Diana R. Sieger is the president of the Grand Rapids Commmunity Foundation. For more information, visit Diana's President's pages or view her biography.

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President's Point of View: The "admission": Is it a sign of strength or weakness?

August 7, 2007

I am particularly heartened by the candor that some foundations have expressed about the difficulties they have had with some of their grants. And this isn’t just a private foundation issue - it is something that should be a part of the DNA of any foundation - private family, corporate, operating and community - and perhaps even more so with community foundations.

I have been a big proponent of the fact that when a program does not produce the results that were planned from the beginning, that isn’t necessarily failure. It is information that we can use to revise plans - start over - or just make sure that in the future when armed with better information, we can chart a course that has a chance of working.

In the national philanthropic news, two California foundations have been especially candid in revealing their insights on major grants that did not work the way they were expecting. In this week’s The Chronicle on Philanthropy there is an excellent article written by Paul Brest, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and James E. Canales, president of the James Irvine Foundation that provides more background on this issue.

When I became aware of the Irvine Foundation’s report entitled, “Midcourse Corrections to a Major Initiative”, I applauded them for their openness to share how they used this opportunity to reshape their strategies. Likewise the Hewlett Foundation’s released a report on how they were able to restructure a neighborhood initiative in various Bay Area communities.

If more funding organizations were able to lead in this fashion, imagine the remarkable work we could do by learning from one another. The Grand Rapids Community Foundation has a number of efforts that have had its ups and downs and phenomenal downfalls. We learn, we listen and we move forward stronger because now we know what may and may not work.

I commend the James Irvine Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for their leadership and strength! For more insight on these two foundations and their reports, here are their website links.

http://www.hewlett.org
http://www.irvine.org

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Comments

Diana ... great post. I am hopeful that we will become more transparent with some of our less than stellar grants as well, so that the learnings can be shared beyond our own foundation. It is sometimes difficult to communicate failures - not that it would look badly on the foundation, but that it looks badly on the grantee organization. The manner in which we communicate failures needs to be with grace and a recognition failure is, in fact, a normal part of non-profit life.

Diana, I miss seeing you since our intensive week together at Stanford in June!

Mark

Posted by: Mark Petersen | August 14, 2007 4:45 PM