Essay: Strategic Philanthropy: Pew's Approach To Matching Needs With Resources
1999; Project HOPE; Volume: 18; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1377/hlthaff.18.3.228
ISSN2694-233X
Autores Tópico(s)Healthcare Policy and Management
ResumoGrantWatch Health AffairsVol. 18, No. 3 Essay: Strategic Philanthropy: Pew's Approach To Matching Needs With ResourcesRebecca W. Rimel AffiliationsRebecca Rimel has been president and chief executive officer of the Pew Charitable Trusts, located in Philadelphia, since 1994. Before joining Pew in 1983 as a health program officer, she had a distinguished career in nursing. She was the first nurse to hold a faculty position in the University of Virginia's medical school. She also was head nurse of the emergency department at University of Virginia Hospital.PUBLISHED:May/June 1999Free Accesshttps://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.18.3.228AboutSectionsView PDFPermissions ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsDownload Exhibits TOPICSGrantsGrant makingHealth philanthropySocial SecurityQuality of careEducationGovernment programs and policiesMediaThe pew charitable trusts have overhauled the national initiatives in their Health and Human Services (HHS) program. The premise underlying the program is the trusts' fundamental idea of strategic philanthropy. Other foundations also have adopted the concept of strategic grant making, so some of my observations may not be unique to the Pew Charitable Trusts. Nonetheless, I restrict my comments to Pew's experience. It has long been my view that the philanthropic tent is large, that one size does not fit all, and that, therefore, generalizations are not always useful, especially in an occasional series of essays by foundation presidents to which this paper is one contribution.History As PreludeThe Pew Charitable Trusts are a group of seven individual charitable funds established between 1948 and 1979 by two sons and two daughters of Sun Oil Company founder Joseph N. Pew and his wife, Mary Anderson Pew. What are today the Pew Charitable Trusts began in 1948 with the Pew Memorial Foundation; its aim was to contribute to the public's health and welfare and to strengthen communities. The same broad principle applies to Pew's HHS program today, but the current era, of course, is very different and requires different approaches.In its early years the foundation worked in almost complete anonymity. The founders' religious principles and family philosophy emphasized that good works should speak for themselves. Nevertheless, requests for support continued to multiply, placing increasing demands on the founders and their colleagues on the board. They came to realize that the proper disposition of their philanthropy required, in the long term, a staff to manage their assets as well as to handle the administrative tasks of grant making.To that end, the board disbanded the foundation in 1957 and transferred its assets to a new entity—the Pew Memorial Trust (eventually Trusts)—to be administered by the Glenmede Trust Company, established by the founders in 1956. This structure enabled the Pews to eventually create individual funds with specific missions reflecting their charitable interests.The trusts have never lost that family concern and involvement; today six of the ten board members are from the Pew family; one of that six is a founding board member. The board, in quarterly meetings, decides whether to approve each grant and considers ideas from the staff for projects that might later become grants.Between 1948 and 1956 the Pew Memorial Foundation made 181 grants totaling $12.5 million. During the 1960s grant making by the trusts grew to a yearly average of $5 million, a threefold increase over the original foundation's average annual grant making. During the 1970s the trusts awarded more than 3,500 grants totaling $296 million—five times the total given during the prior ten years. Between 1980 and 1989 the trusts' board approved $1.13 billion in grants to more than 5,000 organizations. As of 31 December 1998 the Pew trusts had assets of $4.7 billion; the 1998 grant commitment was $213.5 million.The first Pew grant was given in 1948 to the Red Cross for flood relief in Pennsylvania. The trusts quickly developed an interest in education, health care, and social service institutions. Over time Pew added programs in culture, the environment, public policy, and religion. Even though our grant making continues to include an ever-widening circle of nationally focused organizations, we maintain an unwavering commitment to Philadelphia-area organizations.In the late 1970s the trusts published their first annual report and began to issue annual grant-making guidelines outlining the activities that they would consider for support. This period also marked the beginning of a more strategic approach to grant making: Pew began to take a more active partnership role in developing programs designed to respond to needs in the fields that we funded. During the 1980s all of our programs adopted initiatives that the trusts initiated. Such initiatives provided a systematic vehicle for making highly focused interventions to address significant issues or problems.This recent approach, which we continue to refine, has not changed the basic tenets that guided the trusts' founders. The trusts remain committed to encouraging individual growth and potential; improving the quality of people's lives; maintaining and nurturing our democratic traditions; promoting an educated and engaged citizenry; protecting religious freedom; and assisting and supporting those in need.Strategic PhilanthropyAccording to folk legend, Johnny Apple-seed tossed thousands of seeds into the countryside, where many of them took root and filled a nutritional need for settlers in the Ohio Valley. That is a kind of philanthropy, but it is not “strategic,” because Johnny had seemingly unlimited resources