One of the most difficult things for any organization is to think ahead, to imagine new scenarios, to picture different or more innovative strategies for your work. At the beginning of a year, there is both opportunity and temptation to draw back for a period and consider the present and the future. But how to do it well?
Just in time, two knowledgeable authors have offered nonprofit leaders some ways to think in an open-ended but rigorous way about the future. Foundation staff and board members would certainly be able to take advantage.
Jacob Harold offers a new book The Toolbox: Strategies for Crafting Social Impact. Lucy Bernholz offers her Blueprint 2024 in an online format. Both writers are longstanding observers and analysts of philanthropy and civil society, particularly in the United States (both are American). But their advice is not culturally or contextually specific, except in the sense of the types and sizes of nonprofit organizations that they address.
Harold and Bernholz have different backgrounds although both are focused on social change. Harold explicitly calls himself a social changemaker and has led several nonprofits. Bernholz has consulting and academic experience and is based at Stanford University. Both are practical and experienced writers and neither one underestimates the challenges of thinking about the future in the context of social changemaking.
Bernholz is more of a futurist than Harold. She is acutely aware of the difficulties of making forecasts about directions for philanthropy and civil society. She notes that “our current efforts at understanding the present and future are failing – largely because we’re using out-of-date data, built on assumptions that no longer hold, and with models that can’t account for the kinds of dynamics we think are coming but have yet to experience.”
Why should foundations in particular try to better understand the present and the future, given these difficulties? Because grantmaking foundations, as many (including me) have often argued, are uniquely able to take a long view and to act on it, taking greater risks and offering more patient funding. Social change is slow change, as Rebecca Solnit puts it in a recent essay. Solnit makes the case that the most radical change can be the hardest to see because it takes time to accrue, to evolve and to build. Taking a long (multi-year) view, she says, “shows you movements shifting what’s considered possible, reasonable, and necessary, setting the stage and creating the pressure for these events, offering a truer analysis of power.”
So it’s worth taking time to identify and reflect on what can be seen, even if it’s small or incremental. “Somewhere in our future”, says Bernholz,” lies the moment when the old gets outnumbered by the new”. Knowing the difficulty of hearing the signal in the noise, Bernholz has helpfully included in her Blueprint a pull-out section of what she calls ‘sensemaking worksheets”. These worksheets can be used to start sensemaking conversations. She suggests collecting a series of today’s headlines and events and trying to make sense of them in the context of your work – looking for patterns, asking how the work of philanthropy may or may not contribute to the story, thinking about how social media play into story, brainstorming wild card events and then seeing how they might affect philanthropic work., asking how AI might change stories and assumptions, etc There are many possibilities here for generative conversation.
Jacob Harold for his part has put together a book-length guide to tools that can be used for making sense of the present and the future. He suggests that these tools are “frameworks for thinking and acting”. More specifically, they are ways of understanding and shaping context, data, individual behaviour and institutional relationships. In his creatively designed book, complete with images, poetry, charts and texts, Harold describes a “toolbox”, or way of thinking about social change strategies, and nine “tools” for the box, that can be used as approaches to the work of crafting action for social change. Harold’s purpose is not purely sensemaking but helping social changemakers in their effort to create strategies for their work. But like Bernholz, many of Harold’s questions can be used for brainstorming and collective creativity. My review of Harold’s book in The Philanthropist Journal gives you a feel for the tools and the uses that can be made of them. Reading these resources reinforced my view that reflection and creative conversations can be enormously helpful to philanthropies and social sector organizations alike. We may not know what the future will bring but we can prepare ourselves by collecting evidence and asking thoughtful questions about the directions we see around us.
It’s difficult, and somewhat unfair, to generalize about foundation philanthropy. If I have learned anything after two decades of working with foundations, it’s that generalizations quickly find their contradictions. There are great differences among foundations in motivation, strategies and governance.
That said, there is reason to focus on one big generalization right now. It’s about the shared environment in which philanthropies operate. No matter its mission, or target population, or size, or beliefs, a philanthropic foundation is profoundly affected by the urgency of the many systemic global crises we now face – what some are calling a “polycrisis”. In Canada, these overlapping systemic crises are exemplified by our summer of wildfires and floods, along with longer-term concerns about the impact of climate change on the North, on biodiversity, on agriculture and water. We must figure out how to get to greater sustainability without leaving people behind and while trying to put equity and access to opportunity first. We are also still dealing with the after-effects of the pandemic, including long-term health impacts and economic disruptions. The world certainly feels unstable.
In a world of change, philanthropy is hearing a call for even greater change, even for transformation, within philanthropy itself. A new initiative from WINGS, the global philanthropy network, sets out to challenge the field to respond more boldly to the polycrisis. The Philanthropy Transformation Initiative (PTI) calls on foundations to transform their own practices, with the aim of becoming more effective organizations, better able to rise to what it describes as the existential threat that humanity faces.
Transformation is a daunting word. But the group of philanthropy networks, advisors, academics and funders assembled by WINGS for the PTI argues that “the current polycrisis presents a radically new situation – one that will force us all to rethink the short, middle, and long-term view of our existence on this planet. This requires us to make radical changes to the ways in which we think about philanthropy (and many other areas of our lives and societies). As practitioners embodying the love of humanity we cannot ignore existential threats, even if doing so may mean significant changes to what we do and how we do it in the short-term.”
But what can we do? The PTI has put together a report that provides a handbook of sorts for foundations trying to come to grips with what must be done. Understanding that transformation is too big an idea without more definition, the PTI has tried to break it down into three messages and ten principles. The three messages are straightforward:
These messages are the PTI answer to what it captures as the three paradoxes of philanthropy:
These paradoxes are often cited by the more radical critics of institutional philanthropy to justify their call for philanthropy to spend down and/or be dismantled. But the PTI suggests that they can be used as a catalyst for positive change, “with philanthropy actors understanding how they can adopt models and methods that maximise their potential as a force for positive social change whilst minimising the capacity to cause unintended harms.”
