Would You Have Given Gandhi a Grant?
I am one of the fortunate practitioners new to philanthropy who was able to attend both the EPIP and Council conferences this year in L.A. At EPIP, I was also lucky to see Dr. Bob Ross speak about the state of philanthropy. Dr. Ross is the CEO of The California Endowment, and among the many provocative things that he said, the one that caused me and the rest of the audience at EPIP to put down our smartphones and really listen was the following:
“I shudder to think what would have happened if Martin Luther King, or Gandhi, or Cesar Chavez had submitted a grant application to us.”
He made this observation while discussing the ways The California Endowment tries to push the boundaries on risk-taking while also being conscious of its mission, its appetite for risk, and the political and cultural climate in which it operates. (He noted this holds true for other foundations as well.) Generally, he said, foundations are very risk averse. And of course, what impacted the audience was the thought that we could possibly pass on supporting someone who would go on to change the world in a really big way. Or that we already had.
I’ve heard this theme about foundations being hesitant to take risks during the Council’s conference as well. Sunday afternoon, at the fishbowl session on communications in philanthropy, we talked about the ways that foundations and their partners sometimes act out of an abundance of caution, rather than an appetite for risk. Many people said their organizations were cautious because, as Andrew Sherry from the Knight Foundation explained, they fear failure and embarrassment.
However, at today’s digital communications session, Ernie Wilson, dean of USC’s Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism, said that “foundations have no natural predators.” And a representative from The James Irvine Foundation said that for philanthropy, it’s not “innovate or die,” it’s “innovate or become irrelevant.”
At yesterday’s communications session, we heard representatives of the Case, Knight, Packard, and MacArthur foundations-and others-tell stories about instances when their efforts publically fell short. I’m sure that time has given all of them perspective, but it sounded to me like they had come out of their rough patches bruised, but not permanently damaged. And they all said that they learned from the experiences. In fact, Kathy Reich of the Packard Foundation said that she felt liberated once she stopped being afraid of talking about her failures, and her colleagues thought she was a genius.
So, if we as philanthropists don’t have natural predators, then what are we afraid of? Would fear have held us back from funding some of the major changemakers of our time? Would Cesar Chavez have seemed too militant? Would it have been too hard to imagine an independent India? Would we have bet on the promise of a young preacher from Atlanta?
As someone new to philanthropy, I look forward to having a conversation with my peers about how we can be bold, take risks, and learn from failure. Read more about a fearless approach to creating change in a blog post recently published by our CEO, Jean Case, on our website.
Kate Ahern is director of social innovation for The Case Foundation.
