This is a more personal post than usual. It’s about Canadian foundation philanthropy, as may of my posts are. But it is also sharing some of my personal reflections as I look forward to the publication at the end of November of my book From Charity To Change: Inside The World of Canadian Foundations.
Why did I write a book about Canadian foundations? It’s something that I have thought about for fifteen years, although the writing took only two. Over those fifteen years, I have seen a lot of change in the foundation world. Some of it was driven by outside events. Some of it built on the connections and inspirations provided by the growth of personal and digital networks. Some of it has come through internal change as foundations have learned from their own experiences. There has been enough change to make an interesting story that I thought worth telling.
This book is based on stories of individual foundations. But it is also a story about a story itself. One of the reasons I felt compelled to write was that I had been working on telling a good story about the role of foundations for many years. Of course, I should say immediately that generalized narratives about foundations founder quickly on the diversity of foundation behaviours and actions. It’s difficult and inaccurate to say that all foundations play a specific and similar role beyond that of provider of capital for social good.
But in the absence of details or data, stories are built around assumptions. Narratives are built around what can be seen, such as foundation grants. Or about what is not seen, such as how foundations make decisions or what their motives are. There is a public interest in what foundations do and why because there is a public investment in them, through tax subsidies offered to donors. But there is also a default to suspicion in the absence of information, or in the presence of wealth for public benefit without public input on its distribution. In the worst Interpretation, foundations are institutions used by wealthy people to impose their own priorities or to subvert public priorities around social change, while maintaining their own privilege.
I had a motive to develop a more positive story about the role of foundation philanthropy. As the leader of Philanthropic Foundations Canada, it was my job to craft it. I was also more than curious about the unique role that foundations could play in our society. Over the years, I worked on various stories about the roles of foundations, ranging from social investor to strategic risk-taker, to social R&D funder, to convenor and catalyst of change and to community partner. What I understood as I learned more about the realities of foundation philanthropy was that no one description was going to fit. Foundations themselves were changing their missions and roles.
This is what I wanted to capture in a book. I chose to write about foundations in Canada who are generally independent and run by autonomous boards, whether connected through family or not. In talking about foundation philanthropy, I did not focus on public foundations which fundraise for their institutions or communities, although many do extraordinary work. I also chose to write about foundations whose work has evolved over a period of 20 years or more, because this provides a track record of change. And I chose to write about foundations who already understand the importance of communicating what they do and how and why. So, my twenty-plus foundation stories are not representative of all foundations or even of a majority. But they are stories that I hope provide a richness of detail which will nuance the prevailing narrative on foundations. I hope to dispel the mystery, to show that foundations are run by serious people who have humility about their roles and curiosity about their communities, who are willing to change course and to learn from their actions, who are committed to working and sharing with others.
It could be said that I chose only the most positive stories. But I am not uncritical in the book. I am well aware that foundations in Canada are being reproached, as they are in the United States and elsewhere, for not moving quickly, for not responding to the needs of the present, in a world of rapid climate change and increasing inequality. Foundations, just like other organizations, must focus more on equity and inclusion. And they need to be more transparent. That means sharing data more proactively, not only because the regulators ask for it. To show themselves accountable, foundations need to explain what change, what social impact, they seek and how they are going about it. The foundation leaders who I interviewed know this. And many others who I haven’t included directly in the book but to whom I have spoken know it too. Younger generations of families on boards, new leaders of recently-created foundations and donors who have emerged in the last decade are responding to the world of 2022 with creative strategies for deploying capital for public good. A book written five years from now may well include them.
What I wanted to show in this book was that while foundations may vary in their missions and roles, there are common characteristics shared by those who have grown in their social impact over the years:
These are what make the stories in this book relevant beyond Canada. Yes, this is an insider account about Canadian foundations. But it is informed by, and I believe, important to the work of foundations in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other parts of the world. Foundations in all these places are doing the work that I describe in Canada: strengthening communities, building fields, advancing public policy, confronting climate change. What I hope is that by giving some depth to the story of what these foundations do, I also have shown why foundations matter and why we should care. I am as curious and eager as ever to find out what happens next.
