Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Editorial, Michael Moody

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

The Education Collaboration Fund: Possibilities And Limitations Of Pooled Funds, Lisa Philp

The Foundation Review

· Raising money for a pooled fund is time consuming and requires expertise with the funding topic and the target audience. Yet the process of shopping around a pooled fund or collaborative concept can be valuable in its own right, even if most do not participate.

· Shared interest around a topic or community is a necessary but insufficient reason for participating in a pooled fund. A pooled fund provides an opportunity for individuals and family foundations to learn and grow as donors.

· Someone with passion, organizational skills, and persistence needs to drive the process forward or it will …

What Is A Family Foundation?, Michael Moody, Allison Lugo Knapp, Marlene Corrado

The Foundation Review

· Family foundations are important institutions, making up a significant portion of the foundation universe and having both local and global impact. Yet we have no shared definition of this diverse and evolving category. Clarifying the definition will help challenge persistent misconceptions, get perspective on the diversity, and improve foundations’ understanding of their own family dimensions.

· This article surveys the different definitions of family foundation that are, and have been, used by key organizations in the field and by researchers. It also reviews examples of the variations and complicating factors that make answering the title question difficult.

· A …

The Family Difference? Exploring The Congruence In Grant Distribution Patterns Between Family And Independent Foundations, Jasmine Mcginnis, Shena Ashley

The Foundation Review

· Using a broad group of family and independent foundations from a representative sample of Georgia foundations, the authors examined differences in giving patterns between family and independent foundations.

· Findings confirm the result of previous work that studied large foundations.

· There are no substantial differences between family and independent foundations’ preferences even when controlling for a nonprofit’s location and size.

· These findings are relevant for discussions about the role of non-family members on boards.

Challenges And Strategies For Family Foundations With Geographically Dispersed Board Members, Melanie A. Mckitrick, Deborah Hirt

The Foundation Review

· This article, based on interviews with leaders of 10 family foundations, investigates the impact of geographic dispersion on governance, administration, decision making, and grantmaking activities.

· The greatest challenges for family foundations with dispersed boards involve assembling an appropriate staff, ensuring strong communication between staff and board members, and focusing the organization’s mission. Maintaining family board member interest in the foundation’s geographic area and bridging and strengthening ties between generations were also concerns.

· In order to maintain family legacies, all case-study foundations found unique ways to overcome challenges and were deliberate in ensuring that board members stayed actively …

I'M Not Rockefeller: Implications For Major Foundations Seeking To Engage Ultra- High-Net-Worth Donors, Katherina M. Rosqueta, Kathleen Noonan, Miriam Shark

The Foundation Review

· This article describes how a group of 33 ultrahigh- net-worth philanthropists (UHNWPs) approach their giving.

· A few key areas dominated their giving priorities: education; health; poverty and social welfare; and children/youth initiatives each were a priority for more than a quarter of participants – with education expressed as an interest of 55 percent.

· A third of the 24 who responded to the question spent less than 10 percent of their full working time devoted to philanthropy, and 13 dedicated less than 20 percent of their working time.

· UHNWPs view their peers as their most trusted information …

A Hedgehog Moment: The Roles And Pitfalls Of Strategic Philanthropy For Family Foundations And Donors: Book Review, Charles H. Hamilton

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

The Real-Time Evaluation Memo: A Tool For Enabling Evaluative Thinking And Learning In Foundations And Nonprofits, Melanie Hwalek, Mary Grcich Williams

The Foundation Review

· Real-time evaluation memos provide data-based feedback in a timely manner to inform decision making.

· Memos must be concise and include both data and expert synthesis and interpretation.

· The foundation must have a learning culture if the memos are to most useful; there must be time to reflect on the content and implications.

· The balance between data quality and timeliness must be managed and will be dependent on the topic.

· While useful for program management, these memos do not provide the kind of summative information that board members and other stakeholders may require.

Beyond The Veneer Of Strategic Philanthropy, Patricia Patrizi, Elizabeth Heid Thompson

The Foundation Review

· “Strategic philanthropy” has become a dominant theme among foundations in the past few decades.

· While many foundations have developed strategic plans, few have made the internal changes necessary to actually behave strategically.

· Four challenges to strategic philanthropy are identified, including strategies developed in isolation from grantees that execute them and misaligned foundation structures, processes, and cultures that do not support strategic endeavors.

· In order to get beyond the veneer of strategic philanthropy, foundation leaders need to be clearer about their own role in creating change, develop the strategic capacities to do so, and then apply those …

Beyond The Grant: How The W. K. Kellogg Foundation Went Beyond Grantmaking To Contribute To A Major Early Childhood Initiative, Stephen Greeley, Beth Greeley

The Foundation Review

· The seven-year SPARK (Supporting Partnerships to Assure Ready Kids) initiative, created by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation (WKKF), aimed at systemically linking the pre-K and kindergarten worlds as a way to position vulnerable children for greater success in the early grades.

