January, as always, is a time for forecasting by philanthropy observers and “opiners”. But during this never-ending pandemic period, as I read and listen to blogs and podcasts about the year ahead, I notice that no-one is being definitive about their forecasts. Uncertainty is greater than ever. People don’t want to make predictions. They would rather express hopes or, more gloomily, voice fears.
I think that hope is a better starting point. This is shared by Phil Buchanan of the Centre for Effective Philanthropy who posted his first 2022 blog with five hopes for philanthropy and nonprofits. Phil points out that there has been more change over the last two years in how US foundation leaders approach their work than in the previous two decades combined. As he says, “for all the suffering and loss it brought — and continues to bring — the pandemic has shown that deep change, even at institutions often derided as insulated and slow to evolve, is possible when it’s necessary.” In my view, this is also true in Canada, in all sectors.
In early January 2021, I wrote about a new agenda for philanthropy and for what I called the “social good sector”. As I reread my words from twelve months ago, I realize that I was voicing my hope that funders and nonprofits would ask and answer challenging questions that might set them on a new path post-pandemic. Questions such as:
These are all questions about doing things differently…and, I hope, better. I acknowledged then that thinking about these questions is tough and answering them through action is even tougher. But I believe that at least some of them are taken seriously, demonstrated by the conversations at various nonprofit conferences and webinars that took place through 2021, and the funding practice changes that have not been rolled back or discarded. These questions are just as important as we head into a new year, with the pandemic still over our heads.
For 2022, I want to put out two hopes, two fears and one wild guess. Perhaps these could be provocations for discussion at board and management tables along with the still important questions that I suggested for 2021.
Hopes
Fears
A Wild Guess
How can philanthropy confront the harsh syndemic we face today? Yes, I wrote syndemic, not pandemic. The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals, describes a syndemic as “characterised by biological and social interactions between conditions and states, interactions that increase a person's susceptibility to harm or worsen their health outcomes.” In other words, being poor, hungry, homeless, and/or suffering from a condition such as heart disease, obesity or diabetes, makes your experience of a virus such as COVID-19 much worse. So, if you tackle the conditions affecting vulnerable populations, you lessen the impact of the virus enormously. As noted by The Lancet, “the economic crisis that is advancing towards us will not be solved by a drug or a vaccine… Approaching COVID-19 as a syndemic will invite a larger vision, one encompassing education, employment, housing, food, and environment.”
What does philanthropy have to do with this? A good deal. Foundations, as I have often argued, can be key players in systemic change. Philanthropy can work upstream to change the systems that create social and economic conditions for ill health. The de Beaumont Foundation, a US private foundation that focuses on the social determinants of health, noted in a 2019 blog that “increasing health care costs and worsening life expectancy are the results of a frayed social safety net, economic and housing instability, racism and other forms of discrimination, educational disparities, inadequate nutrition, and risks within the physical environment. These factors affect our health long before the health care system ever gets involved.”
De Beaumont Foundation uses the metaphor of the stream as a way to think about how to intervene on health issues. It’s a metaphor that applies to other social challenges as well. Downstream are the medical interventions that treat illness. Midstream are the social interventions such as social workers and community health workers who work on connecting individuals to various supports (housing, child care, skills training, food security etc). Upstream are the interventions that change conditions in communities, including public policies, government actions and community-level collaboration. The upstream interventions over the long term will certainly improve the health and social consequences far downstream.
If we think about what we are experiencing today as a syndemic, what does this imply for how foundations rethink their strategies? Many Canadian foundations were using a mix of strategies before the arrival of COVID-19. The majority probably focus downstream on responding to urgent community needs for food, shelter, medical treatment, skills training, and supports for families and youth. The immediate consequences of the virus have been a sharpening of these needs and a corresponding increase in demand for philanthropic support. Depression, anxiety, loneliness are probably more urgent mental health needs than ever, for example. Does this mean that all resources should be allocated to downstream work?
