Thank you so much for watching!
For more infomation >> Ability Beyond: Finding meaningful employment for people with disabilities - Duration: 2:27. 
For more infomation >> Stop Animal Abuse for Wildlife Tourism! | Red Flag Animal Entertainment | [UHD/4K] - Duration: 2:40. 
For more infomation >> Pirates Return To Pittsburgh For Home Opener - Duration: 7:06. 
For more infomation >> Lee Joon Gi Shares How He's Preparing For His New Character In First Look At Upcoming Drama - Duration: 2:33. 
For more infomation >> Puerto Rico Ready For Tourism To Jump-Start Economy After Hurricane Maria | NBC Nightly News - Duration: 1:47. 
- This is Duke University.
- Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome!
- [Audience Member] Good afternoon.
- See, y'all are here, and you brought the sunshine!
And you come in despite the fact that sunshine is outside.
So, we thank you for doing so.
It's a pleasure to welcome Melissa Berman here.
We welcome all of you here.
It's an honor to have Melissa here to speak this year.
She is one, how can I put this?
She was the founding President of
Rockefeller Philanthropy Associates,
which she has single-handedly, with the help of her board,
built into one of the most remarkable institutions
for helping people deal with problems
relating to philanthropy,
whether it is people who need advice
in figuring out what to do,
need advice in running what they agree on doing.
They do run programs for individuals,
they give advice,
there are classes at public charity,
they have some donor advice funds
they make available to their clients.
What else, did I leave out a category?
- Fiscal sponsorship.
- Fiscal sponsorships, yes, as well.
- Publishing.
And writing and publishing.
- Which not most other groups
that compete with them do not do.
They publish, they do research reports
on particular areas involved in philanthropy.
And, in other words, they're a full-service organization
for persons who would like help in achieving
their philanthropic objectives.
And, my sense is that, you've been open
to innovating in a variety of ways.
Melissa also teaches a course on
philanthropy and non-profits, I think,
at Columbia University.
In fact, she had me up to speak to her class one time,
which I enjoyed very much.
I should say to you, also that
it really is the gold standard.
Maybe the Arabella Advisors would challenge that,
but I don't think so.
I think, my sense is that,
in the world of wealth holders,
Rockefeller is really, at this point,
the gold standard for it.
And that's all because of the way in which
Melissa has developed it.
I mentioned the publications.
She provides a philanthropy roadmap series of donor guides
with support from the Gates Foundation.
She has developed and leads
Rockefeller Philanthropy Associates Research Initiative
in The Theory of the Foundation,
and is the author of three reports
in that initiative itself.
She's been profiled in the New York Times
and the Stanford Social Innovation Review, and so on.
In other words, she's really, in the field of philanthropy,
at the top of that field in the work that she does,
and it's an honor to have her here.
And, so, I do welcome all of you all,
and I would like now to ask us to welcome Melissa Berman,
president of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.
(audience applauds)
- Thank you, Joel.
- Thank you.
- Thank you.
I want to say that, as all of you know,
Joel is a remarkably generous person,
so I think that you need to apply a discount factor
of at least 87% to what he said.
And one thing is sort of flat wrong.
Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors got built up
with a lot of help from a lot of people,
and Joel is one of them.
He has been a great mentor and advisor to me
for all of the years that I've had the honor of knowing him.
I work with a great team of people,
and it's a wonderful time
to be in the field of philanthropy.
There is huge amounts of innovation,
new sources of funding, new optimism,
new openness to partnerships across sectors,
so we have a lot of opportunity in front of us.
What I thought I'd do today is share with you
some of what we're working on in this initiative
that Joel mentioned, called The Theory of the Foundation.
I'll talk both about some of the stuff that we've
already published, and then I'll give you
a little preview of some of the stuff that we're
working on, so that I can get your reactions and input,
because this is really very nascent,
and nothing that we've written about it is
in anything other than pencil at this point.
So, I think this is a great group of people
with a great set of perspectives to help with this.
So let me stand up, so that I feel taller,
and I can see the whole room this way,
and just say to you, Joel gave a great overview
of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.
We've been in existence since 2002.
We were spun out of
the Rockefeller's family office, actually.
Not out of the Rockefeller Foundation.
We have good relations, of course,
with the Rockefeller Foundation
and the other Rockefeller philanthropies,
but we came out of the family office environment.
And we work with donors around the world at this point.
We're still very close to our Rockefeller family roots.
This is a picture of John D., Sr.
and his only son and heir, John, Jr., standing behind him.
John, Jr.'s wife, Abby, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller,
and their six children, the five Rockefeller brothers
and the historically neglected daughter.
And we continue to have, about half of the members
of our board of directors from the Rockefeller family
and are proud to be able to talk about their legacy
in the world of philanthropy around the world.
So, as Joel mentioned, we do strategic planning work.
We actually run, we're the outsource of program staff
for quite a number of foundations,
some global, some US.
We serve as the fiscal sponsor
on managed funder collaboratives,
so we know how hard it is to
get people with resources to cooperate and cede control.
I don't know if you've ever yourself run across
any issues in that field.
And we do research, writing, do symposium,
things like that.
So it's a lot of fun.
This picture illustrates some of our core values
and ways of operating.
One, this was taken in inner Mongolia in China.
Two, you can see that everybody is drinking wine.
So that's an important part of our operating model.
(audience laughs)
- Even in the United States?
