SPEAKER_02 0:12

You're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast with Rodri Davis. Hello, you're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast. This is a podcast where we try to put philanthropy in context. I'm your host, as ever, Rodri Davis, and this week I'm in conversation with Jen Ford Reedy. Now, Jen is the president of the Bush Foundation, which is a grantmaker based in Minnesota in the US, and also the author of a new book, which is what I had Jen on the show mostly to talk about, and that book is called Please Be Good at Philanthropy, an introduction to grantmaking strategy and practice. So I sat down with Jen uh this week and I talked to her about what the Bush Foundation does, but also about what led her to write the book, what it's about, who she hopes reads it. So we talked about the idea of uh the title, what it means to be good at philanthropy, which I think in itself is a kind of interesting question because it shifts us from the idea that philanthropy is just about a motive or intent to the idea that it's a practice and that you can be sort of good or bad at it. We talked about who she wanted to be good at philanthropy, so who the book was aimed at. We talked about the idea that actually there there isn't necessarily one fixed model of philanthropy or one way of being good at it. So what does it mean then to uh work instead and look for competency as an ambition instead? Uh we talked about the importance of having a strategy in philanthropy and kind of how you go about defining that and closing the gap between what it is that you want to achieve and and what you actually need to do in order to do that. We also talked about the uh the the role of funders and how we should understand that and whether increasingly when there are narratives that you know funders should seek to give away power and control to their grantees, which is in many ways very healthy. What is the remaining role of a funder? And actually, does there come a point where we need to sort of lean into the fact that as a funder you do have to make some choices and decisions, and there is a role for funders to play? We also talked about risk and failure, and we talked about what it means to take good risks within philanthropy rather than bad risks, and how that can be uh, you know, those risks can be informed by having an idea up front about what it is you're trying to achieve and and why, as opposed to those bad risks that come from not identifying uh things that you could identify uh beforehand. Uh, we also talked about what it means to fail and whether we have the ability to talk well about failure uh in philanthropy, and whether actually part of the challenge is that we don't have good narratives about what it means to fail well. Uh, we also talked about the idea of pluralism a little bit. We talked about the idea of pluralism, not just in terms of cause areas, but also in terms of approaches, and whether we need to be more accepting of a kind of plurality of different ways of doing philanthropy, and whether uh actually that had become somewhat more challenging in recent years. We also talked about um the idea that even within institutional philanthropy, you need to hold on to the idea of generosity as an important guiding principle and what that looks like when you're working in a foundation. And then finally, we talked a bit about uh history as a guide to understanding the present moment and the future. Uh, in the book, Jen draws on a lot of historical examples. Um where I first became aware of her work, I think, was seeing things that she'd posted that were really interesting on LinkedIn about sort of historical examples of US foundations and some of the things that they'd funded. And so we share an interest in the history of philanthropy, and we talked a bit about why that interest we feel is kind of not just you know nice for its own sake, but actually genuinely kind of relevant to the work of people trying to understand philanthropy today. So without further ado, let's get into the conversation. I really enjoyed this one. Uh, I hope you will too. And I'll be back at the end uh for the usual bit of housekeeping. Okay, great. Well, I'm here with Jen Ford Reedy. Hi there, Jen.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

Hello, nice to be here with you.

SPEAKER_02 4:35

Oh, great to have you on the podcast. So, yeah, as people will know from listening to the intro, you are the president of the Bush Foundation. Uh, and also, more importantly, maybe for the purposes of this conversation, you're the author of a new book called Please Be Good at Philanthropy, an introduction to grantmaking strategy and practice, um, which is what I want to talk to you about today. But maybe the best place to start is if you can just give people a little bit of background on what the Bush Foundation is and what it does, uh, and then maybe we can talk about what it was that led you to write the book.

SPEAKER_00 5:03

Yeah, absolutely. Um, Bush Foundation is a private uh grant-making foundation in Minnesota, located in Minnesota. We do grant making in the upper uh Midwest of America in three states and 23 Native nations. Um Archie Bush was one of the guys who built 3M into a big multi-national corporation. And he and his wife Edith um left all their money really to do good um in the world. And one of the ways they did that was in creating the Bush Foundation. So um now they, you know, almost 75 years later, it's purely independent. We're guided by you know the board and staff of the Bush Foundation trying to figure out the best thing to do with this extraordinary resource.

SPEAKER_02 5:55

Yeah, absolutely. Um and let's come to the book then. So um, as I say, the book's called Please Be Good at Philanthropy. And I want to dig into that title in a bit, but maybe you could just tell us a bit about why it is that you decided you wanted to write a book and what the idea behind it is and who you hope reads it.

SPEAKER_00 6:10

Yeah, I don't know that I ever got to the point of saying I want to write a book, but I was really passionate about um it sounds so weird, but competence in philanthropy. And then and when I was ranting about that to friends, realizing, like, oh, maybe I was more passionate about this than anybody else. So maybe I would be the one to write this book. Um, because I really feel like a lot of the debates we have in philanthropy about practice, like you should do this or you should do more of that, um, may or may not apply to each of us based depending on what we're trying to do, and that we don't have very good frame and very good language to really say, does what we're doing make sense given what we're trying to accomplish in the world? And I think a lot of the practices that we get frustrated by in the field and out of the field, right, that grantees get frustrated by, um, don't actually make sense. And that if you just actually look at the work more in terms of, you know, what are we trying to accomplish? What's the best way to have that happen? What are our habits that may actually undermine our ability to have the good impact we want to have, that you would actually get to a lot of change in practice in philanthropy? That's my hypothesis with the book.

SPEAKER_02 7:25

And and the title of the book, so I mean, I guess first the the idea, in a way, it's kind of saying please be good at philanthropy is an interesting one because it throws up a question and actually in the mind about what does it even mean to be good at philanthropy? You know, and is it kind of it takes you beyond the idea that it's just motive into it being something that you should actually practice? So, what are you kind of saying, both in terms of who you want to be good at philanthropy and what it is you're asking them to do?

