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Lessons in Strategic Philanthropy: How To Do Things With Humans

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This post was conceived as a companion piece to an earlier post on theories of change, titled How to Cause Things in Philanthropy.

1. Engineering without the math. A colleague of mine once pointed out, to my great satisfaction, that as grantmakers we are in fact social engineers. I still feel the glow of this flattering assessment. A PRI here, a dab of cash there, and soon the social machinery is purring contentedly, ending homelessness in Cincinnati or reversing global warming.

That’s the ideal picture, of course. The machines whose wheels we grease invariably have human constituents. These humans snag on one another or break down altogether. Sometimes the entire machine just gets up and walks away.

2. Building a better social intervention. At times like these we might cast a wistful eye at the board game Mousetrap which has delighted children and adults since it was first introduced in 1963.

During the course of this game, players take turns building an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine whose sole purpose is to trap little plastic mice. What a joy to set the mousetrap in motion and watch it work! You turn a crank that rotates a gear that rotates another gear that causes a plastic boot to swing up and kick over a bucket containing a small metal ball that then rolls down a set of stairs and into a chute where it’s channeled to a contraption that dislodges another ball from its high perch whence it rolls into a bathtub and falls through the drain hole onto one end of a teeter board causing a little plastic man at the other end of the board to fly backwards and into a barrel that triggers the descent of the mouse cage.

Those of us who struggle to get our grantmaking interventions to function properly can’t help but marvel at this beautifully choreographed march of causes and effects.

The game also has, I believe, some important lessons for grantmakers and others who work in the Third Sector.

The spectacular predictability of this elaborate mousetrap depends on the fact that interactions between inanimate objects—gears, balls, chutes, and the like—are governed by well-known laws. These laws express in mathematical language the regularities that physicists and others observe in the behavior of matter.

Laws governing human interactions, by contrast, are fiendishly difficult to come by. Unlike the creators of the Mousetrap game, we don’t often have the luxury of encasing our human subjects in plastic and flinging them off the ends of teeter boards or causing them to fall against one another like dominoes.

How then, as good social engineers, can we get our humans to behave in predictable ways? Fortunately, there are regularities of human behavior—stunning regularities—that grantmakers can learn to exploit.

3. The inner-life of cocktail-tropic fauna. In a previous post I considered how causal chains can become ridiculously complicated as they lead from our grantmaking intervention to our hoped-for outcomes. This thwarts our attempts to develop meaningful theories of change for our work.

Causal chains can also become rather brittle: all the stars may be in alignment for moving from some cause to a given effect, from one link of the chain to the next; all the felicity conditions might be satisfied; and yet, if the movement from cause to effect depends on the vicissitudes of human actors, we might be wise to put long odds on the outcome.

One of the challenging aspects of human actions is that they’re mediated by representations of the world. What does this mean? Shine a light near an amoeba and, without thinking, this phototropic creature will ooze its way towards the glow. Light up the sign for a bar and a cocktail-tropic human might move towards the entrance, but there’s no inevitability about it. If he does, he’s likely to pause at the threshold considering whether or not he likes the bartender, weighing his chances of meeting the man or woman of his dreams, estimating the likelihood that the lounge’s one television screen will be tuned to his favorite channel. He’ll consider his options for the evening. He’ll remember an article about beer not being as fattening as wine. In short, his beliefs and desires will interact in complicated ways to shape his resolve and ultimately bring him to a bar stool—or not.

In the case of the amoeba, the shining light activates various biochemical processes that produce the animal’s phototropic behavior. Biochemistry is also very much at work in the cocktail-tropic human, but it doesn’t determine human action without first creating or recreating various representations of the world inside the head of our subject. These representations—beliefs, desires, aversions, fears, memories—will either put a spring in the lounge-lizard’s steps or stop him in his tracks.

Most social interventions depend on linking and coordinating the activities of many human actors, each with his or her repertoire of beliefs and desires, each introducing some uncertainty into the unfolding path of events. Rather than act according to plans—our plans—these actors will be observing, remembering, desiring, resenting, and yes, perhaps even assessing whether or not they’ll cut off their own noses just to spite us.

4. You often get what you pay for. There are many cases in which desired outcomes do in fact arrive at the distal ends of long chains of coordinated human activity. Consider, for example, the writing and delivery of a letter, or the flying of 200 passengers from New York to Paris. These extraordinary accomplishments require the precise sequencing of thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of human actions. But there are important differences that set these examples apart from those we typically encounter in nonprofit work where sought-after goals often elude us.

Put aside for a moment the fact that mail delivery and air travel can fail in spectacular ways. Flying 200 passengers from New York to Paris is no doubt a complicated affair, but each step of the process, from the design and construction of the airplane to the training of the aircrew, operates according to principles that are well understood. By contrast, creating the political will to address climate change might be one of those “wicked problems” that will forever resist a comprehensive solution.

Then there’s the issue of buyer incentive, and here we need to face an uncomfortable truth: there are important social goods that nobody really wants to pay for. If you’re selling a product like an iPhone or a flight to Paris, you’ll find many willing investors and customers. If you’re raising venture capital to end racism in Mississippi you’ll likely need to go begging. When you do, you’ll find that what grantmakers and other donors drop into your hat will never come close to covering the cost of what it will take to accomplish your mission.

There’s a reason so many charities are incorporated as not-for-profits. The nonprofit status of organizations that provide services to the indigent reflects not a failure of entrepreneurial imagination or of will, but rather a clear-headed assessment of what people value enough to pay for freely. Lack of buyer interest means no working capital; it also means a social entrepreneur has little with which to incentivize her staff, cover program costs, or grow the capacity of her organization.

5. Small carrots, big sticks. The issue of an appropriate reward structure for humans whose actions we’re attempting to motivate is a vexing one—especially outside the sphere of well capitalized for-profit enterprises. How do you get complicated, extraordinary things to happen without paying people huge sums of money?

Certainly no catalog of the various ways to motivate human action would be complete without a consideration of intimidation and terror. We see that in North Korea, for example, they host an annual spectacle in which tens of thousands of citizens hold up colored placards at just the right time to create the likeness of Kim Jong-un, or of a missile pointed at San Francisco, or of some other great socialist achievement. These mass displays provide a striking model of coordinated human activity.

