Open hands

We’re gearing up for our big event of the year: the annual RL Petersen Awards for Non-Profit Innovation.  Wednesday is the day, and I am busy writing the script, and working out last minute details. 

We have a full day planned - starting with an afternoon capacity building workshop, then dinner for a selected group, then the awards evening, and topping it all off with a coffeehouse by Jacob & Lily … that creative band I met last year who graciously agreed to come from Winnipeg and play for us.  (Karla calls me her soccer dad.)

I literally couldn’t do this without the comprehensive support from Linda and Brent who have filled in the gaps and will make the whole event run smoothly.  We’re also grateful for the support of the University of Waterloo School of Architecture.  Ever since our donation towards relocating the school to downtown Cambridge several years back, they have offered us complimentary use of their facility for this annual event.  It is MUCH appreciated.

Yesterday Brent and I spent the afternoon continuing our strategic planning process for the next phase of our evolution as a foundation.  One of our discussions centred around the idea of continuing to fund one-off projects. 

When we began to formalize our foundation operations seven years ago, we went from funding general operating support with a blank cheque approach to much greater definition and rigour around project-based funding.  This was a necessary step in our learning.   We needed to introduce accountability and precision to our granting.  We wanted to measure tangible results. 

But the pitfalls of this approach force charities to remain on a tight leash.  There are strings attached, and the basic assumption at work seems to be ‘we don’t trust you to get it right, so you have to do it our way’.  But I wonder if we foundations really are the experts, or just the ones with the money?  Should we not trust those closer to the grassroots?  As well, how well can we really measure social and spiritual transformation, which is our end game?

When I came home last night, an email awaited from my friend Donnie with a link to (yet another) NY Times article, this one entitled Can Foundations Take the Long View Again?  I almost wondered if Denise Caruso, the journalist, had some sort of listening device at our meeting today.  She writes:

“In the 1980s and early 1990s, there was a huge push for private philanthropy to be more accountable and to spend more time being goal-driven,” said Kathleen Enright, the executive director of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, a Washington-based coalition of foundations that promotes ways to improve nonprofit results.

Advisers and trustees compelled foundations to redirect their unrestricted grants to more discrete, short-term projects — for example, distributing mosquito nets in malaria regions — that would deliver a measurable bang for the buck.

“The reason the nonprofit sector exists at all is because it can fund and invest in social issues that the for-profit market can’t touch because they can’t be measured,” said Paul Shoemaker, a former Microsoft employee and entrepreneur who is now executive director of the Seattle affiliate of Social Venture Partners International, a philanthropic network. “The nonprofit ‘market’ is not designed to be efficient in that way. Yet we’re applying the same efficiency metrics to both sectors.”

As a consequence, when foundations switched to project-based accounting, they forced grantees to sacrifice long-term effectiveness for short-term efficiency, Ms. Enright said. Nonprofits could no longer afford to focus on important strategic activities like advocacy or working for social change, which require “deep resources and the ability to change tactics overnight if the situation demands it,” she said.

I had an interesting conversation this morning with Lynn Harris who is doing some research on foundation funding of leadership development for Private Foundations Canada.  I told her about our own journey in funding leadership development - starting quite broadly and fuzzily by opening up the door to all kinds of organizational and program-related capacity building initiatives, which led, mainly, to my frustration at understanding what kind of impact we were having through our grants. 

This led us to narrow our leadership emphasis to professional development for senior staff, around the framework we developed in a request for proposals announced late last fall, and granted this spring - see here and here.   It’s too early to determine what kind of impact we will generate through this initiative, but I believe it will be a more strategic deployment of our finances.

I look forward to reading her report. 

Thanks M for your comment.  Interesting you should mention that, as this has been a thought of mine for the past day as well.  So I went to your blog, and found you are looking for feedback for your own foundation - anyone reading this: please go to M’s post called The Decline Truth - Questions for Nonprofits and give her input on what kind of feedback you would prefer to receive from foundations.  As M gets the results, I will also post them here.

The reason I’ve been thinking about feedback is that yesterday I met with an organization that we had declined.  The development officer had set up a meeting with me for coffee, and I spent time (approx 1.5 hours) outlining why we did not fund the organization.  It was a valuable conversation.  Hard, yes.  But constructive, I hope.

She then asked me about other foundations who she had approached for funding.  Most of them had not even responded to her letter of inquiry.  In one case, she sought feedback three times, and on the third time finally received a standard form letter in response. 

Most smaller family foundations aren’t equipped for responding to the extent we do.  In most of these cases, I suspect family members are volunteering their own time, they often have existing linkages to charities with whom they have great affection and interest in funding and being involved, and adding more relationships on top of the ones we are already managing is just too complicated. 

Sean Stannard-Stockton in his blog Tactical Philanthropy has been taking the temperature of his readers regarding these issues.  See the following posts: Feedback for Fundraisers, Philanthropy Debate Conclusion, and Philanthropy Debate Questionnaire.  As I read through them, I realize there are a number of themes being developed, but one, at least, is how we as foundations give feedback.

