The Beginner's Mind
Date Published: October 19, 2009
The Beginner's Mind
Initiatives e-newsletter
October 2009
A New Openness: Thoughs from Ellen Remmer
Embracing Innovation
Upside Within the Downturn: Possibilities for Corporate Philanthropy
New Ways of Working: Three Foundations Adjust
Board Up Windows or Build an Ark? Adaptive Leadership
Now is the Time - SOCAP '09
Global Learning Communities
TPI Turns 20: Peter Karoff Reflects
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few." - Shunryu Suzuki
The last 12 months have challenged us in so many ways, not least of which is the mismatch between our smaller philanthropic purses and pervasive growing need. It is a time that has called on all of us in the philanthropic sector to draw upon our humility, our compassion and our creativity. Borrowing from the Zen Buddhist tradition, I believe this is a time for the beginners mind.
The beginner’s mind is one of openness; one in which we can separate ourselves from years of practice and improvement, from “truths” we have worked hard to discover and come to accept. Experiences and beliefs are not discarded, just set aside temporarily to make room for new ideas. At TPI, we are inspired daily by the work of our clients and many others across the field who are finding the courage to challenge long-held assumptions and the humility to start from “I don’t know” in their quest to better contribute today and invest for tomorrow. Is building a large endowment to pay for a goodly percentage of a nonprofit’s annual operating cost such a great idea if principal levels can drop by 30%? Is a focus on a nonprofit’s institutional strength and survival more important than a focus on community results that might be better driven through nontraditional, non-institutional approaches? Do we donors really understand what is needed to make change?
This deep recession has been a wake-up call for many to fill the gaps in our understanding of what it takes to be a successful donor and nonprofit. Donors who previously paid less attention to the financial statements of grantees have turned to us for tutorials and due diligence guides on financial stability and readiness. Donors who previously thought little about the world of government funding are looking for help navigating the ramifications of drastic government budget cuts on the institutions they support. Many donors have inaugurated listening tours and convened roundtables to fill in their learning gaps.
A willingness to rethink strategies and tactics has spurred a new wave of deeper donor engagement. Corporations who are forced to weigh jobs and shareholder return against philanthropic gifts are stepping up their volunteer efforts big time, thinking more creatively about the resources they have to offer and providing many more in-kind services. Years of talking about collaboration are now yielding real on-the-ground partnerships among donors and across sectors. Donors who have slowed or stopped grantmaking have used the time to focus on working more deeply with existing grantees.
The challenges of today have brought many donors back to basics. Some are shifting from funding projects to providing general operating support that is flexible and respectful of their grantees’ imperative to respond to rapidly changing needs. Other donors see this as an opportunity to reflect and rethink how they can best make a difference with limited resources. While the folks on the ground, doing the work, are in a great position to know what is most in demand, more and more donors recognize the value of multiple perspectives and new thinking on how best to address critical social issues.
Cultivating the beginner’s mindset is an important life-long practice, but sometimes it takes a jolt of major proportions for us to recognize anew how much there is to learn. Let’s follow the examples we are seeing and all take this opportunity to rethink and re-imagine many possibilities for our philanthropy.
Warmly,
Ellen Remmer, President
The Philanthropic Initiative, Inc.
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Embracing Innovation
The Imperative of Creativity and Resourcefulness
Many organizations are struggling right now to survive in the face of severe budget cuts – and many donors are trying to sustain the programs and groups they care most about. Others, however, are exploring new ways of addressing critical social needs. For donors who are serious about achieving deep social impact, we encourage a continuing openness, or “beginner’s mind”, to new ways of thinking about social problems and potential solutions. We encourage these donors to ask a series of questions that focus on results. For starters:
- How can we use the opportunity to look at fresh ways to address root causes and promote systems change? “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity,” as Albert Einstein said.
- What innovative ideas might lead to greater impact over existing efforts in a particular field?
- In this time of reduced resources, how can we do more with less? What are more cost-effective approaches that should be tested or scaled up in certain fields? How can we develop recurring revenue streams to support important programs?
