June 16, 2013 | Read Time: 1 minute
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation made about $1-billion in grants to thousands of organizations over the course of roughly 30 years, beginning in the 1980s, to improve the lives of people with chronic illnesses and disabilities. But in the early 1990s, the foundation set two other big goals: to curtail substance abuse and improve access to health care for all Americans.
What happened: The foundation failed to set priorities among its three big goals. Each priority was competing for resources and none of them got enough, Johnson said in a published report last year.
Results: Even though two-thirds of the projects achieved some positive results, the grant maker’s report said “inadequate and uncoordinated foundation strategies, tactics, and grant making undercut the potential transformative value of the effort.”