I think there is a case to be made for swimming upstream. The syndemic perspective underlines the importance of not abandoning efforts at systemic change. And there are many strategies, usually employed in a portfolio, that Canadian foundations can employ to pursue change. In 2018, FSG, the US-based consultants who work on social impact strategies, issued a useful guide that listed nine strategies for foundations wanting to work upstream:
In practice, foundations use a mix of strategies, including supporting community programs, generating knowledge (sometimes to inform policy), catalyzing collaboration, and building capacity. More foundations are practicing the convening of communities of interest and of peers and considering collective funding tools.
Since the beginning of the crisis, we have seen many Canadian foundations deploying these strategies and working upstream:
These are all remarkable examples of foundations swimming upstream to address the inevitable changes to systems that we need to cope with and to prevent the worst consequences of a future syndemic. Let’s face it, it’s on the horizon if we think about climate change, let alone another virus.
We don’t exist in a bubble in this world. We exist in a web.
This is how we need to think about our situation as a philanthropy sector, as a country, as a region and as human beings on our planet.
The inevitable push in this pandemic is towards closure, towards turning inward and locking down, into seeing the world as “us” and not “them”. It’s inevitable but it’s not irresistible. In fact, ignoring the world is the worst thing we can do to ourselves. Solidarity, connection, and mutual support are the way to get through this. It’s not an option, it’s a must to maintain our web, not to retreat into our bubble.
This was a central thread in the wide-ranging conversation which I moderated on April 30 for Philanthropic Foundations Canada. The topic was whether and how Canadian foundations can fund globally during the pandemic. But the very thoughtful discussion evolved into being about much more than global funding opportunities. We discussed our opportunity as a country to re-imagine and to rebuild not just our own communities but the global community. We have a chance to bring Canadian values and skills of humility, willingness to listen, to learn and to partner to the job of mending the gaps in the global web.
Dr Peter Singer, former CEO of Grand Challenges Canada and now a senior advisor at the World Health Organization, put it succinctly during the conversation: “This is the biggest global crisis in our lifetimes”. And it’s not just a health crisis, it’s an economic crisis. People will die of the virus. But they will also die from lack of health care for other illnesses. And they will die of poverty. Existing weaknesses and gaps in the global health web will be magnified: access to water and hygiene, food security, children’s health and education, discrimination and violence against women and girls. These gaps don’t just affect other people. The difficulty of fighting the virus in Nigeria or Bangladesh will mean that the virus continues to be a danger everywhere. Polio and smallpox were not just eradicated in North America. They had to be eradicated across the world.
Nic Moyer of the Canadian Council for International Cooperation addressed the need for a robust global health system. This is a role for Canadian philanthropy – to advocate for a strong multilateral system. The World Health Organization is one of a family of multilateral organizations that have grown over the years since the end of World War Two to remedy what was perceived as a lack of and a need for global collaboration. The work that the WHO does would have to be invented now if it didn’t exist – global data collection and sharing, global guidance, coordination of supplies and training of health workers and of course global research and development of therapeutics and vaccines against COVID 19.
Jennifer Brennan of the Mastercard Foundation spoke about how a globally-focused foundation thinks about this moment in global history. In her words, we must seize this moment to build the world we want. Mastercard Foundation has been working for almost two decades to support communities and particularly young people both in Africa and in Indigenous communities in Canada. In its pandemic response, the Foundation has focused on both the immediate and the longer term. It has created the COVID 19 Recovery and Resilience Program, which has two prongs: emergency support for health workers, young people and communities in Canada and in Africa, and support to build longer term resilience through access to digital solutions and financing for small businesses as well as e-learning. Mastercard is also continuing its support for the multilateral system of organizations in the UN family such as the Food and Agricultural Organization which is fighting the locust infestation in East Africa. The consistent goal is to build the resilience of all for the future (which includes the crisis caused by climate change).
Every foundation can have a strategic conversation about how to deal with this crisis from the lens of their own mission or purpose. Is your purpose to improve quality of lives, to address the causes of poverty, to relieve distress, to create vital knowledge, to support leaders, to create better policies? Whatever it is, this is your chance to think about responding to what this moment calls for: stepping up, engagement, advocacy, global connection. It’s not a time to close doors but to open them. We face huge transitions. How can we as funders help to make those transitions better? In the late 1940s and early 1950s, many of the multilateral organizations such as the WHO and the FAO that the world depends on were created with the imagination and leadership of Canadians. Canadian foundations were not as active then as they are today. As individuals and civil society organizations we have opportunities now to engage directly in maintaining our global web. And certainly, foundations have the resources. We can support the WHO COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund today (see below for details). But let’s also use our time now to think about transition, adaptation, resilience and creativity in the 2020s for our country and to advocate for an effective global system that helps us all avoid crises or cope more effectively with their consequences.