- Absolutely, we have a significant number of,
relatively speaking, disproportionate number,
of clients from the liquor business,
and they're all wonderful people.
(audience laughs)
- And even more wonderful
after you've been drinking together.
- So the work that we do,
which is called The Theory of the Foundation,
got this sort of grandiose title from an article
of Peter Drucker's that I remembered
from the years when I was
working at the The Conference Board,
a business membership group that some of you,
certainly somebody from IBM,
which is a big supporter of The Conference Board,
thank you, still,
is part of, and of course, I read Peter Drucker's work
as I was trying to learn about the business sector,
since I was completely untrained in business.
I don't know why they hired me.
But Peter Drucker wrote this very beautiful,
elegant article in the Harvard Business Review,
during an era in which the business sector seemed,
to him, obsessively concerned with
a lot of how-to tools.
Total Quality Management, Six Sigma,
Managing the Whitespace, Value Chain Migration,
all of these kinds of things,
and he felt that too many businesses were ignoring
some of the very fundamentals of their operation.
He wrote this article, called The Theory of the Business,
which said that every organization needed to
understand its mission,
the environment it was operating in,
and what its capabilities were,
and that they needed to review those regularly,
because the world changed,
and the businesses they were competing in changed,
consumers changed, the market changed.
And that all of those were actually precursors
to strategy and to structure.
And he specifically referred to organizations
and not just businesses, and he even gave some examples
from the non-profit sector.
So, we decided that this might be a good model
to apply to the foundation sector,
in large part because, as all of you know,
there's a lot of change in the foundation sector.
I mentioned just a few factors at the beginning.
If you looked at the list of the largest
foundations in the US 25 years ago and today,
the list would look very, very different, right?
We mentioned to somebody recently that we're working
with what could become a new billion-dollar foundation,
and it's sort of like, "Oh, that's nice."
It's not big news, it's just not big news,
a new billion-dollar foundation.
So there are also a lot of new approaches
in philanthropy and there's a lot more reliance
on the ideas of the philanthropic sector
as collectively, many societies have a little less
confidence in government as the source of solutions.
But, despite the wonderful efforts of people like
Joel and Tony and my colleagues in lots of other
universities, et cetera, relatively speaking,
there isn't that much information
about foundations as organizations.
There's a lot that's written
and a lot of well-developed ideas and evidence about
how to think about the effectiveness
of a grant-making program.
The output of a foundation, so to speak.
But all foundation leaders would tell you
that the output of their foundations
is not just the grants that they offer.
Foundations have other important resources,
whether it's their voice,
their convening capacity, their research and knowledge,
their position as a kind of neutral arbiter
that doesn't stand to make a profit off of anything.
All of those things are part of what make foundations go.
And assessing the impact of grants
doesn't actually speak to any of it.
In fact, a foundation is an organization,
like other organizations,
and it has to be managed and led,
has to allocate resources.
And I think up until, maybe, certainly 10 years ago,
this was regarded as a boring subject
and nobody would have funded it.
And starting about five to seven years ago, though,
with new models of foundations,
new ways of trying to think about
different business models, all of a sudden,
people became more interested in this idea.
So, we were trying to help construct something
that would be useful in the sector that talked about
how foundations operate and achieve impact
as institutions, and not just as cash machines.
So that was some of what motivated us, also.
And, I think that, also, we would say that,
as foundations increasingly define themselves as
trying to fund solutions to problems,
rather than just allocate resources to
community-based organizations,
there's a higher level of expectation.
The foundations are making, maybe, bolder and bigger claims,
and that exposes them to a lot more attention
and a different set of expectations than a foundation
has been used to having.
So all of those reasons were what we were thinking of
when we got into this.
I want to be clear in saying,
just because we called it The The Theory of the Foundation
doesn't mean we think there's one theory.
Obviously, there's more than one framework or theory
for a foundation, it's just that each foundation needs to
have its own theory and reexamine it.
So, we started off with the idea that we would
take the three circles that Peter Drucker had,
mission, environment, capabilities,
and we would use those for the endowed foundation sector.
And enough foundations said, "Sure, let's try that,"
to join a funding collaborative and we tried it,
and it failed, I wouldn't say it failed miserably.
It failed very successfully.
(audience laughs)
It was very clear that, if you're talking about
an endowed foundation, an endowed foundation,
when you really admit to the truth of things,
an endowed foundation is not subject to market forces
the way either a grant-seeking organization is,
a public sector organization,
which needs to seek votes, so to speak,
or a business that needs customers.
If you have your own source of capital,
you have a level of independence that you might see
only in, let's say, a privately held family business,
where, if the family members all agree
to lose money on the winery
or on the publishing business, it's okay.
So we needed to come up with a different model.
And so, we did a lot of work.
This is the group of foundations
that participated in the work that
helped create the foundation framework,
and we have a bunch of Global Research Partners
that we're working with now to test these ideas
outside the US, and I'll be speaking to four groups
in Santiago next week, so we'll see how
full of Swiss cheese I am after that set of presentations.
But, we came up with this way of framing it
after a lot of exploration, many interviews.
Mostly, though, I have to say with foundations,
in North America and Europe
that the foundation's three major components,
and this is for an endowed foundation,
not a community or fundraising foundation,
public foundation, are its charter,
its social compact, and its capabilities.
So, charter, for us, is mission plus other things.