SPEAKER_00 7:49

Uh well, I think the the heart of your question is sort of what is um hopefully useful, but definitely provocative about this way of looking at philanthropy, because we can't say what's good at philanthropy. I mean, ask a lot of people in philanthropy what does it mean to be good? Are you good at it? How do you know you're good at it? Like this seems like such a fundamental question. And I think there are a lot of us in the field that can't really answer that, that aren't even thinking in those terms because it's not how we generally have been um trained or not trained to understand our own work. And I think it is motive. Like we we generally tend to define ourselves by our good motives, um our good intents, and then our good efforts. Like we're trying really hard, but there aren't very many of us who could just say, yes, we are good at it because for what we're trying to do, good means X, Y, and Z. And we can show you in our feedback, in our data, and whatever it is, whatever way we're trying to get um, you know, understanding of whether we're doing well or not, we can show you we are good, or we can say we're weak in these areas and we're working to improve it.

SPEAKER_02 8:56

Yeah, absolutely. And and as you say, if there's no particular, there's not a single answer to what it means to be good at philanthropy, and there's not any one model for philanthropy, as you're very clear uh in the book. What does it mean then? You talk more about aiming for competence. So what to you does it mean to kind of have that as an ideal?

SPEAKER_00 9:13

Well, first I'll do a pre-answer, which is I think, you know, we tend to in the field say, if you've seen one foundation, you've seen one foundation. And I think our acceptance of that actually gets in the way of our ability to see that there are actually commonalities across all of our strategies that you can think about. And I think there was a time, even like where businesses were viewed, where like, oh, if you're if you're a watch repair person and you're giving harpsichord lessons, like you're doing such different things that you're not you can't compare across. And over time, we developed understanding of, oh, there are principles of marketing that cut across these things, there are principles of pricing that cut across these things, and and got away from thinking that you know each business is its own unique um entity and that there are principles across. And I think we're kind of just behind that as a field and still feeling like each thing that we do can only be measured in and of itself or under only understood in and of itself and not compared across. Because I think things like, for example, grant size, you should be able to have ways of thinking about what's the right size grant for this thing that we're trying to do that would cut across a whole lot of strategies. So that's a pre-answer because I do think that there are a lot of things that cut across. But at the most basic level, to be good at philanthropy, you have to know what you're trying to get done. You have to have a way of trying to do that thing that actually lines up to it, which sounds very basic, but we often, it often is not true. And then you have to have some way of getting feedback that gives you an indication of whether you're actually having the impact that you want to have. I mean, philanthropy is fundamentally about doing things that affect other people's lives in some way, affect the world in some way. Do we have good mechanisms for getting feedback in one form or another? It doesn't have to be a number, it doesn't have to be quantifiable, but there are ways of getting indications or indicators of whether we're actually having the effect that we intend to have.

SPEAKER_02 11:08

Yeah, absolutely. And in the book, you talk about a number of kind of key principles guiding philanthropy and things that you identify as being kind of unique or unusual about philanthropy, perhaps compared to other fields. And one of those is that philanthropy is about, well, certainly if we're talking about grant-making philanthropy, maybe rather than operational philanthropy, it's about giving away control as well as money because you kind of have to uh in order to do it properly. What does that actually mean in in practice when we're talking about giving away control?

SPEAKER_00 11:37

Well, the particular control that you're giving up is implementation. The reason, because there are a lot of ways that you can be controlling, right? You can be a jerk, you can try and exert a lot of influence, but you don't control implementation. I mean, that's just fundamental to the definition of what it means to do philanthropy. You are giving money to somebody else to do the implementation, to do the work. And this is, to me, an absolutely critical principle for people coming into the field to get, because most people come into the field with experience in some kind of organizational strategy, whether they're in a business or nonprofit or whatever kind of entity they're involved in, they control implementation when they're setting a strategy. And you don't do that in philanthropy. So if you come in and you have organizational strategy mindsets, you're gonna run into some challenges. So you have to accept and realize like, oh, we want something to happen in the world. We need somebody else to make that thing happen. So then the key to philanthropy is is there a match? Like, does our aspiration match with something that someone else in the world wants to do, is ready to do, prepared to do, and has the support to do? And so it changes then a lot of kind of strategic decisions you would make, knowing that you have to um, you can't just dictate what's going to happen in the world necessarily. You have to be able to use your resources in a way that enables some other people in the world to do good things that you would like to have happen and they would like to have happen also.

SPEAKER_02 13:12

And I was really interested in reading the book because I guess there's a lot of debate in the wide world of philanthropy at the moment about the, I mean, giving away control, but also giving away power and essentially a sort of sense that increasingly pushing back on the idea that it's the role of the donor or the funder to decide what is to be done and how to do it. And I think a lot of that's very sort of healthy challenge and kind of correction to um, you know, the fact that we've sort of historically maybe gone too far in the other direction. But I think sometimes when it the pendulum swings the other way, we almost get to a point where it seems as though the idea is, you know, funders or donors should have no say or no idea about what they want to do. Right. And I think you're very clear in the book that it can't be that because it just doesn't work. So do you think kind of funders and donors need to slightly just you know own the fact that philanthropy is essentially about making some kinds of decisions about what is to be funded and how?

SPEAKER_00 14:04

I think so. I mean, I think there's it's a recognition that each has a purpose, right? The grantee has some purpose in their work and the funder has some purpose. And you're trying to find the overlap in that purpose. But if a funder thinks that nonpro nonprofit should just do what they want to do and view themselves as the implementer, that's not gonna work well. And likewise, if the grantee or the nonprofit feels like a funder shouldn't have any opinion or independent objective or purpose beyond giving them money, it's not gonna work well. But the philanthropy is actually finding that middle where you can both say, look, this is what we're trying to do in the world, and the other say, this is what we're trying to do in the world, and say, like, we overlap, we can do this together, we can partner and make good happen that way. But I think there is a, it does require recognition from both the funder, the grantee, that they each have an organizational purpose and they might not be the same. And they don't have to be the same. They just have to be similar enough or overlapping enough to be able to partner to make good things happen.

