Beth’s Blog

Can you have your cake and eat it too?

Photo by Sea Turtle

Note from Beth: I’m hosting a small army of guest bloggers, grantmakers, who are attending the  GeoFunders National Conference taking place this week in Seattle.   The GEO community is united by a common drive to challenge the norm in pursuit of better results. GEO’s 2012 National Conference  shares a range of perspectives and new ideas for smarter grantmaking that leads to better results and presents opportunities for participants to learn from the wisdom and experience of their peers.     If you’re not attending and curious what funders are learning,  you’ll have an opportunity to read some of the ideas and questions being discussed right here on this blog.

Can you have your cake and eat it too? – Guest post by David C. Colby

That was the question in the “The Intertwining Services Funding with Policy Initiatives to Achieve Systems Change” session at GEO. Funders develop service delivery projects, in this case around behavioral health, and used the efforts to facilitate policy change. Lynda Frost of the Hogg Foundation talked about funding integrated mental health services and how that Foundation was able to be the neutral convener of stakeholders to discuss policy. Becky Hayes Boober described how the Maine Health Access Foundation provided $10 million investment for mental health integration initiative that integrated care in over 100 practice sites. They were also able to leverage an evaluation and learning community to develop common definitions for policy.

Karen Linkins, Desert Vista Consulting, discussed the Tides Center and California Endowment efforts on integrating mental health services in California. These efforts contributed to policy changes, but were not catalysts of change. For those interested in using service deliver to produce policy, Karen provided two tools—Strong Field Framework from Irvine Foundation and the System Change Framework—that are on the Session A5 GEO conference website.

Well…can you have your cake and eat it too? As with many things, it depends. Bringing people to the policy table through services projects seems to have worked in Texas, Maine and California. Administrative policy change seems possible—or as Becky Hayes Boober said “less silver bullet, but more silver buckshot.” Buckshot policy is possible.

If were looking for a silver bullet, a high level policy change or redistributive policy, this tactic seems difficult to execute. It involves being an insider and outsider at the same time—how can one be Saul Alinsky and the State Medicaid Director at the same time? Have any of you used this approach? When does it work? When doesn’t it?

David C. Colby, Vice President, Research and Evaluation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. David focuses on using evidence to improve philanthropy and the nonprofit sector.

From Grantmakers to Changemakers

Note from Beth: I’m hosting a small army of guest bloggers, grantmakers, who are attending the  GeoFunders National Conference taking place this week in Seattle.   The GEO community is united by a common drive to challenge the norm in pursuit of better results. GEO’s 2012 National Conference  shares a range of perspectives and new ideas for smarter grantmaking that leads to better results and presents opportunities for participants to learn from the wisdom and experience of their peers.     If you’re not attending and curious what funders are learning,  you’ll have an opportunity to read some of the ideas and questions being discussed right here on this blog.

Use All the Tools in Your Tool Box – guest post by David C. Colby

Eugene Eric Kim of Groupaya challenged GEO grantmakers to become changemakers.  He outlined how this would happen.  According to Kim change starts with the individual; change is hard; and it requires a shift in thinking.  What is needed is comparable to what Thomas Kuhn described in Scientific Revolutions—there has to be a major paradigm shift in thinking.  Young people or new people to the field would bring new ways of thinking and doing philanthropy; older people would die off (or merely retire).  Not a new theory, remember Thomas Jefferson said that every generation needs a new revolution.

Eugene Eric Kim did not describe how philanthropic work would have to change.  At the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we had a paradigm shift.  It didn’t involve young people or some of us dying off.  It involved everyone.  We had a branding exercise in which staff members, grantees, and board members were asked, “What business are you in?” The reflexive response was “giving away money.”  But that was quickly followed by a collective recognition of a paradigm shift—we were about social change.

In a previous session at GEO, Marie Colombo said that the Skillman Foundation had to create a new job—program officer for change making— who does not give away grants, but is involved in social change.  RWJF took a different approach—the job description for all program officers changed to recognize their role in social change.

Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, RWJF’s president, captured the new activities in the phrase five Cs.  To accomplish long-term social change, all of our program officers needed to communicate, convene, coordinate, connect, and count.  Giving away cash was the sixth C.  If you are interested in moving from giving grants to making social change, you have to use all the tools in your tool box.

David C. Colby, Vice President, Research and Evaluation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. David focuses on using evidence to improve philanthropy and the nonprofit sector.

How Can We Learn in Public?

Note from Beth: I’m hosting a small army of guest bloggers, grantmakers, who are attending the  GeoFunders National Conference taking place this week in Seattle.   The GEO community is united by a common drive to challenge the norm in pursuit of better results. GEO’s 2012 National Conference  shares a range of perspectives and new ideas for smarter grantmaking that leads to better results and presents opportunities for participants to learn from the wisdom and experience of their peers.     If you’re not attending and curious what funders are learning,  you’ll have an opportunity to read some of the ideas and questions being discussed right here on this blog.