Social compact is a very different thing from
the environment that Peter Drucker talked about,
and capabilities is a little more similar,
but we think there's a different way to frame that
that's more useful for a foundation.
So, what we mean by charter is
governance and decision-making,
but also your culture and values,
your informal and your formal rules of the road, right?
So every organization has its written policies
and its legal documents, internal policies,
and every organization has a set of unwritten rules
and policies and procedures,
that, for better or worse, play an enormous role
in how decisions are made, right?
And understanding some of that is important,
and this began to occur to us when Larry Kramer said,
"Oh, but of course we evaluate
"all of our programs regularly,
"but we would never stop funding in the environment."
And that's an important kind of statement,
in terms of what you think of as
your unwritten rules and your real charter.
It doesn't say anywhere that
the Hewlett Foundation, obviously nowhere, does it say
that the Hewlett Foundation must always fund
in the environmental field,
but there is such a powerful sense of the importance
of that legacy for the Hewlett family,
for the Hewlett Foundation as an organization,
for the sense of the people who are present there now
that this is important, that they can't,
and of expectations probably externally,
that they can't imagine moving away from it, right?
So those things are important to understand,
and the role of the founder and the legacy of the founder,
extremely important.
And much more important for an endowed foundation
than any other kind of organization,
except for a family-owned business.
A lot of what we learned
and worked through for this initiative
came out of work that we got introduced to
about family businesses and how family businesses operate.
Lot of similarities with family foundations.
So, in terms of the role of the founder
and the founder's legacy,
there's kind of a continuum, as you might imagine,
starting from a donor-led foundation.
If you have a living donor, running a foundation,
what are some of the things
that you might imagine happening?
Remember, I know some of the names in the room
and I don't mind cold-calling.
So, what happens in a living donor foundation
in terms of, let's say, program priorities?
What is that living donor free to do?
- Whatever he wants to do.
- Whatever, right.
Yeah, Whatever.
- [Audience Members] Whatever.
Whatever, period.
Whatever, right.
And that makes a donor-led foundation,
in many ways, very nimble, very responsive,
very able to take a lot of risk,
but it also means for the people who are not the
people who have to implement the whatever,
it means that they can't wander around saying,
"Oh, we would never stop funding in the environment."
They have to take a completely different point of view
about what is permanent and what is not.
A donor-stewarded foundation is one that we would
think of where there may be a living donor.
It's more likely that the people who are in a
governing and decision-making role,
let's say the governing role on a board,
are the descendants or the hand-selected
stewards of that donor's legacy,
the donor's attorney, close business partner,
et cetera, and or family, and that they
use a frame in their head that says,
"Well, what would Amanda have wanted to do
"in this circumstance?"
They have a hologram in their head, so to speak,
of this individual whom they knew,
or whom they believe that they knew,
or who they remember knowing,
or who they heard about a lot, right?
And they have a sense of what would or wouldn't work.
And so, in that case, we get the two folks who are
the first leaders of the Margaret A. Cargill Foundation,
just sort of said, "Well, Margaret didn't really like
"doing policy work, so we don't do policy work."
Period, full stop, that's it, right?
50 years from now, will that foundation
be doing policy work?
Maybe, but there will need to be a different way of
thinking about what their responsibility is,
and so the people who feel like they're donor stewards,
they feel a sense of responsibility to
what the founder would have wanted.
And sometimes that's a great thing,
it's a real clear compass.
In other situations, you know,
somebody said to me that for some years,
until Alberto Ibarguen came in to run the Knight Foundation,
there would arguments in the room about
what John and James Knight would have wanted to do
as far as an internet strategy for the foundation was.
You know, they died before the
invention of the personal computer
and would have had no point of view
that anybody could point to about the internet,
and so that's a kind of exercise in futility, right?
And then in family foundations, there is sometimes
a competition of who knew Amanda best.
And who Amanda liked best.
That happens, that happens.
Those are two synonymous things
in the minds of some people.
So, that's a donor-stewarded foundation.
Donor-connected, I would say, is one where
people have a very strong sense of
the legacy of the foundation,
but it's a legacy more in terms of values,
and a way of looking at the world
than in a literal sense of environment versus education
or policy versus direct service.
And so, that's a sense of continuity
that people want to point to,
but it's much more from a values
and place in the world perspective.
It speaks much more to whether you tend to
form a lot of partnerships,
or whether you act more independently.
Whether you concentrate your resources
around one area or place,
or whether you spread yourself around a multitude of places,
those kinds of decisions get factored in
through a framework of how the original donor
kind of thought about the world.
And that makes for a very interesting and creative
and robust set of conversations.
Sometimes it makes for some difficult decisions
that have to be made.
So we work with a family foundation
in a small, formally industrial town
in Western Pennsylvania.
Their last industrial employer
had vanished a few years before.
No member of the family who was on the board
of the foundation lived in this town anymore.
So, what was their obligation,
thinking about the donors,
to continuing to support this town,
versus other kinds of causes?
There's no right answer to that question,
but that's the kind of thing that people
think about when they're in that kind of foundation,
whereas if it's in a foundation that has a much more
open charter, the decision about moving forward
into new issue areas can be made based only
on how people view the current situation.
There's no need to look backwards in any real way.
So, the Ford Foundation is famously independent of
how the members of the Ford family, who launched it,
thought about the world.
- Or where the Ford Foundation is chartered.
- Right, right.
- Michigan.
- Yes, that, too.
