This week's Grantmakers for Effective Organizations' conference was titled: "Powerful Partnerships: Grantmaker Practices That Improve Grantee Performance". The conference has some great sessions on evaluation, assessing grantee performance, capacity building, foundation strategy, measurement, new technologies, etc. While these explicit themes were certainly topical, the burgeoning undercurrent was what I found to be particularly interesting. Cutting across all of the sessions was a real sense of soul-searching for what the proper role of foundations should be.

As the foundations at the conference struggled with difficult concepts of grantee evaluation, the conversation inevitably turned back on itself, questioning how foundations, as nonprofits, evaluate themselves! In several sessions, this brought participants to an uncomfortable place where the vague purpose of their foundations seemed to undermine their own arguments for greater focus on effectiveness. Here's an example: I moderated a session titled "Creative Philanthropy" which highlighted Helmut Anheier's new book and talked about several foundations that had their own theory of change, where grantmaking was just one means for achieving a defined set of foundation objectives. Anheier's argument was that as publicly-funded institutions, foundations have an obligation to use their financial independence and freedom from regulatory oversight to create social change, not just give grants. The example we used was the Rosenberg Foundation, founded by Max Rosenberg, the dried fruit magnate of California. The Rosenberg Foundation has an explicit mission to advocate for underserved populations, similar to the Woods Fund of Chicago and other advocacy-driven philanthropies. Rosenberg hires lawyers, funds grass-roots organizations and publicly campaigns for social change.

The interesting dynamic was not what was happening on the panel, but rather in the audience. Many of the staff present worked at large, endowed philanthropies - foundations that have their own endowments and often give grants according to generic guidelines (e.g. Arts, Healthcare, International). In light of the calls for grantees to be more deliberate about measuring the impact of their work, it became clear that the vast majority of foundations have only the vaguest of mandates. As nonprofits themselves, subsidized by public dollars, the foundations present struggled with how to wear their own arguments. It was clear that most were looking for a new paradigm - where foundation staff could rally around a mission, stand for something definitive and leverage resources to accomplish a set of outcomes. Invariably, the conversation returned to measurement. Since we can't measure what we do, argued the funders present, and we don't have any particular programs ourselves, how can we have an outcome-driven focus? The answer lies in the assumption that what foundations do cannot be measured - indeed, it can. Measuring the work of the foundation liberates staff from this imbroglio - this existential conflict of advocating for focus while themselves feeling unfocused. General operating grants can be measured, let alone program-specific grants and other foundation activities such as convening, research and advocacy. Cracking this code should enable funders to reconcile this conflict, and embolden their own work with a greater sense of purpose and precision. We welcome the challenge...

JAS