Canadian foundations can grant to the WHO COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund through the KBF Canada Foundation: This is the fastest and only way to contribute directly to global response efforts led by the World Health Organization (WHO). The Fund has raised more than $200m in six weeks and has already disbursed almost half for critical needs.
I am learning some unexpected things as I look for news about the effects of the pandemic and lockdown. The bad news is all too easily found through print and other media. Watching CNN is a frightening experience right now. But I am also finding much good news, especially through social media. Imagine this lockdown five or ten years ago without such media. We would not be connected to a wider human community that is actively sharing and creating and thinking out loud through a world-wide network. I am learning information that I would simply not have known if I stuck to one or two traditional media sources. Even better, I am discovering creative responses through poetry and music. And I am coming across eloquent reflections on our shared condition that console and inspire me.
Social media pointed me to one of these eloquent reflections by Grant Oliphant, CEO of the Heinz Endowments, a private foundation in Pittsburgh. Oliphant is a thoughtful and articulate practitioner of philanthropy. No surprise then that he has responded to this crisis with some important reflections on the situation that we find ourselves in and the meaning that we can take from it. In The Rescue We Seek, Oliphant summarizes five lessons that he believes this crisis is teaching us all:
In my opinion, Oliphant provides a valuable framework for foundation leaders thinking through and beyond this crisis. “It turns out,” he says, “that justice matters, and so do knowledge, government and nature; it turns out that only by embracing our shared future can we be confident of reaching it.”
How could foundation leaders translate this statement into concrete action? Think about each of these ideas in turn. Justice, knowledge, government (or public leadership) and nature. And consider all of these from the perspective of collective action. We might ask ourselves the following questions.
Justice: what can we do as a foundation to address injustice in the face of this crisis? We have heard about philanthropy’s pledges of action and encouragement to change foundation practices so that we remove the barriers and reduce the power imbalances between funder and recipient. Directing more unrestricted funds to the organizations in our communities that are working to support the worst-hit and most vulnerable should be high on almost every funder’s list.
Knowledge: how can we as a foundation contribute to the knowledge that humanity must have to cope with and overcome this global threat? Even if as a foundation you haven’t previously considered funding research, this is surely the time to seek out opportunities for supporting global collective effort to find therapies, apps to test and trace, vaccines, etc.
Public leadership: how can we as a foundation support the development of effective public leaders to help us through future crises? Leadership is more important than ever. As Nancy Koehn, Harvard historian and author of Forged In Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times, suggests, we need public leaders who offer” brutal honesty and credible hope”. Those leaders don’t emerge without mentoring and opportunities for growth. Young people are watching now. Koehn notes “This difficult, turbulent time will surely someday be seen, in part, as a fertile, living laboratory in which courageous leaders were made, not born.”
Nature: how can we as a foundation contribute to fixing the damage done to our natural environment? As Oliphant says, “you can view this virus as a plea for sanity from an angry planet, but I view it more as an expression of the obvious: the more we corrupt the air, water, biosystems and climate that give us life, the more vulnerable we become to illness and death.” If not now, then soon, every foundation will need to think about what it can do to build a healthier ecosystem. This is also about justice.
Collective action: how can we as a foundation contribute to the work/ideas/initiatives of others so that we can together be more effective to achieve more social and environmental justice, greater knowledge, better leadership? Everywhere, private foundations, community foundations and other funders are joining forces to respond to the emergency. Coming out of this crisis, every foundation should consider more participation in collective efforts to recover and rebuild.
Oliphant concludes: “We will triumph against this virus, but that isn’t the only test facing us…the deeper and more enduring test is whether we will use what we learn from this affliction to build a less fragile, fractured society.” This is an opportunity for us to expand our vision, and to grow as funders. Good news amid the bad.
