How Two Community Foundations Balance Head and Heart While Navigating the Path to Impact
Having spent three days at the Fall Conference for Community Foundations last week in New Orleans, a port city where the line between land and sea is ever-shifting, I’m thinking a lot about balance. That may help me understand my colleagues who lead community foundations better, because balance between the tensions of being responsive or proactive is essential for leadership.
The path between humanistic and technocratic impulses in philanthropy is particularly fraught for two reasons. First, they have to shift constantly between one extreme and the other. Second, there are powerful currents pulling them in either direction. Donations are a built-in performance metric—these leaders need to be accountable to donors and to their community—so they have to document and share impact, pulling them toward the technocratic. But they also have to respond to shifting community needs and donor desires, pulling them toward the humanistic.
Such was one takeaway from a conference session, “Balancing the Humanistic and Technocratic in Philanthropy,” moderated by my colleague Paul Connolly. Other takeaways came from the experiences of the panelists, Clotilde Perez-Bode Dedecker, president and CEO of the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo, and Eleanor Glass Clement, chief donor engagement and giving officer at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
When Buffalo narrowed its focus in 2008, “counter-intuitively, it created more opportunities for us to affect change, because we were able to forge deeper partnerships with our collaborators,” said Perez-Bode Dedecker. The new focus allowed foundation staff to identify ripe opportunities, such as the Wipe Out Lead campaign, when the foundation convened 30 organizations to learn how high lead poisoning rates in low-income neighborhoods influence the incidence of learning disabilities in children. The foundation co-created the initiative and worked closely with community partners to determine what success would look like and how to measure it. The foundation acted as a convener, facilitator, visibility-raiser, and catalyst to attract resources to address this issue from state and federal funding. “Success comes when preparation meets opportunity,” said Perez-Bode Dedecker.
Silicon Valley chose to strike a balance between proactive and responsive through a community-oriented approach to evaluation. The foundation used a structured, rigorous process to develop an overall evaluation framework and set a goal of developing indicators for each of its strategies and sub-strategies. Such detail can be daunting, so a navigational signal from the leadership was critical. “Less is more,” the head of the foundation told Clement Glass. “Don’t have more than one or two indicators per strategy.” For Clement Glass, this meant “we needed a few meaningful proxies for progress that would resonate with the general public.” With this guidance, Clement Glass led a process during which the foundation convened community members and grantees to identify meaningful on-the-ground measures of success. Those were then winnowed down to identify one or two per strategy and sub-strategy. Rigor and inclusiveness were not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, the foundation’s model of rigor was inclusiveness; it had the discipline and patience to build in community input along the way.
When leaders strike the right balance between proactive and responsive, accountability and learning, being directive and being inclusive, the benefits can be large. How have you struck the balance in your community foundation, and what benefits have you seen from it?
Chris Cardona is associate director of philanthropy at TCC Group.