and unlimited territory to propagate. In fact, the real Johnny Appleseed—John Chapman—was an active nurseryman with many orchards, a practical frontiersman yet a generous dispenser of seedlings. He was prolific but not profligate in his generosity, and he apparently did a lot of selling as well as a lot of giving away for free. This approach, which suggests a plan based on a larger idea, is considerably more strategic than the legend suggests.Over the years the Pew trusts have developed benchmarks that help to tell us whether a proposal or new program idea meets our criteria for a focused, promising investment. For us, strategic grant making has a well-defined goal that is larger than that of a single project. A single grant cannot be “strategic” in itself. It must be part of a cluster of grants that have a focus. At the same time, that single grant has an explicit and achievable objective. Strategic grant making also has a discernible impact on a problem. We have to do more than offer Band-Aids and, ideally, work on more than symptoms. We aim to identify underlying causes, because attacking them is the only way that finite resources can make a difference.Third, strategic grant making responds to a ripe opportunity. Timeliness is key. Others—for instance, the public or policymakers—must be ready to move on an issue. Even if a large problem cries out for a solution, no foundation or person can attack it alone or in the wrong climate. On the other hand, we cannot simply follow whatever issue is in vogue. Fourth, strategic grant making has the appropriate partnerships in place early on. We cannot spin tidy solutions to major problems in the ivory tower of our offices and then expect to find grantees or collaborators who can somehow read our minds about our intent and expectations. The power of collaboration, shared talents, and resources gives all of the partners a much greater chance of success. Fifth, strategic grant making is simple in design. The problems we try to address are exceedingly complex. We must remain clear about our role in helping society move to solutions; otherwise, our efforts might disappear in the vortex of forces that keep the problem alive.Sixth, strategic grant making allocates an appropriate amount of resources. Too little is a waste of even that investment; too much steals from other needs. Seventh, strategic grant making approaches a problem on multiple fronts. A cluster of grants is like arrows in a quiver or a well-constructed portfolio of many investments. Its impact adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Eighth, strategic grant making is both ambitious and feasible. We want our grants to be successful, but we also want to make sure that the bar is set high enough. Grants are risks; we accept that. If, however, we can learn from grants that fall short, then the failure is mitigated and our future grants ought to be stronger.Ninth, strategic grant making considers core competencies, in Pew's programs and in the trusts at large. Resources are not only financial. They also include human capabilities and skills that we want to draw on constantly and build within our staff and among our grantees. Finally, strategic grant making ought to show progress in three to five years. Time is a finite resource. We try to spend it wisely. Our grants have a rigorous time frame, but not one that inherently thwarts a grant's potential success.Why Strategize?When the Pew trusts first opened their doors, grant making was a fairly simple business: Those in need of support applied; foundations responded with a grant. Grant making was closer to a personal act of charity. Today the needs seem greater; the problems are tougher, more complex, and more nuanced; and there are more applicants for limited resources. In fact, never has there been more pressure on foundations to come to the rescue on so many fronts. Devolution has increased that pressure. For example, the 1996 welfare reform law emphatically shifted to state and local entities many responsibilities that had been lodged in Washington for decades.With the federal government beating a retreat, philanthropy is feeling increasing pressure to fill the void in health care, social services, education, the environment, and the arts. In 1995 foundations gave $10.4 billion to the nonprofit sector. That is a lot of money, but minuscule compared with the $241 billion provided in 1995 by the federal government to states and localities for social programs alone and the nearly $143 billion contributed by individuals. Against these numbers, even the more than $213 million awarded by the trusts in 1998 seems barely significant.We have therefore concluded that if we are to make any difference in addressing specific goals in our grant-making areas, then the relatively simple approach we used in the past no longer suffices. We have to treat our grants as investments, and they have to be invested for leverage—the leverage that will make a measurable impact in finding a solution. Our program directors and their staffs need to seek opportunities for leverage by funding potentially self-sustaining enterprises, sharing lessons learned from research and experience, and encouraging synergy and partnerships among organizations with complementary interests. That is why the Pew Charitable Trusts—and this foundation is by no means the only one to do this—have begun to move beyond our traditional, relatively passive role as grant givers to become catalysts, brokers, information resources, and civic entrepreneurs through strategic investments. The trusts have begun to think more like venture capitalists, seeking to derive the greatest benefit from every strategic investment of capital, time, and talent—except, in Pew's case, the return on investment is measured not in profits but in long-lasting, positive, and powerful benefits to the public.