To Solve Society’s Problems, Grant Makers Need Focus and Patience

A philanthropic proverb tells us that “people have problems, but foundations have departments.”

Ah, that was in the good old days. Now people have persistent problems, but foundations have attention-deficit disorder. The major social ills foundations seek to heal—racism, generational poverty, failing schools—are enormously complex, intricately interconnected, and deeply rooted in America’s history and culture. Big foundations respond to these social ills with grant-making programs that are too brief, too distractible, and too ephemeral: in short, too ADD.

Consider how a large foundation is apt to assist a failing public-school district blighted by dollar losses as companies and middle-class people flee to other regions. The foundation announces a five-year, $50-million grant-making project that will be rigorously evaluated and led by the foundation’s best and brightest program officers. It sounds impressive, but the truth is that foundation ADD has doomed this project even before it starts.

The school system in question has been in decline since the 1950s. When social decay is measured in decades, only a major foundation could believe it possible to turn things around in five brief years. Half a decade is, at best, time enough to gain an understanding of the complex and multifaceted problems in play, to earn the trust of grantees and educators, and to pay for experimental projects that will begin to get some traction. Five years is certainly far too brief a time to arrest decline, or—McGruff-like—take a bite out of it. And yet, in the attention-challenged foundation world, five years is considered a long-term commitment. True, there is always the possibility of providing a second round of grants for another five years, but the ADD foundation’s inability to focus patiently makes it highly unlikely it will keep giving.

Foundation grant-making efforts have traditionally been notorious for being too brief, but in recent years, a new factor has been added to the mix: distractibility. Mania for measurement is the source of the problem. Every self-respecting large foundation now evaluates the stuffing out of its major grant-making programs.

Grant makers lavish time and money on sophisticated systems of data collection and analysis, with the aim of marshaling evidence that the foundation’s programs are indeed achieving their outcomes, or rendered in foundationese, “moving the needle.”

What could possibly be wrong with carefully measuring progress and objectively documenting results? Only this: Foundations afflicted with ADD always misinterpret the meaning of the results. The findings of a five-year evaluation of public-school grants will be identical to the findings of every five-year evaluation everywhere, for which the evaluator’s assessment can always be reduced to a single sentence. “This initiative is off to a promising start, but only time will tell if it can deliver the desired outcomes.”

Most thoughtful people would consider this to constitute a recommendation for a second five-year round of money to give the project time needed to mature and fulfill its promise. To ADD-addled foundation leaders, however, the data suggest a very different conclusion: “We didn’t get the outcomes we wanted, so let’s defund this school initiative and find another one to support somewhere else.”

Instead of sticking with their promising grantees, foundation leaders are distracted by the (illusory) prospect of quicker results offered by other school districts. For the school system that lost its grants, it was a cruel game of bait-and-switch, because the foundation offered support for too brief a time to deliver results, all the while carefully measuring how much the grantees fell short of the impossible timeline, and then the foundation got distracted and gave money to others.

So why are foundation leaders so avid for results that they prematurely abandon promising commitments? The answer is that they feel they cannot afford to wait, and the ultimate cause of their impatience lies in a relatively new phenomenon, one that renders the foundation’s programs and its employees ephemeral things. It may seem curious that foundations chartered to exist in perpetuity would fixate on such shortsighted considerations, but so they do.

It was not always thus. Time was when leadership of a big foundation came as the apotheosis of a distinguished career in fields in which foundations made grants. Time was when big foundations were relatively stable places and leadership transitions were orderly affairs that led to changes in foundation programs and personnel that were gently evolutionary, rather than violently revolutionary.

Over the past 20 years, that has shifted. Big foundations are increasingly led by eminences from high-powered worlds of business, academe, and politics whose entire careers have been ADD in action; people who have held posts just long enough to manipulate them into springboards for the next promotion in their résumé-building quests. A five-year stay in a single job is a tremendously long commitment for these hotshots in a hurry.

When such CEO’s take jobs at foundations, evolutionary change is out of the question, as is even revolutionary change; their approach might best be described as a “sack of Rome” change.

A decent respect for talented staff and promising programs is regarded as hopelessly naïve. The imperative is to sweep away the experienced people and the established programs, replacing them with people and programs that the new CEO can brand as his own, thus burnishing his reputation as a “change-maker” or “turnaround specialist.” Senior staff members considered the epitome of excellence under the old regime are the first in line for the unemployment office under the new.

Grant-making efforts that show great potential after years of painstaking commitment similarly make a quick trip from the penthouse to the outhouse. No wonder program officers are so desperate for solid outcomes; in the ephemeral institutions in which they are working, they badly need evidence to demonstrate to a new “sweep clean” CEO that they are effective employees with programs that deliver. Ironically, they become so desperate for results that they pull the plug on projects that would—given more time—deliver them.

But in the highly ephemeral world of foundations, time is one commodity program officers do not have. So even had the program officers not pulled the plug on the public-school project, come the leadership transition, the foundation’s new CEO would eliminate both the school grants and its program-officer leaders.

The “change-maker” CEO would argue that she is eliminating deadwood and failed programs, and there may be some truth to that. But the sweeping and meat-ax nature of the changes carries off talented and untalented people alike, along with the failed programs. Of course, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the deadbeat and the dreadnought in foundations.

Philanthropy has never defined what practices are worth emulating, so ambitious, short-termer CEO’s can hide behind the fact that their wholesale changes cannot immediately be proven to be ruinous (and, lucky for them, they will be long gone before the devastation they have wrought is fully understood).

What can be said for sure, however, is that by making the entire foundation enterprise an ephemeral thing, they push the evils of undependability down the ranks. The knowledge that your job-seeking CEO will shortly be moving on to the next shiny bauble, and that the next short-term leader will undoubtedly “clean house,” as others have done before, discourages program officers from developing long-term, patient programs.

To be fair, not every big foundation is guilty of “tackling” persistent problems with grant making that is too brief, too distractible, and too ephemeral. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for example, has been tenacious in its aim to exterminate polio, adding years of commitment to its original timeline, refusing to be distracted by equivocal early metrics, and remaining firmly committed to the eradication of polio throughout leadership changes. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has displayed exemplary patience in pursuing outcomes for decades in selected program areas, such as strengthening how nonprofits operate.

Alas, such stellar examples are rare. Most big foundations morph so quickly that today they bear little resemblance to their predecessor organizations of only a few years ago.

Therein lies failure. As foundations bob and weave from leader to leader and from program to program, the problems that they are supposed to be solving fester, growing ever more entrenched and intractable. In society, as in the contest between the tortoise and the hare, “slow and steady wins the race.” We need more foundations to make much longer commitments to help grantees move from “promising” to “proven” and to honor past promises as leader gives way to leader.

Foundation ADD has seriously damaged foundation effectiveness and exacerbated social ills. Which leader will seize the fallen banner of focus, patience, and commitment? Much human well-being depends upon the answer to this question.