About two years ago CSPCS, along with the Fuqua School's Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) and the Bridgespan Group, hosted a conference at Duke titled "Scaling Social Impact: What We Know and What We Need to Know." (Session summaries of the conference can be found here.) Out of that conference came a book edited by CASE's Paul Bloom and our own Edward Skloot, Scaling Social Impact: New Thinking
In today's Chronicle of Philanthropy, Thomas Tierney and the Center's Faculty Chair, Joel Fleishman, discuss the recent announcement that 40 very wealthy individuals and families, at the encouragement of Bill and Melinda Gates, have taken the Giving Pledge, promising to donate half their wealth to good causes.
I focused last week on a couple of the ways that funders can begin to “act bigger” in today’s more networked and interconnected landscape for public problem solving. But I want to also give a quick preview of the other major way in which we believe funders will need to improve over the coming decade: “adapting better.”
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.
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,
the field—and the institutions and individuals within it—were going to need to change too.
The Manchester Bidwell Corporation uses arts, education, and job training to transform communities and improve people’s lives. Based on its success in its hometown of Pittsburgh, the organization has opened new arts and technology training centers in Cincinnati, Grand Rapids, and San Francisco—and it is actively looking for other replication sites.
The same is true in philanthropy as in life: when we want answers, we tend to go to people we believe are the experts on a given topic. The more money we have at our disposal, the more likely we are to seek out expert advice.
Ask a group of nonprofit leaders what bugs them most in their dealings with foundations, and I’ll bet you dollars-to-donuts someone will mention the onerous administrative requirements tied to many grants. For the Friends of Buffett and Gates (FOBGs) who are considering the challenge to give away half of their wealth, I therefore have a simple request: Make sure the application and reporting processes you create are guided by practicality and mutual need, rather than your lawyers’ cautionary tales.
It’s great news that Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates are asking their billionaire peers to give away half their wealth. To the extent that people heed the call, we could see the launch of several more billion-dollar foundations and a flood of new philanthropic dollars in the years ahead.