This entails a change in mindset, which is where the three messages come in. The PTI suggests a mindset shift from being achievers to being enablers of others to contribute to social change; from separating operations and endowments from values and wealth generation, to aligning them; from thinking more about the short-term and the local to thinking about the longer-term and the global.
Yes, much easier described than done. So, to break it down into more do-able steps to transformation, the PTI names ten principles to guide practice:
For each principle, the 87-page PTI report offers a so-called “catalogue of resources, recommendations, and insights”. It discusses specifics, recommends practices, and lists resources and tools. For instance, under the first principle on transparency and accountability, the report defines the terms, discusses why funders should pay attention, suggests how to get started and how to go beyond, lists potential obstacles and possible solutions, and then adds a digitally-linked list of resources on the topic, sourced from around the world. In addition, WINGS has produced a separate and more detailed guide to transparency and accountability which I referenced in my June 2023 blog. What I appreciate about this guide is that it’s not all or nothing. Canadian foundation boards, leaders, and staff can choose one or more steps. Transformation isn’t immediate or all at once. The idea is to start on the steps, using this as a route map of sorts. To encourage and inspire, WINGS has created an opportunity for storytelling and case studies through the PTI website. One of the ambitious WINGS goals for the PTI is to create a global framework for philanthropy, to which funders can add evidence of changing practice under one or more of the ten principles. The case studies today come from Indonesia, Egypt, Brazil, Colombia, China, the UK, Australia and China. Will there be a Canadian foundation case study listed there soon?
Do we need to open the curtains in the house of philanthropy? Many would say yes. But easier said than done. What does that look like? Who decides? And how far to go?
WINGS, the global network of philanthropy associations, offers some answers, or at least some ways of getting to answers, with a new publication for foundation leaders, boards and staff. It is ambitiously titled Moving From Reflection to Action: A Guide on Transparency and Accountability for Philanthropic Organizations. This title tells us why transparency should be considered by foundations and other philanthropic organizations: transparency is part of accountability. WINGS suggests that both are a “precondition for building trust, legitimacy, and community support for each organisation's work.”
Governments are also raising the bar on philanthropic organizations to prove their legitimacy. Government regulation of philanthropy is justified by the need to protect the public interest. Particularly in those places where donors receive tax benefits for their giving, there is public interest in ensuring that philanthropy benefits public and not private causes. It is interesting that this WINGS publication was funded by the European Union. It comes as the European Commission has just released its proposal for member states to provide tax incentives for the social economy, including corporate tax exemptions and income tax incentives for individual donors, as well as facilitating cross-border giving within the EU.
In Canada, regulators and policy makers are under pressure to gather more data on philanthropic activity. The federal government is preparing new questions for charitable funders to answer later this year in their annual report of disbursements and investments. The curtains are being pulled open, by community partners who want to know more about their philanthropic funders, and by governments who want to know more about how the public interest is being served.
So, this guide from WINGS comes at an opportune time. But what does it address? The guide defines transparency as “the state that results from making information available from inside an organisation to a wider public, either through proactive publication or by responding to requests for information.” It defines accountability as “a readiness to take responsibility for actions, achieved by being transparent about those actions against a pre-defined framework of values and indicators, and responding to the findings of any evaluation and/or the feedback received from stakeholders.”
Many Canadian philanthropies passively meet the test of transparency by making information on governance, financials, and charitable activity available through the annual disclosure to government. However, this information is usually at least a year out of date when it is published on a public database by the Canada Revenue Agency. This is remedied to some degree by maintaining up to date websites and reports which some foundations publish proactively. But the published information varies from detailed to scanty. There are few guidelines on what should be made public, with the exception of those provided in the voluntary Imagine Canada Standards Program.
The WINGS guide provides a helpful mapping list of topics and documents that could be made public and discusses some of those that should remain private such as employment records and personal data. It also suggests some useful criteria for discussion internally around what information to provide and under what circumstances. The guide adds suggestions on how to make a transparency policy stick, including designating a responsible person for ensuring that transparency rules are followed, and regular reporting and evaluation of the transparency policy. This will seem onerous to smaller organizations. But the guide is rigorous in its description of what make a transparency commitment more than just words on paper.
Similarly, in its description of a path towards greater accountability, the guide recommends an accountability plan that engages everyone from the board to the most junior staff member. Such an accountability plan has many developmental steps and is arguably more challenging to formulate than the transparency action plan as it involves identifying to whom and for what the philanthropic organization is accountable. The brave organization will also consider how to deliver that account and what to do when it is not meeting expectations. Recognizing this challenge, the guide does its best to describe each step and provides checklists to help along the way. It doesn’t provide any models or examples of organizations who have attempted to walk the path and who can share success and failure. This would be very helpful. WINGS is inviting organizations to tell their stories and we may see more of these as this guide is taken up and implemented.
This is a valuable tool for philanthropic foundation boards and leaders of organizations of any size. And it comes at the right time. I do see Canadian funders creating and making public their data and reports on goals and outcomes as well as activities.
A couple of recent examples:
And there are other examples! We are seeing more opening curtains in Canadian philanthropy. What would be interesting would be to have one of these foundations measure their reporting against the WINGS guide suggestions and let us know how they are doing and what may come next.
Do the following situations sound familiar, if you lead a smaller Canadian charity?
These situations sound like the everyday experiences of the part-time or single employee who is trying to lead a small charity. And you would be right in thinking that this reality is both common and unfair.