Learning from Foundations' Mistakes - Nonprofit Quarterly

Foundations Embrace Failure: Real Lessons Learned | Nonprofit Quarterly | Civic News. Empowering Nonprofits. Advancing Justice. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 Donate
 
 
 
 -->
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Foundations Embrace Failure: Real Lessons Learned

 
 
 
 
 
 Rick Cohen 

 March 23, 2011 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 

 

 

 
 
 

 
 

 “This is the story of a philanthropic initiative that did not meet the expectations of its many stakeholders. Given the challenging social problems that foundations and our grantees try to solve, we should expect that we will often fail to achieve our shared aspirations. When this happens, we should seize the opportunity to understand the causes in order to improve our own performance and benefit other working in the field.”—From the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation report, Hard Lessons about Philanthropy & Community Change from the Neighborhood Improvement Initiative 

 
 The Hewlett Foundation report ( PDF ) quoted from above is widely seen as candidly self-critical on the foundation’s $20 million comprehensive community initiative with language in the foundation president’s cover letter describing one of the site’s self-destruction and calling the entire effort a “ great disappointment .”   More recently, Hewlett held what appears to be an internal competition among its grantmaking departments for each to identify one grant that fell short of expectations and provide an analysis of what went wrong and what the foundation should learn from the experience.

 Other foundations and other institutions are increasingly congratulating themselves for their new openness to “embracing failure” – being willing to talk about mistakes, admit them, and try to learn from them.  Examples of proponents of learning from failure include the Annie E. Casey Foundation (as evidenced by Casey VP Robert Giloth’s edited volume, Mistakes to Success ( PDF ),  the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation , the Case Foundation , the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation ,  the trade associations promoting small foundations, the Asian Development Bank ( PDF ), and major international corporations .

 Is this posturing or is it for real?  And to what end?  Will foundations admit that they completely screwed up, or will they suggest, as Hewlett ultimately did with its comprehensive community initiative, that the grants were mistimed – that the communities weren’t really ready for the foundation’s help?  All too frequently, the discussions of failure are really not about failure at all. They are discussions of programs that fell somewhat short of expectations. Even more frequently, the program failures are in fact small successes – the programs that didn’t achieve quite what they were intended to achieve, but still left the communities measurably better than they were before the foundat

... (truncated, 27 KB total)