Here are three resources to foster collective funding in this crisis (and there are many community-level collective funds in Canada as well):
COVID-19 Action Fund from CIFAR to mobilize the best thinkers across the world and provide the space needed to quickly address COVID-19 and understand future pandemic threats.
Covid -19 Response Fund, to support the World Health Organization in partnership with the United Nations Foundation and Swiss Philanthropy Foundation. Canadian donors can channel funds though the KBF Canada Foundation to the WHO.
Opportunities for Philanthropic Response to the COVID-19 Crisis. The Bridgespan Group provides perspectives on where funder resources can be productively and collectively channeled.
The COVID-19 emergency has faced private funders with an enormous opportunity for change. A week ago, I wrote about how groups of private funders are coming together to create and commit to pledges for a more responsive relationship with their grantees and communities. Four funder associations in Canada have now come up with a strong collective pledge of action that sets out five guiding principles for foundation strategies during and after the emergency period.
Canadian foundations are being urged to act quickly, flexibly and generously to meet the needs of their grantees and the community at large. This is consistent with the voices across the community sector that are appealing for a commitment from their funders to continue their grants, to lift any conditions on them and to put faith in their grantees to use the funds as necessary. Funders are also being asked to increase their overall funding and to direct it to the emergency as it grows.
The demand for funds will certainly exceed what any one funder can supply, even if foundations take more from their endowments as they are being urged to do. How do you know where to target your limited funds most effectively? It seems obvious but the best thing to do is to ask them. The always thoughtful Phil Buchanan of the Center for Effective Philanthropy in a series of three recent blogs has suggested that funders must reach out across their entire population of grantees, to quickly identify those in the most precarious positions — and then target their near-term resources to those organizations accordingly. CEP suggests a quick survey of grantees to ask them: how have your operations been disrupted? What do you need most from us? What are you in danger of having to stop or abandon as the crisis continues? A proactive reach out to grantees (unless you have hundreds of them) should be a relatively simple thing to do.
But there is more to think about than maintaining support and communication with grantees, although that comes first. As I read through the commentaries that are coming fast now from observers of philanthropy, I notice how the crisis is sharpening the prevailing debate about the role of private philanthropy in society. Should foundations dedicate all their resources to address social injustice, to advocate for the least advantaged, to change underlying and systemic conditions? Or are they unable to do so because they are part of the very power structure that creates injustice? Does their commitment to the perpetual endowment model prevent them from acting effectively, with enough of their resources, on the here and now? Some even within the foundation community are critical of the response to the crisis so far, suggesting that it reveals, as it does in so many ways, the inability of foundations to react effectively.
I don’t believe this is true. We have not yet seen what Canadian foundations can and will do. It is encouraging that the fourth and fifth principles of the joint funder association statement address head on the question of social justice. The statement suggests taking action for equity now in the emergency and in the long term.
In the now: “Support and amplify community-based organizations so that their needs are heard and met. This is particularly true for equity-seeking groups.”
In the longer-term: “Invest time and energy to notice, make visible and share with others new ways and norms of approaching our work that result in deep change and can be scaled up toward equity and justice in the months and years to come.”
Actions are the ways in which we make credible our words. So what to do?
Does the COVID 19 pandemic offer an opportunity for change in Canadian philanthropy? And if so, what and how? It’s much too soon to tell, probably. But it’s interesting to note the observations made in the last week by U.S foundations that this is the time for radical response. It’s not too soon to say that the shutdown of our society and economy by the pandemic will lead to major shifts in the non-profit sector, certainly in the short to medium term. There will be a need to rethink financing structures, work practices, collaborations etc. This forces a response not only for the next two months but probably for the next year and beyond.
Seizing the opportunity, the Ford Foundation and the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project of which Ford is a sponsor proposed a “pledge of action” for changed practices among foundations. This pledge commits foundations to 8 principles for funding and relationships with community partners and grantees:
Remarkably, this pledge has now been signed by over 200 foundations (and counting). It’s a stunning example of collective response from the foundation sector. Funders can provide desperately needed funds…and do so much more!