SPEAKER_02 15:11

And you you talk at one point in the book. I think you mentioned the idea that that one of the challenges for philanthropy, one of the risks is that it's it's often prone to kind of main character syndrome. Is that also, I mean, I guess that's the flip side is that you've got to own that sense of making decisions and having the kind of responsibility to do it. But the danger is then that you start to view the entire world through the lens of this is, you know, this organization is affecting change, and you kind of don't look outside the walls of that organization. Is that kind of the thing that you need to guard against, though, even if you are sort of taking that responsibility for decision making?

SPEAKER_00 15:44

I think absolutely. Because philanthropy just almost never is the main character in practical terms, in terms of change happening, right? We're supporting character overwhelmingly because somebody else needs to own and do the work and usually carry work far beyond then the period of time that the philanthropy is even engaged, right? Somebody else owns it and carries it forward. And so slipping into main character syndrome, um, I mean, one makes you a jerk the way it does in all of life, right? Makes you harder to work with and um can be disruptive in that way. But it also is just going to get you to worse philanthropy because if you're not understanding your role relative to all the other characters involved and all the other people more directly affected by the work, all the other people who have more expertise or experience related to the work, if you're not recognizing how you fit in and then playing that role as well as you can, um, you're just gonna lead to worse outcomes, but potentially really disruptive harm.

SPEAKER_02 16:40

And do you think, I mean, this is just a sort of personal opinion I picked up, I think, in through conversations, certainly in recent years, that one of the challenges is that we don't necessarily have very good narratives about what it means to succeed or fail or to be good or bad at philanthropy. So we kind of we end up using proxies and and often this is in some of those conversations about giving away power and funders doing that. This seems to me like one of the challenges is that it's very difficult to do that when you don't have a good way of explaining what your success as a funder would look like in a situation where you have less control or less power.

SPEAKER_00 17:16

I think that's right, An. I think you're really hitting on something important because we don't know how to define success. So it's related to how can we define for good? We don't even know how to define success. Because there are so many reasons for this. I mean, one, we're trying to do things that are hard to measure, right? So if we have this idea that success is some measurable change in the world, well, that's going to be hard to pull off for a whole lot of reasons. But we also have the fact that we're celebrated for our intent, right? We're celebrated for trying. We're celebrated for the boldness of our vision. We're celebrated for all these things that aren't actually tied to whether we're having the effect that we intend to have. And um, in the same way, we're not that great at being able to say for ourselves, oh, did we actually have the effect we wanted to have? It's really hard for people outside to tell whether we're doing a good job. So for the media, you know, to be able to say, well, you know, Bush Foundation tried this big bull thing. It didn't work. Here's how it didn't work. You know, we don't tend to have that kind of external accountability or sunlight on what we're doing. Um, because it's the news tends to be about the announcement of the big gift, um, not the, you know, come back five years later, come back 10 years later, did it actually work the way people hoped it would work.

SPEAKER_02 18:33

Yeah, absolutely. Which is, yeah, I guess one of the challenges is that the, you know, in a way, if it goes well, foundation and nonprofit does their job isn't a news story in that sense.

SPEAKER_00 18:42

Whereas it's that's right. And we love a train wreck. And we don't get that many of them, but like the um, you know, the big Zuckerberg gift to Newark was one where it was high profile enough and you could watch it happen and people could be grumpy about it that you could really say, like, oh, this is not working. It's really those, you know, only the very richest sort of already celebrity folks who kind of get that attention, which, you know, is tough for people when they're starting out. We see over and over, like, you know, the first couple gifts that um our you know, rich celebrities make often don't work very well because they haven't done the practice beforehand and people haven't coached them into, you know, how what does it actually take to do this well? And so then you get these very, you know, high profile, sort of, you know, best case wastes of money in some cases, you know, really messing some stuff up.

SPEAKER_02 19:31

And and I guess in that the Zuckerberg example, uh, which is the the one around kind of uh New Jersey public schools, I think, isn't it? That you that the big part of that story is the sort of hubris of it of going on TV or going on on Oprah to announce that you're coming in to solve this problem. And as a result, I guess when it went wrong, there's also sort of Schadenfreude where everybody's like, well, we quite enjoyed that. Um, I guess what it does go to maybe though is a question about actually is failure a pretty important element of doing philanthropy properly? Because if you're never failing, to me, what it says is you're not trying anything risky enough if you're you're never doing that. So again, on that narratives question is another part of it that we need to be better at understanding what it means to fail in a good sense in philanthropy.

SPEAKER_00 20:15

I think so. I agree with that because I I think um when we have to talk about them at all, but then we have to tease out I mean, which part of this was because we took an informed risk and it didn't work, versus which part of it was we didn't actually take into consideration what people actually wanted, or we didn't take into consideration the actual capacity of these organizations to do this work, or all these ways that you can fail that are that are extremely avoidable. Um, and if you know, if we could get have more examples that we can really tease through to be able to say, you know, this is what a great failure looks like. You were actually trying to build the capacity of the system. You really had an informed idea of what people wanted and what research said was possible and what practitioners believed would work, like all these things lined up. You took a big bet on this and it didn't go, it didn't work. We learned something, and that was a good failure. Um, but I actually think the vast majority of our failures would not be in that good failure category for a variety of reasons, you know, that we've moved too fast, that we didn't really build the relationships we needed, that we didn't actually even think through, you know, whether it made sense what we were doing, or we didn't stay in long enough. Like there, there's a whole there's so many different ways you can go wrong. And I think we repeat a lot of those same failures over and over. And a lot of times it's because we're coached to think big about the change we want to see. Right. And so you get excited about we want to have this change, and then you do something toward that change without really having a way of strategy development that's rooted in what's possible. Like what is the capacity of the system to do right now, and then what would it take to actually build more capacity to do. This next best thing we want to do, and just being realistic about what that takes in terms of time and money. And so instead we end up doing something that I call evocative philanthropy, which is something that feels like it's going to make a difference toward that issue, but isn't really enough either in money or in ambition or in um, you know, the the significance of the change itself to really push us toward that issue. So we feel like we tried. We were trying something, but we didn't really, we were never really doing something that was designed to make a meaningful difference on the thing that we say we want to make a difference on.

