A Foundation’s Voice and Other Assets Are More Valuable Than Its Money

Gordon Moore, the former head of Intel, likes to say, “If everything you try works, you aren’t trying hard enough.”

That admonition from the benefactor of the philanthropy I lead is very freeing, because I know that if we fail fast and learn from our mistakes, we’ll be doing what Gordon and Betty Moore want most.

But his words also pose a daunting challenge, because it’s clear the Moores don’t want us to be grant makers but change makers.

To be sure, our foundation gives away money. But when we do that, we think about every dollar we give as an investment—in people, institutions, and ideas that we believe can bring about transformational changes.

And we have other assets—including our voice, our ability to help nonprofit organizations become stronger, our commitment to collaborating with others, and our ability to get out the word about key new findings from our grantees.

That power can make as much, if not more, of a difference as the dollars we provide to nonprofits.

As the ability and willingness of government and other public institutions to help is waning, it’s important for all of us in philanthropy to think hard about how we can do more to solve the world’s problems.

Foundations increasingly have the money we need to be the most influential players in creating bold responses to increasingly complex social issues. The number of foundations has grown from 56,000 in 2000 to over 100,000 today, and that sharp growth is expected to continue, not just in the United States but around the world.

But the substantial increase in numbers won’t be sufficient. It’s time for all foundations to push ourselves to make the transition from grant maker to change maker.

That’s why Independent Sector’s annual conference, to be held next month in San Francisco, is organized under the theme of “GameChangers.” That’s just one example of the emerging realization among people in the nonprofit world of what it will take, collectively, to tackle the profoundly important issues of our time

The signs that many foundations are seeing this need to change are beginning to emerge. Among them:

Increasing focus on getting to the root of the world’s problems. Philanthropy has long been characterized as “charity”—benevolent support of the “needy,” broadly defined. This mind-set focuses on dealing with the consequences, or symptoms, of larger, deeper issues.

As head of the Nature Conservancy and in other jobs I held before moving to the world of philanthropy, I spent most of my career creating parks and preserves for imperiled species and habitat. I came to realize that while those efforts were successful in expanding the number of protected places, the environmental threats to the planet were intensifying and global rates of species and habitat loss were continuing to rise.

And so it has been for many other social issues: confronting problems but not eliminating the sources of those problems.

Encouragingly, I see increasing numbers of foundations taking on the causes of social problems. To do this requires a willingness to stick to the same issue for a very long time and to support unorthodox ideas. It also takes a high tolerance for failure and a commitment to learning and adapting.

Managing relationships, not grants. A prevailing convention among foundations has been to regard the relationship with a supported organization as contractual: In return for money, organizations produce the results for “our” strategy (and all too often, a voluminous report that no one reads).

Even the lexicon—“grant,” “award,” “grantee”—reinforces the notion of benevolence. Fortunately, many foundations are re-imagining our role as enablers, not contractors, and forging long-term relationships built on trust, candor, and solidarity behind a shared agenda. And we should take this further.

Foundations should spend less time on the cumbersome, time-consuming processes and paperwork and more on helping organizations as trusted advisers, sounding boards, and networking conduits.

Collaborating and forming coalitions. Foundations very often encourage the organizations we support to spend more time collaborating. We should put our money where our mouths are.

Doing that requires grant makers to move away from our own isolated, disconnected approaches to promoting change and toward working in concert to meet broad objectives.

Mark Kramer and John Kania, top officials of the FSG philanthropy advisory firm, have done great work in books, articles, and research describing and promoting the notion of “collective impact”—getting nonprofits and foundations to work together to create change. We should all pay attention to such research to figure out how best to move forward together.

It’s not a natural act for foundations to give up full control. But we’ll need to be willing to be led sometimes to have any real chance of truly transformational change.

With the extraordinary surge in philanthropic resources, grant makers have an enormous opportunity to re-image our roles. We also have a duty to society to do nothing less.