How does it work?

If you are one of the performers and you do well, you get an extra carrot in your annual ration of vegetables; if you don’t, the authorities stick you and your family in the North Korean gulag. This, I believe, is what’s known as the “carrot and stick” approach to human motivation.

These tough love tactics are clearly too radical for most nonprofit work. The ostentatious tableaux, however, might come in handy for foundation CEOs who, in lieu of publishing inspiring monographs of their pensées, can opt instead to communicate their key philanthropic insights with colorful, football-field-sized displays.

6. Greasy cheeseburger with a side of salad. And then there’s reason. We can’t bang our human subjects together like billiard balls; and it would be challenging to pay our way to good social outcomes in many key areas of nonprofit work. Fear and intimidation are out. Why not try an appeal to reason? In this domain at least we often observe arresting regularities. If forced to choose, more than nine times out of ten a person will strike his head with a kiwi fruit rather than with a hammer. This unprecedented degree of predictability provides strong evidence that we are in the presence of a rational actor.**

Without even thinking about it, we presume that the agents up and down our causal chains will be reasonable. This could be the Holy Grail we’re looking for. It could, that is, if human rationality were robust enough to overcome all the other stuff going on inside our heads, stuff that frequently messes up the calculus of homo rationalis.

Consider these glosses on the groundbreaking research of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, renowned for their studies of deviations from rationality:*

The set-up	What a rational actor would do	What actually happened
“[S]ubjects were given brief personality descriptions of several individuals and asked to assess, for each description, the likelihood that it referred to an engineer or a lawyer. In one experimental condition, subjects were told that the descriptions were sampled randomly from a group of 70 engineers and 30 lawyers, and in a second experimental condition the proportion of the two professions was reversed.”	“A rational assessment of probabilities, … would involve some combination of prior probabilities (based on the relative percentage of engineers and lawyers) and current information (based on the description), leading to different probability estimates in the two experimental conditions because of differences in prior probabilities.”	“Subjects’ estimated probabilities were nearly identical, however, demonstrating the tendency to … neglect prior probabilities or base rates. Similar patterns have been identified in countless other experiments.”
“[R]esearchers gave subjects the following description: ‘Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.’ Subjects were asked to assess the likelihood that various statements about Linda were true, among them being that ‘Linda is a bank teller’ and ‘Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.’”	“Given two events A and B, the probability of the conjunction … of A and B cannot exceed the individual probability of either A or B.”	“Over 85% of subjects believed it was more likely that Linda was both a bank teller and a feminist rather than just a bank teller, contrary to the laws of probability.”
[People facing decisions over medical treatments are told in some cases that a particular treatment has a 90% survival rate; in similar cases they’re told that the same treatment has a 10% mortality rate.]	[The two options are logically equivalent so they should elicit the same response.]	“People … respond differently to a 90% survival rate than they do to a 10% mortality rate, although the two are logically equivalent. These framing effects are difficult to reconcile with rational choice ....”

I remember another example from my graduate school days in which subjects were presented pairs of photographs, each depicting a possible meal, and asked to assess which of the two had the lower number of calories. In one set-up, picture A showed a greasy cheeseburger; picture B showed the same cheeseburger together with a side of salad. I leave it to the reader to guess the outcome of this particular experiment.

These are refined studies, but the evidence for our persistent irrationality is often in plain sight. Ten years after 9/11, 41 percent of Americans still believed that “Saddam Hussein’s regime was directly involved in financing, planning or carrying out the terrorist attacks,” and according to a recent Pew study, 33 percent of all Americans reject evolution saying that “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” Some of us still avoid stepping on cracks or walking under ladders.

Other cases elicit more pity than derision. Nonprofit staffers who work with people in crisis, for example, know that these individuals may not always make rational choices; they will not consistently desire more rather than less good for themselves. Unfortunately, there are powerful forces that mess with our ability to make wise decisions for ourselves and our families. Even when we’re not in crisis, reason will often yield to more pressing demands on our psychic machinery.

Finally, we need to consider that we can have perfectly rational actors operating in a flawed scheme to address some social challenge. The scheme might be flawed because our analysis is unsound, or because our strategies and tactics are defective, or simply because perfectly rational actors might have reasonable grounds for refusing to cooperate with our boneheaded plans.

7. The paranoid madman. What do we do in the face of these challenges? Dear reader, if you’re a grantmaker, have you ever had a brutally honest conversation with a disaffected grantee, with one of those nonprofit leaders you’ve appropriated into your strategy for making the world a better place? If you have, then you probably have some inkling of why it’s so difficult to do things with humans. People don’t like to be played. They don’t like to be managed. They prefer to be the authors of their lives and the work they undertake.

And yet so many exemplars of “strategic philanthropy” are top-down affairs. We grantmakers, myself included, act as arrogant elites, drawing arrows and triangles on the whiteboards of our well-appointed conference rooms with no one around to challenge our flawed thinking. We strut about like giant roosters puffing out our breast feathers and clucking incoherently about “disruption” and “theories of change.” We look foolish to everyone except ourselves and those even more foolish than we are.

What’s missing here is a certain kind of sensibility rooted in the imperative that we treat people as ends not as means. This sensibility has as one of its fruits the goodwill people feel towards those who approach them in humility, asking for help rather than offering to save them from themselves. With this sensibility it becomes immediately possible for us to do things with humans rather to humans. Our causal chains become less brittle. A sense of commonality sustains our social change efforts through their rough patches.

Beyond this sensibility, what’s needed most, in my view, is a profound distrust of those who would straightjacket the work of civil society, imposing on it the apparatus of technocracy, framing human behavior as a problem that requires management by social technicians. “What if history was a gambler, instead of a force in a laboratory experiment?” asks Ralph Ellison in his Invisible Man. “What if history was not a reasonable citizen, but a madman full of paranoid guile?” To admit these as possibilities is to forge our causal chains one tentative link at a time, in solidarity with others, quickly reaching the point where we’re left staring into the dark of an unseen future, rejoicing in our anticipation of what’s possible rather than dreading what we cannot foresee and manage.