SPEAKER_02 22:37

And I'm I'm really interested on this point of failure and kind of why we don't talk about it in such a healthy way in philanthropy. And do you is there any sense, do you think, that it's partly because um, you know, kind of underlying some of these failures, the um the lack of willingness to to kind of actually analyze them and understand what the points of failure are is linked to the fact that there isn't the confidence that that actually the decision has been based on you know the right steps and that there was a strategy in place. And it is it actually a kind of reflection of the fact that everybody kind of knows that they didn't necessarily quite go into it in the right way.

SPEAKER_00 23:11

I think that definitely could be part of it because we are human beings. And some of it is um, you know, it'll be a new administration and the foundation looking back and thinking that those people weren't as smart as they were when they're actually just as smart as we were. Um, but we're just all learning the same things over and over. I I also think, you know, so as part of this book, there's a there's a workbook that goes deeper into some ideas, and then also we'll put on the website some case studies and history and some other materials that people can work from. And, you know, so wanting to have some of those case studies be failures, and there aren't a lot of great examples out in the world where people have shared their failures, the ones that do I so appreciate. Um, but so we created one, I created one that's on a Bush Foundation failure, um, which was an ambitious $40 million effort to change how teachers were trained in our region to um with the larger goal of changing, closing achievement gaps related to race and income in our in our region. And it was a failure. I mean, the the core part of our theory of change of how it could work involved measuring teacher effectiveness and tying that back to the institutions. We never were able to do that. We we can't, we couldn't do it. Did good things happen? Yes. I mean, the the partners who took the opportunity and really made big changes in those higher ed institutions, the teacher training programs, it was transformational for them, right? So good stuff happened. That's different than did it work? What we set out to do, did it work? And I can remember one time being on a panel with a couple of those grantee partners in front of a group of foundation folks. And I was saying they were saying these are the good things we did. I said it was a failure. The discomfort in that room was palpable. And some of it was because of the grantee, right? They they and I think that's regularly a thing. Like we don't want to take the grantees down with us. Like the ability to separate out from a Bush foundation standpoint, it was a failure for what we tried to do, what we intended, versus you know, these organizations failed, or shouldn't people shouldn't invest with them in the future or try something else with these institutions, you know? And I think that's a real thing that we don't want to, you know, our grantees are so tied up in our work that I do think we worry about bringing them down with us. So I think some of it is goes right back again to our ability to say this was our part of the work, not just the effort failed, but this was our foundation role. We can say the role we played, and then was that a success or not? What can we learn from how we played our role that could inform future foundation efforts versus just up or down, you know, the effort failed or didn't fail.

SPEAKER_02 26:05

Which is, yeah, it's really interesting. And I mean, I guess it's a tricky narrative in a way, or it has a level of nuance that's kind of difficult sometimes to for people to deal with. But it does seem to me it's tied also to some of the debates that are going on around kind of the right way of measuring impact and the role you know of foundations within that and the kind of concerns about imposing top-down systems of measurement on grantees. I think even people who accept that sort of say, yeah, actually, yes, but it's still okay to measure whether it's a success from our point of view as a funder, but that is not saying anything, as you say, about whether or not the the nonprofit with funding is doing good work. I mean, in some cases it might be that it is, but it doesn't necessarily mean that there is a possibility of that that organization doing great work. It just happens that it was the wrong choice to fund them if the desired outcome was outcome X. Um, but that yeah, yeah, that is a kind of tricky narrative to get across. But maybe that's the one that we need to sort of embed more in thinking about uh the role of foundations in particular.

SPEAKER_00 27:09

I think that's right. And then you'd see a lot of patterns, right? You'd see so many evaluations that say, well, it would have worked, but there was turnover at the grantee leadership. And then you'd think, like, okay, if over and over things are things are failing because the leaders turnover, does that suggest something deeper about how we're doing our job, that we're not baking in the expectation that leadership is going to turn over? Um, you know, so we find these, you know, causes for our failures sometimes that we should be able to, if we looked at enough across enough of our work, we would be able to say that's not a reason for failure. The failure to account for that happening is the reason for for failure. And and again, pull it back to our practice and how we're doing developing the strategies or supporting the work, um, rather than, well, too bad, that was out of our control, and that happened again and again and again.

SPEAKER_02 28:04

And and you mentioned there about strategies ties to something you you touched on before, the the idea that actually there's there's this big gap to be closed between what you're trying to achieve as a donor or a funder and actually what you need to go about doing. And it kind of that the one doesn't automatically fall out the other. It actually takes quite a lot of thought to get from it. So, what are the kinds of things a funder needs to figure out in order to make that connection between their overall aim and what they should actually be doing on a day-to-day basis?

SPEAKER_00 28:31

Well, um, I think there are there are a number of things within there. I'll focus on something that's really basic, which is just even understanding how hard will it be to make this change happen. Like if there's some change you want to have in the world, like are you capable of pulling that off? Is that a reasonable aspiration for you to work toward? And I think one of the there are a lot of really interesting sort of paradoxes within philanthropy, but one is the difficulty of a change in the world is different than how hard it is for a foundation to do because we're not the implementers, right? So you can have an outlandishly ambitious um aspiration as a foundation, right, to settle Mars. And it could be really easy philanthropy if there are organizations out there that are working on it and all you have to do is write them a check. On the other hand, you could have a really small ambition. Like example I use in the book is putting a footbridge over a creek and a local park. That could take a lifetime of effort, you know, if you can't get people to agree to do it, and you know, if no other people aren't bought into that vision, you could work for years and years and years and never get that done. So the degree of difficulty for a foundation in getting any sort of thing happen to happen in the world is are the other people who are needed to make that change happen actually inspired to do it? Are they equipped to do it? And are enough of them ready to go to work to actually make it happen? So when we do strategy sessions in foundation boardrooms that are really about that are disconnected from what's the capacity and energy to make something happen, um, we will get into, we will, we will fall into strategy traps where we have an ambition that does not align with what the world wants to do. So we have to spend a lot of time trying to convince people to do the thing we want to do. And we are then blind to the fact that there's a whole lot of energy and passion right here, right next to it, where people are actually really engaged and ready to go and want to make a change happen, and all they need is money, right? Where we could be making much easier change happen if we would stay more connected to um where are the opportunities for impact rather than just setting an aspiration for ourselves divorced from what's the landscape like? Where is there actually energy and capacity to do something big?

