June 4, 1998 | Read Time: 5 minutes
It has been nearly three decades — back to the early years of the Great Society — since the role of non-profit organizations and the services they render has been debated as intensely as it is being debated today. The decline of federal involvement in human services, and the corresponding shift of responsibil ity toward states and localities, is forcing non-profit organizations and local governments to forge new relationships, re-examine old ones, and reapportion resources as the fiscal and political ground shifts under their feet.
Those seismic shifts have had the effect of exposing the shakiness of the non-profit institutions through which foundations typically work. In simpler times, most foundations felt that they could restrict themselves to devising new strategies for dealing with social problems, confident that government would adopt and expand the ones that worked best.
Even at its most generous, government support was never much of a guarantee that programs or services would grow efficiently, produce results in proportion to increased funds, or reach a scale commensurate with the need. But the buttress of public dollars compensated for — or simply disguised — the fragile organizational skeleton around which social programs were built.
Now, though, it is clear that the goal of improving the lives of people in poor communities won’t be met until sufficient institutional strength is built so that operating organizations can efficiently and economically reach, serve, and empower a significant number of the people in need.
Foundations today, therefore, have little choice but to focus more on strengthening the institutional ligaments that turn isolated good ideas and small but effective programs into coherent industries of service. That means such things as devising effective systems for recruiting, training, and promoting staff members; fostering generally recognized standards of quality and measurements of productivity; and exporting the best practices and programs to other organizations.
To be sure, the dual challenges of inventing better methods and reaching more people don’t pose an either-or choice. It is possible, and usually desirable, for foundations to balance the intellectual laboratory work of program innovation with the more nuts-and-bolts labor of organizational development. But at some point, the success of the whole enterprise depends on the productive capacity of the institutions that will bring new ideas to the great numbers of people who need them.
Excellence begs for scale. Small may be beautiful, but it usually isn’t enough.
For the past 13 years, for example, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, where I am president, supported research on trachoma, the world’s leading preventable cause of blindness. Just in the last year, however, an international consensus formed around a strategy for de feating the disease. With a generous donation of an antibiotic from the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, it became possible to demonstrate the strategy’s effectiveness in real-world tests, leading to a national trachoma-control effort in Morocco.
From a promising beginning in Morocco, the challenge is now to help extend that strategy to more places and more people. What began as a search for new methods has evolved into an organizational and management challenge on a global scale. To finish our work on trachoma, we now need to insure that the solution ends up in the hands of institutions that are sufficiently strong, efficient, well-coordinated, and focused on results to reach the 150 million people worldwide who are infected, and the hundreds of millions more at risk.
In other areas of non-profit work that the foundation supports, such as helping disadvantaged students do better in school and reducing the incidence of child abuse, the Clark Foundation, like many other grant makers, is much nearer to the inventive and exploratory end of the spectrum. In fields that do not yet have a clear answer about what strategies are the most effective, and what techniques yield the best results, that focus is more than appropriate.
Yet even in the earliest stages of that work, foundations need to keep one eye trained on the endgame: the point at which successful new methods can confidently be entrusted to production and delivery systems that work — those that will extend effective services to more and more people in need.
To accomplish that will require, among many other things, the development of working partnerships among charities and government agencies that share a stake in expanding and strengthening effective organizations.
When a program innovation is ready to be replicated and expanded, it’s unlikely that any foundation or other source of money can do the job by itself — and few founda tions want to stay permanently attached to any one program. So for a foundation to complete its work on a promising new venture, it must enlist other investors — both governments and foundations — early in the process and enlarge their role over time. Only then can a grant maker be confident that when its own role is finished, others will care deeply enough about the program to keep it alive and enlarge it.
By diversifying the base of support for new or expanding organizations, by arming them with the management and technical skills they need to grow, and by strengthening institutions that foster collaboration, foundations can build the effective delivery systems that will bring better services to more people.
That does not mean abandoning our traditional interest in developing new products and services. But it seems, in hindsight, that like most of the foundation world, we have not been as attentive as we might have been to the latter end of the philanthropic continuum: the end where effective programs are strengthened, reproduced, and enlarged.
That’s an honorable imbalance, but an imbalance nonetheless. So long as grant makers could rely — or thought we could rely — on government to handle production and scale, our concentration on the more experimental end of the research and development spectrum may have seemed appropriate. Now, though, grant makers should expect to be judged not only by the quality of our ideas, but equally by our ability to help those who implement those ideas gain the institutional strength they need to adapt, excel, expand, and endure.
Michael A. Bailin is president of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, in New York. This article is adapted from an essay that appeared in the foundation’s most recent annual report.
