Foundations Urged to Collaborate and Embrace Diversity

By Noelle Barton and Suzanne Perry

Mark Warner, the former governor of Virginia, this week criticized foundations

ALSO SEE: AUDIO: Listen to an interview with Steve Gunderson, president of the Council on Foundations. (Photo by Dennis Brack/Black Star) AUDIO: Listen to an interview with Mark Warner, former governor of Virginia, on the role of philanthropy and government.

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.

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.

Despite being the largest philanthropy in the United States, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation must work in tandem with governments, businesses, and other foundations to solve the demanding social problems the world faces, said Melinda Gates at a meeting of grant makers here.

"Yes, we have a lot of resources, but it is a drop in the bucket compared to the goals that we have and where we're trying to go," the co-founder of the Gates Foundation said at the conference.

With $33-billion in assets, the Gates Foundation looms over all other charitable funds; the Ford Foundation, in New York, is the second largest fund with $12.2-billion. Last year, the investor Warren E. Buffett pledged more than $30-billion to the Seattle fund, insuring it will remain the biggest grant maker for the near future.

Ms. Gates called the Buffett gift "astounding." She said the organization will use the massive contribution to strengthen its grant-making programs that focus on global health, worldwide social and economic development, and American education.

But while Mr. Buffett's pledge will essentially turn the Gates Foundation into a $60-billion philanthropy giant, Ms. Gates said the foundation's wealth pales in comparison to what it wants to accomplish.

For example, even if Gates poured its entire assets into supporting public education, it would not cover the operating costs of the California school system for one year, she explained.

With such a disparity, the foundation needs to work with others, she said.

"If we're going to have a global impact and do it over the long haul, then governments and businesses have to be involved. They are central to everything that we do as a foundation," she said. Ms. Gates also said that her fund will continue to form partnerships with other foundations.

After her speech, Ms. Gates suggested that foundation officials who are attending the conference should use the meeting to pursue such cooperative efforts with each other. "Collaboration is really, really important," she told The Chronicle.

Despite the challenges that the Gates Foundation and other grant makers face, Ms. Gates emphasized the importance of doing tough work.

To illustrate her point, Ms. Gates told a family story. A few years ago, while watching her then 3-year-old daughter struggle to tie her shoes, Ms. Gates overheard the child mutter under her breath, "This is so difficult. But I like difficult."

For foundation officials trying to improve the world, "it will be difficult," she said. "But I am hopeful because I think we all in this room, like difficult."

Grant makers should step up their support of research on what works to eliminate gun violence, said speakers at a session that was added to the agenda after the shootings of students and faculty members at Virginia Tech University last month.

Greg Nickels, mayor of Seattle and a member of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a coalition of more than 200 mayors, told grant makers that he hoped they would support more research so policymakers will have the information they need to make good decisions.

Gary Yates, president of the California Wellness Foundation, in Woodland Hills, said foundation spending on research can influence public policies. Since 1992, he said, California has enacted a series of gun-control laws that he said cut the number of shooting deaths in half. Mr. Yates said the research that foundations in the state financed on the subject had been used to help lawmakers figure out what was likely to work best.

David Hemenway, author of Private Guns, Public Health, said he agreed more research was needed, but that he was frustrated by how few foundations support such studies.

The Joyce Foundation, in Chicago, which has supported his studies, is "the only game in town" in terms of providing consistent support on efforts to reduce gun use, said Mr. Hemenway, who is a professor of healthy policy at Harvard University's School of Public Health.

Roseanna Ander, who oversees grants to prevent gun violence at the Joyce Foundation, said that organization has spent $42-million on the topic in past decade. She said foundations do not necessarily need to set up special grant-making programs on the topic. Instead, she said they could design grants that deal with the connections shootings have to other the problems they seek to solve — such as domestic violence, suicide, and the troubles of young people.

Ms. Ander called gun violence preventable, and said "far beyond the dollars you invest" new attention to the cause from grant makers would make a big difference.

Big changes in the news-media landscape, including the waning influence of traditional journalistic outlets and the growth of alternative information sources such as blogs, will affect the way philanthropic organizations get news about the issues they care about, according to experts who discussed the issue at a session here. But some were more optimistic than others about what that means.

"Newspapers are getting dumbed down, getting more shallow, less substantive; newsrooms are getting cut back, news holes in the newspapers are getting smaller," said Mr. King, who was editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer before he took over the Heinz Endowments. "The old economic model of news gathering is broken."

Mr. King said he worries that will deprive foundations of substantive reporting about ways to improve society and of journalistic checks on their effectiveness.

Jay T. Harris, director of the Center for the Study of Journalism and Democracy at the University of Southern California, also expressed concern about the growing tendency of mainstream broadcast and newspaper companies to give more priority to the needs of shareholders and less to their "public trust responsibilities."