SPEAKER_02 31:02

And this really interesting, it's linked. I was having a conversation with somebody the other day when they were making a point about whether this whole idea of philanthropy should aim to fund in the gaps, is actually kind of not that helpful in a lot of ways, because kind of you're always just funding in the gaps, apart from anything else, even if you do successfully, if nobody else is doing it, there's no redundancy built into the system and that kind of thing. So actually, do you do you think this idea that philanthropy is only good when it's funding things that nobody else is is actually kind of thinking about it the wrong way around?

SPEAKER_00 31:32

I think that is the wrong way around. I think that's one of the things that is comes from people coming in with strategic training in other disciplines, right? Because if you're running a business, then finding a gap is naturally seems like the place that you can really, you know, have opportunity. And philanthropy, it's the opposite. Um, and so working in a gap can work. It's not like that can't ever work, but it's usually gonna be way harder than working where other people are because you need a lot of other people to want to do the thing that you want to do. So if you find a true gap, meaning nobody's working on this, you're gonna have to convince people to move over from whatever they are doing to work on your thing, um, which could really cause harm if you're taking them away from other important work. And you have to be sure that this thing that you're getting them to work on is more valuable than anything else that they could be doing. Like the risks really go up, the costs and the risks really um really go up when you do it that way. And you know, the the idea of looking for opportunities in places where other funders aren't, that can work, right? Like if you're just saying nobody's funding in this space, so we'll look and see are there, is there good work happening there? That's maybe an equivalent mindset that could work. But the idea of truly saying we're gonna find a gap and that's gonna be the way to have um an impact. Like I said, it can work, but it's likely going to be a lot harder with a lot more potential risk of harm.

SPEAKER_02 33:01

And I wonder if to some extent it's tied to what I always think of as the kind of myth of the philanthropic lone saviour, which is the idea, you know, we'd slightly have this story about the best examples of philanthropia where some kind of iconoclast, usually historically speaking, a man, has come in and, you know, kind of brought brilliance from another field and kind of identified something that nobody else ever thought of and therefore kind of changed it. And actually, you know, maybe there are a handful of examples of that happening, but generally that isn't how these things play out. But I do think that myth is quite dominant and certainly among some people, kind of coming to philanthropy today leads them to think that the best thing they can do is go and sort of strike out on their own in an area where nobody else is doing anything.

SPEAKER_00 33:46

That's really interesting, Rodri, because like what are the examples of that actually? Even as you're saying it, I was like, if your question to me was what are the examples? And I care a lot about philanthropic history. I read about it a lot. And I was like, I don't know that we have examples that actually underpin that narrative at all. I mean, the the big stuff, like the, you know, the Carnegie libraries sort of in the United States and around the world, that was still based on like, do local um communities want it? And are they willing to step up and say they'll pay for part of it and they'll maintain it? Like that was still, it was, you know, one guy and a whole bunch of money and a transformational thing in the country, but it was fundamentally designed around, you know, do communities want this and are they willing to work for it too? Okay, I'll pitch in some like the idea that, you know, of a successful philanthropic intervention that was truly imposed um by some brilliant fella, I'm not sure we have. No, that was historical examples.

SPEAKER_02 34:44

I mean, again, without I I do want to get into the weeds a bit on the history in in a bit and come back to that. But um, I mean, actually, with most of those historical examples of the big uh philanthropists, actually pretty quickly they tended to employ people to help them with the decision making, who did then go out and and put quite a lot of effort into understanding where need was and where there was kind of you know opportunity uh to kind of influence. So yeah, I I don't know. It just it feels to me as though there is this narrative, but as you say, it's almost entirely unfounded, uh, and yet it it feels like it's quite pervasive.

SPEAKER_00 35:16

And maybe the root of that is actually another example of confusing business strategy and philanthropic strategy is that we think that's what success looks like in a business landscape, what heroic success looks like in a business landscape. And so we think that it can apply in philanthropy when we don't actually have um, you know, the the examples to back that up.

SPEAKER_02 35:35

And and I guess even in the for-profit uh context, a lot of people would say actually it's never as simple as that. Usually, you know, these things are heavily subsidized and all and all this sort of stuff.

SPEAKER_00 35:44

So I think that's right. And there's a whole teams of doing it, but we do have a a way of romanticizing entrepreneurs and business leaders that as definitely you can see then the source of our romantic narratives, at least in the business. More than in philanthropy.

SPEAKER_02 36:01

Um I just wanted to circle back to to what you're saying about strategy there, because one of the things also that you mentioned in the book is it's kind of really important for funders to develop a strategy so they're actually kind of basing what they're doing on a plan of some sort. But you also make the point that there's a danger in kind of narrowing the focus too much or becoming too rigid, and then actually you need to kind of maintain some flexibility within that to adapt to things as they go along. Why is that so important in in philanthropy? And kind of how do you maintain that balance between having enough strategy that you've got a clear sense of direction, but also being able to adapt as you as you go ahead?