That, too.
The Rockefeller Foundation, for example, has a charter,
it's founding documents establish its purpose as
the well-being of mankind throughout the world.
This covers a lot of bases.
(audience laughs)
John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and his son,
John D. Rockefeller, Jr. no longer played
a leadership-controlling role in the foundation
after, I think, the 30s?
- Yes. - Or was it the 20s?
- Yes, 30s.
- Due to some perceptions on the part of some people
in Congress that they might be using the foundation
to deal with various political issues
that they were having some problems with.
Labor laws, stuff like that.
And so John D. Senior and Junior brought on board
the good and the great,
and became sort of minority, shareholders, so to speak,
of the foundation at that point.
But, the well-being of mankind throughout the world
doesn't leave you much of a guidepost to operate by, right?
So, there's a vague sense of the people who live inside
the walls of the Rockefeller Foundation now,
that public health is a signature achievement
of the Rockefeller Foundation and that that might be
part of the legacy to look back to,
but that's their choice.
There have been many presidents
of the Rockefeller Foundation who have sort of looked at
global health or public health, and went,
"That's nice, but that's not where
we need to put our resources now."
So that's a really, really important factor,
and this is, in our view,
this is unique to an endowed foundation.
No other organization, except maybe a family business,
needs to think about this kind of thing.
So, in addition to that,
organizations, whether they're family funded or not,
and so these parameters work for
independent and corporate foundations, as well.
Your charter may be very narrow,
or it may be extremely broad and open,
like the well-being of mankind.
There are certain foundations, conversion foundations,
legally restricted to fund around health in a certain
state of the union, or something like that, right?
Some organizations have a lot of written policies
and a lot of written materials
defining who they are and what they are,
and others are much more lightly burdened with paper.
And that's neither a good thing or a bad thing.
Often, that means that there isn't a good enough clarity
on how it is the decisions are gonna be made.
- You could add digital to that.
- Pardon?
- You know, the Duke Endowment.
- Yes.
- It's guided by this video that Mr. Duke,
I'm sorry, not a video, a charter that has to be
read to trustees once a year, - Yes.
In the group assembled.
- Yes, right.
So, that's a very formal process, right?
And some are very tied to history,
like, you have to listen to this every year.
And some see the foundation as having a responsibility
to be a resource for the present time, full stop.
And the future.
So, the second quadrant, not quadrant.
Sorry, there are are only three of them.
The second of the three areas is the social compact.
And that, to us, is a combination of things
that has to with who the foundation feels accountable to
and how they exhibit that.
Obviously, the regulatory environment that they're
operating in is part of that.
But then there are also a set of
unwritten expectations from external forces
that can be important for the foundation.
So, for example, we did a symposium on this
at the Bellagio Center in Italy
and one of the participating foundations
is headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal.
And like a lot of European foundations,
it's a combination grant-making and operating foundation
and one of the things that they operate
is a symphony orchestra in the city of Lisbon.
Which they would dearly love to hand off
to an appropriate non-profit organization
for whom this is a central mission and activity.
The idea that they would be abandoning the orchestra,
as it gets portrayed in the media,
becomes a big hue and cry.
Big hue and cry.
And they have to make a decision,
in the midst of all the other kinds of things
that they might be wanting to change,
is this the battle they want to fight,
or do they simply give in to this expectation
of a lot of important opinion leaders
who help give them their license to operate,
that it's gonna be easier to just have
violinists on the payroll of the foundation.
And, in fact, they currently have violinists
on the payroll of the foundation.
So, there's a sense, in other words, of
what is it that gives you your license to operate?
What changes are going to be met with dismay?
How will you react to that?
Who are those influencers?
And then, there's also a broader set of expectations
that change over time about what's the proper arena
for a foundation to be operating in, right?
So, as many of you know,
the John and Laura Arnold Foundation,
very active in the field of criminal justice reform,
developing models for judges and prosecutors to use
about who can be granted bail, et cetera, et cetera,
and who needs to be actually held.
20 years ago, I'm pretty sure that would have been
thought of as inappropriate,
and even now, some people do think it's inappropriate,
and they have to be willing to deal with some flak
on things like that.
The Gates Foundation deals with flak about the influence
that it may or may not have on the public school system.
So, those expectations change over time,
and clearly from one culture to another,
they vary tremendously.
So, both Joel and Wendy have mentioned our work in China,
where, trust me,
no wealth holder is creating a private foundation
to fund in human rights.
That's not, that can't happen.
I mean, that like, literally couldn't happen.
And the foundation that you saw a picture of it
from inner Mongolia has somebody from
the Ministry of Civil Affairs on its board,
and when we presented to the board,
everybody waited for her to speak and react
before they spoke and reacted.
That's different from how many of the foundations
in this room would operate or expect to operate.
And then, in various countries in Europe,
it's kind of in between, right?
Where many European foundation leaders are
astonished, or appalled, at how activist
US foundations are on policy issues.
They view the foundation's appropriate role in society
as a partner to government, government has legitimacy.
A private foundation, in their view,
does not have legitimacy,
because who elected the private foundation?
Just, in their view, because you happen to be a
successful business person and wrote great software,
that does not make you authorized to weigh in on
and push an agenda on public education.
And in the US, we're not quite as adamant about that.
Some people are.
So there's dialogue and debate about that.
But there's this huge spectrum across the world
about what's acceptable and what's not acceptable.