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* All of this material is excerpted from “Daniel Kahneman: Judgment, Decision, and Rationality” by Jack S. Levy, Rutgers University, available for download here. I’ve arranged excerpts from his text into table form.

** The rational actors of some economic and social theories figure prominently in the work of grantmakers who promote consideration of the “triple bottom line,” the economic, social, and ecological benefits produced by for-profit enterprises. I’ve been informed by private communication that researchers at the University of Schmerz am Überhogen are very close to developing the quadruple bottom line. In a landmark paper appearing in the Mathematikerzeitungsbringengelächterjournal, Alfred Stüber has proven that n-tuple bottom lines are impossible for any prime number n greater than or equal to 95,651.

 

 

Related articles

How to Cause Things in Philanthropy

Philanthropy's Uneasy Relationship With The Social Sciences

How to Cause Things in Philanthropy

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1. Minding the nature of cause and effect.  In philanthropic and nonprofit work, we model causes and effects when we plan a program, evaluate an intervention, articulate a theory of change, sketch a logic model, or, more generally, attempt to give an account of what the heck it is we’re trying to do.

2.  Causal attribution.  At times, after making sober pronouncements about our fundamental inability to identify our work as the cause of a desired effect, we will still gladly take credit for the latter. This is what’s known in the biz as the “problem of attribution,” which, as many of you know, is really no problem at all.

3. Representing causal attribution. We use pictures to represent the connection between our intervention (i.e., the cause, labelled C in Figure 1, below) and its intended effect, dutifully labelled E.

 

One troubling feature of this cause and effect diagram is its simplicity. This is not what we pay our consultants top dollar for. Prima facie, it fails to represent the fact that it usually takes more than one step to get from our intervention to our intended effect, so that instead of the situation pictured in Figure 1, we require something more like:

 

Our initial intervention, C₁, causes effect, E₁, which is itself a cause, C₂, of another effect, E₂, and so on, until we arrive finally at our intended effect.  Here at least we’re getting more causal connections for our money!

Unfortunately, even Figure 2 will not do for any theory of change worthy of the name. As we know, effects can—and in fact almost always do—have multiple causes, and their causes have causes, and so on. The situation for most social interventions is more like that depicted in Figure 3:

 

This is called a fishbone diagram¹, for obvious reasons, and of special interest to us is the fish’s spine, the primary chain of causes and effects (here represented by a dark arrow) that leads to our hoped-for outcome. This diagram faithfully captures the fact that each cause has its own causes (labelled “secondary”), and that these causes too have their causes (labelled “tertiary”), etc.

Judging by the shape of this particular fish, I would guess that it’s a flounder, which, if you think about it, is not a bad metaphor for what many of us do in philanthropy.

4. Playing Pachinko with people’s lives.  Are we there yet? No, not even close. In spite of our flounder’s impressive skeletal structure, it turns out we might be barking up the wrong fish. Figure 3 represents only one possible chain of events arriving at our final destination, the “Effect” in the rightmost box. But as we know from experience, just about any intervention we dream up can lead by multiple paths to our desired outcome.

Represented in Figure 4, for example, is a theory of change for a program that gives tenants representation on the management board of their public housing project, with the intended effect of improving the condition of the property.² I've excluded all possible secondary and tertiary causes to simplify the exposition, but you’ll notice immediately that there is not one, but several, paths that lead to our desired goal.

An extraordinary feature of the theory of change depicted in Figure 4 is that despite its overwhelming complexity and despite all the vagaries of human action, causes and their effects tumble like Pachinko balls toward their lowest state of potential energy, here represented by the box labelled “Improved condition of property.”

Is this reasonable?

To answer this question, it’s worth pausing to consider the reason why some grantmakers require mind-bending theories of change from their grantees. Theories of change, like the one depicted in Figure 4, are intended to make explicit our beliefs about the causal paths that lead plausibly from our social interventions to our desired outcomes. But therein lies their greatest weakness: Our theories of change are limited primarily by our imaginations. As I’ve argued elsewhere, we can imagine a thousand reasons, none of them pictured in Figure 4, why the placement of residents on the management board of a public housing project might lead ultimately to an improvement in the property. One of the resident managers, for example, might have a brother-in-law whose contracting company does excellent work for half the price; or one of the resident-managers might be very successful at organizing volunteer work crews that dedicate one Saturday each month to repairs and upkeep; or the very presence of residents on the management board might inspire a local donor to endow and thereby double the public housing project’s maintenance budget; etc.

It’s also possible that events might take one or all of the paths pictured in Figure 4 and the condition of the property not improve one bit!

Once we introduce human actors into our causal chains we move outside of the art and science of philanthropy [sic] and into the realm of fortune telling (with some exceptions that I describe below). Requiring grantees to construct detailed theories of change for their interventions is the kind of cruelty that only a grantmaker can think to inflict.

5. Gettin’ our loops on.  Reality is much more complicated than even Figure 4 suggests.  In the world of organic and inorganic beings, certain anticipated effects “loop back” to reinforce, or, in some cases, impede other elements of our program design. Consider, for example, the diagram below, in which various lines of causes and effects lead ultimately to “failed states.”³

In this simplified exposition, notice how GLOBAL WARMING is part of a reinforcing loop that includes RISING SEA LEVEL, SALTING OF COASTAL AQUIFERS, SPREADING WATER SHORTAGES, PUMPING FROM DEEPER WELLS, and INCREASING ENERGY FROM FOSSIL FUELS.  Feedback loops like this are the rule rather than the exception for many if not most social interventions.  The great pioneers of system dynamics were quick to acknowledge their importance and model their effects in complex social phenomena. We ignore them at our peril.

Notice also the mixing of physical causes (e.g., RISING TEMPERATURES) with human causes (“increased demand for food”), another perplexing feature common to many theories of change.

6. Felicity conditions. To complicate matters further, even the simple cause and effect connection pictured in Figure 1 conceals enormous conceptual difficulties. The figure appears to assert that cause C is inevitably followed by effect E. But this cannot be what it depicts.