SPEAKER_00 36:38

Well, you don't have to, right? I mean, nothing that I say in the book is a have to, right? These are all like ways to think about it. You can do good philanthropy a lot of different ways. You just have to think through the implications of your choices. So I think that you know there are examples where people really do lock in on a strategy, go long on it. And, you know, we've had some really successful philanthropic interventions because somebody's focused and committed for the long term. So that that can certainly be true. I think the reason why most foundations, I think, would be better served by keeping their head up and looking around for opportunity goes back to actually what we were talking about earlier, one of those fundamental truths about the fact that you don't control implementation. So, you know, you you really have to to have the best possible impact, you have to be conscious of the opportunities for impact, right? So you have to keep your eyes open or your head looking around enough to see like, oh, there's something really high potential happening over here, um, where if I just gave them money, it would really take off. Um, and it's just recognizing that if you get locked in and you know, you're all about this kind of intervention with the school district to do this particular thing, and other people aren't excited about that, or you know, other people lose interest in that, maybe they were excited and it's not paying off, like you could focus yourself into kind of a dead end or a slow path at least, um, and not make much progress. That, you know, trying something where you feel like, okay, people are bought in, this is a high focus strategy that we think could really work, you can try it, but but making sure that you're not like conceptually and strategically and cognitively so locked into that that you can't see, oh, either because this is hitting a wall or because of some other event that's happened, there's actually a bigger opportunity over here. And that's not to say move quickly, because one of the ways we can cause harm is by abandoning things too early. But I think we can also just waste a lot of money if we stick with strategies for a long time when there's not enough interest energy from others or just enough promise in what's going on for us to feel like this is actually worth sticking in. And you know, all those decisions about what you go into in philanthropy and then what you move out of in philanthropy are all decisions that you have to make really responsibly with um, you know, good impact from input from the people affected. Um, but sometimes it's the right thing to change your strategy.

SPEAKER_02 39:03

Yeah. And and I guess I'm really interested in that because it strikes me, particularly if you're thinking about something where you're trying to seek a social change, actually, it could be really hard to know at what point to make that call. Because I guess it's sort of Rebecca Solnit's point about a lot of social change feels very slow and like it's never going to happen until it does, and it happens really fast. So actually, when you're sort of within that as a foundation, how do you make some of those judgments about whether something is kind of not work is slow because it's not working and you've kind of made the wrong call versus actually you just need to stick with it and have the patience?

SPEAKER_00 39:38

Well, a couple of thoughts. I mean, one, you kind of have to know the personality of your foundation and the human beings involved when you're setting the strategy. Because if you're a group of people that's gonna get bored after a few years, you know, big social change is not gonna happen in a few years. So you shouldn't set that kind of strategy. Like you should be realistic and make sure you're not, you know, setting expectations for the world that you're gonna be working on this issue when you're actually not gonna stick with it long enough to make a difference. And so anybody who's partnering with you would feel abandoned or undermined in their work. I think the trick to doing something that's truly big and long term is that you're gonna have to define it in a way that allows you to have an opportunity orientation to some degree. Because big social change rarely happens through a strategic plan. You know, it's like this is gonna happen and then this is gonna happen. And this, I mean, you could do a logic model of what you hope happens, but society's messy. It doesn't happen that way. So you have to have an open enough orientation that you can say, oh my gosh, did you see the news of what's going on in London? Like that's an opportunity there. If we could put more energy there, or did you see this group of people that are fired up to do this work in a different way in China? Like, how can we, how can we bring more awareness to that? Or, you know, like you have to kind of have a large enough and flexible enough conception of what you're working toward that you can see windows open or when fires ignite, or whichever metaphor you want to use, but where there are opportunities to actually get more people either thinking differently about the way you want them to think differently or acting differently toward, you know, whatever change you're hoping to make in the world.

SPEAKER_02 41:22

Which I guess, in a way, and I think you mentioned in the book, and it's something other people have cited, is is one of the the many lessons it feels like can be taken from the success of conservative philanthropy in the US, which is there's this overall very clear goal, but within that, an enormous amount of flexibility in terms of what is funded and a willingness to kind of shift quite quickly to other things as opportunities arise.

SPEAKER_00 41:43

Yes, I agree with that. I mean, there are um a number of foundations together that we kind of view as this conservative strategy integrated that were very successful. And I think there are a number of lessons. Um, and one of the lessons I think is just a fundamental recognition that change happens through people. And so you're trying to get people to think about things in a different way. So, how do you get a lot of people to think about things in a different way? And who are the people that you can invest in who can be influential than with other people? And you know, so I think there was a very they're very willing to make bets on ideas and people promoting ideas and building the capacity around these ideas and around these people to spread their ideas. There's um some really, really good work in the in the book. I use the example of the Federalist Society, of course, which is one of the most common examples of all the different things that were funded within that movement. But, you know, a willingness to invest in a club for law school students, um, you know, and and the the vision to see that actually connecting people, encouraging people at that stage of their career could pay long-term dividends for your strategy, you know, of helping people think about the law and society in different ways.

SPEAKER_02 43:01

Yeah. And I guess this touches on something else I wanted to ask you about, which is you it seems very clear from the book that you're kind of a pluralist by nature in the sense of kind of accepting the idea that philanthropy has multiple different forms. And I guess, you know, touching on what we're saying before, that might mean the cause areas it works in, but also in terms of the approaches and the strategies that are used. Um, and to you, is that something essentially to be celebrated as one of the strengths of philanthropy, the fact that it is very pluralistic and kind of reflects a wide variety of different ways of seeing the world and doing things, or is it something that you kind of accept maybe needs to be challenged? And I and I ask it because it feels as though this is one of those questions where maybe there was some consensus at one point on the idea that actually pluralism is a pretty fundamental principle, and maybe there's less consensus on that. So, actually, kind of your idea that we need to allow for philanthropy to be something that takes all these multiple different forms, do you do you increasingly think there are kind of people within the second Who wouldn't take that as a starting assumption? And how do you kind of engage there around this question that you're trying to get out of how to be good at philanthropy?

