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September Must-Reads

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This month, we read transparent accounts from the Ford Foundation’s Megan Morrison and Chris Cardona, who shared the foundation’s journey addressing its flawed approach to collecting grantee diversity data, and Laura Weidman Powers, who wrote about why and how she stepped down as Code2040 CEO. We also read about the importance of getting out the vote, tensions in philanthropy and a report on young professionals in philanthropy.

1. Making It Count: The Evolution of the Ford Foundation’s Diversity Data Collection

EQUITY | Center for Effective Philanthropy | 10-minute read

When the Ford Foundation revisited its grantmaking process, it also revisited the questions it asks applicants and grantees about diversity. In this blog post, the foundation shares its journey identifying flaws in its previous approach to gathering grantee diversity data, how it now collects and analyzes the data, and what it’s learning. This journey also led the foundation to turn the spotlight on itself and begin an internal diversity, equity and inclusion audit.

2. How to Know When It’s Time to Go

LEADERSHIP | LinkedIn Pulse | 11-minute read

In a powerfully transparent blog post, Code2040 cofounder Laura Weidman Powers shares the story of why and how she stepped down as the organization’s CEO. She writes openly about the pressure and loneliness that can come with leadership, how she prepared for a successor and how she knew when the organization’s success no longer depended on her leadership.

3. Stop Sitting on the Sidelines, Nonprofits, and Get Out the Vote

ADVOCACY | The Chronicle of Philanthropy | 4-minute read

Outcomes of the November midterm elections will impact the work of nonprofits. More than ever, nonprofits should—and legally can—encourage and educate voters this year, argues Billy Shore, the founder of Share Our Strength and Community Wealth Partners. (For more resources on how foundations can effectively and legally support voting and advocacy, explore the Council on Foundations’ Advocacy Toolkit and Bolder Advocacy’s resources for foundations supporting advocacy.)

4. Gospels of Giving for the New Gilded Age

EQUITY | New Yorker | 15-minute read

Is philanthropy solving problems or creating new ones? Should philanthropists be focused on doing more good or doing less harm? Starting with a description of Andrew Carnegie’s approach to donating his wealth while cutting wages for employees, the writer of this article considers these questions through four pieces of literature, including the recently published “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World” by Anand Giridharadas.

5. Dissonance & Disconnects: How entry- and mid-level foundation staff see their futures, their institutions and their field 

SECTOR TRENDS | Emerging Leaders in Philanthropy | 20-minute read 

This report by Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy shares findings from a 2017 survey about early- and mid-level foundation staff members’ thoughts, feelings and experiences in philanthropy. The survey results reveal that:

  • 55 percent of young professionals in philanthropy see themselves leaving philanthropy within the next five years
  • 6 percent see a clear path to advance from their current positions within their institutions
  • 51 percent think philanthropy is an effective player in social change
  • 21 percent think the culture of philanthropy is inclusive of all backgrounds
  • 40 percent think their institutions are in touch with the needs of the communities they support

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To Go Further, Get Serious About Culture

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This blog was originally posted on the Collective Impact Forum blog. See the original post here.

We’ve all witnessed the importance of culture in organizations. Many leaders have seen their efforts fall apart because their team wasn’t aligned or power dynamics impeded their progress. On the other hand, others have been part of teams that built such a deep sense of trust that they took greater risks and ultimately achieved greater change.

Culture can speed up or slow down progress because, at the end of the day, we’re complex humans working with other complex humans. These same dynamics are at play in collaborative efforts such as collective impact initiatives. If we want to be successful at collective impact, stakeholders must define and tend to a shared culture across the collaborative.

While many of us can attest to the importance of culture from our experience working inside organizations, our research at Community Wealth Partners backs it up. When we examined various transformational initiatives that involved multiple stakeholders, including the anti-malaria movement and anti-smoking movement, in every instance, an intentional culture emerged as a necessary element in achieving dramatic change. And though each culture will be unique, the cultures in these change-making initiatives shared several characteristics:

  • A focus on outcomes
  • Transparency
  • Authenticity
  • Collaboration and partnership
  • Equity and inclusion
  • Continuous learning and improvement
  • Openness to risk and change

Whether your collective is newly formed or has worked together for years, you can take concrete steps to build, strengthen and maintain culture.

How to Build Culture in a Collective

Culture is defined as the “way we do things around here” or, more formally, the values (what we care about) and behaviors (specific actions to live out the values) that guide how we interact. Explicitly stating values and behaviors can help inform a group’s decisions and how individuals interact with each other. It can prove particularly important in moments of tension, grounding groups in shared values and helping them productively work through conflict.

