meaningful and enduring. Why is it so hard for community foundations (and their colleagues throughout the philanthropic sector) to acknowledge failure and use it to strengthen their roles as community-change agents?
Rather than focus on the theory behind fear of failure, for instance, that failure is just a product of focusing on a short-term time horizon, I want to propose some solutions:
* Institute within foundations a culture of learning in which failure is a necessary byproduct of the process of leading, including having a special prize for the team that made the biggest blunder and figured out a way to use it to move forward.
* Institute a national day of learning in which foundations share a major mistake they made and how it transformed their practice of community leadership. Starting with the internal discussion and then going public in a big way might help us begin to see how downright silly it is to keep our failures in the closet. This is a cliffhanger for me.
As community foundations begin to incorporate community leadership into their DNA as the new business model to ensure ongoing competitiveness and relevance, they are going to engage in high-risk ventures. These types of efforts inherently have the ability to generate high yield but also the tendency to fail more often than traditional, “safe” grant making. Given this state of affairs, what will community foundations do? Stay tuned.
For an interesting exploration of the topic of failure in philanthropy, please see the reflections of Jim Canales, chief executive officer of the James Irvine Foundation.