Suppose C is my request that you pour me a glass of wine, and E is your pouring me a glass of wine. You might decide to pour me a glass of wine without my asking you (and for which, by the way, thank you). But if I ask you to pour me a glass of wine and, moments later, you do so, we can safely assume that my request was the cause of your kind action.⁴

If, however, you have no more wine, or I ask you impolitely and you decide to deny my request, or a piano falls on your head before you have a chance to reach for the bottle, the intended effect E will never materialize.  The cause C leading to the effect E depends critically on the presence of certain conditions (wine in the bottle) and the absence of others (falling pianos).

Shouldn’t these felicity conditions somehow be part of our theory of change? If so, where do we put them? Even more importantly, is there enough time before our sun goes nova to adduce all the felicity conditions that would make possible your pouring me, upon request, a nice glass of Merlot?

7.  The full monty. Once we take into account the inevitable feedback loops, the required felicity conditions, the multiple branches emanating from a simple intervention, the secondary and tertiary causes, etc., here is the complete theory of change for the simple act of mailing of a letter:

8. Some preliminary conclusions/observations. Grantmakers fall into error when they engage in armchair speculation about effects that lie at the distal ends of long causal chains. If our intervention depends on a tightly choreographed march of causes and effects, we will almost certainly be disappointed.

Are we therefore to abandon trying to pinpoint causes and effects in social interventions? Are we to declare the causal nexus an impenetrable mystery? Not at all. Causes and their effects are as much at work in the social as in the physical realm and we need to understand them as best we can. As for felicity conditions, most times when I ask you to pour me a glass of wine, there will be no menacing pianos about.

Our problems begin when we overreach. Our arrogance is on full display when we ask grantees to engage in exercises beyond the abilities of Stephen Hawking. Moreover, a great deal of what’s been written and discussed about theories of change and other jetsam from the world of “strategic philanthropy”—this post included—is a bunch of arm-waving that will continue to enrich technocrats like me but fail to advance the cause of justice, the latter having much more to do with truth and repentance than with logic models. But I digress ...

9. Keeping it real.  That said, even in the domain of human behavior, even with all the quirks of human personality, there are surprising regularities we can exploit in order to do good for the world.  I’ll describe some of the more esoteric examples in subsequent posts.  For now we can at least acknowledge that philanthropy is filled with simple, effective interventions, supported by equally simple theories of change.  For example:

[1]  I make a grant to Organization XYZ to pay the light bill → Organization XYZ uses my grant to pay the light bill → Organization XYZ’s lights stay on

Nice. Elegant. Too simple, perhaps, to garner you a Genius Award, but arguably the kind of intervention most critical to the health of our republic.

In the Spring 2010 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review⁵, Paul Brest, then-president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, took two of my colleagues, William Schambra and Bill Somerville, to the rhetorical woodshed.  He criticized them for their skepticism about theories of change, for advocating that we make grants to extraordinary nonprofit leaders without requiring them to spell out the causal chains that lead to their good outcomes. “These skeptics,” Brest argued, “are implicitly analogizing grantees to idiots savants—individuals who are able to do complex calculations … in their heads without knowing, let alone being able to explain, how they do it.”⁵

Putting aside the issue of the misplaced idiot savant analogy⁶, I believe that Schambra and Somerville have it exactly right. Their idea of providing funding to great nonprofit leaders who have succeeded in the past is supported by a compelling theory of change.  It looks something like this:

[2]  I make a grant to an organization run by a great leader who consistently delivers great outcomes year after year → The organization delivers great outcomes

Some of you will note the similarity between this theory of change and the following familiar example:

[3]  The rotation of the earth has caused the sun to rise every day for the past five billion years → The sun will rise again tomorrow

There are no guarantees in the theory of change outlined in [2] just as there is no guarantee that the sun will rise tomorrow. But you can hardly do better than this as a grantmaker.

An organization’s “theory of change” can, in most cases, be directly inferred from what it proposes to do. Instead of agonizing over confusing and manifestly inaccurate cause-and-effect diagrams, simply apply the plausibility test: Is it plausible that the grantee’s actions might lead to the desired outcome? How plausible is it and how do we know?

10. Complaints department. The reader likely has many questions and objections.  I’ve listed only those that show my argument to best advantage:

Objection:  Sixty-eight percent of our grantees report benefitting from the construction of theories of change.

Reply:  I’m not here denying that theories of change, and the process of constructing them, have helped many people in the nonprofit world. I’ve been assured that they have. But while I myself find it helpful to discuss my work plans with my dog, Gracie, I would never dream of requiring this of my grantees. We can perhaps settle the matter as follows: Divide your grantees into two groups. Ask the first group to construct theories of change for their interventions. Ask the second group to describe their work to their pets. Now poll the two groups to find which of them claims to have benefitted most from the exercise. I’ll publish your results on this blog. This, I believe, is what’s called “data-driven decision-making,” the alternative being, I suppose, to ignore the evidence of our senses altogether.

Objection:  Figure 4 is overly complicated. It should include only those branches that are most relevant to our intervention.

Reply:  Which branches are those? Are some of them perhaps missing from Figure 4? How do you know? What are your criteria for including some branches and excluding others?

Objection:  Struggling with complicated theories of change makes our grantees stronger, more able to cope with the vicissitudes of grantmakers even more confused than you or I.

Reply:  Point well taken.

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Notes:

1.  From the RFFlow5 website, available at https://www.rff.com/fishbone.htm.

2.  From Carol Weiss’s,  “How Can Theory-Based Evaluation Make Greater Headway?” Evaluation Review, Vol. 21 No. 4 (1997).

3.  From Lester R. Brown’s “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?” in the May 2009 issue of Scientific American.

4.  This was the argument of the philosopher Donald Davidson in the essay “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” presented at the 1963 meeting of the American Philosophical Association and published in the Journal of Philosophy 60 (1963). I’m not making this up.

5.  Paul Brest, “The Power of Theories of Change” in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2010. 6.  Ibid., p. 48.