So, these are some of the components of it.
Who do you report to?
In the UK, which we think of as very much like
the UK philanthropic scene,
a foundation does have to file an annual report.
Parts of that report become public,
but not the list of grantees.
That information is disclosed only voluntarily
by the foundations.
And there is huge resistance in some quarters
to changing that.
And everybody always raises the example of
human rights organizations, which could be endangered
if their names are listed.
So, there are legitimate points there, et cetera,
but the level of disclosure,
the class I teach at Columbia Business School
was on global philanthropy,
and there is no actual answer to the question of
what the amount per year of global philanthropy is,
because there are so many cultures in which
none of this is recorded.
Organizations that work in some of the areas
that some of the public charities in this room
work in, are not actually legally structured
as non-profits, because it's just too hard or whatever,
and so there's no way to track the flow of funds
from a grant maker or a donor to a nonprofit,
either at the granting end, or at the receiving end.
And we're able and meant to do both in this country,
but we're unusual in that.
So, I talk a little bit about legitimacy,
and about whether the foundation
is supposed to be only responsive,
or in a change-making role in society.
And then there are also things in there about
risk tolerance, in terms of the social compact.
The Ardell Foundation is clearly willing to take a
high degree of risk.
They're perfectly happy to have people criticize them.
That's fine for them.
Other foundations either don't have the luxury of
being in that position, don't have that legacy,
or choose not to be in that
more adversarial kind of role in some ways.
So, the third sector is operating capabilities.
And in Drucker's model,
that's kind of a list of things that you're good at.
And in the foundation sector, we didn't think that was
so relevant, like, are you good at communications
or are you good at planning?
That is important, but we felt it was more relevant
to look at a set of issues that's under
tremendous flux right now in the foundation sector.
So, resourcing.
Do you do everything internally?
Or do you outsource a lot of what you do?
Is your decision-making as a foundation centralized?
Or, is it much more decentralized?
So, the Ford Foundation is in the midst of
an enormous organizational culture change,
because they had been extremely decentralized.
If you were a program officer with the Ford Foundation,
you had a broad set of guidelines
and a budget to operate within,
and as long as there was a sense that
you were making credible choices,
you made those choices.
And now, the foundation has many more,
sort of broad initiatives that cut across
a lot of program areas,
where somebody who's in human rights is told,
"You're going to be part of this
"initiative we're working on in criminal justice reform."
Somebody in the arts sector,
the arts part of Ford, is told,
"You're going to be part of this initiative
"that we're working on around criminal justice,
"because we think the arts is an incredibly effective
"way to raise awareness and develop agreement
"for some of the issues around this."
And then there's somebody in education,
who's told, "Oh, and by the way, you're gonna
"help us figure out how to improve education
"for prisoner reentry."
So, the program officer is, in that model now,
a little bit less empowered
and a little bit less like an independent,
tenured faculty member, right?
So, that's a big change in a lot of foundations.
Then, some foundations are very proactive,
meaning that they set their own course,
they develop a plan and they execute against it.
And it's like, "This is what we're doing,
"we're moving forward.
"This is what we're doing for the next three years.
"We have to stick with our plan if we're gonna
"achieve the results we want."
Other foundations are much more willing to be
reactive and responsive,
and I'm sure you can see this is neither
a right or a wrong.
It's really a huge amount of management is
choosing which way you would like to be inefficient, right?
So, the same thing with flexibility.
Some foundations are extremely creative.
They try lots of new approaches.
They are very open to ideas from the outside,
and others are much more disciplined.
They want to choose a field of work
and pursue it in a very straight-line kind of way.
And again, it's not that one is better than the other.
Each has its advantages and drawbacks.
And then, I think the last area has to do with
how the foundation thinks of its programs
and its programming,
including communications and partnerships.
Is it very broad, or is it very deep?
And again, there are advantages and disadvantages to each.
If you go only deep into the issue, let's say,
of criminal justice reform, you may find that
there are dimensions of it, including, for example,
education, as I mentioned earlier,
that you're not touching,
because you've chosen to go deep.
On the other hand, if you go too broad,
everybody knows what happens.
You're the victim of your last conversation
and it's hard to see what you're achieving.
And then, are you networked, or are you independent?
Some foundations are almost always doing things
in collaboration with other foundations,
or with the public sector,
or with multilateral organizations,
or they have reached the stage where
they're often really co-designing their programs
with their major grantees.
And other foundations are much more independent
in how they act.
They've developed their plan.
They want to hold themselves accountable to those results.
They've made a set of allocation decisions,
and they don't want to pull back from them
until those decisions have had a chance
to play themselves out
and have the results evidenced.
In other words, they don't want to buy IBM today
and sell it tomorrow and buy Hewlett Packard instead.
And, so, again, I'm not trying to say that
one is better or worse than the other.
These are clearly a set of choices
where there are advantages and disadvantages
and very few organizations are consistently
at one end or another of the spectrum.
What we do find, by the way,
is that some organizations want to have a
very disciplined set of internal processes,
and they want to be networked,
and chaos ensues, right?
They show up at the meeting with the other funders
and say, "Well, but you know, we've made all our budget
"decisions for this year,
"so we'll be happy to think about
"doing something next year,
"and we can only fund organizations whose budget size is
"between a quarter million and a two and a half million
"and this is what our application form looks like,
"And we couldn't make a grant unless this
"application form was completed."
