Grooming Better Grant Makers

By Stephen G. Greene

For Yodon Thonden, who runs a small New York foundation established by her husband, a trip

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to South Africa in April provided an interesting exercise in grant-making dynamics.

She and eight other donors and grant makers -- including women from New Zealand, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan -- had each contributed at least $5,000 to a pool for distribution to some of the South African charities they visited during their weeklong trip. The gifts were one of the conditions of their participation in the Philanthropy Workshop, a yearlong course sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation that exposes new philanthropists to some of the principles, skills, and strategies of giving away money.

"It was a fascinating process of building consensus," says Ms. Thonden, a lawyer who until last year worked for the children's-rights division of Human Rights Watch, in New York. "My vision is broader now," she adds. "Before, I was researching a very discrete issue."

The course, which culminates this week in a critique session in which each participant proposes a grant of at least $10,000 to a U.S. organization and then defends his or her choice before a panel of peers and Rockefeller program officers, is part of a broad push by grant makers to make philanthropy more effective. While some programs are aimed at grant-making neophytes like Ms. Thonden, others seek to help more experienced program officers and foundation executives, and to help ensure that promising ideas and "best practices" are diffused more quickly and widely.

Those programs are being underwritten by several other major grant makers, including the Ford, Ewing Marion Kauffman, and David and Lucile Packard Foundations.

The efforts are prompted in part by recognition that traditional ways of grooming grant makers are insufficient, given the large influx of donors and foundation officials with little or no experience in philanthropy. More than 5,000 foundations were created in the United States last year alone, and many more are sure to follow, as the World War II generation bequeaths trillions of dollars to its heirs, and as many of the people who made millions in the past decade turn their attention to giving some of it away.

"In the past, at foundations, the feeling was that whatever they did was great, and no one was thinking very hard about whether they were making a difference," says Vicki Rosenberg, chief operating officer of the Council of Michigan Foundations. Today, however, "a lot of people are thinking hard about how foundations do their work: Are they doing the best work they can? Are they getting the best results they hope to achieve? People are being self-critical, trying to make sure the money's hitting the mark and going as far as it can."

And as foundations increasingly scrutinize their grantees in hopes of tweaking their performance and making them more effective, inevitably some grant makers are turning that same spotlight on themselves.

"People are searching for examples of how to do different things in the field," says Jan Jaffe, who directs the Ford Foundation's latest attempt to develop better philanthropists, a program called GrantCraft, which was announced this spring. "There's more examination of what grant-making skills and tools are, and how you transmit them."

She adds: "So many new grant makers and donors are coming into the field and saying, How do I learn to do this?"

Grant makers often enter the world of philanthropy with extensive experience in and a passion for a particular field of interest -- the arts, education, the environment, or social policy, for example -- but with little formal training in all the elements that can convert that passion into productive results.

"Say you really care about K-12 reform," says Ms. Jaffe. "It takes all your energy to stay on top of that field. But then you also have a second discipline, which is grant making." Traditionally, the "craft" of making grants has received short shrift, she says, partly because the activity is relatively new and has not developed the training and educational structures that characterize fields like art, education, or social work.

GrantCraft tries to fill part of the gap by distributing more widely the kinds of materials presented to new program officers at Ford as part of their weeklong orientation. For years, Ford has informally allowed other local grant makers to sit in on those sessions, but it decided recently to make such information available to a broader audience. The result is GrantCraft's growing collection of publications and videos that distill the experiences and successful strategies of officials at Ford and other foundations and nonprofit groups when confronting a wide range of topics.

Video titles include "Building a Network" and "Scaling Up Successful Work." Among the guides are "Building Community" and "When Projects Flounder."

Much of the information may be downloaded from the project's Web site, http://www.grantcraft.org. Grant makers may order up to three videos online. All of the videos are also available for viewing at the Foundation Center libraries in Atlanta, Cleveland, New York, San Francisco, and Washington.

Also available online, starting next month, will be an Internet version of the Foundation in a Box project sponsored by the Association of Small Foundations, in Bethesda, Md. The project, designed for foundations that have few or no full-time paid staff members, involves compiling hundreds of pages of material from scores of diverse sources like BoardSource, the publisher Jossey-Bass, and the National Center for Family Philanthropy. A print version is to follow in September.

"You're not necessarily born knowing how to be a philanthropist," says Charles Scott, the association's executive director. "A lot of people enter the foundation world a little nervous."

The association is also increasing the number of Trustee Leadership Seminars it holds around the country to keep pace with growing interest among its members, who include many novices in philanthropy who find themselves sitting on foundation boards. "They are good at business, but they have never given money away before, and they want to do it effectively," Mr. Scott says. "They learn how to evaluate a financial statement, how to look at a budget, and how to do challenge grants or matching grants," among a long list of other topics, he says.

Surging interest among grant makers who are focused on becoming better at their trade has also prompted the Council on Foundations to beef up its schedule of workshops aimed at improving skills among foundation board and staff members.