6.  One of the interesting characteristics of idiots savants is that the complex calculations they perform in their heads are often correct.  If the nonprofit world harbored the analogues of idiots savants—executive directors, for example, who could correctly intuit the interventions required for lifting whole communities out of poverty—I would strongly encourage them rather than force them to give an account of their methods.  Despite their inability to explain how they arrived at their program designs, I would prefer that they changed the world the way they do, rather than the way most of us don’t.

 

Coming up:  Human motions and human actions; cause and effect in the law; Donald Davidson and naïve belief-desire psychology; rational actor theory; Pavlov, Skinner, and Duhigg; the Law of Large Numbers; crowdsourcing; leadership development and other empowerment strategies; movement building; arts corridors and anchor institutions; tipping point arguments; and structural change.

“Sullivan Principles” for Progressive Funders?

Old dingoes like me who remember the 1980s campaigns to encourage disinvestment from companies doing business in apartheid-era South Africa might also remember the role played by the Reverend Leon Sullivan, a Baptist minister who at the time was a board member of General Motors. He developed a set of principles for companies doing business in that country which essentially required equal treatment and access to opportunity for all workers regardless of their race.

The Sullivan Principles, as they came to be known, were adopted by over a hundred companies that had operations in South Africa, and they were used effectively by many advocates for divestment.

What’s most striking about these principles is that (1) they were voluntary: there was no regulatory body that required compliance; (2) they helped coordinate activity across a broad range of stakeholders; (3) they united activists in common cause with the business community; and (4) they contributed to a great social good: the end of apartheid in South Africa.

What if progressive funders were to develop and voluntarily adopt a set of principles that governed the way they worked with one another, that strengthened their collective efforts? What would such a set of principles look like?

Here are some I would introduce for discussion:

1. The “Do ‘With’ Rather Than ‘To’ Principle”: This principle would be suitably elaborated for different kinds of actors. It would govern how grantmakers treat their grantees, and how each of these treats the communities they serve. A national funder operating under this principle, for example, would never dream of parachuting into a given geography without first meaningfully engaging local partners in the analysis, choice of strategies, selection of tactics, and overall program design for his intervention. This principle is intimately related to …
2. The Maximization of Coordination Principle: It would be a natural part of the planning work of the aforementioned national funder to gather together colleagues—both national and local—who were working in the same geography (or issue area) to map each of their proposed contributions, understand their theories of change and strategies, and explore ways to support one another’s work. Local funders would be expected to do the same with their colleagues. The “Do ‘With’ Rather Than ‘To’ Principle” alluded to earlier would help ensure that grantees and other stakeholders were included in these conversations. Another aspect of this principle that would need elaboration is the coordination of advocacy and community organizing activities—coordination horizontally, so local (or national advocates) know what their colleagues are doing, and vertically, so that national advocacy efforts connect in meaningful ways to local advocacy efforts, avoiding the “random advocacy walks” we so often see.
3. The Drop Everything Else You’re Doing Principle: To repeat what I’ve written elsewhere, the next time an issue—let’s say it’s immigration reform—garners sustained national public attention, all of us who are progressive funders, advocates, and community organizers should drop whatever else we’re doing and get behind the issue. Even if immigration reform is not our thing, we should devote a substantial part of our organizations’ resources to helping the progressive advocates for that issue win their legislative or policy victory, and we should encourage our partners to do so. Progressives got clobbered two years ago during the national debates on health care reform. Here was an issue that would affect the fates of people in low-income communities for years to come. Yet while many health advocates struggled valiantly to win support for a national health care system, many more activists ignored the issue because it simply wasn’t theirs. They saw themselves as education advocates, or housing advocates, or criminal justice reform advocates, or something other than simply advocates for low-income people. Imagine what would have happened if funders, advocates, and community organizers across the country had adopted the Drop Whatever Else You’re Doing Principle. Imagine if the voices in the pews, in the schools, in the neighborhood centers had been able to shout down the opposition. This is related to ...
4. The Get The Money Out Of Politics Principle: One of the main problems with American democracy is how to acquire it. With only 535 senators and representatives, it’s small wonder that progressives can’t afford to buy one. The amount of money spent on getting elected is obscene, and in contemporary congressional races, the biggest spender has almost always won.¹ The issue of money in politics cuts across all areas of progressive work and often puts a full stop to our best advocacy efforts. We should all be devoting attention and resources to this issue.
5. The Everything is Connected Principle: While LGBTIQ advocates, for example, clearly have specific agendas (e.g., equal rights, anti-bullying legislation, etc.), they, like all progressives, need to understand the broader context in which their particular struggles take place. This is one gay man’s opinion: we can disconnect the struggle for LGBTIQ rights from other civil rights issues, but in doing so we evince a profound misunderstanding of what it is that gives power to our calls for justice.
6. The Empowerment Principle: We should always be striving to yield power to our grantees and to the communities they serve. When doing capacity building work, for example, rather than inflict a consultant on a grantee, we should make a grant to that organization so it can hire its own consultant.
7. The Globalization Principle: We often work in our little part of the world, on our own small set of issues, and we lose sight of the emerging World Order that affects our work in ways seen and unseen. The Globalization Principle would help ensure that it’s part of our collective efforts to understand how globalization increasingly affects us and our colleagues overseas.

Please feel free to suggest your own principles or elaborate on those listed above. I see the development of these principles as much more than another idle flipchart exercise, and hope there’s enough interest in continuing the discussion.

Progressives in the US context are consistently outflanked and outspent. These principles constitute one suggestion for how to give our efforts some conherence and some teeth. How would you go about it?

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¹ If you consider all congressional elections with at least two general election candidates during the last six election cycles, the candidate with the largest war chest won 8 out of 10 Senate races, 9 out of 10 races in the House. These figures do not reflect the very high cost of being able to run in the first place, much less successfully. It’s no accident that 47 percent of congressmen (250 members) are millionaires. The influence of the new Super PACs is yet to be determined. But the plain old vanilla political action committees follow a familiar pattern. Of the top ten PACs (measured by total giving in the 2012 election cycle), 8 represent corporate interests, 2 represent labor. The data are consistent and overwhelming.