Over 15 years ago, TPI published an essay called “Innovators” by Margaret Mahoney (then President of the Commonwealth Fund) on the role of innovation in philanthropy. She said that innovators are fixed on good results to a greater extent than most people, and are interested in process only as a means to an end. Innovators move the world forward by defining the problem differently – they (1) see the situation as it is; (2) build on existing strengths, including human strengths; and (3) share discoveries with others. They convert the possible into the real. They are not necessarily inventors themselves, but connect invention to society.
Social innovations rarely occur quickly. As a rule, change comes slowly, and cannot occur unless the environment is conducive to it – meaning an openness to continuous improvement, to taking a fresh look at why and how certain things are done the way they are, and to considering how things might be done differently. These ideas resonate more than ever in this time of economic retrenchment. Mahoney’s essay ends by saying that "putting a premium on innovation... will unleash the collective strength and creativity required to build and sustain a good society."
In the context of deep social impact, true innovation is not usually about some great new idea. It often involves taking what we know and have learned, and applying it to the real world, perhaps in some new way or through a different process. Innovation is often incremental in nature, as opposed to groundbreaking. It can be about looking creatively at available resources. It can be about creating models that provide different incentives that can change systems and people's lives. It can be about turning traditional ideas on their head to uncover less obvious needs and funding opportunities.
One example is a “scholarship” program that TPI has designed on behalf of an anonymous donor. To many talented students of modest means, an education from an elite college can be life changing for them and their families – yet some of these students struggle and falter at college, unable to capitalize on a tuition scholarship or low cost loans. By focusing on the less obvious needs, this program supports students in all kinds of ways except the most traditional approach of providing actual scholarships. Through mentoring, a peer network and financial support to obtain the things so many students take for granted – like laptop computers, books, and even the ability to go out with their friends for pizza – the program ensures “scholarship” students thrive.
How can donors bring a beginner’s mind to their work, and encourage innovation that could lead to greater impact? TPI has used a variety of methods, all of which have produced creative approaches in different circumstances. Donors can:
- Bring grantees together who are working on similar issues – by sharing ideas, lessons, experiences, and challenges, such convenings can encourage grantees to think “outside of their boxes”, take some risks in experimenting with new approaches, perhaps even collaborate in some way that leads to greater impact.
- Conduct an idea scan to seek input from a variety of experienced practitioners, experts, researchers, and other leaders in a particular field.
- Convene diverse practitioners, creative thinkers and others to do a “deep dive” – analyzing research and knowledge relevant to a particular issue while also exploring how ideas from other fields and disciplines might spark fresh ideas and creative thinking.
- Solicit ideas through a Request for Proposals (RFP) process – by issuing an open-ended invitation to practitioners, funders can empower those who deal with issues on a day-to-day basis to put forward creative solutions to complex problems.
Innovation in philanthropy does not – or should not – imply funding new ideas simply for the sake of starting something that is different or unusual. It does mean encouraging nonprofit leaders, educators and funders to consider new approaches that could be more effective than existing efforts. The starting point is strategic thinking, in combination with creativity and resourcefulness, in analyzing problems and potential solutions.
Leslie Pine, Vice President
The Philanthropic Initiative, Inc.
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We lie before a real opportunity to rethink and evolve traditional assumptions and practices – and ultimately create a new standard for corporate social investing that brings about levels of impact typically only achieved by the most ambitious programs.
TPI has recently reached out to trailblazing CEOs and corporate leaders (insights from which will be published in the weeks ahead) many of whom see the potential for corporate philanthropy to emerge from turmoil as stronger, more secure and able to achieve deeper social impact – if all corporate leaders seize the moment and bring to it a new openness. When thinking differently, the possibilities are many. Here is some of what we heard:
- If financial cuts must to be made, cut non-strategic giving out of your philanthropic budget and purposefully distance it from “philanthropy.” Sponsoring tables for a client’s favorite charity or buying into a golf tournament that gives you great visibility are fine – but move those efforts to marketing. Unencumbered by expenditures that do little to bring about societal change, your giving program will receive greater respect and your employees will view it as a more worthy place to invest their time.
- Use this “lull” as an opportunity to build relationships. “R before T” Jerome Smalls chided me as I rushed into asking him about the state of corporate philanthropy – “Relationship before Task”. Jerome heads community relations for The TJX Companies and lives by the belief that meaningful change requires solid relationships. “People want to work with others who they like and trust.” Take this opportunity to get to know those who you hope to help and those who can be allies in your efforts.