Because journalism plays a vital role in setting community agendas and keeping citizens informed, it should perhaps be removed from "a pure business model," he said.

But Arianna Huffington, an author and founder of the Huffington Post, a political blog, said there's not that much to regret. Traditional news coverage, she said, suffers from "attention deficit disorder," focusing intensely on a story for awhile, then abandoning it. She said new technology "offers the possibility of introducing giving and volunteering into our lives in a consistent way." Blogs can provide long-term, "obsessive" coverage of a disaster or social issue, while donors can follow the progress of an issue, or a person who needs help, online.

Ms. Huffington challenged the notion that a "golden era" of journalism was coming to an end, complaining that the mainstream news media had suffered an "incredible dark mark" by failing to challenge the Bush administration's case for starting the war in Iraq. Blogs are beginning to offer substantive journalism, she said — noting that her blog, for example, plans to hire a full reporting team to cover the 2008 presidential campaign.

She said her blog also plans to introduce a new feature at the end of May called Living, which will cover "everything except politics" and have as one of its missions to engage young people in philanthropy.

Ian Rowe, vice president of strategic partnerships and public affairs for MTV, the youth-oriented cable television network, discussed the ways his company has used new technologies to get young people involved in social causes — for example, sponsoring a contest to design a video game to educate people about the humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan. He said MTV has worked with foundations on some of its projects — including the Kaiser Family Foundation on a project to collect first-person stories from HIV/AIDS victims and their family members for a documentary and Web site.

But he urged more foundations to be open to partnerships with for-profit companies. He said that a $100,000 grant to MTV, for instance, can help spread information to hundreds of millions of households around the world.

"Sometimes giving money to a for-profit media business can be a highly efficient way to maximize your impact around an issue," Mr. Rowe said.

As foundations face increasing pressure to prove that they are effective, they must do more to get ideas and recommendations from people with a wider variety of backgrounds, Steve Gunderson, chief executive officer of the Council on Foundations said in an interview at the meeting.

Explaining the council's new push for more "diversity" in areas such as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, Mr. Gunderson said foundations need to be better listeners and that means tapping the expertise of people who reflect the faces of the people they serve.

"We are not talking about quotas and impacts of 'x' amount of your board or your professional staff or your grants ought to be given in A,B, or C," he said in an interview. "What ought to be discussed is if we seek to be effective in a pluralistic and diverse society, diversity must be the foundation upon which we build our strategies."

The council's board created a new position, director of diversity programs, to supervise projects to help diversify the foundation world, for example through fellowships, training, research, and by taking action to develop stronger ties to global philanthropy. That position is expected to be filled shortly, Mr. Gunderson said.

Mr. Gunderson spoke on the sidelines of the council's annual conference, which drew more than 2,000 participants and is focusing on disaster preparedness, the environment, poverty, and public health. He said the council picked themes where foundations could show leadership, adding that the common thread in those issues is that disadvantaged people suffer disproportionately when things go wrong.

He also discussed the council's new approach to Congressional regulation and responded to criticism by Mr. Warner, that foundations are too reluctant to collaborate on projects that could have a national impact.

The council has drawn up what it calls the 2007 Agenda for Philanthropic Partnership, which sets out specific legislation that it wants Congress to adopt — for example to improve the tax treatment of donor-advised funds, make permanent a provision that allows people to give tax-free money from individual retirement accounts to charity, and extend tax breaks for donations of conservation property.

Mr. Gunderson, a former Republican member of Congress, said charitable organizations should stop feeling defensive about their relations with Capitol Hill, given the good work that the vast majority of groups are doing. Instead, they should take the following approach: "You got to take the offense, the second is you've got to have an agenda, the third is you've got to educate and communicate that agenda, not only to your field but especially to the policymakers."

Mr. Gunderson said Mr. Warner's criticism of foundations had some validity, but that foundations are handicapped because there are few mechanisms to help them collaborate.

"One of the biggest requests I am getting from 'new philanthropy' is that we help them bring together people who had the common focus of their giving, the common mission, so they could partner, and they could collaborate," he said.

He said some groups involved in improving the schools have told him they don't want to reinvent the wheel but don't know how to find out even what other people are doing in their state. "I don't think there's a lack of willingness to collaborate," he said. "I don't think we've given them the tools and the infrastructure to do that."

As a sign of the times, the council for the first time invited blog writers to cover the annual conference. Mr. Gunderson said that reflected the organization's desire to open its doors to more people following complaints that it was too exclusive. The new approach can also be seen in its decision to create an "associate" membership for people not involved in traditional foundation or corporate philanthropy, he said.

Mr. Gunderson said he is pleased because a number of people have commented to him in the hallways: "Steve, if you've done anything, you've opened the doors, you've put out the welcome mat."