Foundations Urged to Do Better Job of Collaborating

By Suzanne Perry

Mark Warner, the former governor of Virginia, on Sunday criticized foundations for their reluctance to collaborate on projects so they can have a national impact and urged them to drop their sometimes "holier than thou" attitude toward working with politicians.

"It's a lot easier to get Democrats and Republicans to agree together than it is to get foundation staff to work together and collaborate on a major scale," Mr. Warner, who was considered a strong contender for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination before he withdrew his name last fall, told the annual Council on Foundations meeting here.

Mr. Warner — who made his fortune as a telecommunications entrepreneur and has been a donor to a major "venture philanthropy" group in Washington — also urged foundations to prepare for an acceleration of technological change and the "new wealth" it will generate, which could increase tensions between traditional philanthropy and new, more entrepreneurial styles of giving.

"If you think the last 10 years have been wild, you haven't seen anything yet," he said.

Mr. Warner said he discovered the "not invented here" approach of many foundations when, as head of the National Governors Association in 2004 and 2005, he won support from more than 40 governors for an effort to improve the nation's high schools.

The project attracted seven or eight foundations that contributed about $50-million, but it should have drawn dozens of foundations and hundreds of millions of dollars, he said.

"The bureaucracy, the unwillingness to collaborate, the unwillingness to partner, the sense that, No, we want to do our own stand-alone special project or demonstration grant as opposed to taking a good model and trying to take it to scale, I think is an issue that you as a community need to continue to wrestle with," he said.

Mr. Warner also urged foundations to shed any reluctance they might have to "get their hands messy" by mixing with politicians. "If we are really going to make meaningful, significant long-term substantive change, you've got to deal with the policy world," he said.

He said foundations can help policymakers who are trying to make meaningful changes, in part because they have the freedom to be more innovative than government.

"You can help provide that funding for that idea that potentially is too hot politically for funding to start with," he said. "But if you prove it out, then we can show how we can take it to scale at a public level."

Mr. Warner was one of the founding donors of Venture Philanthropy Partners, a group that provides educational help to children from low-income families in the District of Columbia area. Started with money that came mostly from technology entrepreneurs, it does not provide grants for specific programs — the kind of giving many foundations favor — but instead helps the nonprofit groups improve their operations over the long term to help the children, Mr. Warner said.

He called this a "venture-type approach" that could be a model for others.

Ethics and Efficiency

The changes and challenges facing philanthropy are much on the mind of many of the grant makers here. Welcoming participants to the conference, Maxwell King, president of the Heinz Endowments in Pittsburgh and chairman of the Council on Foundations, predicted that the key challenge for foundations in coming years will be to maintain their sense of ethics while they also try to make their organizations more effective.

Mr. King said the same pressure for efficiency and effectiveness that pushed the business world into a new era of intense competitiveness in the 1980s and 1990s is "surely coming to the American nonprofit world in the next 10 to 15 years."

Lawmakers and the news media will be watching how effectively foundations are spending their money, Mr. King said, and foundations must respond in a way that does not tempt federal or state governments to add excessive regulations.

"It is going to be our job to manage those pressures, to manage that process thoughtfully and skillfully so that the process benefits philanthropy and does not result in such regulation or bureaucratic constraint that it kills the spirit of our movement," he said.

Noelle Barton contributed to this article.