“In our lexicon, leveraging is about capturing the public interest through good timing, good partners, imagination, and creativity.”In our lexicon, therefore, leveraging is not merely about money. It is also about capturing the public interest through good timing, good partners, imagination, and creativity. For example, when we began Americans Discuss Social Security (ADSS) in 1997, the public was hearing projections about Social Security's future and recommendations by policymakers who doubted its future solvency. In surveys, however, Americans expressed uncertainty about the nature of the problem and felt that they had no way of getting a handle on the issues. Administered through our HHS program, the nonpartisan ADSS addresses the problems of lack of participation and knowledge. It conducts surveys to pinpoint gaps in public knowledge and the perceptions and misperceptions about Social Security; to find areas, if any, of public consensus on the problems; and to learn what trade-offs Americans might make to secure the program's future. ADSS sponsored an interactive video teleconference linking 1,200 citizens in ten cities—a kind of national summit, said to be the first such conference ever. ADSS subsequently convened symposia in five cities across the nation and a conference in Washington, D.C.; participants discussed Social Security issues and came to conclusions about what society and policymakers might do to address its problems. Like American democracy itself, ADSS is an experiment in civic engagement.This grant ends in 1999, and we will be conducting an evaluation of ADSS. We will look at both the details of this particular project and its overall aim: to help rebuild the voice of Americans in the political process, to engage them in discussion of a national policy issue, and to help create a dialogue between the public and policymakers so that public policy might better reflect public will.Programs And LeverageThe trusts manage their grants through seven programs. Six are defined by topic, and one, the Venture Fund, is designed to capture opportunities that do not fit neatly into one of the other six. The following briefly describes an example of leverage in three of Pew's seven programs.HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES.The trusts have just completed a decade of support for the Pew Health Professions Commission, which aimed to assist health care professionals, health professions schools, health care delivery organizations, and public policy-makers in responding to the challenges of educating and managing a health care work-force capable of improving the health and well-being of people and their communities. This was a novel niche ten years ago: Health education and training had long been the province of the various professions within the field. No one had considered that the public, with a huge stake in the results, ought to have a voice in ensuring that the persons who treat them have the best and most relevant professional preparation possible. Four landmark commission reports and many task-force reports recommended sometimes controversial reforms in health professions education, regulation, and workforce policy and, overall, gave reform thinking a grounding in an otherwise turbulent time, in a field where it is not always comfortable or convenient to rock the boat.PUBLIC POLICY.This program focuses, in part, on improving the quality of elections, a piece of Pew's effort to foster the renewal of democratic life in the United States. Campaign finance reform and improved campaign conduct are essential elements in this effort. Among other goals, the trusts aim to engage citizens, the media, and candidates in crafting campaign codes of conduct; to measure and make public the quality of campaign dialogue in actual campaigns; and to discover even more effective ways to encourage citizens to play an active role in electoral politics.VENTURE FUND.Many journalists feel battered by technology and economic pressures; the numbers of newspaper readers and viewers of network television are declining; and a growing number of Americans say that the press gets in the way of solving the nation's problems. In turn, many journalists seem to have lost confidence in their professional moorings and purpose and to have even confused and confounded the mission of their field—to be a public service for a healthy and informed democracy. The Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) has sounded an alarm, inspiring professional soul-searching as well as pointing to the best examples of current practice. A series of forums has started a national conversation on the state of U.S. journalism. Earlier this year the project issued “report cards” on local television news in twenty cities, with recommendations to improve the quality of local news. The project is directed by a career journalist who involves leading editors, reporters, and news analysts.EvaluationUnderlying the grant-crafting process—going before and after it—is evaluation. I give it a special heading here because there is little sense in asking a grantee to achieve a result unless the result can be measured. Most foundations have come to grips only recently with the difficulty of constructing proper measurement tools. At Pew this responsibility is in the hands of our Planning and Evaluation unit, indicating that asking, “How'd we do?” is an element embedded in all grants from the earliest developmental stage until well past closure. Planning and Evaluation staff encourage program staff to raise such questions as, “What is this effort trying to achieve?” (to articulate a goal or objective); and, “How will the effort achieve this goal or objective?” (to articulate a strategy).The actual evaluation takes a form appropriate to the program being examined. To evaluate ADSS, for example, outside consultants designed a coding instrument to assess the transcripts of the five-city symposia. They made sure to code for specific facts, values, and policy