The council used to hold its Institute for New Grantmakers every other year, notes its chief executive officer, Dorothy S. Ridings. Even after it switched to annual sessions a few years ago, those institutes were still oversubscribed, she says, with many more people wanting to attend than the 150-person limit would allow. So this year the council is offering two such institutes, one in Portland, Ore., in July and another in Washington in December.

Since 1982, those institutes have trained more than 1,500 grant makers in the principles and practices of grant making and the world of philanthropy, says Ms. Ridings. But because people differ in their learning styles and their tolerance for large conferences, she observes, the council in January began offering Grantmaker Basics as an online course of study. So far, 61 people have signed up for the course, which they follow at their own pace and usually complete in a year. In some cases, participants are matched with experienced foundation officials who serve as mentors, making themselves available for consultation by phone and e-mail.

Many regional associations of grant makers are also active in giving their members the tools they need to become better at their jobs. While many cater to newcomers to the field, some also focus on more experienced staff members.

Grantmakers of Western Pennsylvania for several years has offered daylong workshops for its members, which it calls Grantmaking 101. But it plans to add a more sophisticated workshop -- Grantmaking 201 -- this fall, with Grantmaking 301 to follow next spring, says Judith Donaldson, the executive director.

"We're trying to develop lifelong learning curricula" for association members, Ms. Donaldson says, that will continue to be useful for grant makers throughout their careers.

"Grantmaking 201 and 301 are designed to look at the role of grant maker as community leader," she says. "In 201, they do a self-assessment: How far have you come? What are your strengths? What do you need to develop?"

A common thread in many of the current efforts is encouraging grant makers to feel a part of a much broader enterprise.

"There is a significant sense of isolation in the field," says Lynn D.W. Luckow, president of Northern California Grantmakers, which recently polled state foundation officials about their jobs and careers. "To find out who else is working on the same things they're working on is helpful, and good for morale. It helps the field become more effective when they can learn from the successes and failures of other organizations."

Grant makers are much more willing, even eager, to join forces now than in previous decades, says Ms. Rosenberg, of the Council of Michigan Foundations -- in part because they recognize the value of exchanging ideas with people whose perspective on grant making may differ from their own.

"There is more of a tendency to collaborate, to learn from other foundations, and to seek opportunities to leverage your money," she says. "In the past, if you were a small funder, you didn't see opportunity, and if you were big, you didn't see need. But there's so much information out there, and things are changing so fast, that there's an awareness of the need to be involved in public-policy issues. I don't think you can work in isolation anymore and do the job well."

That belief also informs Rockefeller's Philanthropy Workshop, which is building a network of alumni around the world, many of whom are exploring grant-making collaborations with one another.

Workshop participants attend four intensive weeklong sessions over the course of a year -- three in the United States and one in a developing country. The curriculum, taught by Rockefeller officials and other experts, combines readings in philosophy and literature with skills-building sessions and site visits to many nonprofit groups.

"They taught us to be proactive and outcome-driven, but not so hung up on achieving results that you can't take risks," says Ms. Thonden, who runs the Isdell Foundation with her husband, Kevin Toner, and is its sole staff member. "Also, to take on big problems, but break them down into their smaller parts to make them more understandable."

Mr. Toner, founder of a hedge fund on Wall Street, established the foundation to support a variety of activist causes. Its current focus is promoting self-determination for the people of Tibet, mostly through grants to American groups. Ms. Thonden's parents emigrated to New York from Tibet, which in 1949 was invaded by Chinese troops.

"For me," says Ms. Thonden, "because I've had no experience in grant making, the actual nuts and bolts of what to look for in a grant proposal, how to assess the health of an organization you're considering supporting, the nature of grantor-grantee relationships -- all this practical training was incredibly useful for me."

Salvatore LaSpada, who directs the Philanthropy Workshop, calls it a "grueling philanthropic boot camp" that offers "training in social problem solving" rather than mere grant making. "Strategic philanthropy is about much more than simply picking organizations, no matter how effective they might be," he says. "It's about investing private capital to devise comprehensive strategies which seek to create change at a systemic level."

Ms. Thonden seems to have taken that message to heart. "Now, I'm not so focused on specific programs but on building powerful organizations," she says, "putting more focus on capacity building for the different Tibet support groups we're involved with, making them stronger so they can be more effective overall and able to sustain themselves over time."

While working for Human Rights Watch, Ms. Thonden spent part of her time helping to raise money to support its activities. From her new perspective, the line between grant seeker and grant maker is fuzzier than it previously appeared.

"When I became a grant maker, I always thought I'd be grant making," says Ms. Thonden. "But one thing I've learned is that in order to be a good grant maker, you've got to be a good fund raiser, using your social capital to draw in support for organizations you believe in."

She adds: "I thought my fund-raising days were over, but now I'm realizing they're just beginning."