Gail’s question at the end of this post made stop and think.    Keeping people engaged in learning along the way happens when people discover that it is the learning that is exciting part!

How Can We Learn in Public? – Guest post by Gale Berkowitz

Yesterday I attended the GEO session Learning in Public. The topic intrigued me, but I must confess that I was also drawn to the session because Beth Kanter was facilitating it. Speaking of learning in public, with Beth at the helm, I knew I would learn something about engaging audiences, and I am always on the hunt for better ways of connecting to the audience. She did not disappoint!

The session started out with a group exercise, a living spectrogram.  Here’s how it works:  A statement is read.  The audience decides if they agree, disagree, or are neutral.  The first question was easy:  “I like chocolate.”  YES!  But the next question was not so easy:  “When it comes to evaluation and strategy development, there’s no such thing as “too transparent.” I agree and I don’t agree, but I am certainly not neutral.  While I lead Evaluation and Learning at The MasterCard Foundation, part of my job is to help us be transparent about what we are learning.  Among the many things I like about our Foundation, one of them is that we are working with all of our partners to build monitoring, evaluation and learning in from the start of each project.  By doing so we have a better chance of getting the important learning questions right from the start and build the information systems early on so that we have a better chance of answering those important questions when the time comes. We are doing our best to learn in public and in collaboration with our partners.

All that probably sounds pretty good.  But like the session presenters discovered, not everyone cares about data equally, particularly in terms of how it is produced.  But like the session presenters, people are much more interested in the results.  They don’t just appear, and it often takes awhile (years) to get results.  The challenge may be to find ways to keep everyone engaged in the learning along the way.  Maybe I should ask Beth for some ideas about this?

Gale Berkowitz, Director, Evaluation and Learning, The MasterCard Foundation. For the past 10 years, Gale has lead evaluation and learning within foundations.

Who and What is the “The Network”, Really?

Flickr Photo by hanspoldoja

Note from Beth: I’m hosting a small army of guest bloggers, grantmakers, who are attending the  GeoFunders National Conference taking place this week in Seattle.   The GEO community is united by a common drive to challenge the norm in pursuit of better results. GEO’s 2012 National Conference  shares a range of perspectives and new ideas for smarter grantmaking that leads to better results and presents opportunities for participants to learn from the wisdom and experience of their peers.     If you’re not attending and curious what funders are learning,  you’ll have an opportunity to read some of the ideas and questions being discussed right here on this blog.

Who and What is the “The Network”, Really? – guest post by Paul Shoemaker

A few years ago, I changed my title to “executive connector,” mostly for the heck of it. It stuck, largely because it really describes well what I do and SVP does. Over the last few years, we are more and more about the network (yah, I know pretty much everyone is). All of this Collective Impact / Action work is right up our alley. SVP IS a network so that kind of work should sort of “tailor-made” for us to do and be effective at. I think there is real potential for significant positive change in our communities in next couple decades, primarily because everyone is getting it, i.e. no one org. can do this on their own, we gotta get out of our silos, we have no choice but to work way more collaboratively, connectedly, etc.

So much of the conference reinforced and extended my ideas about all that, BUT it also mixed things up for me in one significant, and very good, way. I will walk away thinking a lot harder about WHO AND WHAT IS “THE NETWORK” REALLY? For example, I sat in on the excellent breakout on Beneficiary Feedback with CEP’s Youth Truth and the Hogg Foundation (Hook ‘em Horns, my MBA alma mater). In SVP’s work, we get very engaged with and close to our grantees for long-term, capacity-focused relationships. We get lots of feedback from them, real-time, via independent / anonymous surveys, etc. BUT we do not get beneficiary feedback directly. Should we? In concept, it seems like a no-brainer, but in practice, is it really optimal for us to do so? IDK yet. But it also reinforced big-time that “the network” is not just us funders and non-profits. It’s the community itself, it’s the beneficiaries, it’s the other organizations and people on-the-ground in our communities. Yes, I knew some of this already. But the conference gave me that gestalt-type view of it all (that’s what conferences are for).

This collective, network (whatever you call it) work is right, powerful, and it’s gonna get harder and harder as we go along. We darn well better have a big tent view of who the network is or we’re gonna fail. We can’t all decide the whole world is our network, we have to draw and define some version of the network that fits our own core competencies and enables us to be effective. But we better draw the lines around our “network” pretty widely and make sure that everyone is engaged and involved, especially the people that we are all trying to “benefit.” Thanks, GEO.

Paul Shoemaker is Executive Connector at SVP Seattle.