SPEAKER_00 44:09

I I think that there are people in the field who would not take that as a sort of starting platform at this point. And there's there's there's pluralism and purpose, and then there's pluralism and form kind of. And those two things are related but slightly different. I mean, the the degree of different form that philanthropy can take. I mean, I think my book in some ways is a celebration of lots of different forms of philanthropy. It is saying there are lots of ways you can do this. The giant caveat to me is that you should know whether you're doing it well. So I have my own opinions of whether some of these ways of doing philanthropy is likely to be effective or not, but they all could be. But it's, are you doing that and getting real input from the people affected by it and having evidence that it's actually, you know, working? And, you know, it's sort of, I feel like the practice of philanthropy, the the means by which we do philanthropy, there's a lot of opportunity to make it better. And I, so I do think that there are a lot of practices that would wither and die if people really looked at is this working? Is is this actually an effective way to make um the the change that I want to make in the world? The pluralism of purpose, I do think is quite important, you know, from a US perspective, on just thinking about the role that philanthropy pay plays in our society. Um and that part of um what makes philanthropy valuable is that ability to experiment around the edges, right? To support ideas that aren't popular or controversial, to try things that other people don't think will work. You know, so I I do think that philanthropy should operate out of consensus comfort zone some part of the time. And I think that, you know, if you understand philanthropy in part as freedom of speech and, you know, people's ability to promote and support different kinds of ideas, it makes sense that you know, philanthropy should be funding things right now that make all of us uncomfortable. Everyone should be uncomfortable with some of the things that some people are funding, and that would that would be a sign that it's actually going well. I do think, however, that the term philanthropy is meaningful with the, you know, love of um humanity, basically. And so, you know, I do think in my the eye of me as a beholder, there are things that are going on in the name of philanthropy that aren't philanthropic. I think that's really hard, you know, it's it's a little like I know it when I see it kind of definition. It's hard to say, but I think you do have examples where people are getting tax breaks for things that aren't what I would describe as philanthropic. That's just a really tough thing to think about how you're gonna, you know, put policy around that. But but I think it's it's true. So I think of, you know, for those of us who are in philanthropy, if we're trying to define the field and improve standards in the field, I think it's up to us to create a definition of this is what we think philanthropy is, this is what we think it means to be good at it, and recognize that some people who believe they're doing philanthropy are not in that um by our definition.

SPEAKER_02 47:14

And and I guess as with anything, there will always be edge cases, and that's kind of important. But the lesson that you take from those edge cases is not to extrapolate to, oh, and actually this tells you something about you know the whole of practice, and therefore let's make you know kind of sweeping changes. It's actually what you need to then do to kind of redefine those edges where you can, but in acceptance, probably that you're never going to perfectly define everything so that it's only the things that you like and not the things that you you don't like that are in included within it. Um I was gonna ask a couple of other things, and I definitely want to just keep some time just to comment on the question of um history because I know that's something that runs through the book. One thing I just wanted to touch on, actually, and in the there's a part in the book that I really liked where you sort of made the point that the book is largely about institutional philanthropy, so it's kind of not individual philanthropy in the pure sense, it's always kind of filtered through the idea of institutional philanthropy, and particularly foundations. But you make a point that it's really important, despite that, not to lose sight of generosity as a principle and sort of not to get so into you know the the business or the mechanics of philanthropy that you lose sight of the fact that it is fundamentally, as you say, about that love of humanity. What does that mean in a foundation context?

SPEAKER_00 48:27

Well, I think you could do you can do clinical philanthropy have a good impact on the world. I think people do. I think that generosity is a valuable operating principle for a foundation for a variety of reasons. I think it helps you remember that grants are actually gifts. It's a gift. And you know, whether you think of it as an investment, you think of it as return on impact, you're fundamentally making a gift. And if you think about then who is the beneficiary of this gift in some ways with affection and warmth, the way you would with generosity, I think you get to better philanthropic practices because you really do think like, okay, I'm trying to do something to help the end beneficiary, or I'm trying to do something to help this organization help those folks. Am I giving them something that is affirming and supportive and shows care and respect and appreciation for what they're doing? I actually just think that natural orientation will get you to better practices. I also think that defining things as a gift helps you think differently about risk. I think that it's so easy to start thinking about philanthropic dollars in investment terms, where you have a totally different set of requirements in terms of risk management, in terms of how you're defining success. That orientation is much more likely to slip you into bad practices, you know, around misunderstanding of risk, over um estimating the risk to yourself, underestimating the risk to other people, um, thinking about um managing down costs in a way that actually undermine the work you're trying to support. So I think there are practical ways where having that mindset gets you more easily to practices that actually are going to help you be more successful. I also think that um generosity is so important as a civic principle in any society, and that we want, we need people to feel generous and caring toward each other for our, you know, in the American context, for um, you know, our 250-year-old almost experiment to work, um, that I think there's a matter of modeling generosity as an institution that matters, like showing what we are doing is practicing generosity. It's a caring for each other that we need all of us to do for us to really be, you know, a society that works well for everyone.

SPEAKER_02 50:58

Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree. Um, and and just before I let you go because I'm aware we're coming up on time, um, I really wanted to just uh sort of uh circle back to this question of history. Because as I say, you know, you've touched on it a bit in the conversation, but it's also something that runs throughout the book. There's lots of great historical examples in there, which is a fellow history philanthropy nerd, I actually I absolutely loved. Just I'm really interested in your take on kind of why you think historical perspective is so is useful as a practitioner in particular. And it's kind of interesting for its own sake, yes. But what what do you find it brings to your understanding of philanthropy as it is now?

