I apologize up front for sounding like a grantee, but as someone new to the foundation community, the bulk of my professional career and, frankly, my life has been impacted by grant making in some way or another. As a child, I along with my single mother were supported by the Jane Addams Hull House, one of Chicago’s largest not-for-profit social welfare organizations, while we lived in a notorious public housing facility (Cabrini Greens). In middle school, I participated in summer enrichment programs, learning about computer programming and Shakespeare. High school was facilitated through a scholarship to a private school literally on the other side of town (3 buses and a subway ride away). College and post-grad educations were supported through the National Merit Scholarship provided by CIT (a financial holding company) and financial aid provided by donors to Princeton University and Columbia Law School. I should not be surprised that the course of my career would steer towards nonprofit work to provide services and advocacy on behalf of kids like I was and communities like mine.
Looking back on my journey both personally and professionally, I will let you in on how we – foundations and funders – look from the other side of the wall of philanthropy. I say wall since we seem remote and walled in to our grantees, and now that I am on the other side, I wonder why we got to this point given our humanitarian desires and intentions. I say this to let you know how desperately the grantees and communities depending on our support desire to know where we are headed and how they can partner more effectively with us. There are several trends at play that have disrupted the status quo and may help us to build doors in that wall.
First, generationally, whether in family foundations or elsewhere, younger people and younger philanthropists have had a different experience than their elders and therefore a different baseline from which to view progress, problems and the issues of social responsibility. Their experience (Post-Civil Rights Movement, Post-Viet Nam War, Post-Watergate Generation coming into adulthood during the War on Terror, the longest war in US history and the most pessimistic view of the future of the world and our country relative to the economy and the environment) underpins their sense of the responsibility and impact of philanthropy. We now have emerging the most socially tolerant generation in US history that has been the most exposed to diversity and the contradictions of poverty and inequality amidst vast wealth.
Other trends include the obvious advances for previously marginalized groups such as racial minorities, gays and lesbians and women. At the same time, the advances have produced the polarization of resistance and resentments in groups who feel their way of life or status and comfort is jeopardized. Although there is a long way to go to truly live as equals in a just society, this evolution has dislocated and disrupted the ways that the different groups interact and has resulted in fear and instability about where we are heading.
Globally, America’s place in the world is shifting more than any time since WWII, and our sense of ourselves and our security, economically and culturally, has been disrupted. Americans have yet to learn how an inclusive, multicultural society should function. This stands in contrast to our propaganda for so long that America was a land of freedom and democracy for everyone. Philanthropic solutions within the context of this fluctuating terrain of interest groups, problems and power relationships are difficult to fathom and understandably even more complex than ever before.
Many of the traditional approaches in philanthropy are valuable and have advanced our society in modeling the ways to solve critical problems in our society. In addition, philanthropy has begun to embrace the challenges more than other sectors of society by addressing issues of systems change whether in education or the environment. We also find ourselves embracing the need for collective impact approaches where funders are collaborating more, and attempting to create evaluation models that reflect this shifting terrain while insisting on outcomes that are both grounded in verifiable data and values driven.
Our challenge is that we face a very different economic environment that can no longer assume a substantial amount of public investment in these problems. We all know that government is struggling to reach consensus and fiscal sustainability, and yet the fiscal upheaval of our economy and financial markets also made it clear that the private sector’s role was subject to new limitations as well. In Connecticut, these challenges are compounded by our multifaceted relationship to external markets like Wall Street and the global economy, our glaring wealth and achievement gaps, and our lack of scale, which makes resources difficult to find and the task of influencing the national discussions and trends more difficult.
As leaders with resources, experiences and purpose, we must partner with local communities in ways that decrease their dependence on us and empowers them to provide direction on issues that affect them most directly. The Graustein Memorial Fund has been engaged in this process for 20 years and most directly under the auspices of our Discovery initiative, which has supported the development of partnerships, consensus and leadership in over 50 communities throughout the state to focus on early childhood problems and solutions. By being less prescriptive and more supportive, we feel we are providing the backbone support for the development of a community invested in early childhood issues that will eventually thrive, as we shift into the role of facilitator, partner and supporter.
Through the early childhood funders collaboratives in our state and nationally, we are working with the strategic partners we see as critical, while leveraging the resources we are able to invest to maximum impact. Long-term solutions must result in a self-sustainability that requires we walk away at some point in the full knowledge that we are not needed in order to sustain fully the community’s development.
Foundations will always be around in some form in America since they reflect the ethos of community that has existed since we were created as a new nation. And all of us have adopted a role that fits our priorities and capacity to exert the influence that we feel is useful or needed in relation to our resources and vision. Making the shift to community partner instead of sustainer requires that we shift our thinking to provide the room for others to lead and grow, and to share our thinking as we would with partners. I know that we all sincerely wish for this and welcome our determination to get there together as we toil in our different vineyards of hope and challenge.