Let’s Stop Reinventing Potholes

Politicians and philanthropic organizations share a common fault: We find it difficult to admit when we have made mistakes. In politics, it’s easy to understand why. Voters may treat a legitimate mistake as a sign of incompetence and throw an elected official out of office.

But the public does not generally hold foundations accountable for results, if only because most people do not know much about what we do. And as grant makers we are seldom critiqued by grantees, who are reluctant to bite the hand that feeds them.

Being insulated from criticism perhaps lures us into believing that we, as grant makers, never make mistakes — a temptation reinforced by a pervasive tendency not to evaluate the results of our efforts. We rarely acknowledge shortcomings even to ourselves, let alone to others.

Such reluctance has real costs — it wastes time and money. Foundations cannot learn from their mistakes if nobody acknowledges making errors. We deprive ourselves of the enlightenment that comes from finding out why something didn’t work. And we miss the opportunity to help colleagues learn from their peers.

With these thoughts in mind, each of our foundations recently published reports on large-scale efforts that yielded much less than we had hoped.

The James Irvine Foundation’s report, “Midcourse Corrections to a Major Initiative,” describes the difficulties that led to a significant midpoint redirection of a $60-million effort to improve educational achievement at low-performing schools in five California cities.

And in “Hard Lessons About Philanthropy and Community Change From the Neighborhood Improvement Initiative,” the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation shares missteps in an ambitious $20-million plan to reduce poverty and develop new grass-roots leaders in three California neighborhoods.

We issued these reports because we believed they provided important lessons for grant makers and nonprofit groups about what it takes to bring about major changes in communities. The only thing philanthropy needs less than reinvented wheels is reinvented potholes.

We also wanted to promote a more open culture in philanthropy.

As Prudence Brown, a research fellow at the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago and co-author of the “Hard Lessons” report, said, “Foundations find it difficult to talk about these things openly. This [report] gets a conversation going. It will allow others to come forward and say, ‘That happened to us too.’”

To fuel this conversation, here are some of the key lessons each of our foundations learned:

Irvine’s after-school project. In 1999, the Irvine Foundation started Communities Organizing Resources to Advance Learning, an eight-year effort to improve the academic achievement of children in the lowest-performing schools in five California cities: Fresno, Long Beach, Pasadena, Sacramento, and San Jose.

When the foundation began this effort, known as Coral, education experts gave the plan high marks. The idea was to give money to local groups that would run after-school programs designed to improve the academic performance of students. An additional goal was to make families and community groups more aware of the problems facing California schools so they would in turn push public officials to make needed changes.

But at its midpoint, Coral struggled to put its ideas into action. The number of students in after-school programs fell short of agreed-upon goals. Cost per participant was more than double what was widely considered reasonable. The quality of the after-school programs was generally rated poor to moderate.

In addition to those concerns, new research cast serious doubt on the likelihood that after-school programs, no matter how superb, would do much to improve educational achievement — in part because the amount of time students spend in after-school programs is so limited, and because students with the greatest need often lack basic literacy skills, making approaches like providing help with homework almost ineffective.

The foundation asked Public/Private Ventures, a group experienced in evaluating nonprofit efforts, to conduct a rigorous review. The review in turn led to changes now under way, such as adding literacy training to the after-school program and shifting many management responsibilities for this work from the foundation’s staff members to an outside consultant. As a result of this midcourse correction, the foundation and educational groups have gained renewed hope for the project’s success.

But along the way, Irvine officials learned lessons that would be helpful to any foundation spending millions of dollars over several years to bring about a major social change:

• Do not commit to a major effort without well-vetted goals and rationales as well as clear means to measure results along the way and an information system that has been tested in the real world. In the early stage of Coral, leaders lacked solid ways to determine whether the project was doing what it was supposed to do.
• Ask critical questions about the facts used to shape the project. Some of the assumptions that were behind the design of Coral were contradicted by more recent research.
• Think equally critically about the abilities of grantees and staff members to carry out the project. Coral planners erred in expecting these players to excel with after-school work that was new to them.
• At the start of a project, commit to enlisting an outsider to conduct a midpoint review. Irvine leaders lost time and harmed their relationship with grantees by adding this review step only after problem signs became apparent.
• Be cautious about requests from grantees or foundation staff members for more time, more resources, and more assistance to achieve project goals. In the case of Coral, adding money, months, and experts would still not have achieved the original project goals. A fundamental rethinking of the project approach was required.

Hewlett’s neighborhood effort. In 1996, the Hewlett Foundation agreed to back a 10-year project to improve the lives of residents in three Bay Area communities: East Palo Alto, the Mayfair area of East San Jose, and West Oakland.

The foundation enlisted three local community foundations to manage the project, while creating new organizations and involving existing ones in each of the three neighborhoods.

The goal was to achieve tangible improvements for residents and to strengthen the long-term ability of the community foundations and neighborhood organizations to spur economic and social developments that would sustain the improvements.

The West Oakland project imploded quickly, the victim of mistrust of outsiders, factionalism among community leaders, and disagreements between them and the grant makers about governance. However, the effort left Mayfair and East Palo Alto better than it had found them and helped create organizations that continue to provide youth-development and education programs, as well as conduct efforts to improve public safety and undertake other important activities.

But despite the huge investment of financial and human resources, the effort fell far short of achieving the hoped-for improvements in residents’ lives. While some people involved would hesitate to call it a failure, given the project’s costs and ambitions, it was a great disappointment to many.

From this experience, Hewlett officials learned several important lessons that can shape future efforts for them and other grant makers. Among them:

• All participants must be clear from the outset about goals, strategies, and indicators of progress. The neighborhood improvement project was started without a clear definition of what success would look like.
• Foundations must work hard to establish candid and respectful relationships with the diverse people and organizations that are essential to achieving community change. When tensions arose in this project, participants often couldn’t find a way to talk productively about their differences and work through them together.
• Everyone can gain by committing to learn throughout the entire project. While the effort was infused with evaluations of the process to bring about change from the start, tools to evaluate results were added only toward the end, when it was too late to affect the course of the effort.

Private foundations are tackling increasingly large and complex social problems that require millions of dollars and vast human resources.

Careful evaluation, a genuine openness to learn from failure, and a willingness to change are critical to success in these undertakings. When foundations don’t learn and share the information necessary to correct course, it is their intended beneficiaries — often the neediest members of society — who ultimately bear the cost.

Success stories don’t suffice. To serve our missions and maintain our credibility in the nonprofit world and with the public at large, foundations must tell the whole truth. Today, much of the wisdom gained by foundations is packed away in file cabinets and stashed in computer servers. Let’s change our approach: Admit mistakes. Share them. Move on. Take fullest advantage of the one thing philanthropy may have in almost as much abundance as money — knowledge.

Paul Brest is president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and James E. Canales is president of the James Irvine Foundation. The reports discussed in this article are available on the Web sites of the foundations, http://www.hewlett.org and http://www.irvine.org.