A first step in getting intentional about culture is to start a conversation about what core values guide the group’s collaboration. You’ll want just a few values, ideally no more than five. The clearer and more concise they are, the easier they will be for members of the collective to remember. For example, one of the Arizona Early Childhood Alliance’s values is “respectful dialogue”—it’s short, sweet and easy to recall.

The next step is determining how these values can be lived out through behaviors. While many groups recognize the importance of clarifying their values, few articulate associated behaviors. Yet getting detailed on what, exactly, collaborative members can do to live out values is crucial to turning lofty ideas into clear action. When articulating behaviors, make sure to keep the group’s broader goals in mind and tie behaviors to the outcomes you’re seeking. Group members might start a discussion about behaviors by asking themselves: What are the behaviors I expect of my partners and to which I’m also willing to hold myself accountable? One of the ways the Arizona Early Childhood Alliance wanted to demonstrate their value of “respectful dialogue” was to “seek first to understand and then to be understood.” Aligning on these behaviors is important, but perhaps even more critical is building commitment among all group members to hold themselves and each other accountable to them.

Adapted from the Stanford Social Innovation Review article “Cocreating a Change-Making Culture.”

These conversations provide a great opportunity to address power dynamics, which can limit a group’s progress. Power dynamics inevitably exist—between funders and grantees or around race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, socioeconomic status and other identities. As a group, discuss structures that might help you recognize, equalize and manage power dynamics. For example, the Kauffman Foundation’s Early Education Funders Collaborative adopted a one-vote policy in which all funders, regardless of the size of their grant, would have the same decision-making power. Other collaboratives have created shared-leadership structures and rotating leadership roles.

How to Maintain Culture

Culture-building isn’t a task or onetime project. You must continually nurture culture and revisit it. It helps to create mechanisms to recognize when the culture is being lived out and when the group falls short. This might include shout-outs in meetings where team members recognize moments in which they’ve seen each other uphold the values or a space for team members to share feedback with each other. The culture will be tested as the group welcomes new members, shifts its strategies and responds to new dynamics. As new members join the collective, you’ll also want to give them an opportunity to shape and commit to the culture. It also helps to revisit the behaviors and ensure they’re leading to the collaborative’s desired results. We’ve found it helpful to go through the process of revisiting values and behaviors as often as every three years.

When it comes down to it, culture is often seen as a nice-to-have, yet we believe culture is critical if a group hopes to truly transform communities. To make the change we seek through collective impact initiatives, we have to do the hard and rewarding work of co-creating a strong culture.

For more resources on culture, take a look at the SSIR article “Cocreating a Change-Making Culture,” the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations Culture Resource Guide and the Collective Impact Forum blog post The Culture of Collective Impact by Paul Schmitz.

To read the original post, head over to the Collective Impact Forum blog.

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August Must-Reads 2018

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Each month, we gather five new resources that can help us work smarter, think more deeply, and more effectively contribute to the change we seek. This month’s reads include initial results from the Ford Foundation’s BUILD initiative, how Democracy Fund is adapting its strategies in changing times, the Meyer Foundation’s data showing the importance of leadership development, reasons that Native American organizations and causes are chronically underfunded, and economists’ arguments against randomized control trials.

 

1. One of the Country’s Largest Foundations is Trying to Change How Philanthropy Works

STRATEGY | Inside Philanthropy | 13-minute read

The Ford Foundation’s BUILD initiative is changing how the foundation works by providing social justice nonprofits with long-term grants for general operating support and organizational strengthening. Two years in, BUILD is starting to see positive results: organizations are planning and collaborating in ways they never could before. This blog post shares some early results and the BUILD director Kathy Reich’s hope to make this type of grantmaking the status quo not just for the foundation but for the whole philanthropic sector.

2. Adapting Long-term Strategies in Times of Profound Change

STRATEGY | Stanford Social Innovation Review | 6-minute read

Imagine you carefully crafted a set of long-term strategies, and then something happens to change the context in which you’re working. How can you shift your approach to this new context? After the U.S. presidential election, Democracy Fund—like many organizations—grappled with this situation. The foundation had just completed a two-year planning process when the election brought upheaval around the very issues they chose to focus on (elections, governance and the public square). In this blog post, Democracy Fund shares what they’ve learned and three ways other foundations can equip themselves to better respond to changing contexts.

3. How Investing in People Directly Supports Programs

CAPACITY BUILDING | Fund the People | 4-minute read

It may seem wise to prioritize capacity building for fundraising over leadership development, especially for organizations with tight budgets. And yet, data from the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation’s capacity-building investments show that non-financial related capacity building had a greater positive impact on organizations’ revenue. The Meyer Foundation president and CEO Nicky Goren shares why professional and leadership development is core to an organization’s ability to produce better and bigger results.

