In Defense of the ‘Effective Philanthropy’ Approach

To the Editor:

In his “My View” column (“Where Have the ‘Learned Foundations’ Gone?,” August 22) Stanley Katz correctly observes that many philanthropists take the short view. But he erroneously criticizes what Mark Kramer and Michael Porter have termed “effective philanthropy” for being inconsistent with support of the development and promulgation of knowledge by institutions of higher education.

The essence of effective philanthropy, or what we at the Hewlett Foundation call “strategic philanthropy,” is that we and our grantees agree on objectives and assess progress toward them, and (to quote Professor Katz quoting Kramer and Porter) the foundation “measure[s] its success by the performance of the organizations that it funds.”

This approach to philanthropy, which is elaborated in the President’s Statement in our 2001 annual report, is entirely consistent with long-term commitments to developing knowledge. We understand that knowledge development demands patience and a long time horizon, and that the path to success is not linear and is inevitably accompanied by failures. But while we are prepared for the failures that come from exploring the unknown, those of us who have come from the academy — as many foundation presidents and program directors have — know that faculty and administrators are quite capable of frittering away resources in the absence of agreed-upon objectives and indicators of progress.

Therefore, we are result-oriented, and work together with grantees to develop milestones on the path to knowledge and to jointly assess whether the path remains promising. This has resulted in long-term relationships with great institutions of higher education, support for innovative projects such as MIT’s Open CourseWare and Yale’s Center for the Study of Globalization, and also sustained support for experiments designed to improve elementary and secondary education. All of these arise out of our pursuit of strategic philanthropy.

It is worth noting that Professor Katz’s rose-colored view of the early 20th century as a time when at least “learned foundations” put their funds at the service of academics following their own lights is at least partly wishful thinking. I do not derogate this as a strategy. In fact, it has often been successful whether supported by foundations or, in the past half century, by the federal government. But I doubt that it was as pervasively the mode of any group of foundations at the turn of the past century.

For example, Professor Katz approvingly cites, as an example of the proper activity of a learned foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation’s work in addressing the scourge of yellow fever.

It appears, however, that Rockefeller did not make grants that led to the discovery of the underlying cause of yellow fever; this had been discovered during the Spanish-American War 15 years before the foundation was established. The foundation funded the near-eradication of the disease first by aggressive use of known methods to control its outbreak and later by sponsoring the development and manufacture of a vaccine.

Deploying philanthropic resources to solve problems in a directed way is neither new nor necessarily short-sighted. Like the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1920s and ‘30s, today’s foundations are building on basic science to address contemporary problems.

Targets like HIV/AIDS, overpopulation, climate change, and global poverty call for strategic philanthropy, whose ultimate purpose is to assure that philanthropic dollars actually make a difference in improving society rather than just making the donors feel good.

Paul Brest
President
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
Menlo Park, Calif.