Special Breed of Grant Makers Hunts for New Ways to Solve Bedeviling Problems

To help formulate a $130 million investment in on how to get the most out of crops, the Rockefeller Foundation didn’t turn to soil and plant scientists. Instead it chose a new cadre of experts: Members of the trucking industry.

The approach marked a shift in the foundation’s long-running support of food and anti-hunger projects . Beginning in the 1950s, during what was heralded as the Green Revolution, Rockefeller invested in projects around the world designed to increase agricultural yields. But for its YieldWise program, launched in 2016, the grant maker has instead focused on reducing food waste — and, not surprisingly, the transport industry has a lot to say about keeping food fresh from the field to the dinner table.

The huge investment could contribute to Rockefeller’s big goal: reducing hunger worldwide. However, the brainstorming process behind the decision has a much broader aim: looking for new, meaningful ways to invest grant dollars.

Rachel Korberg, an associate director at Rockefeller, and a cadre of peers are at the forefront of that movement. Every few months for the past two years, strategists like Korberg from about 15 foundations to discuss ideas for solving old problems in new ways and identifying new challenges where they could make a big difference. Today the group will gather in the offices of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors in New York for a day-long get together co-hosted by RPA, the Open Society Foundations, and the Pew Charitable Trusts.

The bottom line for this “marketplace of ideas,” Korberg says, is making philanthropy more transparent and effective, with each dollar having a bigger impact. Foundations, she says, spend a lot of time delving into the mechanics of setting up programs and evaluating their success. More light should be shed on how grant makers choose where they invest in the first place.

“Philanthropy has continued to be this shadowy, murky thing,” Korberg says, “because we don’t know where priorities come from.”

‘Hunch Spots’

These gatherings of foundation strategists have given the group a sense of how others in their position glean insights into how to spark social change and how to properly measure risk. Although the goal is simply to exchange those kinds of insights, the meetings may ultimately lead to foundations pooling their resources toward common goals, according to some members of the group.

In the years leading up Rockefeller’s YieldWise investment, Korberg, Claudia Juech — a former Rockefeller associate vice president who left in October to lead the Cloudera Foundation — and a small group of colleagues began the hunt for new ways to alleviate hunger.

Both women, who have backgrounds in finance and international development, consider themselves generalists compared with the subject-matter experts who run Rockefeller’s programs. They began by asking farmers and agriculture specialists broad questions, such as, “What’s your biggest challenge,” rather than delving into minutiae, like what per-acre yield a farmer can achieve using certain seed hybrids.

To get even more advice, and to process it, they began to speak a new language of scenario planning, replete with “scan huddles,” “hunch spots,” and “pulses.”

Pulses are quick conversations on social media that the foundation used to crowdsource a developing plan. Korberg and Juech invited colleagues to make suggestions on Rockefeller’s intranet, in a section they called a hunch spot. As the ideas rolled in, the women led scan huddles to further evaluate the evidence behind the hunches. And in a scenario-planning exercise, they considered four plausible sets of future events and how these might alter the problem they are trying to attack.

As they scanned, huddled, and pulsed, a clear strand of thinking emerged: Food that is lost, spoiled, or misdirected somewhere between harvest and purchase in a market is a big contributor to food scarcity and hunger. Recognizing that, Rockefeller made creating more efficient logistics and transportation systems a big part of its YieldWise program.

Help From Coke

To refine their approach, the opportunity scouts sought advice from an array of interested parties: the trucking and hotel industries, multinational food and beverage companies such as Coca-Cola, young entrepreneurs, antihunger activists and academic researchers.

“We were trying to draw on multiple perspectives and multiple strands of evidence,” Juech says. “We were deliberately not trying to focus on one school of thought.”

The whole process made her curious about how other foundations sleuthed for new ideas on where to deploy their grant dollars, whether they used a new approach to a long-vexing problem or an area of funding they hadn’t explored before.

In 2016 she and Kevin O’Neil, associate director at the Rockefeller Foundation, started looking for answers from other grant makers, including the Case, Draper Richards Kaplan, Ford, and Hewlett foundations; Bloomberg Philanthropies; and the Boston Foundation.

Each grant maker takes a different tack.

Lori Grange, strategy officer at the Hewlett Foundation, says she serves as a kind of “in-house consultant” to program officers. Before a new proposal is sent for board consideration, Grange will subject program staff to an exhaustive series of questions: What’s the problem being addressed? What evidence is informing the approach? How has Hewlett historically tackled the issue? Which organizations are already working on it? Would Hewlett need to create new organizations? What assumptions are driving the strategy? What progress would likely result the first phase of the funding?