- Re-examine the role of money. Bobbi Silten who leads The Gap Foundation urges corporations to think first about what skills, talents and other company assets they have to offer their community – and then enhance those efforts with monetary giving.
- Look to your employees. They clearly understand the correlation between the financial health of the company and the financial health of their family – yet they are also acutely aware of a world of need around them. By dealing in philanthropic currency that includes not only dollars, but time and skills, you will more deeply embed generosity and action within the corporate culture – empowering broad-based action and shoring up the company’s commitment to the community before future storms roll through. And, don’t make the mistake of equating skills-based volunteering with executives; turn to every employee and ask them what they believe is the biggest value they can offer.
- Finally, take a moment to reflect upon what caused this economic crisis: a moral crisis. “Today it’s rare to hear the words ‘corporation’ or ‘business’ without also hearing the word ‘greedy’” said Boston Scientific Co-Founder John Abele. He believes the need for corporations to rebuild trust is critical – but warns that there is danger when a corporation approaches philanthropy as a means to rebuilt trust. When Arnold Hiatt pushed a groundbreaking social responsibility effort as CEO of Stride Rite it was not a calculated attempt to raise corporate profits (which it did beyond all expectations), “I did it because I refused to separate myself from my values”. Silten, too, credits her experience of working for companies who “allowed me to bring my values to work” for her growth as a leader in this field.
Are we seeing a temporary setback to corporate giving? Clearly. Will we see a permanent change in corporate social investing? We hope so – if we can get corporate leaders across the board to embrace the possibilities envisioned in the minds of these “beginners.”
Jim Coutre, Vice President
The Philanthropic Initiative, Inc.
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New Ways of Working
Three Foundations Adjust to New Realities
How are funders re-thinking assumptions from the past? How have their relationships with grantees changed? What have they learned? How is their work different today than it was a year ago?
We posed these questions to some funders and here is what we heard.
- “At the Frances P. Bunnelle Foundation in Georgetown County, South Carolina we changed overnight from a place-based Foundation flush with funding, striving to get the dollars out the door as quickly and efficiently as possible, to one of reduced circumstances. We had significant funding already committed before the year began. The Bunnelle Board decided to honor the previously made commitments and try to be more creative with the reduced amount of funding available for competitive grants.
We reduced the amount that could be requested from $25,000 to $20,000 and for the first time allowed grant seekers to request general operating support. Sadly, we had to eliminate our Sustaining Grant program that supported 17 organizations well known to us. We hoped that the general operating support would help ease the pain of eliminating this popular grant program.
The Foundation also hired consultants to help local nonprofit groups with strategic planning and governance matters, and to facilitate collaboration among groups with joint goals.
Most recently we have surveyed local grantees to solicit their opinions of the Foundation’s performance in its first five years. Most respondents wrote in depth and provided thoughtful comments that will help form the basis of our new action plan.”
Geales Gavin Sands, Executive Director
Frances P. Bunnelle Foundation
- “Given the challenges that beset the Foundation in late 2008, we really had no choice but to work differently. While we were committed to honoring all existing grant obligations, we were unable to initiate any new funding. However, we were not going to just sit here and do nothing. So we convened a series of meetings of our grantees here at the foundation and asked them two things: 1) How are you doing? and 2) What can we do, beyond grantmaking, that would be helpful to you? About 50 people participated and we followed up with an on-line survey to all of our community-based grantees.
We heard lots of great ideas and this formed the basis for our new workplan. Since our grantees were cutting staff and had lots of demands on their time, they asked us to gather information around specific issues. For example, we researched how to access college interns and we created a forum for grantees to exchange available office and meeting space with one another. We offered to review proposals that they were developing for other funders – we acted as critical readers. We also engaged consultants to conduct workshops on creating effective websites and on evaluation.
This past year has certainly been a growth experience for us. We’ve always had good communications with our grantees, but this process has helped us develop a lot more empathy about the challenges non-profits are facing in these tough times. And it has expanded our ideas about all the ways we can help our grantees beyond making a grant.”
Jean S. Whitney, Executive Director
Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family Foundation
- "The Victoria Foundation gives general operating support to local organizations primarily in Newark, NJ and we stay with grantees for the long-term. The confluence of the bad economy, a new school superintendent, and a fairly new Mayor has allowed us to seriously think about how long we want to support some groups. In order to fund new school district and City priorities, we have to free up money. That means we may not be able to continue to support a group we’ve been with for 30 years.