4. New First Nations Report Explores Why Philanthropy Continues to Underfund Native American Causes

EQUITY | Business Insider | 4-minute read

Large foundations’ giving to Native American organizations and causes is declining. This report by First Nations Development Institute shares what might be leading to the chronic underfunding of Native American communities and causes. In addition to elevating several underlying reasons and addressing common misconceptions about Native American communities, the report also includes recommendations for both foundations and nonprofits, including the importance of making site visits and supporting Native Americans’ careers in philanthropy.

5. The Foreign Aid System Is Broken. Randomized Control Trials Won’t Fix It.

EVALUATION | Bright Magazine | 8-minute read

Evaluating impact through randomized control trials may work well in medicine, but not in social change, argues Barbara Harriss-White, one of 15 leading economists—including three Nobel Prize winners—who wrote a letter speaking out against “aid effectiveness.” In this interview, she shares why the group thinks randomized control trials won’t help us address systemic root problems and might cause more harm than good.

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July Must-Reads

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Each month, we gather five new resources that can help us work smarter, think more deeply and more effectively contribute to the change we seek. This month’s reads cover what went wrong in a global effort to reduce open-fire cooking, a conversation about the role of data and foundations in fighting racism, how organizations can create a strong culture, trends in charitable giving, and how collaborations can navigate challenges in sharing data.

1. Undercooked: An Expensive Push to Save Lives and Protect the Planet Falls Short

STRATEGY | ProPublica | 18-minute read

After eight years and $75 million, efforts by the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves have seen only modest progress. The stoves distributed haven’t effectively reduced users’ risk of deadly illnesses, if they’re used at all, and the environmental impact of cooking fires has proven to be less harmful than initially thought. So what went wrong? And what can we learn from this effort? This article raises valuable questions we can ask ourselves as we seek to strengthen our own change efforts.

2. Conversation about Data and Racism

EQUITY | Chronicle of Philanthropy & Twitter Feed

Philanthropy’s Racism Problem Stems From Too Little Data

(4-minute read) To guide their actions on diversity, equity and inclusion, foundations need to understand the demographics of the organizations and communities they’re granting to (or not), say Michelle Greanias and Melissa Sines of PEAK Grantmaking.

Response from Jennifer Lentfer

(1-minute read) Yes, and while data is important, foundations must also question their power and how they might exacerbate inequalities in asking for this information, says Jennifer Lentfer of Thousand Currents.

3. How Leaders Can Strengthen Their Organizational Culture

CULTURE | Stanford Social Innovation Review | 7-minute read 

The social sector isn’t immune to toxic individuals and cultures. To counter that, we should not only hold ourselves accountable for what we accomplish, but also for how we accomplish it, argues Alexa Cortes Culwell of Open Impact. Leaders should ask four questions: 1) Are your organization’s values and cultural norms explicitly stated? 2) Does your organization have policies in place to ensure that everyone, especially top leadership, is held accountable? 3) Does your organization have policies in place to support diversity, equity and inclusion at all levels? And 4) Does your revenue model take into account fair and equitable employee compensation? For more on creating a strong culture, including 10 steps to guide your culture efforts, take a look at our article, “Cocreating a Change-Making Culture.”

4. 6 Signs of Trouble Ahead in Charitable Giving

SECTOR TRENDS | Chronicle of Philanthropy | 2-minute read 

Although charitable giving was at its highest in 2017, several trends suggest the future of philanthropy might be shaky. The percentage of Americans who donate is declining among every age group, income level and education level, leaving nonprofits to increasingly rely on wealthy individuals. At the same time, groups are getting creative in how they raise money.

5. Data Sharing Within Cross-Sector Collaborations

COLLABORATION | The BUILD Health Challenge | 51-minute read 

We know how important data is in collective efforts to improve community health, but we may not agree on how to use it. This report examines the five most common data challenges from the BUILD Health Challenge cohort: 1) HIPAA concerns, 2) logistics of sharing data across different data systems, 3) language differences between partners, 4) lack of experience with data, and 5) finding methods or metrics to evaluate interventions. It includes examples of how others tackled these challenges, takeaways, tools and best practices.

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June Must-Reads 2018

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Each month, we gather five new resources that can help us work smarter, think more deeply and more effectively create the change we want to see in this complex world. This month’s reads cover ways funders can support refugees and asylum seekers, equitable systems change, lessons from capacity-building cohorts, how grantmakers can help nonprofits measure impact and reflections on civil society today.

1. Philanthropic Strategies to Support Refugees and Asylum Seekers

STRATEGY | Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees

This new report comes at a crucial time as needs surge among refugees, asylum seekers and unaccompanied children. In it, you’ll find 10 case studies of how grantmakers—including Open Society Foundations, Weingart Foundation, Robin Hood and others of various structures, sizes and geographic priorities—are supporting newcomers. Their strategies shed light on the diverse ways grantmakers can take a more active role, while the lessons learned and recommendations highlight the need for grantmakers to collaborate, think systemically, take holistic approaches, leverage their convening power and more.

