SCALING SOLUTIONS TOWARD SHIFTING SYSTEMS

Scaling Solutions toward Shifting Systems: Approaches for Impact, Approaches for Learning, 2018

This report summarizes a year of research on how funders can work more collaboratively to place longer-term, more adaptive resources with organizations to help them scale their impact. It includes findings from case studies of 25 funder collaboratives aimed at systems change.

By Juniper Glass Oct 4, 2016 The study describes the landscape of collaboration between grantmaking foundations in Canada: how and why philanthropic organizations are working together towards shared goals. This topic was selected because of the dearth of research on Canadian philanthropic organizations (Rigillo et al, forthcoming; Pole, 2016) and because collaboration has been identified as part of the trend towards strategic philanthropy.

Los Angeles: The California Endowment. …, 2005

Philanthropy as an Emerging Contributor to Development Cooperation, 2014

Philanthropy resists easy definition and categorization. That has made it difficult to track its contribution to specific development goals. But it need not impede philanthropy’s ascent into deep engagement with others in international development cooperation. Philanthropy, no matter where it originates, is driven by the imperative to meet human needs, alleviate suffering, and tackle the systemic challenges that prevent human development and progress. On one end of the spectrum it can be pathbreaking, supporting innovation, field building, first movers and fast movers - and at the other, it provides patient capital for long-term challenges that require painstaking efforts that go beyond political winds and shorter-term business interests. Philanthropy needs to leverage the larger resources and expertise of official development cooperation actors. And governments and the UN system need to leverage the insights, innovations and more nimble approaches of philanthropy and those organizations who the sector supports. Philanthropy reaches across borders and silos to create a better and safer world for all. The power of joining the forces of official development cooperation and philanthropy in the service of the new international, universal development goals will make a substantial difference. But this will require new mindsets, partnerships and forms of collaboration amongst the UN system, governments and the philanthropic sector alike. The challenge is worth surmounting for the leverage and greater impact it will bring.

ABSTRACT: Calls for greater transparency among corporations and social institutions continue to grow in the literature. Many contend that greater transparency is needed to reduce potential for wrong doing and enhance the capacity of interested outsiders to protect the public’s interests. Yet, transparency is not a cost free objective, there are consequences to imposed transparency. This research contributes to the opacity and transparency literature by probing for a deeper understanding of organizational and environmental factors that lead to opaque practices, exploring both negative and positive outcomes of opacity and investigating practices that can help reduce adverse effects of opacity between collaborating entities. Private philanthropy presented an interesting sector for studying opacity and its potential consequences, including potential for public benefits. Researchers have expressed concerns about private philanthropy’s systematic lack of transparency and external accountability, which is further exacerbated by effects of disparate power. The private foundation literature is critical of private philanthropy conducting its affairs as an unchecked, but powerful secret society. Concerns expressed about a lack of transparency and disparate power among private foundations seem understandable given that they have private control over large sums of tax-advantaged funds. However, researchers have neither explored nor defined the nature of opaqueness in private philanthropy. The privacy and transparency literature suggests that transparency can impose additional costs, impede productivity and stymie innovation. This research resulted in a deeper understanding of the nature of opaque foundation practices, discovered that opacity can result in beneficial outcomes and identified strategies foundations and grantees successfully use in overcoming challenges related to opacity and coexisting disparate power.

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 2008

A survey of U.S. environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) receiving grants in 2000 from private California foundations allowed the authors to evaluate conflicting claims on the impact of foundation funding on nonprofit grantees. Different from the view of elitist critics that foundations co-opt their grant recipients, these NGO respondents view foundations as mildly constructive across several organizational domains. These results are more consistent with pluralist and resource dependency arguments that view foundation donors as supportive of NGO capacity building. Whether the funding impact is cooptation or capacity building has less to do with NGOs' degree of dependency on philanthropic funds and more with grant types received and their organizational traits. Multiyear programmatic grants are associated with capacity-building, whereas 1-year program grants are associated with cooptation. A simplistic interpretation of elitist theory may underestimate the diversity of motivations among funders and the tremendous administrative costs associated with a rigid supervision of grantees.

This paper captures the state-of-the-art on impact measurement by discussing the complexity of impact measurement, including drivers and reasons, relationships, and implications for further research. Additionally, a special focus is led on the funder-grantee relationship. As funders become more and more operational engaged, their part in the impact evaluation goes beyond giving money. We ask how the funder itself and its actions can be included in the evaluation of philanthropic activities (Langer, 2004). The following section will describe and critically discuss challenges of measuring impact and recognising success. Finally, the paper will conclude by highlighting current research issues in terms of theory-building and empirical analysis. Additionally, we make possible forecasts on the future development and improvements on impact measurement in the philanthropic sector.

