Richard

Stephanie: I hope to see you at the GEO event next month.

Curtis: Thanks for sharing your blog post.The list best practices to ensure that there is appropriate and effective wielding of power is a good one.

http://interactioninstitute.org/blog/2012/02/02/funder-as-convenor-part-2/

And this is something that we continue to explore through our joint offering with GEO, “Engage for Results.”

Very timely conversation!

Thanks,

Curtis Ogden
Senior Associate
Interaction Institute for Social Change

GEO recently conducted a national survey on foundation practices. The results will be released at our national conference, March 12-14 in Seattle.

One of the key findings is that grantmakers who are goood partners with their grantees–getting feedback, having open conversations with them, engaging them in decisions–are far more likely to provide the types of support that matter most to nonprofits’ ability to achieve meaningful results. This data shows that the value of investing in relationships is not just so we can feel good about one another; investing in relationships leads to smarter grantmaking and better results.

Thank you for bringing this conversation forward. We look forward to continuing the conversation and supporting grantmakers in their efforts to be better partners to their grantees when the GEO community comes to your city next month.

Lori Bartczak
Grantmakers for Effective Organizations

Here’s the thing:

Part of the reason we have to keep revisiting existing concepts in new ways is that folks do indeed “forget” so we must re-discover.

For example, in 1989 (pre-social entrepreneurship’s popularization or Venture Philanthropy’s introduction)I was told by a, uh, major east coast foundation program officer that “if there is one thing we know it is that nonprofits can’t think like businesses, so if you have new money, put it into job training.” He couldn’t even conceive of the notion that at that very time there were, in fact, social workers already taking the “good” part of business thinking and applying it toward attaining their social mission as they saw fit. (In fact, my MSW program–circa 1981– taught from business management texts for exactly this reason: Social workers were in fact using business practices to advance community goals–despite what the foundation exec may have thought…). Later the following spring (1990), we had begun our grantmaking initiative at Roberts Foundation wherein I asked our lead grantees to come together with me once a month to discuss their work, share ideas and lessons, and in the context of this, I would add funding as needed to support our collective efforts. I was describing what we were doing at a foundation executive meeting in SF and I was actually reprimanded by one of my foundation colleagues (from, uh, a major west coast foundation) for “lacking professional distance and objectivity” with regard to my grantees’ work….can you imagine that?

In large part due to the consistently negative response I received from (at that time) the dominant, existing “thinking and practice” within mainstream philanthropy, I (and i would hazard to guess, others…) had to come up with concepts and language which distinguished what we were trying to do from the dominant practices of that period.

I would be among the first to argue that in the now two decades which have passed as these “new” ideas went mainstream they lost something and were not executed with the level of fidelity and consideration some of us initially envisioned, but the thing was that within the context of that day and age they were not only viewed as “new” by many in the mainstream–but did indeed stand in sharp contrast to the dominant practices of that period and were initially largely dismissed.

As so nicely stated by Phil (and I imagine others…) the “problem” with much of the “new” talk is that folks today (in any day?) do not know what they do not know–they are not stupid, but rather simply ignorant with regard to some of the deeper history so well presented by Zunz.

In the face of this ignorance, one has to try to re-frame one’s vision, ideas and practices since simply saying “yes, but… we KNOW this…” doesn’t usually carry much weight against the powers that be and the force of what we supposedly “know” to be true…

My apologies if this is a little muddled–I’m writing at 2:15AM from Abu Dhabi…

best to all and again, great discussion–Thanks!!