“We try to ask good questions,” she says. “We try to act as a critical friend. They’re probably deep in the weeds of the issues. We try to bring a fresh perspective, play devil’s advocate, and help them avoid confirmation bias.”

Moving Faster

Stacey Gillett, who works on government innovation at Bloomberg, says the New York grant maker takes a less rigid, quicker approach to new ideas than some of its peers. All staffers there are encouraged to share ideas about what to work on next, and new programs are developed on the fly.

And the moment a new program is up and running, a member of the team managing it is assigned the job of looking around the corner to determine future funding gaps, Gillett says.

“It’s really a benefit to have someone on the team where part of their job description is thinking about what comes next,” she says. “It’s all quite integrated into the work we are doing day to day.”

Early on in Bloomberg’s “What Works Cities” effort, which helps city governments improve how they use data, Gillett and her colleagues began hearing a common complaint from mayors: Compared with private-sector counterparts, top city officials had few opportunities for professional training.

Based on those observations, the grant maker last year dedicated $32 million to the Harvard City Leadership Initiative, a training program for city-government executives.

Trump Effect

Participants in the “opportunity scout” meetings don’t hew to a particular ideology or approach. But Donald Trump’s election and many of the events since, including the administration’s travel ban and increased incidents of racist violence, have put foundations working for social justice and equality on the defensive, says Jennifer Aronson, associate vice president for programs at the Boston Foundation.

The meetings have helped Aronson feel ready for a looming challenge: making sure the 2020 census reaches all Americans, which has emerged as a pressing issue in the scouts’ discussions.

“We progressives are playing catch-up,” she says. “We need to anticipate what’s happening next and not get caught off guard.”

The Boston Foundation takes its own steps to ensure the people in the region it serves are fully counted, viewing those who live and work in the community as valuable sentries for new ideas.

For example, when it started its “Collaborate Boston” grant competition in 2013, the foundation made sure to interview anyone who applied — an attempt, Aronson says, to reach deep into the local community and tap leaders whose ideas may not have previously been given full consideration.

“There are so many advantages well-resourced organizations have to navigate an application process,” she says. “A lot of the most creative applications came from the ones where there were spelling mistakes.”

This year the grant maker intends to listen even harder to local voices. The winners of Collaborate Boston will be chosen by a panel of about a dozen “community fellows” who have advised the foundation.

Entrepreneurial Approach

The Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation looks at potential program areas like an investor weighing the risks of an unproven business pitch. No surprise, given the foundation’s venture-capital pedigree: It sprang out of one of the most storied Silicon Valley investment firms.

Stephanie Dodson Cornell, a managing director at Draper, says early-stage nonprofits and social entrepreneurs that are being evaluated for possible investment are weighed on a set of criteria: their ability to attract more capital, the strength of their leadership, whether they are trying to tackle a complex issue, whether the solution is redundant or novel, and whether Draper can add any distinctive value to the work.

Those considerations played into the foundation’s decision to support Uptrust, a social enterprise that sends text messages to people reminding them of court dates, as part of a broader criminal-justice push.

To develop a plan of attack, the foundation gathered 11 former federal prosecutors and other experts and mapped the points in the criminal-justice system where philanthropy might make a difference.

Draper found it would probably be most helpful in reducing the number of people entering the prison population and lowering the recidivism rate but was less likely to have success in the kind of broad advocacy efforts needed to accomplish policy goals like increasing prosecutorial discretion and making sentencing guidelines less rigid.

Uptrust fit the model. It provides a technical fix to a discrete challenge: getting more people to show up in court. But it doesn’t aim to make sweeping changes in the criminal-justice system of the sort a foundation that supports advocacy and movement building might seek.

“Large foundations that have program managers with a lot of expertise on an issue tend to have a very well-honed theory of change around a particular issue,” Cornell says. “We are in continuous scan mode, which means that it’s important to know where change can happen in the system but less important to have a particular theory of change.”

Building Blocks

Under Raj Shah, who became Rockefeller’s president in 2017, the foundation no longer has a separate team of “opportunity scouts” doing hunches and pulses. But it will continue to incorporate the scouts’ approach of scanning for new ideas in each corner of the grant maker’s work as it “doubles down” on its core issues of global health and hunger, energy, jobs in the United States, and building “resilient” cities, Korberg says. She and her fellow foundation strategy experts still meet regularly to discuss how philanthropy can achieve more.

The regulars insist the gatherings aren’t a prelude to full-scale collaborations among the members; they are meant to be more informal information swaps. Still, at least according to Juech, who left Rockefeller last fall, the discussion groups could lead to something more concrete.

“Could this lead to joint funding?” she asks. “I think most everyone in the group would be excited about that prospect and has identified that as the ultimate goal. But we are not there yet.”