Foundation Transparency - Opacity: It’s Complicated Abstract Private philanthropy has been referred to as one of the least transparent and accountable social institutions in the United States. Accordingly, private foundations are being challenged to become more transparent. Like other charitable institutions, private foundations already disclose extensive information about their activities in federal tax returns, which the public can easily access. Yet, a widely held presumption is that private foundations remain intensely and uniformly opaque. Research findings confirmed that private foundations are generally opaque, but also found that they selectively engage in situational transparency, which is not generally observed in the literature. This article makes three contributions. First, it uses specific indicators to assess the existence private foundation opaque practice, resulting in important insights regarding the contexts in which each may occur. Second, it reports findings that, under certain circumstances, private foundations have intentionally relaxed their opaqueness in favor of greater transparency with certain grantees in furtherance of philanthropic objectives. Third, several questions are posed to help guide foundations in deciding for themselves how and with whom they might wish to engage in greater transparency. Research findings discovered that the matter of transparent/opaque practice in private philanthropy is less than straightforward. As it turns out, transparent/opaque practice among private foundations is a nuanced and complicated matter.

The Foundation Review, 2009

· The Colorado Trust provided three years of general operating support to nine advocacy organizations working to increase access to health through policy change work.

By Nancy Pole, PhiLab August 7, 2016 By describing and critically discussing foundation collaboration as a field of practice, this literature review aims to provide a conceptual and analytical framework to accompany the Canadian case studies on foundation collaboration that form Cluster 3 of the SSHRC research development project. While grantmaking foundations support and engage in collaborations with a range of different actors, the focus here is on collaborations amongst foundations themselves, in which other types of funding partners may also be present. For the most part, these collaborations build upon and around the central role that foundations play as grantmakers – as funders to third sector organizations. The term “collaboration” is taken to refer to a broad range of relationships between grantmaking foundations. It has become a bit of a buzzword in the sector literature, in keeping with current ways of looking at philanthropy and social change. A move towards increased collaboration in the sector closely follows the shift over the past fifteen years towards more strategic forms of philanthropy. In this context, collaboration is often seen as the only way to achieve ambitious change goals, based on the recognition that multiple actors need to work together to solve complex problems. Broadly speaking, grantmaking foundations collaborate in order to make existing work more efficient, to develop more effective interventions (“increase impact”), to support learning and to develop now knowledge, and/or to exercise combined influence with policymakers or other funders. A review of case studies reveals that collaboration among foundations can indeed achieve some of these purposes and yield synergistic effects that could not have been achieved by foundations acting alone. However, there is some doubt as to whether collaboration helps to improve efficiency from the grantmaker’s perspective. A range of different collaborative forms exists to support these different purposes. These fall into two major groupings: “light-touch” collaboration types where participants generally retain their full autonomy over strategies and granting procedures, and deeper, more integrated forms of collaboration requiring partners to establish joint objectives and ways of working. Most actual foundation collaborations combine different purposes and take on hybrid forms that evolve over their life course. The deeper forms of collaboration are both difficult and counter-normative, challenging foundations’ attachment to autonomy and brand and requiring that they relinquish some control over decision-making. In considering collaboration, foundations should give some attention to its strategic fit with their aims and to their own organizational readiness to collaborate. The literature suggests that few if any foundations will agree to collaborate purely for the sake of impact on the problem to be solved, if there are no individual or organizational benefits to be gained. This may be particularly true for public fundraising foundations that need to position their brand in order to survive in a competitive market. Prominent among the key conditions or factors for collaboration success are the importance of shared purpose and realistic goals, structure aligned to purpose, flexibility and adaptive capacity, and investment in strong, trusting relationships. This literature review indicates that collaboration holds promise for many grantmaking foundations seeking to strategically leverage their own limited resources, and for those seeking to contribute to results beyond what they could hope to achieve on their own. At the same time, by enabling foundations to concentrate and coordinate their resources, collaboration can amplify existing challenges of power and legitimacy associated with private philanthropy, including how it may work to amplify foundations’ capacity to set and further agendas for which they are not held publicly accountable, and how it may reinforce inequitable granter-grantee power dynamics. Finally, the literature review points to a few areas where future knowledge generation activities could make a useful contribution to the field, by: - drawing more upon existing knowledge about collaboration and partnerships that has been generated within other sectors of activity; 2 - expanding the frame to focus on cross-sector collaborations that foundations engage in, many of which are particularly positioned to catalyze or to structure change within industries or institutional fields; - seeking out the perspective of non-foundation stakeholders on the specific role that foundations are best positioned to play within these sector-spanning spheres of activity.