options discussed and also for the tone that characterized the particular discussions. They conducted pre- and postsymposium interviews with attendees and interviewed a random sample of residents of one city. To analyze media coverage, the consultants tracked print articles and television stories, and they also examined content by dissecting the news reports according to twenty-five diverse issues relating to Social Security. In short, the means of evaluation matched the various parts of a complex endeavor.Outside of the foundation world, I am often asked, “How hard can it be to give away money?” My answer is, “It's not hard, but it's hard to do it effectively.” Accordingly, we tie planning and evaluation into not only grant crafting, but also institutional planning. Evaluation has helped us to improve our grant-making programs, keep our strategy focused, and increase our accountability to the public, whom we ultimately serve.Clearly, evaluation (as we define it) is not merely a monitoring responsibility, which essentially makes sure that grantees fulfill their financial or programmatic obligations. In the more ambitious sense in which Pew uses the term, it refers to effectiveness. For instance, not only do we ask, Did grantees carry out our strategy and the work of our shared mandate, but also, Did those activities have a public impact? (Did they educate? Change opinions? Advance the debate?)Evaluation also can show where we fall short of success. We have a long-standing, successful fellowship/scholarship project in biomedical science, and we extended that kind of award mechanism to other program areas. Several of those did well, too, but others did not—victims of what the evaluators called “technique-driven programming.” In those cases that fell short, we reexamined the need we were trying to meet and designed a more appropriate means to reach the goal.An internal risk of giving evaluation such a high profile is that program staff may look for projects for which success can be easily measured and achieved. But that would defeat the trusts' purpose. Institutionally, we want to be clear about our direction, we want our grantees to know what we expect, and we must know whether to stay the course with a particular grant or portfolio of investments. Evaluation can be the discipline that keeps us focused and a tool to stimulate organizational learning, for ourselves as well as our grantees.How We Decide What To FundWhile much of our focus is on providing fact-based information and opportunities for public dialogue, we have a point of view, which is expressed principally through our grantees and the work we support. Some projects, like ADSS, are public-education efforts. The approach is neutral: Pew has no preferred approach to Social Security reform, but it does want citizens to participate in the debate. Other efforts that we fund may help to create a middle ground, where bitter opponents can use fact-based information to bridge their differences when addressing pressing issues, such as global climate change. What we do is akin to sending out invitations, setting the table, and turning on the lights. We trust that citizens will embrace the opportunity to become engaged in the issues that affect their lives.At Pew we give ideas rigorous and careful study and testing. Our concern is not about advancing a particular ideological slant—we have been aptly described as “raging moderates”—or the amount of money requested, but about need, relevance, potential effectiveness, and long-term impact. We have been criticized at times for requiring our potential grantees to submit plans that are highly detailed. We conduct painstaking, even exhaustive, internal reviews of proposals so that we can knowledgeably and wisely carry out our stewardship responsibilities.Our program staff—the director, the program officers, and the associates—are drawn from the field; they typically have both academic and real-life experience with their issues. Knowing the field, they are more likely to find appropriate partner organizations. When we are considering the scope of what each of our programs might do, the principle is focus. Rather than spreading the wealth and trying to make all grant applicants happy, program staff try to pick the right and ripe opportunity to work on in the first place. Having professionals thoroughly grounded in areas where Pew can be most constructive helps with decision making. Once a project or cluster of projects is under way, we try to further maximize its impact through even smarter consolidation of resources.Although there are many useful courses on philanthropy, the skills required to structure innovative programs and build effective strategies are more likely acquired than taught, in the formal sense. Accordingly, we learn by doing—and what Pew does has often not been done before or at least not done in the way Pew is attempting it. That is why we regard much of what we do as an experiment—with the attendant acknowledgment that on occasion we will fail. For Pew, the unacceptable alternative is to tackle small problems rather than big ones, to set reachable goals rather than ambitious but pragmatic ones.We believe that we have talented, innovative, idea-filled persons on our staff and leading our programs. We have a board willing to explore uncharted terrain, try untested approaches, create new problem-solving vehicles when needed, and weather the occasional controversy. This openness allows the trusts to take risks. Serving the social good is a lofty concept that can get lost in abstractions. We know that idealism needs an anchor, and aspiration needs accountability. Using the combination of these seemingly paradoxical qualities helps us to make the tough, informed choices needed to do the trusts' work and, we hope, to do it well. Loading Comments... Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. 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