· At the foundation, the initiative served as a departure point for WKKF to move from its traditional grantmaking role to a changemaker role.

· To create change, a foundation must articulate – and commit to – a point of view about how change can occur. A theory of change can be a powerful tool to guide ongoing …

Is The Policy Win All? A Framework For Effective Social-Justice Advocacy, Barbara Klugman

The Foundation Review

· This article offers a theory-of-change framework to help those engaged in social-justice advocacy to reflect on whether social-justice values are being retained in the process.

· A reproductive rights effort in South Africa provides an example of how social justice values can be lost in the advocacy process.

· The failure to sustain work on the ground pointed to the need to maintain a base of support even after a policy victory.

· Strategies must be revisited as social and political contexts change.

· One of the critical social-justice values that supports the establishment and maintenance of alliances is …

Peer Networking And Community Change: Improving Foundation Practice, Thomas E. Backer, Ralph Smith

The Foundation Review

· This article brings together the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s 15 years of experience with peer networking— examining through two research studies the process of peer networking and its impact, both with community-based and funder groups.

· Peer networking helps people with common interests to exchange information, disseminate good practices, and build a leadership structure for work they do together, such as a community change initiative.

· Casey’s research identified 10 good practices for effective peer networking, as well as 10 challenges that can affect its success; a four-level model was created to provide context for these findings.

· The …

Funding Cultural Adaptations To Promote Effective And Efficient Mental Health Service Provision, Lynda E. Frost, Rick Ybarra

The Foundation Review

· Given the changing demographics of the U.S. and documented racial and ethnic health disparities, behavioral health service providers must look at adapting their services to better meet the needs of their diverse client populations.

· Grantees implemented three types of cultural adaptations: sociocultural/organizational, structural/ service delivery, and clinical.

· Most adaptations were not directly related to the specific evidence-based practice and would be relevant in many service-provision settings.

Editorial-Open Access, Teresa Behrens

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Leadership Development In The Social Sector: A Framework For Supporting Strategic Investments, Grady Mcgonagill, Claire Reinelt

The Foundation Review

· While much of the research on leadership and leadership development has historically studied private sector settings, recent work has begun to build knowledge about leaders in public and community settings.

· New models of leadership, including collective leadership, are being developed and implemented by foundations.

· A framework for identifying the level of intervention (individual, team, organization, network, or system) and the level of impact (individual, team, organization, community, or field of policy and practice) is proposed as a tool for more strategic investing in leadership development.

Leveraging Social Networks In Direct Services: Are Foundations Doing All They Can?, Katya Fels Smyth

The Foundation Review

· Social networks are critical to physical and mental health, and they shape how people see themselves and their possible futures.

· Social networks represent an under-leveraged resource in social services’ efforts to alleviate poverty and other social challenges.

· Foundations may be unintentionally creating barriers to practice that leverages social networks by incentivizing individually-focused, highly specific services delivered in standardized, replicable ways.

· “Network-oriented” practice can help craft a new way forward that threads the needle between everything-is-different-for-everyone and everything- is-the-same-for-everyone.

· By focusing funding on efforts that build and support social networks, foundations can deepen and sustain the …

Learning From An Adaptive-Consultative Approach: One Foundation’S Experience In Creating Systems Change In Education, Srikanth Gopalakrishnan, Hallie Preskill

The Foundation Review

· This article describes a creative relationship between the Ball Foundation and the Rowland Unified School District. The approach was adopted by the Ball Foundation when they observed that grantees who had a closer relationship with them were more successful than those who had a more traditional relationship with them.

· Based on the concept of “adaptive leadership,” the relationship allows for flexibility and a more collaborative approach between the foundation and grantee.

· This approach requires both the funder and the grantee to be committed to learning and adapting strategies as needed to respond to both results and changing …

Executive Summaries

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Executive Summaries

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Developing Foundation-University-Grantee Collaboratives As A Model For High-Impact Philanthropy, Michelle B. Nayfack, Priscilla Wohlstetter

The Foundation Review

· This article reports on results from the Weingart Foundation’s Urban School Districts Reform Initiative. The goal of the initiative was to improve urban education, and ultimately raise student achievement, by supporting sustainable reforms in school districts educating high numbers of low-income students.

· The Weingart Foundation determined the scale and scope of the effort, and set forth specific goals and timelines; the districts were invited to propose projects that were organic and integrated into their own strategic plans.

· Based on research conducted by an intermediary, potential grantees were identified; six grantees were interviewed about their strategic plan priorities …

Expanding Organizational Advocacy Capacity: Reflections From The Field, Annette Gardner, Sara Geierstanger, Lori Miller Nascimento, Claire Brindis

The Foundation Review

· Organizational advocacy capacity is an increasingly important area of inquiry, raising questions about the opportunities (and limits) for achieving and sustaining policy change.

· The California Endowment implemented the Clinic Consortia Policy and Advocacy Program to expand grantee advocacy capacity to support the policy and operational needs of California’s community clinics.