2. Systems Change with an Equity Lens: Community Interventions that Shift Power and Center Race

EQUITY | Management Assistance Group and Building Movement Project

As we see more attention to racism and other injustices, we’re also seeing greater urgency and commitment to not only improve systems but disrupt and transform them. Yet dominant approaches to systems change typically don’t integrate an intentional racial equity lens. This webinar introduces a framework with four key components that distinguish systems change with an equity lens from other systems change efforts and features speakers Lauren Padilla-Valverde, Senior Program Manager at the California Endowment, and Reverend Joan C. Ross of the North End Woodward Community Coalition.

3. Learning Together: Building Capacity and Relationships

CAPACITY BUILDING | David and Lucile Packard Foundation

For the past five years, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation has worked with grantees and other funders to co-design capacity-building cohorts. Based on a recent evaluation, those cohorts are working: 99 percent of participants said their capacity in the focus area increased as a result of participating in the cohort project, and 100 percent of participants reported that they benefited from the peer-learning format. Along with their evaluation results, the foundation shares five recommendations that emerged for other funders planning cohort-based capacity building projects.

4. 8 Ways Grantmakers Can Help Nonprofits Measure Impact

LEARNING & EVALUATION | Chronicle of Philanthropy

Using evaluation data to assess long-term change and learn for improvement requires a shift for many grantmakers and nonprofits who are more accustomed to using data to report on programmatic outcomes as an accountability measure. Organizations need time, skill and money to make this shift, and experts say grantmakers aren’t providing the level of support that would help nonprofits use evaluation as a tool for learning and improvement. This resource shares eight ways grantmakers can help organizations measure—and maximize—their impact.

5. Civil Society for the 21st Century

SECTOR TRENDS | Stanford Social Innovation Review

In this new Independent Sector–led series, contributing authors share their thoughts on civil society, defined as the vast, undefined space between the individual and the state. What does it look like today for individuals to organize around the things that matter to them and advance shared goals? The series will explore civil society and its origins, evolution, boundaries, blind spots, values, variety, obstacles and opportunities.

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May Must-Reads 2018

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Each month, we’ll be gathering five new resources that can help us work smarter, think more deeply, and create the change we want to see in this complex world. This month’s reads cover equitable grantmaking, impact evaluations, capacity building in a time of disruption, an argument against fairness, and framing issues to make progress.

1. Power Moves

EQUITY | National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy

This toolkit is a very thorough, actionable resource to guide foundations in examining how well they build, share and wield power. To truly strive for and advance equity and justice, the toolkit states, you have to understand your own power and privilege. The toolkit includes best practices, sample questions to gather data and solicit feedback, discussion guides, and next steps and tools for implementing changes.

2. Bracing for a Downturn: Nonprofits, Charitable Deduction Worries, and How Foundations Can Help

STRATEGY | The Center for Effective Philanthropy

This survey shows how nonprofit and foundation leaders view the implications of the 2018 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. In short, most of them are concerned that charitable giving might go down. The survey also highlights suggestions for how foundations can help nonprofits such as supporting their efforts to raise money and be financially sustainable, helping them and their donors understand the effects of this legislation, and promoting the importance of nonprofits.

3. The New Normal: Capacity Building During a Time of Disruption

CAPACITY BUILDING | Open Impact 

How is the current economic and political environment impacting the capacity building needs of social change leaders, nonprofits, networks and movements? How are funders responding to these changing needs, and how can they better support this work going forward? This new report shares findings on what nonprofits need most right now and recommendations for how nonprofits and foundations can meet those needs.

4. Ten Reasons Not to Measure Impact—and What to Do Instead

LEARNING & EVALUATION | University of Washington and Northwestern University

Subscription Required – Impact evaluations—while important—are only a good investment in the right circumstances, argue the authors in this Stanford Social Innovation Review article. When circumstances aren’t right, organizations must build an internal culture in which the right data are regularly collected, analyzed and applied. For more on how to build this type of culture, take a look at our blog post on creating a culture of learning through evaluation.

5. Picture This: How We Frame Issues Matters for Social Change

STRATEGY | The Communications Network and FrameWorks Institute 

The way we frame issues profoundly influences our understanding of them and how we approach solutions. This Stanford Social Innovation Review series shares how framing issues of gun violence, sexual violence, immigration, climate change, aging, addiction and housing have helped spark meaningful dialogues and drive change. As we’ve found in our own research, communications must be viewed as a critical piece of strategy in order to make large-scale change.

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