The Drop Whatever Else You’re Doing Rule

Until those of us who are progressive funders and advocates learn to better coordinate our efforts, we will lose consistently to the well bankrolled forces who oppose us.

Here’s the good news: we don’t have to sit through tedious convenings or master the newest social media technologies to attain this coordination.  To borrow from the language of the Wall Street occupiers, there is a no-cost “horizontal, autonomous, leaderless, modified-consensus-based” way to work together more effectively for social justice.

The idea is simple: The next time an issue—let’s say it’s immigration reform—garners sustained national public attention, all of us who are progressive funders, advocates, and community organizers should drop whatever we’re doing and get behind the issue. Even if immigration reform is not our thing, we should devote a substantial part of our organizations’ resources to helping the progressive advocates for that issue win their legislative or policy victory.

Call this the “Drop Whatever Else You’re Doing Rule,” if you like.

Recall what happened two years ago during the national debates on health care reform.  Here was an issue that would affect the fates of people in low-income communities for years to come.  Yet while many health advocates struggled valiantly to win support for a national health care system, I saw many more activists ignore the issue because it simply wasn’t theirs.  They saw themselves as education advocates, or housing advocates, or criminal justice reform advocates, or something other than simply advocates for low-income people.

Imagine what would have happened if funders, advocates, and community organizers across the country had adopted the Drop Whatever Else You’re Doing Rule.  Imagine if the voices in the pews, in the schools, in the neighborhood centers had been able to shout down the policy-makers who had been bought by powerful interests.

Now in the advent of the Arab Spring, with the rise of multiple people-led movements in the United States, we’ll be challenged again to break out of our siloes and support Americans who are taking to the streets for economic justice.

Consider supporting the Drop Whatever Else You’re Doing Rule.  Bring it up and debate it with your friends and colleagues.  If you have other ideas for coordinating progressive action, please share them.  How do we keep progressive advocacy from becoming a random walk? 

 

Grantmaking Strategy, Part 2: Of Mortals and True Strategists

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Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

— Philip K. Dick

Balm For The Soul ... If For Nothing Else

[Editor’s note: To read part 1 in this series of posts on grantmaking strategy, please click here.]

So somehow—using a combination of consultants, perhaps, and Ouija boards—we’ve answered the UR-Question and settled on a set of goals.  We’re now ready for strategic planning, part 2.

Before going on, I need to lay some cards on the table.  For a long time I’ve viewed most strategic planning work as a kind of hucksterism that has relied on the placebo effect far more than on any kind of intellectual rigor.  We attend many meetings, we convene many people, we contemplate a long series of pie charts, and at the end of this process we produce a document that garners some confidence for us and a nice check for our consultants.  Our newly minted strategic plan has an air of plausibility and so we plow ahead, putting aside our qualms about the hair-raising leaps in logic that purchased our assent.

Studies produced by very intelligent people chide grantmakers for a lack of strategy in their work, begging many questions about what constitutes a “strategy.”  In one such study, a strategy was defined as “[a] framework for decision making that is 1) focused on the external context in which the foundation works and 2) includes a hypothesized causal connection between use of foundation resources and goal achievement.”  The authors of this study went on to claim that a majority of the grantmaking frameworks they examined did not meet this definition.  This was to me an extraordinary claim, for I’ve never once in twenty-five years of nonprofit work met a grantmaker whose grantmaking “framework” was not strategic in the sense just described.  The definition sets a very low bar.  The authors of the study offered this by way of explanation:

What constituted a strategy under our definition? Here is an example that would meet our definition from a foundation that aims to improve children’s education. Its decision making is guided by a framework that is external to the foundation: “Provide grants to nonprofits that work with teachers to improve the quality of lessons.” In addition, the foundation staff could articulate a hypothesized causal connection between foundation resources and goal achievement: “Our grantmaking supporting improved teacher training stems from our analysis that under-qualified teachers are the biggest reason why children’s educational achievement isn’t improving fast enough.”

This stands in contrast to a decision-making framework for the same goal that would not meet our definition because it looks only inward at an internal process for providing grants: “Our grantmaking process starts with a letter of intent that is reviewed by a staff member and then a full application that is reviewed by two different staff committees.”

Are we to believe that none of the grantmakers in this second example, that nobody in this foundation’s leadership or on its staff, could, if properly engaged, give some account—any account—of how their grants might lead to improving children’s education?  This sounds to me more like a failure of communication than a real lack of strategy, at least as it’s defined by the authors.  It appears to me these folks simply didn’t understand the question.  Doesn’t the very fact that these grantmakers make grants to educators rather than to figure skaters suggest that they might not be the blithering idiots we take them to be?

Definitional issues loom large in the strategy debate.  If we narrow the definition of a strategy—perhaps by requiring that we articulate an elaborate theory of change to support our intervention—do we then heap scorn on grantmakers like Bill Somerville?  He argues, essentially, that funders should simply get out of their offices, identify who’s doing consistently good work in the community, and then give them some money.  Is Mr. Somerville’s m.o. unacceptably unstrategic?

Ironically, Bill Somerville’s approach—cavalier as it sounds—is in fact supported by a straightforward and, in my view, compelling theory of change.  It looks something like this:

1.  Each time I’ve given nonprofit leader X a grant and asked her to spend it wisely to make the world a better place, she has succeeded beyond my expectations.

2.  I will give nonprofit leader X a grant and ask her to spend it wisely to make the world a better place.

3. Therefore, nonprofit leader X will likely succeed beyond my expectations.

Nonprofit leader X inspires our trust because of her talent, her intelligence, and her ability to marshal resources and be a good leader.  These qualities abide with her and account for her consistently good performance.  It’s not irrational—nor, by extension, is it a bad strategy—to invest in people with qualities like these.