So, we worked with a group of funders
for one of the funder collaboratives that's under
our aegis, and it took 18 months to get these
issues straightened out.
So, I think, to some extent, that's what many of
the foundations participating in this initiative
are hoping to get out of it,
is a way to try and understand
if it's really important for us to be networked,
what do we have to be willing to give up
in terms of being disciplined
and in terms of being proactive
and in terms of being decentralized?
'Cause one of the
things about some of these really big funder collaboratives
is that they have to be CEO to CEO to work,
especially things like the Grand Bargain for Detroit,
which was outside of everybody's program area.
So, then you start to become very top-down,
and then you find yourself becoming top-down
in an era in which we're ever more aware
that we need to be much more respectful of
and responsive to the voice of the beneficiary,
the voices of the communities that are actually affected.
So, how do you do that when you're being top-down
instead of bottom-up?
I wish I knew the answer to that question.
So, I'm gonna stop here.
All of this stuff is pretty much, by the way,
in a publication that we did with the Foundation Center
and their GrantCraft series.
It looks like this.
I would've been happy to send copies down for everyone,
but they're out of print right now,
and so we're working on getting some new ones.
But it is on both the Foundation Center website
and our website.
It's a free public good.
I probably should have said that
before you started taking notes.
(audience laughs)
- I would love to hear you tell us a little bit
about the thing we were talking about in the office.
The project that grew out of
the famous art collector's
wish to do something about
improving the criminal justice system.
- Yeah, yeah.
- This is a project that Rockefeller Philanthropy
is actually administering.
Say a few words about that.
I mean, it's unusual.
- So this is what's unusual in the sense of,
the funder who launched this
is a woman named Agnes Gund,
who is one of New York City's leading arts philanthropists,
was the Chair of the Board of the Museum of Modern Art.
When I had the real pleasure of going to meet with her
in her apartment in New York,
I asked the person who greeted me at the door
to please walk more slowly,
because what's on the walls and around is unbelievable.
It's a woman in her 80s, and she collects art
that is at the cutting edge.
And she collects a lot of art of
the kinds of artists who aren't
part of the traditional privileged world of
galleries and representatives and showings
and Art Basel and stuff like that.
So, she began because some of her grandchildren
are part African American,
to have a kind of growing awareness
of the dangers, and the issues and challenges
that they confronted simply because of
what they look like.
And she combined that, of course,
with the growing awareness that many of us
have had since Ferguson
of what the criminal justice system
does to people and to communities
and to families.
And she approached Darren Walker,
who is the President of the Ford Foundation,
and Darren is an unusual institutional foundation president
in that he has lots of interests outside
the world of policy, et cetera.
So, he collects art.
His husband is in the art business.
And he knows a lot of art collectors
and therefore arts philanthropists,
and so, he has a personal relationship with Aggie Gund.
And so she came to him and said,
"I'd like to do this.
"It's totally outside of the mission,
"charter, capabilities, et cetera, of my foundation.
"I don't want to start building
a team of criminal justice experts.
"You have a team of criminal justice experts.
"If I give the money and I do it in a way
"that tries to invite other people
"who are arts philanthropists to say,
'I, too, could sell some art and use those proceeds to fund
"criminal justice reform,'
Would you figure out where the money should go?"
And he said, "Sure."
And why wouldn't he, right?
Because she's talking about $100 million.
- It was more than that, it was $140.
- Well, that's what the painting sold for.
- The painting sold--
- The painting sold for, after the fee, one painting,
$140 million after that.
100 of it is going for the Art for Justice initiative
over 5 years.
And so, Darren said, "But, you can't give the,
"I don't want to Ford Foundation to,
"We need a partner, and we need a partner who can
"do the care and feeding of the donors
"and provide programs for them
"and publications and ideas
"and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
"so I'm calling "Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors."
So, he called me,
and in my job,
it's my job to say yes to Darren Walker.
And it's also, I mean, why wouldn't I wanna do this?
So we are the partner on the Art for Justice Fund,
the grant funds come to us.
All the other donations come to us.
At the moment, I'm proud to say,
we own an extremely impressive and valuable
piece of jewelry, which no one will let me wear,
that's gonna be auctioned by Christie's shortly.
- So, were you responsible for arranging for
the selling of this art?
- We coordinate with Christie's.
That's part of the service that we're providing,
which the Ford Foundation doesn't have people
who know how to do that,
but we have people who have been in organizations
where you get don-- and we have donations of oddball things.
And so that's,
We can handle.
We know how to handle that and we,
a few years ago, a donor gave us a diamond.
A really, like diamond, diamond,
which, again, I was not allowed to wear.
But it was the cover of the Phillips auction,
jewelry auction thing,
because that's a way for many people to fund philanthropy
is, you donate.
If you are generous enough to do it this way,
you donate the work itself
to an organization, to a public charity that will sell it.
You don't have to pay any capital gains,
so if you sell it and donate the proceeds,
you have to pay capital gains.
On the other hand, the value that you get
for the deduction is nowhere near what you would get
if you sold it, but many people do do this.
We worked with a donor who, he and his wife donated
about a dozen modern paintings,
de Kooning and stuff like that,
to the Jewish Communal Fund in New York.
They were auctioned,
and that created a $40 to 50 million fund
that they used to advance the cause of nursing
in the US, where it turns out the nursing shortage
relates more to the lack of faculty
than the lack of qualified potential students.