In a recent blog on philanthropic accountability I noted that accountability can take many forms; in philanthropy it often takes the form of accountability for achieving results (mostly successful results).
In this blog I want to focus more on the question of accountability for philanthropic learning. What happens when you don’t get the results you expected? Who decides when and how a philanthropic project is a failure? And more importantly how might one hold accountability for learning from failure?
We know it’s easier (and more appealing) to claim accountability for success than it is for failure. Both funders and fund recipients want to know that philanthropy has “succeeded” in its purpose. And they tend not to want to talk about when it doesn’t work. As I noted, accountability in the form of measuring results tends to predominate in discussions of accountability for both funders and nonprofits. This can be as straightforward as confirming that the funds were received and spent as agreed, with no reference to outcomes. Or it could include some accounting for numbers of beneficiaries reached and services provided, again without reference to outcomes. Failure might then be a failure of control but not of outcomes.
But what if philanthropy were accountable as much for learning as for controls or even for outcomes? What would that look like and how might it change the relationships (and accountabilities) between funders and fund recipients? These questions aren’t original. They come up most often in discussions about learning through evaluation. Many funders understand the value of evaluations, and even set aside some funds for it in their grants to charities But, as Caroline Fiennes, a UK-based consultant and director of Giving Evidence, has pointed out, “most charities shouldn’t evaluate their work”. She notes that charities are best at implementation not at evaluation, and that it is a waste of their time to ask them to use research skills they don’t have to produce information that may already exist elsewhere about the merits of their interventions.
So, what should funders do? Fiennes is a believer in practicing rigorous, evidence-based philanthropy. But she suggests that funders learn by seeking out sources of reliable evidence on what works from evaluators and researchers. Where reliable evidence doesn’t exist, this may be an indication of a gap that a funder can fill by supporting new research. In doing so, a funder is amplifying its own learning and acquiring reliable evidence that can help shape its funding decisions, without asking the charities themselves to supply the needed evidence. A funder can in this way take accountability for its own learning.
Today, many funders are being told to leave accountability for success or failure in the hands of the people who know the context and the beneficiaries best. This may be a fair statement to make about rebalancing power in relationships between funders and charities. But it doesn’t mean that funders should retreat from the opportunities to learn that could be offered through funding relationships. This point was well-made in a recent special feature of Alliance Magazine on Learning from Failure. Donika Dimovska of the Jacobs Foundation, guest editor of this feature, points out the advantages of systematic and proactive learning in philanthropy. She also points out “the disconnect we often find between how funders and their grantee partners set expectations and hold each other accountable not only for outcomes but also for learning.” Dimovska wonders “how often do you hear a grantee asking the funder: what did you learn, let alone what and how did you learn from a failure? ‘Failures’ are almost never the result of individual players but are rather the result of the interplay of actions, behaviours and attitudes of several actors operating in complex systems, which is why… engaging in transparent, intentional, evidence-based learning together with our grantee partners can be very powerful.”
There are many ways that funders can engage in (and demonstrate accountability for) systematic learning. They can fund the rigorous gathering of evidence, as noted earlier. They can engage in evaluations, especially developmental evaluations which can help them adjust their own strategies and thinking, using emergent learning approaches. They can be disciplined about testing their own assumptions and hypotheses about the work they want to pursue. They can structure learning among groups of their partners by giving them opportunities for sharing learnings with each other. They can use Pause and Reflect approaches and techniques to systematize their learning and do it collaboratively with grantees. They can create learning agendas. There is no shortages of examples and tools for philanthropic learning. What is needed is a learning “mindset”. Such a mindset is not common in philanthropy. As Donika Dimovska says ruefully, “learning how to learn is the ultimate frontier for many of us”. Yet there are examples of foundations in Europe, the United States and Canada who are adopting this mindset and whose leaders are highly committed to learning. Metcalf, Lawson, Hallman and Bombardier are just four of the Canadian foundations who have accelerated their learning approaches through the pandemic crisis as shown in Approaches to Learning Amid Crises: Reflections from Philanthropy. It’s even more important that these leaders and their colleagues share their learning about learning as widely as possible. When accountability for learning becomes as important as accountability for results, the conversation about the role of philanthropy can begin to shift from exercising power to deploying wisdom.