The new school Superintendent, Dr. Clifford Janey, brought all of the funders to the table and said, “These are things I see, what do you see? These are the things I’m willing to admit need to change, what are your opinions?” This had never been asked of the Newark funder community before, and in fact, we hadn’t come together as a funder community like that before. But economic realities have made it clear that funders as well as our grantees need to partner more if we want to get certain things done. Personally, I see some silver lining in this downturn; it would have taken years for us to get to this point if we hadn’t been forced to.”
Dale Robinson Anglin, Program Officer
Victoria Foundation
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The State We Are In
We start with the assumption that the turbulence and uncertainty we are now experiencing is not a bump in the road, but the beginning of a sea change.
This is not an emergency. An emergency is when the house is on fire. You know how to get out of the house and get the fire put out. A crisis is when the house has burnt to the ground. The rules of the game are changing and no one knows how to move forward.
How do you prepare to survive and thrive in the future when the future is so unknown? You will never have all the information you want in order to make the decisions you need to make. There will not be a clear path forward. Unpredictable twists and turns will be the only certainty.
And you still have to lead.
In these times, a new kind of philanthropic leadership is called for, where the most essential skill is the capacity to meet unanticipated realities and prepare for unknown futures. Ellen Remmer uses the metaphor of a beginner’s mind. We call it adaptive leadership.
The Basic Choice: Hunker Down or Adapt?
The risk is that you and other philanthropists will respond to the current uncomfortable uncertainty by hunkering down, pulling back, throwing short term technical fixes at the problem, and defaulting to what you know best to quell your own fears or respond to the frustration and anxiety of your grantees.
Hunkering down is about across the board cost cutbacks, gaining efficiency by squeezing here and there, instituting more control, conserving and protecting resources, and waiting it out. We hear stories every day about people and organizations that are pulling back everywhere possible. This is akin to Noah addressing the flood by boarding up the windows on his house, rather than building an ark.
You cannot wait for the hurricane to pass if there will always be turbulence. You cannot wait for the fog to clear if you will never be able to see the future clearly.
As the Jack Nicholson character says in the movie of the same name, “What if this is as good as it gets?”
A Beginner’s Mind Means Distributing and Taking Losses
Adaptive Leadership is an iterative process: identifying what is core and what is expendable, running multiple simultaneous experiments to explore new practices, learning from the experience and then integrating successes and bringing them to scale.
Hunkering down is not leadership. There’s a quote from St. Thomas Aquinas that fits here: “If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.”
In the past the function of those in philanthropic leadership in times such as these might have been to serve as a buffer and shelter people from the storm; under today’s circumstances, the job is to increase the capacity of your own organization and your grantees’ organizations to use the moment, the disequilibrium, as an opportunity to make progress.
In order to figure out what next steps to take, you and your grantees will have to tap a wider range of human resources, both internal and external, enlisting the engagement of people deep into the organization and unusual external allies outside as well.
And equipping people to operate under continuing uncertainty and rapid change means developing the capacity of others to have the courage to make decisions in the moment, and to see those decisions as experiments to be monitored and learned from, not as solutions to problems that can then be put to rest.
Marty Linsky, Co-Founder and Principal
Cambridge Leadership Associates
Marty is a long-time faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School. His most recent book, co-authored with Alexander Grashow and Ron Heifetz is The Practice of Adaptive Leadership (Harvard Business Press, 2009)
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This year’s Social Capital Markets conference in San Francisco (SOCAP 09) was attended by over 800 philanthropists, investors, entrepreneurs, intermediaries and (of note this year) policy makers from around the globe. As last year’s inaugural conference took place during the single worst week of stock losses in Wall Street history, it was understandable that participants approached September’s conference with some trepidation. But it was immediately clear that last year’s anxiety has been replaced with feelings of possibility and opportunity. Indeed, the recession was embraced as a ‘wake up call’ which could (finally) catalyze some deep rethinking of our strategies around solving social challenges and our investments – both philanthropic and ‘market’.