So, they fund people, nurses, to get their PhDs
and become nurse scholars, so to speak,
so that they can start to teach.
So, there are a lot of people who do that,
so we are working, we work with the Ford team,
we're working on the issue of eliminating cash bail,
we're working on the issues of unequal sentencing outcomes,
and we're working on the issue of reentry,
and we're working on the issue of awareness building.
And both the reentry and awareness building are
also using arts as a tool to raise awareness
to allow people who have been tangled up
in the criminal justice system to find
ways of using their voice
and to link that voice to communities.
- And it's gotten into a major project,
because I know that Darren is now
talking to his other friends who like art,
and getting other donors to contribute to this fund.
- So, yeah, we did an event in someone's home
in San Fransisco recently, so.
So, it's a very, that's the kind of partnership
that would not have happened before,
and I think most foundation presidents
would not have been willing to take some of this on.
Aggie Gund is not a passive investor here.
She is part of the governing board.
She reads the docket.
She asks a lot of questions.
She goes on site visits.
She asks for the team to look into issues
that are personal and meaningful to her,
like, what can we do to help parents in jail,
so that their children are not suffering
as much as they might ordinarily, things like that.
So, she has gotten up to speed
and the initiative has an advisory council
of leaders in the field,
some of whom are experts who work at places like
the Arnold Foundation,
others of whom are advocates,
many of whom are formerly incarcerated.
And the Ford Foundation recently asked us to
host in our organization, we have to figure out
how this is gonna happen,
two, sort of, Art For Justice fellows,
who will learn about philanthropy and grant-making,
who are formerly incarcerated youth,
so that we can start to get more understanding
of how all the different sides of the table
work into more communities.
So, that's a very exciting thing.
- Fascinating.
- Isn't it?
- Yeah.
Yeah, it is.
I've asked you earlier about whether
there was any, you know,
some of you all have heard about the partnership
between the Koch Brothers and the Ford Foundation
in criminal justice.
Is there any relationship between that
and what you're trying to do?
Or is it just totally informal and separate kind of thing?
- They're fairly separate.
The goal for the Art For Justice Fund
is to bring new money,
new money and new advocates into the
criminal justice reform here.
So we don't, in other words,
from the point of view of the way Darren looks at it,
which I agree with totally,
if the Koch brothers take money that they would have
already put into the partnership with Ford
and run it through the Art For Justice Fund,
nothing has changed.
So, we're looking for new money.
So, we have new money from the Walton Family Foundation.
They've done some stuff in this field before,
but this is separate and above.
And, from Darren's point of view and our point of view,
we're also completely neutral about whether
a donor gets excited about this
and decides to put their money
with the Funder Collaborative,
or do something separate.
We count that as a success, either way.
This is really about, the field of criminal justice reform
has nowhere near the level of funding that it needs,
and we're probably at a juncture that,
in the US, where there's real opportunity to make progress,
there are some important ballot initiatives
in Ohio, in Florida, relating to things,
there was recent action in Texas, all of those relate
to rights of people who have been incarcerated to vote,
and that's part of this picture also, obviously.
So, we're kind of at a moment.
- Think about how brilliant the idea was to call
people who have art of that value,
which is inherently enormously valuable by definition,
with a major public policy problem that everybody,
including the Koch brothers and the Ford Foundation,
agree needs to have money put into it,
but the money isn't just there.
And so, using the involvement of wealthy art owners
and capitalizing on the value of what they've got
to put it into a field like criminal justice reform
is, I think, an absolutely brilliant idea.
- Yeah, because almost every wealthy person in the US,
super-wealthy person, is an art collector, right?
And, for many people who are generous and philanthropic,
but who have not been particularly involved with
this kind of an issue,
it's not easy to find your way into this
and to know where to donate money
and to know what political agenda
you are or are not affiliating yourself with,
so what this does is give people
an easy on-ramp into the field
and in a way where their risk is managed for them,
because you have the expertise of the Ford Foundation
and RPA, you're one of many.
You're not doing this all on your own.
You can have some reassurance about
what kind of vetting there is and stuff like that.
And so, among the people we're talking to about this
are people who are executives in private banking,
because their clients want to be more engaged
in philanthropy, but if you're a private banker,
it may not have been part of your training to understand
how to help them deal with issues as complicated
and emotionally and politically charged
as criminal justice reform, right?
But for us to come in
and talk to a group of clients of a private bank
about this fund and, forgive me for saying it this way,
the brand names that are associated with it,
that's a space that makes the private bankers
feel that they can be safe
and that they're not gonna be putting their
relationships with their clients at risk,
or with their bosses, right?
So, once we got past this sort of framework thing,
which is really a kind of internal look,
we started to get questions from foundations
about, "Okay, but how do you operate?"
"How do you make this work in the actual world?"
Right?
And so, we started looking at the idea of
an operating model, right?
So, your framework drives your operating model.
And we looked at the business model canvas,
which has a lot of the features that you're talking about,
and adapted it for a foundation.
And what you see in the green circle
is the state of the world, right?
And that has to do with the fact,
as just for a few examples,
foundations that were funding in conservation
began to realize that they needed to
turn their attention to climate change.
That putting land into conservation is a part
for climate change, but it's not the whole answer.
It means that you have to think about
who your communities are.
It means that you have to think about
what technologies are available to you
that weren't before.
You have to think about political constraints,
political risk, country risks,
so that's where all of those things
that you were just mentioning kind of live.
