About the margins
One of the temptations that face foundations is to settle back after a few years, and rest on one’s laurels. We can stop growing, changing, learning. We learn to anticipate the grantseeking rhythms, the approaches and the asks. It is gratifying to give grants to many important initiatives – projects need our support, and we see concrete results from our partnerships. But does this mean we are doing a good job? Are we achieving solid gains towards a noteworthy purpose?
This past year we shut off the tap for new grants after ten years of aggressive funding. During this period of fallowness we were grateful for the opportunity to suspend the grantmaking cycle, evaluate past decisions, and consider what unique niche could Bridgeway fill as an engaged funding partner to charities in Canada. This reflection period has allowed us to more accurately articulate a place for Bridgeway to operate most effectively. We believe that we offer our best to organizations that are learning and serving at the margins.
But where are the margins? To answer this question, consider your organization and answer these two questions: Where are you headed? and Who is being served?
We believe a Bridgeway grant is most productive when applied to two types of margins. First, there is a margin at the edge of an organization’s advance forward. This is what we would call a strategic margin. Second, there is a margin at the rim of an organization’s service. We call this the outreach margin.
A strategic margin is the place in your organization that is on the leading edge of your movement forward to achieve your strategic objectives. It is the new pilot project, the expanded initiative, or the fresh approach. It is the place between your organizational dream and reality of why you need to achieve this dream.
An outreach margin is the place where your organization touches those it strives to serve. These margins are the places where light penetrates darkness or where good confronts evil. Our world is filled with places of great need and significant opportunity. It is offering hope and engagement in a place where despair and alienation is more familiar. The outreach margin is concerned with social and spiritual transformation.
With this new emphasis, Bridgeway is seeking to discover and partner with organizations which are prepared to stretch beyond themselves to move into these strategic and outreach margins.
Strong and helpful post, Mark. As always….
Wow that was quick! You commented just after I posted it!!
One of the things the foundation I am working with did yesterday (in addition to the free training they provide, much like what you are proposing for Brigeway) was to send an email to all it’s grantees/partners.
The email is protected but the gist of it was:
“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.
Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?
Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. Jesus. (Matthew 6ff)”
and it ended with them telling us they were PRAYING for us.
THIS is philanthropy in action.
Those are great verses, especially with today’s financial climate.
Well, yes, but more importantly, it’s who SENT the verses. In looking at the gap between the “givers” and the “askers” it heartens me to know end to see that on “giver” really “gets” that we’re in this TOGETHER.
It’s THAT shift in funding focus I find so wonderful.