I would suggest that we leave the definition of what constitutes a grantmaking strategy wide open and simply assume that grantmakers have some idea of how their grants might lead to their desired effects.  We might need to expend some effort making these ideas explicit, but at the end of the day the question that matters most is not, “Do we have a strategy?” (most of us do) but rather, “Is it any good?” quickly followed by, “And how do we know?”*

There are ways, I believe, to address these questions without succumbing to the allure of theories of change and other forms of superstition.  I also believe that something has to be done to bridge the yawning gulf between our stated aspirations and our actual effects on the world. As grantmakers, we should either step up our game or get out of the way and let somebody else try.

 

Coming up: Grantmaking Strategy, Part 3: Taking a Harder Look At Some Common Social Change Strategies

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* I would also add, “Ultimately, is there any empirical evidence to support the claim that well articulated grantmaking strategies generally lead to better outcomes?”

Grantmaking Strategy, Part 1: The Ur-Question in Philanthropy

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Without an eternal goal toward which time is necessarily tending …, history is a road leading nowhere.

— Charles Upton

I.  Many Things Pressing, One Thing Needful

Given a set of well-defined philanthropic goals—e.g., reduce world CO2 emissions by 10 percent over the next 20 years, provide quality health care for all residents of Levittown—we can, with a lot of hard work, devise plausible strategies for moving toward those goals.  It’s far more difficult for a donor or grantmaker to take a step back and answer the question: What in fact should my goals be, and why?

For those who control significant amounts of discretionary capital, this question is among the most vexing in all of philanthropy.  It’s the Ur-Question on which hinges so much that’s right and so much that’s wrong about contemporary philanthropic practice.

In spite of its importance, it’s also the question most often elided in the strategic planning work that grantmakers conduct.

How do independent foundations, which have almost complete freedom in the choice of what they can fund, rationalize their choice of grantmaking goals?

The space of potential goals can be narrowed to some degree by considering constraints on talent, money, and other resources, or by adhering to historical patterns of institutional investment.  But this narrowing of the space begs many questions and still leaves a mind-warping universe of possible goals for the grantmaker to consider.

Have you decided to end childhood hunger in your region?  This is clearly a worthy goal, and one with enormous practical and emotional appeal.  But is it tolerable for you to have well-nourished children with poor health outcomes, attending low-performing public schools, living in neighborhoods with significant gun violence?  You clearly can’t do everything, but why focus on this one thing rather than another that might yield greater benefits for society?  And greater benefits measured how?  Do you simply say, ‘We’ve got to start somewhere,’ and leave it at that?  Is that the best answer any of us can give?

I don’t believe it is.

A more satisfying answer takes us, I would argue, from the familiar landscape of logic models to the more unsettling terrain of philosophers and priests.  Addressing the Ur-Question in philanthropy rather than waving it aside requires that we pause to consider our cherished assumptions and, possibly, confront some potentially uncomfortable facts about ourselves.  This goes for grantmakers large and small.

II.  Uh, What Was the Question?

A very smart colleague of mine once devised an exercise to help individual donors get in touch with their inner-program officer.  (Relax: This is not as horrible as it sounds.)  I’m paraphrasing here, but she asked donors to consider something like the following scenario:

Mary is a single mother living with her two young children in Hardby, a run-down part of the city.  Unfortunately, Mary’s neighborhood hasn’t recovered from the ravages of recent hurricanes.  Homeless individuals and families live in some of the abandoned properties in the neighborhood which are also used by prostitutes and drug dealers. Escalating levels of drug-related violence in the neighborhood have made parents afraid to let their children play in the streets.

Mary’s daughter, eight-year-old Elizabeth, is a gifted musician but suffers from asthma and other health problems.  Mary fears that her son, 13-year-old Martin, will be “lost to the streets.”  He’s had difficulty at school.  Unlike his younger sister, Martin doesn’t like “book learning” but prefers instead to work with his hands.

Mary can’t work a regular 9 to 5 job because she can’t afford childcare for her two children.  To make ends meet, she takes care of her neighbor’s children during the day for a small fee and does piecemeal sewing work to supplement her small income.  She has often dreamed of a career in nursing, but simply hasn’t had the time or resources to pursue her dream.

Donors were then presented a list of some of the nonprofit organizations serving the Hardby community:

• Hardby Community Health Center: Provides free primary health care to Hardby residents
• Hardby Boys & Girls Club
• Microenterprises 4 All: Helps individuals launch and grow their small businesses
• Hardby Childcare Association: Provides childcare services to the indigent
• Childcare For All Coalition:  Advocates for higher quality and more accessible childcare services
• Young Promising Musicians Charter School
• Hardby Neighborhood Association: Organizes a neighborhood crime watch and organizes residents to advocate for better law enforcement and police protection
• Etc.

Here was the exercise: Each donor was given $1 million in Monopoly money and asked what kind of nonprofit investments she would make in this scenario.  The donor could choose to invest in one or several of the nonprofits on the list, or add her own.

As you can imagine, a very wide range of grantmaking strategies emerged from this exercise.   Some donors focused on the immediate needs of Mary and her family; others invested in longer-term solutions.  Some ignored Mary and focused on the children; others saw getting her into gainful employment as the key to all their futures.

I’ve conducted this exercise with many groups of donors, and what’s most surprising is that only once was I ever asked to specify the goal of the exercise—that is, to answer the Ur-Question. We can, with a little reflection, formulate the goal any number of ways, with each variation eliciting a different response. For example, we can ask the donor to invest the $1 million in such a way as to ...

… generate the most good for the most people

… address the root causes of the problems facing Mary, her children, and their community

… adhere to the Golden Rule

… maximize the social return on investment.

We can imagine the world we want to see.  For many in the West, it’s the Star Trek world of the 23rd century (minus the intergalactic warfare), in which everyone’s basic needs are met; everyone is engaged in meaningful employment; there’s significant time for leisure and contemplation; and bigotry has been eliminated.  For others it might be a world run by theocrats in which women are discouraged from pursuing careers, and single mothers are shunned. Unfortunately, our different visions of the ideal world are more often negotiated by violence than by reflection and debate.

Each of us can imagine the world we want to create.  What’s far more difficult is to formulate the goals and strategies that will propel us there.

