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5 Changes I Want to See in Philanthopy

1. Big Lever Funding

I am currently participating in the Illinois Task Force for Social Innovation. And working on ci2iglobal, and transitioning Inspired Legacies. Having worked in or around nonprofits and philanthropy for a decade, I have seen the field changing. I remember the first budding of Mission Related Investing, when there were basically 3 foundations championing it. Then I discovered people were doing Program Related Investing, and we started to see a broader spectrum of how money was being used in the philanthropic sector. We were collectively working to optimize how much money was creating purpose-filled value.

Last year I toyed around with some friends on mapping the financial spectrum. We are doing it again with the task force. It is exciting to see the hybridity between for-profit and for-purpose work and the financial innovation to support it.

However, concurrently there has been an increasing demand for nonprofits and social purpose organizations in general to quantify what they do. When I look at what I consider charity (aka bandaids on existing issues), these metrics really help tell the story about what an organization is doing to deliver that bandaid.

And… my struggle all along, even before I joined the social change effort, was to find the big levers that shifted how things are. What would it take to remove the need for these bandaids? I keep looking for the big levers.

But big levers don’t get funded until they pay off. Usually.

I never bothered to even look for foundation funding or grants for my work on shifting culture to be more thrivable. Who gives grants for core culture change? I think it ought to be funded. It may actually catalyze more transformation in the system, by aligning people and projects along a story. But how do you measure that? How would you even track the spread of the idea, all the people making hundreds of choices differently because they started to see the world differently? At the end of the journey, you can find your way back. But where is the end of the journey? Can you find where it ends and hear back? Do people even come back to you 2-5 years later and tell you a story of how “thrivability” led them to do something different. (Usually only when they know you.) If five years from now, scientists working on environmental science shift their view to look at the world from a thrivable perspective and it unlocks something that allows a cascade of action to follow that make the world more livable, can I claim that as my impact? Could I possible ask for money for the hope that this happens?

 

2. Be more like an investor and less like middle management

In startup land, this isn’t unreasonable. A startup can develop a product or an idea, pitch it to investors, get some funding…and if their idea works, the funder gets payback. If it doesn’t…well, losses all around. Investors know that most of what they fund will fail. It is an art of finding enough that succeeds with big enough returns to keep going. Where is this attitude in philanthropy? Both transformational change and startups live in complex adaptive systems… they can’t be predicted and causality is challenging if not impossible. And yet, there is a vital part of the startup world funded by people willing to put big dollars into unpredictable possibilities for the small opportunity of making a big return.

Philanthropy, in adopting more practices from the business world, took on a middle management mindset in far too many cases. Instead of optimizing for what might make the biggest change in the area to address, the optimization has tended toward who can show impact in the funding cycle. It tends toward projects that have strong “predictability” in them. I know how many people will be fed, clothed, housed, cared for if the project is funded.

Let’s be careful here. There are some foundations and philanthropists that are willing to be risky with their giving. They give to a collection of efforts knowing that some won’t turn out as hoped. They may even fund across the spectrum from highly predictable charity efforts to systemic change efforts. But the general vibe of the field is one of mitigating risk of money being used ineffectively by having the metrics to back it up.

 

3. I want to see a Venture Capital Philanthropy company. 

adVenturePhilanthropy or something. They share the risk of some of the projects not achieving desired results…but have smart portfolios of giving capital. Think of it like a high end giving circle where you pay sophisticated philanthropic advisors to fund a portfolio of efforts on causes that you and others care about. The advisor or firm then shares with all the donors the report on value created through giving.

 

4. And, like a business, ROI can be based on value created instead of “impact” made.

Impact. Benchmark. Difference from before. What is the impact? I want to see what is the value. Can we switch from impact assessment to tracking the value created? By doing so we open up more options for tracking the transformational work we want to do in really evolutionary giving. (We are working on this in the book Christelle Van Ham and I are writing called, for now, Action Spectrum).

 

5. Power Adjustments

Additionally, as someone who has managed to avoid having any big donors to yank me around, we have got to get better as a collective about the co-creation of strategy. Grantees are so beholden by the power of the money a donor offers that they can’t say, “what you want me to do doesn’t work.” Instead they all too often feel like they must say whatever pleases the money master. This isn’t really their fault. Nor is it the fault of the givers of money. Both sides need to work on creating agency for everyone involved, which takes a lot of conscious practice and communication clarity.