SPEAKER_00 51:34

I mean, one simple answer is just that so many things have been tried before, right? And if we're not learning from that, then we're undermining ourselves. Like we're you're not operating from the benefit of you know learning the things that have worked and haven't worked through our entire history. I think there's another part of it that's just general field consciousness. Like I think it goes back to this idea of one foundation as one foundation. Like if we view our work in isolation and not view it as part of a community of funders operating now, but also as um, you know, part of a field that has evolved over time and why are we the way we are and and what can be um gained from understanding us as somebody who's building on uh you know foundations laid by by other funders. I'll I teach a class regularly from Minnesota Council on Foundations. It's on the history, and people really respond to it. Like it does help make sense of how we are and who we are right now to understand like, oh, this isn't just a natural form, the foundation. There's a reason we evolved this way. And there are a bunch of decision points in time related to policy or related to individuals' choices that could have resulted in a really different-looking philanthropic landscape. And it could, you know, change a lot in the future. And I think that helps to understand, you know, our fundamental whys in form and intent and to recognize that we are shaped by all these historical forces and we have power and opportunity to shape those forces going forward, um, which, you know, I'm on the board of the council and foundations. I care a lot about this as a field, and I think our field will benefit from having more and more people who see themselves, understand themselves as part of a field, as part of a tradition, and something that we want to get stronger and healthier and you know, be better and better contributors to making the world a better place.

SPEAKER_02 53:27

Well, I mean, absolutely music to my ears. I mean, I I teach a couple of courses on history of philanthropy as well. And one of the things, I mean, two of the things that absolutely trying with what you're saying. I mean, one is it's a really good way of getting a sense of what the cyclical themes are and how many things come back round again, and not not necessarily I think sometimes you're right, there's a part of that which is seeing things that have been tried before and trying to kind of avoid making the same mistake, but also being clear about those things that we're gonna do again or are gonna happen again, just because they're kind of baked into the very idea of philanthropy and you can't get away from it. But I think kind of understanding which those are, and then the other one, which I absolutely what you said there about the the power of uh history as a way of thinking about the future, again, I think that appreciation of contingency and the sort of understanding that things are the way they are now for a whole set of kind of complicated individual and systemic reasons, and then when you stand in this point in time and look forward, if you've got that mindset, actually you can have a much broader horizon about what's possible in the future and not necessarily be tied to things, which absolutely I find very liberating.

SPEAKER_00 54:31

So absolutely, I agree. And I also say philanthropic history is fun, like it is just entertaining because it's like it's like an underground history because people don't know how philanthropy contributed to all the things that we know happened in American history or British history or you know, wherever you are in the world, but that like you know, to say, like, oh, that's how the rape kit came to be, or that's how women's rights came to be, or you know, whatever it is in the history of the country, there was philanthropy behind it in some way. And so these stories, it feels like sometimes an underground history that's just fascinating. I mean, the example, one of the examples in the book is why are school buses yellow and uh where they are all over the United States. Well, that was like an intentionally funded effort by Rockefeller Foundation to make um, you know, school transportation more safe. And and these histories, it relates back to everything we were saying earlier about, you know, philanthropy's inability to understand and explain itself and the impact that it's having. But because of that, it means that um, you know, the history is largely unknown and there's a lot of just fascinating stories to just be interested by, but also really appreciate at the difference that philanthropy's made.

SPEAKER_02 55:44

Yeah. And and if you stumble into the field, as I I certainly have, actually, the the opportunity to genuinely kind of have an impact on the history of philanthropy as a field, because as you say, it's it's not uncharted territory. There's a lot of kind of academic work out there, but it's often quite disparate and hidden away, and it certainly hasn't filtered through into the consciousness of the public or practitioners. So there's a an enormous opportunity there. Jen just remains to say thanks ever so much for finding time to come on the podcast. Great to have a chance to talk. Um, I'll put links in the show notes to places where people can find uh the book. Uh have you got any kind of things coming up that you want to let people know about, link to the book, any events you've got coming up, or any sort of milestones?

SPEAKER_00 56:22

Oh, that's a good question. We do have, you know, wherever I can get to philanthropy conferences and things to get the book in the hands of um as many folks as possible. This is not a money-making venture for me or for Bush Foundation. This is a programmatic initiative. We want it to be useful. So, you know, any opportunity we have to show up in a conference, to talk about it, to give away books, you know, we want to take advantage of it. And we do have other materials coming online. So if folks want to follow me on LinkedIn, um, that would be a way to keep getting announcements um uh when we have new case studies available, new history, different, different materials that we hope will be useful to folks.

unknown 56:57

Great.

SPEAKER_02 56:57

And I'll yeah, I'll make sure I put links to those too. Um yeah, thanks ever so much for for your time. And yeah, wish you all the best in the future.

SPEAKER_00 57:04

Thank you. It was a real honor. It was a real honor. I'm a listener, and it's a real treat to um be here with you. So thanks for this, but thanks for all you do.

SPEAKER_02 57:20

Okay, great. Well, my thanks again to Jen for coming on the podcast. Um, I'll put links in the show notes to places where you can find uh more about the book, uh more about the sort of workbooks and exercises and things that go along with it, and also about uh the Bush Foundation and some other things that Jen's written. I'll put some things in there that I've written that might be of interest as well. If you're interested more broadly uh in issues around philanthropy and civil society, do check out the website at Why Philanthropy Matters. Uh, you can find all kinds of articles, long reads there, some shorter reads, uh, news updates about things that I've been doing, all the back episodes of this podcast and lots, lots more. Uh, so do check that out. Uh, you can also follow me on social media, on LinkedIn's the best place, but you can also find me on Blue Sky if you want updates about things that are going on in the world of philanthropy and sort of news and views. If you like the podcast uh and you've got ideas for people that we could talk to or topics we could cover on the podcast, um do get in touch. You can find the contact details at the Why Philanthropy Matters website. Uh if you like it and you think other people would enjoy it, do uh share the love and tell those people. Uh personal recommendation goes a long way. So if there are loved ones or colleagues or loved colleagues uh that you think would enjoy particular episodes of the podcast, or indeed all of them, then do let them know. And why not let the world at large know more broadly by uh showing your love by leaving us a nice review uh wherever it is that you get your podcast, so that'll bump us up the algorithm as well. It should uh I'm sure help. Other than that, should mean to say thanks ever so much for listening, and I will see you next time. Bye.