Accompanying this energy and excitement, there was also a real sense of urgency – an awareness of the criticality of taking action at this time. The conference highlighted efforts around performance standards and ratings systems, as well as global networks on impact investing, social innovation, and exchange platforms. While much of this work is still in the early stages, there was consensus on the importance of creating the mechanisms and marketplace that will catalyze improved flow of social capital: grants, program related investments, social venture capital, and blended value, market rate investments. As Carla Javits so clearly stated in the opening panel discussion on social innovation – “it’s about excellent implementation”.
Actions we take today have the opportunity to effect real and lasting impact ten years from now – but the key word is of course action. Just as the economic meltdown has been catalytic in having so many of us rethink – and even reset – it might not lead to the changes we want to see unless we enact those ideas, follow those strategies and move the ball forward. I left SOCAP excited by all the possibilities and opportunities but also (and importantly) charged with a sense of urgency and mandate for taking action.
Andrea McGrath Director of The Center for Applied Philanthropy at TPI
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Even as philanthropy in the U.S. works to strengthen its theories and practices, our neighbors overseas look to the U.S. model as a learning opportunity and as a catalyst for more thoughtful, effective and widespread giving at home. While these learning quests can take many different forms, they all share a desire to understand best practices and lessons learned in hopes of inspiring new attitudes and approaches to accelerate social change. For over two decades, TPI has invested time to encourage and facilitate learning communities as we’ve found it can often be just as eye opening to the “teachers” as the “students.” Two study tours and a conference are among our recent global efforts:
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Family Philanthropy in Hong Kong –
TPI recently returned from Hong Kong where we served as Forum Advisor to the Ze Shan Foundation’s first ever forum to encourage and support strategic family philanthropy. Over 75 philanthropists attended Family Philanthropy: Values and Strategy, and participated in sessions on such topics as family legacy, synergies and leverage and strategic giving. A highlight of the event was a performance and fireside chat by musician/philanthropist Peter Buffett.
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Study Tours for Global Philanthropists –
TPI has collaborated with Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government on two study tours for philanthropists from other parts of the world. After a successful seminar with Chilean families and businesses in November 2008, the two organizations will be hosting a delegation from the People’s Republic of China in late October for two days of study, discussion and interactive visits with Boston based philanthropists.
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TPI Turns 20
Reflections from Peter Karoff
It was a day in early June 1989 - and if Leslie Pine says it was June 4th who am I to disagree - when TPI officially opened its doors for business. If you had asked the five people present that day what business TPI was in, I think the answers would have ranged from ‘change the world’, to ‘revolutionize philanthropy’, to ‘bring analysis and discipline into a field that has very little’, to ‘I have no idea but if we don’t go broke it looks like it could be fun.’
So that is what we did.
And that is what TPI continues to do twenty years later.
We were in a small two room office at 75 Federal Street that Catherine Corinha, a colleague from my previous businesses, had expanded from the closet I had used during my two-years at Columbia. It was still a closet but sufficient for our purposes, vague as they were.
In thinking about those early days when we went from having nothing to do and losing lots of money, to becoming very busy inventing what has become both the economic and programmatic model for philanthropic advising, what stands out is how amazingly consistent the original themes, and tensions, have been.
Work with wealthy individuals and families to help rationalize and maximize wealth to the benefit of society. Work with corporations to find the intersections between corporate resources – money, skills and people – and community at large. Work to promote philanthropy through research, teaching and capacity building. These were the major themes and remain so today. The primary tension has been how to do excellent work and do so within a budget that clients are willing to pay for. But we have never viewed TPI as “just’ a consulting firm. The ambition has always been a higher one, and therein lies another central tension between the practice, and the promotion of philanthropy.
It is interesting that today this kind of social business hybrid is all the rage. What’s more interesting is that we have been able to make it financially sustainable.
The biggest joy from TPI has been the people and the learning. The people who we have met and worked with are truly amazing – they are what gives one hope in a tough world, and it is a gift to all of us that we have that opportunity – even when they drive us crazy. It is the learning, the growing up with ideas, programs and their impact on the issues communities, and individuals, that our clients, and we, care so deeply about, that is the real gift to those of us who work at TPI.
A truly wonderful group you are! So many people to thank, and I do. And I can’t wait to see what happens next!
Love to all,
Peter Karoff, Founder
The Philanthropic Initiative, Inc.
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