Collectively, we need to truly and deeply believe that everyone at the table working on transformation has some value to contribute. That value may come in different forms: it may be time or ideas, or network or skill, and of course money or influence. When we cater to the one with the money we make small or even invalidate the other forms of capital at the table – the experience capital or intellectual capital etc. And that will undermine our shared goals. It gives us less assets to work with instead of more! We all have power. It can come in many forms. It doesn’t make us equal… it just allows us each to have something to offer. And thus everyone at the table of social transformation is valuable.

Catastrophe Thinking

I am pretty sure my entire life has been lived under the hovering cloud of the apocalypse. Sure there were moments of possibility – the fall of the wall, the election of Obama, the end of apartheid in South Africa. But mostly the global events we hear about focus on the end of civilization as we know it, albeit in small chunks at a time. It is still framed as disaster…. we are losing what we had and aren’t moving into a better world (except in small isolated ways). From AIDS to Bird Flu, from Rwanda genocide to Sudan and Burma, nuclear proliferation, the Gulf Coast disaster 2.0 (and Katrina as 1.0), Haiti (and so many other earthquakes, mud slides, volcanoes, and other weather/geological disasters for humans) – plus economic crisis and climate change, the extinction of so many species, and the war on terror (which just grows fear and terror) all converge – even for those of us who don’t watch the news. There is overpopulation, sex slaves, and child mortality issues as well as deforestation, crumbling infrastructure, and coach potatoes living in suburban nightmares. There are activists working cancer into their bodies with their martyr-like dedication. There are those in sedated near oblivion – zombie-living. There are hedonic wealth-seekers facing doom with greed and opulence. This is the story of crumbling and disintegration. Our globalized post-modern world tumbling through catastrophes.

We tell this story, and we have been telling this story, for my whole life. And the fear-mongering started long before I was born – the the cold war threatening nuclear annihilation for half a century.

I am tired of this story. I am tired of seeing faces worn down with the contraction of fear. I am weary of the negativity and desperation driving people to hate, divide, hoard, and fight. I am sick of finding out my government is justifying killing people in order to obtain more resources (because, I guess, we are in such a state of lack!).

We victimize ourselves, and in that suffering, we victimize others with our trauma.

Enough. Put it down. Don’t believe the hype. Don’t fight for a world you already gave up on.

Look for the flower emerging in the sidewalk – life pressing through without complaint or blame to assert its urge for sunlight. Nature is incredibly resilient and adaptive. Work within the world we have to co-create the world we want. Focus on what is going well and right, and encourage more of it. Breathe and be the serenity prayer.

Do not deny the brutal facts before us, but know that you see those facts through a filter of the story you are telling yourself (and others) about the world. You can transform that story and see those facts in a fresh light – from a different vantage point. Turn on the thrivability light, and recognize that life gives rise to more life. Never before in human history have we known a greater wealth of possibility.

After three days in Philadelphia discussing philanthropy and philanthropic strategies for transformation, I feel deeply convinced and inspired by a model I can see of thrivable philanthropy. Gerard calls it evolutionary philanthropy, and there might be some subtle distinctions. However, let me explain. And then I hope it will be more clear why our stories about our world could shift to transform our experience of it and the world itself.

Let’s call charity the work that we do to address immediate needs of others who can not, for whatever reason, care for themselves. It is as if you are standing on a riverbank, see a baby floating downstream, and you rush out to save the drowning child. Only, there are not enough people pulling drowning babies from the river, and the babies have suffered from being in the river. Our hearts break open. Some savvy volunteer wonders aloud – “who is tossing babies in this river?” And a crew of helpers decide to go upstream to find the cause. And they discover a system out of balance allowing babies to land in the river. They decide to change the system and set up programs to help mothers and advocate for social justice. We call this social change and social justice work. Still, babies are floating down the river. The philanthropist supporting this work starts to wonder – huh, what impact is my giving having? I want babies to stop ending up in the river – this is madness! And the social justice worker says – well, we think we have decreased the number of babies in the river, but this is a complex adaptive system so I can’t name all the causes and effects! I can’t clearly attribute your dollars having saved babies without acknowledging other programs and the dynamic changes in the system in which our town operates, babies are born, the economy shifts, and nature takes her course. We might have even changed our baby counting practices in a way that changed how many babies we can account for, which skewed the numbers giving an artificial bump. But we are not sure.

Then a thinker stands up and says – it is the very culture and beliefs in which we operate that give rise to these systems that aren’t taking care of all these babies. And the philanthropist has to choose now – either fund better metrics to know whether there is an impact… or fund cultural shift. And there are still babies in the river, and everyone’s hearts break open knowing it and seeing it. And they are sad.

