November 11, 2010 | Read Time: 1 minute
Below is the final part of my interview with Ben Cameron, program director for the arts at Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, about a program administered by Nonprofit Finance Fund and financed by Duke to help arts groups. (Read the first, second, and third installments.)
Through the multiyear “Leading for the Future” project, Nonprofit Finance Fund is directing more than $10-million in capital from the foundation to 10 performing-arts organizations. The goal is to give them the flexibility to test new ideas, explore new business approaches, resist distraction, and even risk failure.
Below, Mr. Cameron shares his thoughts on the lessons he’s learned during the program’s first year.
With innovation and risk comes the possibility of failure. How have you seen your grantees use capital to turn major disappointments into future artistic successes?
Success for us lies not in the implementation of a particular project as it was originally conceived but in the depth of learning that comes from undertaking change.
Many of our grantees’ plans evolve and take on different shapes, and rightly so. In fact, a spectacular “failure” might be more informative and useful than a more modest “success” in terms of helping both the organization and the larger field move forward in addressing the challenges of the new century and the future.
A question I find myself asking is: How does an organization go from being one tackling an innovative project to one with an organizational culture dedicated to innovation?
Ultimately we hope that the organizations we fund will be dedicated to change as an ongoing practice, not as a project to be relegated to the side. The groups that will prosper in the future will be those whose innovative projects translate into innovative cultures.