So, we situated that in a foundation's operating model,
because that's not so much about identity,
but about what do we do?
Now, what do we do?
Right?
And the other thing that swirls around the operating model
is the idea of resource realities, right?
That has to do with the availability of
not just money, but talent, technology,
a kind of operating climate, right?
Things like that.
So, that's where we are bringing the outside world
into this, is through a look at operating models.
So, this is brand-new.
We're gonna be sending out a working paper
about this philanthropy canvas as an operating model
to the 30 some-odd foundations that have been kind enough
to fund this work and share their reactions,
and then we're gonna discuss it
at the Pocantico Center in May,
assuming there's something left of this
after people shred it, but we'll see.
And what we're trying to figure out is,
are there some sort of types of operating models
that would be useful.
So, a lot of interesting work has been done
about different ways that foundations achieve impact.
Joel is a leader in this.
His work about American foundations
and the different ways that they achieve impact,
whether it's human capital or research,
or other things like that,
is the foundation of what we're building on here.
But we're trying to talk about how foundations
operate as institutions,
not just the kind of work that they fund on the outside.
And so, we're thinking of models like a talent agency.
So, if you're a talent agency, you want to find
the sharpest, best people in the community
working on the issues that you care about,
and you want to empower them,
meaning you don't want to come to them and say,
"Hi, I have a solution.
"can I contract with you to implement it?"
You wanna say, "I believe that you're
"on the right path here, and I wanna help you,"
and then, like a talent agency,
you showcase them to other people.
You introduce them to other funders.
You get them in front of the media.
You help them publish.
You use all of your resources, not just your money,
to bet on their talent, right?
And you may be betting on an individual or an organization.
It's very risky to be betting on the individual
versus the organization,
as we have seen in our sector also.
So that's one model.
The other model is the think tank model,
where you go, "We're gonna bring in
"a bunch of smart people here,
"and we're gonna try and come up with an answer,
"and then we're gonna look for organizations
"outside us to trial-run them."
The Ardell Foundation does a lot of that.
I would say, increasingly in recent years,
the Rockefeller Foundation has done a lot of that.
Then, you need to bring in people who are
good at strategy, good at issue analysis,
but not necessarily implementation,
because that's gonna be outside, right?
And then you have foundations that are acting
a lot more like a real estate project developer.
You wanna get something done
that is not in your power alone
to do with grant dollars, right?
So, you need to have policy change.
You need to have community-based organizations endorsing it.
You need to have a lot of advocacy work done.
You need to have people figure out how to risk manage it,
so that people will come to the table.
All of this.
You need to provide neutral space.
You need to have all of these moving parts coming together.
And grant-making is a tenth of it.
It might be a very important tenth, or 20% of it,
but it's only part of it.
So our offices used to be
with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund,
and the guy who's their program director on the environment,
I remember thinking in my ignorance back then,
that he was getting away with murder,
because he really spent, as far as I could tell,
only 15, at most, percent of his time
reading proposals and making decisions about
who was gonna get a grant.
But, actually, his job was to be a campaign manager.
And he went out and built coalitions with the
corporate sector, with government, multilateral entities,
with various kinds of consumer, youth groups on campuses,
all this other kind of stuff.
He was a cross between a campaign manager
and a real estate project developer.
Grant-making was really only
15% of what he needed to do to achieve his goals.
And that, for many foundations,
that's a very different model person
than someone who's an issue expert who has a budget,
and who holds him or herself responsible
for using that expertise and that budget.
- But there are echos, we're running over time,
so I don't wanna prolong it unnecessarily,
but when I think about
the great foundation program officers
whom I know of or know,
that's the way Mike Sviridoff operated.
He built coalitions, he provided seed money,
he'd want to go out and campaign,
where he'd show folks, showcased it to other places,
so, in a sense, you crystallizing and putting into
an analytic framework what the best values have been
and how the best people doing this historically
over the past 100 years.
- I think that great foundation people have been
doing this forever, and what I would say is
one suggestion that I made, which no one liked,
not a single foundation liked,
is this activity is nowhere on the balance sheet,
so to speak, of a foundation.
Nowhere.
And even in terms of the traditional way
that a foundation accounts for itself,
there is a category called direct charitable activity,
and a foundation can allocate cost and time against it,
but unless you really have to,
it's just an annoyance,
and the people who understand how to fill out the 990
and the people who are doing this work,
by and large, are not the same people, right?
Just like foundations run across problems where
the people who know how to invest
and the people who know about the issues
are not the same people,
sometimes they are literally in different cities,
and so, when you want to do impact investing,
it's not easy.
So, one of the things I asked some foundation people was,
would you ever think about using time sheets?
And they went,
"We're not a law firm!"
(audience laughs)
So I got shot down on that,
but that role and the amount of resource
that foundations put into a lot of this,
it's like nowhere.
And if you don't, my belief is,
maybe it's because I worked
for a business management organization for 15 years,
if you don't understand how you're
allocating those resources
and how much resource you're putting into it,
how would you know whether it's effective or not, right?
Maybe you should have twice as many people
in your communications function.
But if you don't try and figure that out,
how would you know?
So that's what we're about now.
I will be happy to report back at some point
about whether I survived this,
and that's the end of my presentation.
(audience applauds)
- Wonderful.
Đăng ký:
Đăng Nhận xét (Atom)
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét