Tuesday, February 3, 2015
F.B. Heron and Edna McConnell Clark Foundations Lauded for Granting Unrestricted Funding
In philanthropy today, we are doing some good “architectural” work in emergent philanthropy, networks, and collective impact, to name a few. But to achieve a breakthrough like the Empire State Building, we need to fundamentally change the underlying practices we use to construct our philanthropy, just as radically as Starrett Brothers and Eken did.
We have good materials (committed people, financial capital, promising solutions) but are sometimes using outdated practices that are often more grounded in an inside-out, funder-centric point of view than the external realities of the grantees, programs, and systems we seek to change.
We need to become far more outside in, driven by external realities and signals. There are several practices that would go a long way toward effectively reconstructing philanthropy (download the full piece below), but this work begins with the most structural one of all: providing unrestricted funding....