· In-person meetings with decision-makers and developing working relationships were among the key advocacy activities undertaken by 19 grantees. Grantees secured several policy wins through a variety of strategies, including mobilizing member clinics to be potent advocates.

· The “return on investment analysis” indicates that grantees secured policymaker …

The Best Of The Humanistic And Technocratic: Why The Most Effective Work In Philanthropy Requires A Balance, Paul M. Connolly

The Foundation Review

· As a more technocratic approach to philanthropy has emerged over the past 15 years, it has been seen as the opposite of humanistic philanthropy.

· Rather than a dichotomy, these approaches are on a continuum.

· The best tools from each approach can and should be brought to bear, including the wellthought out and disciplined strategies and results orientation of technocrats and the values base, intuition, responsiveness, and flexibility of the humanists.

· Staff and board leaders at foundations should articulate the humanistic-technocratic blend they desire, deliberately distill it into the organizational culture and everyday practices, and hire staff …

Executive Summaries

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Evaluative Tools For Articulating And Monitoring Foundation Strategy, Helen Davis Picher, Sandra Yetman Adams

The Foundation Review

· Research shows that while foundation leadership and staff value strategy and foundations largely perceive themselves as strategic, they often struggle to articulate, implement, and track strategy. The William Penn Foundation has developed a collection of tools to articulate and assess its progress toward strategic goals.

· Each tool employs a structured format to promote standardization; flexibility, though, is encouraged in the application of each tool to ensure that form does not dictate function. Each tool provides a template for organizing information that should be tweaked as needed.

· The speed and breadth of adoption of each tool varies and …

Reframing Assessment Of Grantee Perceptions: Reconsidering Effectiveness With Broader International Stakeholder Engagement, Laurel Pendleton, Michael Y. Moon

The Foundation Review

· Stakeholder engagement is important in philanthropy because it allows grantmakers and grantees to pool their respective resources more effectively to address their shared target issues.

· As more and more foundations and other grantmaking entities venture into the expansive world of self-evaluation, it is prudent that these methods be examined in light of international funding relationships.

· In order to better understand how these tools and methods can be used internationally, we outline the opportunities presented when using frames as one basis for decision-making in complex situations.

· Using the hypothetical case of a U.S. funder seeking to understand …

Editorial, Teresa R. Behrens

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Exposing Real World Philanthropy To The Next Generation Of Social Work Leaders, Yoko Crume, Edgar Villanueva

The Foundation Review

· This article describes a method for instructing social work students in the art of enhanced collaboration with foundations, shifting the focus from “writing a winning proposal” and “finding alternative funding sources” to “developing collaborative partnerships for sustainable community development and social change.”

· The program consists of four major steps: charitable foundation review and case presentation, self-guided review of real-world proposals, mock grant proposal development, and side-by-side proposal review.

· Student proposals were rated similarly by the instructor and the foundation program officer, even though different criteria were used, suggesting that well-written proposals are also likely to clearly address …

Promoting Community Leadership Among Community Foundations: The Role Of The Social Capital Benchmark Survey, Doug Easterling

The Foundation Review

· Faced with increased competition for donors and calls for measurable impact, many community foundations (CFs) are adopting a more proactive, strategic approach to philanthropy – one that has come to be known as "community leadership."

· Community leadership has proven challenging for many CFs. In theory, community assessment is a useful tool allowing CFs to identify strategic issues where leadership activities are warranted. This article examines the effect of a large, coordinated assessment project, the 2000 Social Capital Benchmark Survey (SCBS), conducted by Robert Putnam and the Saguaro Seminar at Harvard University.

· Of the 34 CFs that participated …

Community Philanthropy: How The Delta Region Revives, Embraces, And Promotes The Spirit Of Giving, Charlotte L. Williams, Sherece West, Joanna Klak

The Foundation Review

· Community philanthropy is the giving of time, talent, and treasure that when invested locally is characteristic of positive change and lasting development.

· This article reports on a survey of 31 small Arkansas communities of 5,000 to 15,000 in population using open-ended descriptive questions. Responses were compared across communities to assess variation in giving/fundraising, civic engagement, and leadership.

· Data confirm that giving/fundraising was substantial, particularly in communities with populations of 8,000 or less.

· Findings show that people are giving not only their money, but also their services, time, and skills – especially in times of emergency response. …

Getting To Results: A Tool And Lessons From The Annie E. Casey Foundation’S K-12 Education Portfolio, Tory Read, Bruno Manno

The Foundation Review

· In 2002, the Annie E. Casey Foundation adopted a results-based accountability (RBA) framework to track and report on the results of their philanthropic investments.

· The RBA tool was piloted in a few program areas, including its K-12 education portfolio.

· Grantees were highly engaged in an iterative process to determine appropriate measures, refine the theory of change, and how to track progress.

· Overall, the RBA tool enabled staff to get a sense of how grantees were doing and therefore how the foundation was doing in a way that hadn’t been possible before.

· The K-12 program got …