My journey today kept me up late tonight, as I met new friends and heard a new twist on living from Jacob & Lily.  J&L are a Winnipeg-based band (why does all great Canadian music originate in the ‘Peg?), and they live in a trailer and do gigs at pubs throughout Canada and the US, like Red Rooster in Burlington, where I met them tonight.

Jacob & Lily (the band) are really Karla and Gary and Caleb (the people).  They were seeking some ideas from me regarding growing a sustainable charitable organization (as artists, this is important!).  But I left tonight feeling as if they had given me much more than I had given them.

Karla’s voice is Sarah MacLaughlin-ish … airy, haunting, spiritual.  And their music takes you to places you’ve never been.  Karla’s last song had to do with finding a treasure in a field, then selling all you had to buy the field.  What are we willing to lose, in order to gain?

Click here for Jacob & Lily’s blog.

My friend Wayne sent me this press release which reports on a study called “Paying for Overhead”, published by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University and the Aspen Institute’s Nonprofit Sector and Philanthropy Program.   It states:

The findings reflect longstanding tensions in the nonprofit sector. On the one hand is the desire of many foundations to incubate new solutions, coupled with concern that providing long-term and/or general operating support may harm nonprofits by creating dependence on foundation funding. On the other hand are concerns that foundation overhead funding that is too little or too brief may harm nonprofits by risking inefficiency or reduced effectiveness.

“This study demonstrates the need for better communication between nonprofits and foundations about these issues,” said Eugene R. Tempel, executive director of the Center on Philanthropy. “Nonprofits should more fully explore foundations’ willingness to fund administrative costs. And given the short duration of much foundation funding, nonprofits and foundations together should also consider ways that foundations may be able to help nonprofits identify and develop other sustainable sources of overhead support.”

At Bridgeway we have tried to deal with this tension by creating two funds.  One, the Innovation Fund, supports new, well-defined initiatives for up to a three year period.  The other, the Capacity Building Fund, allocates funding towards back office expenses for up to an equal period of time.  However, capacity building funding is awarded primarily to organizations with which we have a longer relationship and particular interest in seeing them prosper.

Tomorrow is one of the biggest days of the year for me and for Bridgeway.  It’s really the main event of the year, and we invite the public to come and celebrate with us.  We’ve identified eight organizations (of an original 69 to select from) that are really innovative, and tomorrow three of them are announced as winners for 2007.  Two honourable mentions receive $5,000 towards their general fund, and the winner is awarded $25,000.  It’s kind of like Oscar night for Canadian Christian charities.

The purpose of the award is to stimulate best practices towards innovative programming solutions done by Canadian Christian charities.   Since the award is named after my dad, I guess we could call them the Reggies.

One thing I like about these awards is that we have an independent Awards Committee (ie. non-family members) who are tasked with selecting the top three winners according to five criteria: innovation, strategy, impact, clear outcomes, and transformation.  So this year we have Lorna Dueck, John Pellowe, and Jamie McIntosh.  (Both Lorna and John have posted on this blog, caught up in the Statements of Faith discussion.)

We have a full house of confirmed attendees - 130 - but more will likely show up and for latecomers it will be standing room only.   I love our venue where we have been having the award for the past three years (at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, Cambridge Campus), but if we keep growing we will have to consider moving to a larger space.  UW doesn’t charge Bridgeway for this space as a previous Bridgeway grant to the School of Architecture gives us some special privileges.

We also have a maxed-out afternoon capacity building workshop at which Brent Fearon will moderate a discussion between Financiers and Fundraisers.  Should be great!!

I’m one of the only ones who already knows which winners have been selected (someone had to order the trophies!), and it’s hard not to let out the news.  But suffice it to say, the evening is full of surprises.  I’ll post the results here and give commentary on them in the next few postings.

Here’s a new voice.  Trista Harris is a Program Officer for a Minnesota community foundation.  She writes a post entitled Advice to Those New in the Foundation Field, in her blog New Voices of Philanthropy. 

I have just completed my first year as a program officer at a community foundation. Being a new Foundation staff member is really uncharted territory. There isn’t a handbook that tells you how to be an effective program officer and everyone seems to approach his or her position from a different perspective. I’ve made it my personal mission to try to demystify the foundation field for new foundation staff, prospective foundation staff, grant seekers, and most importantly for myself. In that vein, I have developed 6 pieces of advice for those new to the field that I hope makes your entrance into the foundation field a little less hazy.

Those six pieces of advice include:

1. Don’t believe the hype 
2. Treat grantees with the respect and reverence that they deserve
3. Expand your professional network
4. Get some support
5. Never stop learning
6. Extend your hand to those that are interested in the field

Click here for her thoughts on each one of the six items.

I felt much the same as Trista when I started in this role 6 1/2 years ago.   There’s not a lot of places to go for support or learning in this field.  I’m happy to report here, though, that I was recently accepted into Stanford Graduate School of Business — Executive Program for Philanthropy Leaders.   After ending last quarter with a round of professional development grants for 20 different charities, I also had an application of my own into Stanford.  Two weeks ago I was accepted into the program, and look forward to how it will build me in future years.