Strategic Philanthropy's Growing Pains

Who could argue with John Kania, Mark Kramer, and Patty Russell’s assertions in their recent article, “Strategic Philanthropy for a Complex World,” published in SSIR’s summer issue?

Their assertion – that many of today’s social problems are unpredictable, “the result of the interplay between multiple independent factors that influence each other in ever-changing ways” – isn’t particularly revolutionary.

The authors call for a more emergent approach to philanthropy as it tackles these most complex problems. “We have now come to the conclusion that if funders are to make greater progress in meeting society’s urgent challenges, they must move beyond today’s rigid and predictive model of strategy to a more nuanced model of emergent strategy that better aligns with the complex nature of social progress.”

If this seems rational, it’s because it is. But rationality doesn’t preclude controversy, especially in the heavily debated area of strategic philanthropy.

It took a week or two for some of philanthropy’s biggest thinkers and heaviest hitters to respond. But respond they did.

William Schambra, the director of the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, and long-time strategic philanthropy critic took his turn this week in an article published in the Nonprofit Quarterly.

Schambra begins in the voice of a beleaguered nonprofit director, who while settling in for another night working from home happens upon the Kania et al. article, much to her dismay.

“Wait…what? My program officer had assured me that logic models and theories of change and chains of cause and effect were the wave of the future! But here the journal she so strongly recommends is saying that they’re so yesterday—flawed, inadequate, Newtonian, outdated. So I’m committing my organization to an approach that the experts tell me is rigid, simplistic, useless. Of course, I could have told them that, based on my everyday experience.”

After two decades in the making, after nonprofits big and small have finally shoehorned themselves into its rigid confines, the strategic philanthropy framework “has suddenly been shaken at its core by the apostasy of some of its leading practitioners, writing the lead article in strategic philanthropy’s flagship journal.”

In response, Kramer writes that FSG has not abandoned it’s original stance on strategic philanthropy.

The true damage, says Schambra, falls onto the shoulders of the rank-and-file nonprofits that have tied themselves in knots adhering to "strategic" dogma. The bigger, more lavishly resourced organizations will move on and adapt to the next latest version of strategic philanthropy. And the authors of the article – all in leadership roles at FSG, a strategy consultancy for philanthropies, nonprofits, and business – though undoubtedly well meaning, are able to just walk away, says Schambra. “Indeed, they’re now selling a new version of strategic philanthropy that, they assure us, is vastly superior to the old one.”

Next came Phil Buchanan, the president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, with his post, “Emerging Views of Emergent Strategy.” Buchanan has long argued “against the top-down, isolated way strategy is frequently developed and implemented in philanthropy.”

You’d be forgiven at this point if you were beginning to believe Buchanan and the folks at FSG were on the verge of forming a copasetic alliance poised to move philanthropy into a golden age of effective strategy that honored the sometimes chaotic form real social change entails.

That golden age may still be a few years away.

Buchanan notes that he and many others in the philanthropic thought community have been sounding these same alarms for years: a 2009 CEP report, an Alliance magazine article, a Chronicle of Philanthropy article coauthored with NCRP’s Aaron Dorfman, and the work of Patti Patrizi, who has “argued eloquently for years for an ‘emergent’ approach to strategy…”

If FSG's approach to strategic philanthropy is going to evolve, Buchanan seems to be saying, then at least acknowledge the body of work that surely led them to the light. “It’s crucial that those positioning themselves as brokers of wisdom to large foundations are forthright when they recognize they got something wrong,” Buchanan writes.

Buchanan also alleges that Kania et al. fail to attribute specific ideas that “originated elsewhere.” We’ll leave these claims alone. Mark Kramer has posted a response to Schambra’s article that addresses this. As did Patti Patrizi. We’ll let the reader make that call.

But all this matters, writes Buchanan, because "those of us who care about the effectiveness of philanthropy need to be forthright when we get it wrong, so that both practitioners and researchers can understand and learn. In addition, to the extent that our work builds on the work of others, we need to acknowledge it – both because it is simply the right thing to do and because, again, our audiences can then better understand the applicable history and context."

At issue amid all the brouhaha, is the ability of grantmakers to create impact, to make change, to tackle the problems we all care about. Debate is good and the fact that smart people are digging in to ways to improve philanthropic effectiveness portends a brighter future for us all.

But, writes Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, “philanthropy is at an inflection point.”

“We have been trapped in a binary discourse that categorizes grantmakers as either strategic or undisciplined, either focused or haphazard, either rigorous or sloppy…the time has come for us to set aside our adherence to a prescriptive theology that constrains how philanthropy approaches solving complex challenges.”

For Christine Letts, the Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in the Practice of Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, the article is a “welcome addition” to the growing chorus of those critical of strategic philanthropy.

“Despite the fact that others have suggested these ideas in the past, it is still worthwhile to continue to raise them. As André Gide wrote in Le Traité du Narcisse, ‘Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.’”