OPINION
To Solve Society’s Problems, Grant Makers Need Focus and Patience
By Joel orosz
APHILANTHROPIC PROVERB tells us that “people have problems, but foundations have departments.”
Consider how a large foundation is
apt to assist a failing public-school district blighted by dollar losses as companies and middle-class people flee
to other regions. The foundation announces a five-year, $50-million grant-making project that will be rigorously
evaluated and led by the foundation’s
best and brightest program officers. It
sounds impressive, but the truth is that
foundation ADD has doomed this project even before it starts.
The school system in question has
been in decline since the 1950s. When
social decay is measured in decades,
only a major foundation could believe it
possible to turn things around in five
brief years. Half a decade is, at best,
time enough to gain an understanding
of the complex and multifaceted problems in play, to earn the trust of grant-
LEE CARTER AND LARRY MOSCOW
Diagnosis:
FoundationADD
ees and educators, and to pay for experimental projects that will begin to get
some traction. Five years is certainly
far too brief a time to arrest decline,
or—McGruff-like—take a bite out of
it. And yet, in the attention-challenged
foundation world, five years is considered a long-term commitment. True,
there is always the possibility of providing a second round of grants for another
five years, but the ADD foundation’s inability to focus patiently makes it highly unlikely it will keep giving.
Foundation grant-making efforts
have traditionally been notorious for
being too brief, but in recent years, a
new factor has been added to the mix:
distractibility. Mania for measurement
is the source of the problem. Every self-respecting large foundation now evaluates the stuffing out of its major grant-making programs.
Grant makers lavish time and money
on sophisticated systems of data collection and analysis, with the aim of mar-
Big foundations
respond to social ills
with programs that
are too brief and too
ephemeral.
shaling evidence that the foundation’s
programs are indeed achieving their
outcomes, or rendered in foundationese,
“moving the needle.”
What could possibly be wrong with
carefully measuring progress and ob-
jectively documenting results? Only
this: Foundations afflicted with ADD
always misinterpret the meaning of
the results. The findings of a five-year
evaluation of public-school grants will
be identical to the findings of every five-
year evaluation everywhere, for which
the evaluator’s assessment can always
be reduced to a single sentence. “This
initiative is off to a promising start, but
only time will tell if it can deliver the
desired outcomes.”
Most thoughtful people would consid-
er this to constitute a recommendation
for a second five-year round of money to
give the project time needed to mature
and fulfill its promise. To ADD-addled
foundation leaders, however, the data
suggest a very different conclusion: “We
didn’t get the outcomes we wanted, so
let’s defund this school initiative and
find another one to support somewhere
else.”
Instead of sticking with their prom-
ising grantees, foundation leaders are
distracted by the (illusory) prospect of
quicker results offered by other school
districts. For the school system that
lost its grants, it was a cruel game of
bait-and-switch, because the foundation
offered support for too brief a time to
deliver results, all the while carefully
measuring how much the grantees fell
short of the impossible timeline, and
then the foundation got distracted and
gave money to others.
Nonprofits Must Tell Donors About Solutions if They Expect to Win the Public’s Trust
WE’RE LIVING in a post-trust era. And it’s that fact—not merely a faltering economy or a dysfunctional political system—that’s led
to a tough few years for nonprofit institutions.
The questions of how we got here and
who is responsible are up for debate.
What isn’t up for debate is that government is seen as dangerously partisan
and ineffectual.
Large financial firms are seen as
predators, not partners. And many view
the big institutions that used to help define and unite us—churches, schools,
the news media—with skepticism, if not
outright scorn.
Unfortunately, nonprofits aren’t immune from the public’s growing distrust toward all things big. Causes that
used to be fairly uncontroversial, like
Head Start and Planned Parenthood,
are now flashpoints in our national debates. As Americans have grown more
suspicious of each other’s motives and
convinced that our problems are intractable, the ability of nonprofits to marshal wide swaths of public support has
diminished.
True, reports suggest that charita-
ble giving is finally on the rise again,
but most nonprofit organizations have
learned the hard way that we’re living
in a different world. Successfully nav-
igating these uncharted waters of the
post-trust era is about much more than
just economics. It’s about absorbing
how potential donors’ worldviews have
changed and what we must do to con-
tinue to thrive.
rather than talking about
helping the “poor,”
nonprofits must adopt
the language
of positive action.
they can ask donors for money to help
solve them, but they should do so cautiously.
Chances are that the people a non-
profit seeks out for help already know
that the issues it is fighting for are real.
What they wonder is whether the orga-
nization can really do anything about it.
Yes, child poverty and cleft palates are
terrible, but how will your group make
a meaningful difference?
