May 5, 2009 | Read Time: 1 minute
“Why create a foundation in the first place?” asks Lucy Bernholz in a blog post
on challenging assumptions about the way grant making is done. “What about creating media platforms, loan funds for advocacy campaigns, or innovation hubs within public agencies?”
Ms. Bernholz, a philanthropy consultant, asks readers to consider: Has society thought about all the alternatives to foundations and traditional grant making? What are the alternatives?
Among the ideas she describes:
- Making small grants to many organizations working on a particular issue, rather than trying to pick a few “potential winners.” That way, she says, “funds support both the organizations and the ecosystems they collectively represent.
- Eliminating duplicative efforts to evaluate charity effectiveness. “As we speak, there are probably dozens of foundation program officers doing similar due diligence on the same organizations,” she says. Instead, foundation leaders might encourage their program officers to compete to produce the best reports and other evaluation tools, which would then be followed by all the foundations.
- New ways for foundations to glean “nuanced, informed, and truthful input.” “Can we learn anything from looking for trends and connections between how individual donors use the information, metrics, and feedback loops of GlobalGiving or Kiva and how foundation decision makers seek info, metrics, and feedback?” she wonders. “Are ombudsmen possible?”
Ms. Bernholz isn’t necessarily advocating any of these approaches; she just wants readers to recognize the assumptions they make.
“Our assumptions are so familiar to us that we are sometimes blind to them,” she says. “Do we need an endowment, a staff, a grant program? Might it be better to fund something through taxes than try to fund it philanthropically? Is perpetuity part of a strategy or a default position?”
What do you think?