Transforming culture takes longer, it is harder to measure, the complex dynamic system of it all makes it next to impossible to attribute agency clearly. And, it is where the greatest possibility for creating a culture that ever more deeply transforms itself, cares for each other and the whole, and enables the world we want.

Change your story.

Positive Deviants

I really love this term. It seems to hold contradiction in itself, as our (at least my own) conception of deviants is usually a negative one! To deviate, however, simply means to do differently. So ask the question – where is someone doing something different that has a positive impact? Here is a lovely article on the power of positive deviants.

you are awesome
Creative Commons License photo credit: Torley

What I love about this story is how it highlights letting change come from within a community. We may know from the outside of a community that behaviors x, y, and z would help them. However, trying to impose those activities tends to fail. When we find those that are within the community that are doing things differently than the others that align with the behavior shifts that would lead to longer life or greater health and opportunity, we can point to those and allow peer influence (remember your Cialdini) to work its magic.

Where is positive deviance in your own life? Where do you do something right/well that you want to do in other areas of your life? Where do you see positive deviance around you? How can you encourage more of what works?

I first heard about this term about 5 years ago – from two mavens: Drake Zimmerman and Tom Munnecke. Nods to them both.

SIDENOTE: My concern here – the caveat, is using this sort of methodology to export culture. Helping people learn how to make money and thus join OUR system may not be what is most useful to us or to them. This is a case in which we might look inside our own culture and find positive deviants. Who is able to live best while relying on financial capital the least? How do they do that? Rather than – if everyone in the world has more money, we will all be better off. The whole poverty alleviation project is a misguided ego-centric approach to better world building. Make people better off – regardless of whether that involves money or not. And do not measure “well-off” by monetary standards. Some of the poorest people I have seen own the biggest houses, fastest cars, and handle the most money.

Thrivable Living: Edge-Riding

How do you lead a thrivable life? Let’s begin by looking at edge-riding.

One of my colleagues asked me once, why do you insist on riding the edge? To be honest, I think there are lots of ways I am not pushing the edge. And some ways that what I do might be pushing some cultural edge, but it isn’t an edge for me. For example, the father of my kids has them the majority of the time. We have been doing it this way for five years (and three of those years we have been separated.) Our kids don’t seem to think this is strange. It is how we are. I don’t wake up in the morning debating about it. It is what it is, and for the most part seems to work for us. Creating Thrivable.org, on the other hand, feels like edge-riding to me.

Wisdom from the darkness
I do sense that there is something about living a thrivable life that has to do with riding the edge. When I talk with people who have faced their own death – whether through an accident that they have willed themselves to come back from or the threat of cancer, the death of a loved one near to them, or just a serious wake up call, I hear a craving for the edge. Sometimes it grows slowly, and often times it comes in the blink of an eye. This life is short and precious. As Mary Oliver’s poem goes, “What are you going to do with this one wild and precious life?” Well, I am not going to spend it sitting down and passively letting the world go by me. And when I talk with people who have suffered tremendous loss – of wealth or love, passion project or dream, I hear there too a certain resilience that allows for riding the edge. An “I know how dark the darkness is, and I learned to survive that, and I can survive what comes next” attitude emerges in the ones I admire. Whether having faced death or failure, questions emerge that can bring one to strive for edge-riding:

What is the worst that can happen? Can I survive that?
If I don’t do anything or don’t choose this course, will I regret it later? In 5 years? 20?
Can I look in the mirror with integrity and love myself?

But what will my friends think of me?


Most of us ask this question when we ponder something on our edge. We look to them to externalize our sense of ourselves and the norms of our tribes. However, the answer does not rest with them, it rests in our own hearts. You are the only person you have to live with for the rest of your life. The only one. Not your significant other(s), not your family, not your work circle or faith circle. You. When you are 80, and the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of your family play at your feet, will you look in the mirror and say, “I lived a thrivable life – living in dynamic balance with myself and the world around me?” No one else is having to look in that mirror with you.

If you can’t look into the mirror today and love yourself, then you won’t likely be able to do it when you are 80 unless something changes. You are the only one responsible for that change. That is the integrity test – looking in the mirror and knowing that you have integrity – with your nature, your dreams, and your inner most self. Being able to do that, well, I think it is worth riding the edge for. If you really want to honor your nature…really want to achieve your dreams…really want to connect to your innermost self, then find your edges and ride a few until you evolve in the person that feels a glorious tingle when you look in the mirror and discover – “cool, I actually admire the person facing me.”