(By the way I would add a 9th principle: Commit new funding to the umbrella and intermediary organizations that help to lift up the collective voices of the sector at national and regional and local levels.)
What is fascinating about this is to see the rapid mobilization of American funders around a set of practices that funder organizations such as Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, individual foundations such as Ford, observers such as Vu Le, centres such as the Centre for Effective Philanthropy and collective projects such as the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project have been advocating for a few years. This is the reply both to the growing critique of elitist foundation practices and to the increasing realization of the effectiveness of diversity, inclusion and participation practices. So this may be the spur to fundamental change in philanthropic practice across a wide group of American funders. This is certainly what Ford (which led the way with its BUILD program) and others are hoping now. Note the 8th principle
“Learn from these emergency practices and share what they teach us about effective partnership and philanthropic support, so we may consider adjusting our practices more fundamentally in the future, in more stable times, based on all we learn.”
It takes a crisis to create a turning point. Is this a turning point for Canadian funders as well?
What stops us from creating (or adapting) and signing a similar pledge? What stops us from considering how to act collectively not only to support short term emergency response to community need but also to re-evaluate practices for the long term? Philanthropic Foundations Canada is informing Canadian funders about COVID 19 responses through a new weekly digest. It could work with Community Foundations of Canada and other funder groups to move us towards a reconsideration of giving practices during and perhaps after the pandemic.
Meanwhile we are seeing some creative examples of collective response to the pandemic. The National Center for Family Philanthropy in the US is offering an interactive map and continually growing list of resources for funders re COVID 19. We can do this for Canada! Here are just a few funds and resources already available for Canadian funders:
Locally
National and Issue-Based
International (for Canadian funders)
Charity Village is putting together a list of umbrella and intermediary groups working on COVID 19 response for the charitable sector as a whole.
“The path forward is to realize that we do have power, even in the face of something that makes us feel incredibly small, and that it lies where it always has—in remembering that we are in this thing together and in finding ways to embrace our collective responsibility and accountability to each other.” – Grant Oliphant, Heinz Endowments.
We are in this together. This is the key message of what is happening in this pandemic. Governments and public health experts are asking us to do what is necessary for us all not just for each of us. This is a remarkable time. People are realizing in very specific ways how important their actions are to the welfare of others. Most who work in the charitable or community sector think about this in their daily work. But it isn’t front and centre in the public awareness. So it’s a shock when we are all confronted at the same time with the need to behave for the public, not the private, good. We are in this together…..and we are called on to give up something for others. Freedom of movement, social gathering, collective enjoyment. It’s mind-bending but necessary.
More than this, philanthropy is called on to do what is necessary, what must be done for the public good. As my colleague Krystian Seibert in Australia has noted, this is the time for philanthropy to be at its best. This is scary. And for foundations especially as the stock markets wipe out enormous value in endowments, it is very scary. This is as challenging as in 2008. Perhaps more. But just as we were summoned in 2009 to step up and commit to community partners, not to reduce funding commitments but to maintain and even increase them, we are called on again to step up. And we have so many tools and supports today that we did not have even in 2009.
“Maintaining community lifelines and safety nets are one of the most important contributions of the philanthropic community”. This is from an excellent webinar on the pandemic and how philanthropy can respond , from the Center for Disaster Philanthropy. The CDP offers great resources to help foundations think through their strategies in this unprecedented situation.
Foundation leaders are also giving us some moral direction as they step up their leadership. Comments from the Barr Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Heinz Endowments, the McConnell Foundation, the Hallman Foundation, the Lawson Foundation tell us: What must philanthropy do in this crisis?
This last point is so crucial. Infrastructure strengthens the organizations that weaken in the face of this terrible barrage by providing information, creating connections, advocating and lobbying. Imagine Canada, the Ontario Nonprofit Network and others are doing everything they can to keep the sector informed and to remind governments that sector organizations need extraordinary support to get through this crisis, just as small businesses and individuals do. They need help to do this work.
The financial and economic consequences of this crisis will fall heavily on the charitable sector. Foundations must be there to help for months and maybe years to come. We got through 2008-2009 together. We can get through this together too. But with courage and commitment. We must not flinch or fail. We are accountable to each other.