III.  Doing To, Doing With

I’ve been reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, struck by the many parallels between the Brotherhood he alludes to in his book and the contemporary confraternity of progressive grantmakers.  He devotes several passages to three young boys—Zoot Suiters? Hipsters?—whom he describes as “tall and slender, walking stiffly with swinging shoulders in their well-pressed, too-hot-for-summer suits.”  They are “outside of historical time” because they don’t embrace the leftist ideology of the Brotherhood.  But they strike a nerve with the protagonist:

I got up and went behind them.  Women shoppers with bundles and impatient men in straw hats and seersucker suits stood along the platform as they passed.  And suddenly I found myself thinking, Do they come to bury the others or to be entombed, to give life or to receive it?  Do the others see them, think about them, even those standing close enough to speak?  And if they spoke back, would the impatient businessmen in conventional suits and tired housewives with their plunder, understand? … But who knew (and now I began to tremble so violently I had to lean against a refuse can)—who knew but that they were the saviors, the true leaders, the bearers of something precious?  The stewards of something uncomfortable, burdensome, which they hated because living outside the realm of history, there was no one to applaud their value and they themselves failed to understand it. … What if history was a gambler, instead of a force in a laboratory experiment, and the boys his ace in the hole?  What if history was not a reasonable citizen, but a madman full of paranoid guile and these boys his agents, his big surprise!

Among other things, I’m reminded by this extraordinary passage of the infelicity of words like “goals” and “strategies,” invoking, as they do, our many failed attempts to dam up and control the flow of human events.  I’m reminded of the distinction we sometimes make between “doing with” and “doing to,” vainly and arrogantly ignoring where the true sources of power lie. And I’m better able to appreciate Winston Churchill’s warning that “However beautiful the strategy, [we] should occasionally look at the results.”

Well, I’ve looked, and not only is Mount Zion still a hell of a ways off, but it appears to be receding into the distance.

 IV.  Good Actions in Bad Faith?

We would be less than honest with ourselves if we didn’t consider another possibility:  Just as local efforts to provide skills training to the unemployed can seem futile when the country as a whole has plunged into a deep recession, so can our collective efforts as grantmakers appear insignificant when contrasted with the vast forces affecting the communities we aim to serve.

For those of us attempting to fund significant social change, how do we rationalize our work to ourselves and others? Are we

• Convinced, in spite of the evidence to the contrary, that the revolution can be funded?
• Biding our time, ready to support the next great people’s movement when it comes along?
• Going through the motions, collecting our salaries month after month, too bought in or too blind to see that we’re not really making any headway?
• Resigned (as one of my colleagues put it) to taking a permanently adversarial position?

Or are we simply keeping hope alive because the alternative is too awful to contemplate?

 

Coming up: Grantmaking Strategy, Part 2: Of Mortals and True Strategists

 

 

The Problem With The Internet, Part 2: The Internet and Social Change

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With all due respect to my WCT colleague, Albert Ruesga, I don’t believe the Internet is currently the best place to build a social change movement rooted in deliberation and consultation.

Deliberation leading to shared understandings that subsequently inform action; consultation broadening a social change community beyond a few committed elites—I’m convinced the brunt of this work can best happen offline.

I’m not denying that the Internet has provided communities of social activists new tools for collaboration.  It clearly has.

I’m saying there are many characteristics of the Internet and its use that get in the way of transforming a group of loosely associated individuals into a community with shared understandings about the world and how to change it.  The story of Joe Sector, described in an earlier post, begins to name some of these barriers, but there are others.

Consider the state of our critical thinking and reading skills; our general lack of media literacy; our inability or unwillingness to penetrate what some critics have called the Illusion of News.

We carry all of this baggage and more with us on our travels through Cyberspace, though we convince ourselves that we’re fleet of cyber-foot, dancing effortlessly from site to site and blog to blog.  We fill with frenzied points and clicks the time we might otherwise spend banging our collective heads against a shared problem.

Philanthropy’s Primum Mobile

In his lovely essay, “The Evolving American Foundation,” James Allen Smith describes how the germ metaphor ignited the imaginations of many who worked in the foundation field at the turn of the last century.  This metaphor was especially seductive because it suggested that we might understand and address our social ills the way we diagnose and cure disease.  According to Smith, the germ metaphor fell out of favor some time later and was supplanted by others that more accurately reflected social complexities.

But the use of the germ metaphor has stuck with us.  It’s clearly related to the metaphor of the root cause which persists in the parlance and thinking of philanthropy.  We still hear of programs, such as the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, for example, that “aim to address the root causes of poverty in America.”  And indeed, a casual Google search on the phrase “root cause(s)” will turn up many more.  The metaphor of the root cause has many cousins in philanthropy, among them the lever and the key (as in the “key to the puzzle”).

Nowadays we recognize, as others did long ago, that there are conceptual difficulties in identifying anything like a root cause of poverty (beyond the condition of not having any money).  The phenomenon of poverty is part of a dynamic system of many parts, interacting in complicated ways.  This complex system has no discernible root that we can yank out of the ground as we might the root of a noxious weed.

But we shouldn’t let ourselves be too awed by the image of the complex system.  Physicists, economists, electrical engineers, and others have been successful in creating mathematical models of very complex systems and using these models to predict the behavior of these systems over time.  Jay Forrester, for example, used one such model to analyze industrial business cycles and another to analyze the behavior of the stock market.  What’s unusual about these models is that they lack a point of origin—there’s no discernible “root.”  What you have instead are “feedback loops” and entities called “stocks” and “flows.”  These constructs enable you to predict how a system will respond when you change one of its properties.

Here perhaps is another case where foundations have imported the words and concepts of other disciplines without also importing their insights.  As foundation professionals we talk about complex systems, yet we don’t often apply the tools developed in other domains to study them.  In our weaker moments, we might even invoke the complexity of a system as an excuse for our inability to make any headway on a given problem. 

I suggested in another post that meaningful campaign finance and lobbying reform might the keys to making significant headway on the issue of persistent poverty in this country.  But would a deeper analysis tell us that this too is a will o’ the wisp?  Is it folly to search for root causes or pressure points?  Or is it the case, as La Rochefoucauld once said, that the man who lives without folly isn't so wise as he thinks?