Duke Sanford School of Public Policy

Even under normal circumstances, it can be tricky for foundations to change a grantmaking strategy once it’s launched (hence all the learned writing on “mid-course correction” and “exit strategies,” which has provided a generation of consulting fees for people like me). Yet strategic changes become even harder when a foundation’s life expectancy comes down to single digits. At that point, the time for making adjustments is short, and the risk of a rushed or haphazard course-correction rises steeply. It becomes all too easy, in the course of trying to renovate a program in its final years, to discover that you’ve accidentally dismembered it.

"Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." —Samuel Johnson, as reported by James Boswell in Life of Johnson.

With the publication of the second annual report on spend-down at the AVI CHAI Foundation, Tony Proscio and I have had the opportunity to reflect on some of the lessons that we, as well as the trustees and staff at AVI CHAI, have learned over the first two years of the project.

Yesterday I wrote a bit about the Strategy Landscape, an innovation that the Monitor Institute has been developing to help funders better “understand their context”—one of the 10 next practice areas we discuss in our new report, What’s Next for Philanthropy. The next practices represent principles and behaviors that are particularly well suited to the more networked, dynamic, and interdependent landscape of public problem solving that is now emerging. They’re approaches that we believe have the potential to become the widely accepted best practices of tomorrow.

Before I dive into some of the different “next practices” highlighted yesterday that we think may become important parts of philanthropy’s future, I wanted to first say a few words about one of the key pieces of what I think it’ll actually take for funders to start acting bigger and adapting better over the next decade.

When the Monitor Institute first started its exploration of the evolving “future of philanthropy” ten years ago, I was one of its funders, a program officer at the Packard Foundation. A big part of what we were trying to do was to create an urgency and an awareness that the world around philanthropy was changing, and that if philanthropy was going to remain relevant and achieve its potential in the coming years,

I want to thank my friends at Duke University for letting me serve as guest blogger on the Intrepid Philanthropist this past week. Offering unsolicited advice to the Friends of Buffett and Gates (FOBGs) as they consider how to make a splash with their philanthropy has been more fun than I'd imagined. And it’s reminded me of all the great things that are happening in this field, and of all the smart thinking grantmakers are doing about how best to put their philanthropic resources to work.

It’s great news that Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates are asking

I’d like to conclude my stint as an “Intrepid Philanthropist” by asking a question I have been putting for several years: Whatever became of the “learned foundation”?&

Tactical Philanthropy’s Sean Stannard-Stockton has written an interesting

Since publishing my book Strategic Giving, I have traveled around the country and abroad talking