Apr 24, 2009

Global Philanthropy Forum: Choosing Projects Guaranteed to Succeed

by Laura Starita

Philanthropy Action is live blogging at the Global Philanthropy Forum

Something of an axiom seems to have emerged within the discussion about philanthropy and the public sector, which claims that one of the advantages of philanthropy over government is that philanthropic efforts can take more risks. Jane Wales made the point in her opening remarks at the forum; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said much the same when she urged philanthropy to experiment with unproven approaches and then bring those that work to government channels to scale.

Perhaps philanthropic organizations are in the position to take risks and try new things, but do they? There seems to be little evidence that they do. Nonprofits, like everyone else, are vulnerable to a herd mentality, as evidenced by fads within the sector, both in embracing practices of questionable utility (matching gifts larger than $1:$1, embedded giving, social networking) as well as financing interventions without fine-tuning their execution (microfinance). In many ways, the collection of individuals and organizations represented at the Global Philanthropy Forum seem, in so many ways, like a gathering of venture capitalists and their fund-ees: the people are whip smart, their pitches fine-tuned to deliver the details in thirty seconds or less, their aims to find people either with money or contacts or resources to further their plans. And like venture capitalists, they have more the reputation for risk-taking than the reality.

Geoffrey Canada, the controversial founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone, seemed to sum up the dynamic in response to a member question about how to best scale what he has done in central Harlem to other distressed communities: Choose places with a high probability of success. He was referring specifically to the announcement made by the Obama administration that they want to take Canada’s approach and replicate it in different environments. His reasoning was sound: new ideas, particularly those that require change in the public sector, require significant proof of success in order to get buy-in from public and private audiences. But his statements are consistent with what happens so often in philanthropy: target not the ultra-poor but the pretty poor; not the desperately sick, but the pretty sick. Funding and interventions have enormous personal benefit to these communities and that benefit should in no way be deemed less just because there are others in even more dire straits, but painting all of philanthropic endeavor with the brush of innovation ignores the reality that philanthropists who aim to leverage and scale their investments suffer under the same burdens as other sectors.