[Ford Foundation] - President Darren Walker: Strategic philanthropy too often minimizes or ignores complexity because it is difficult to understand and predict.
As John Kania, Mark Kramer, and Patty Russell’s provocative article affirms, philanthropies should, and do, deploy a multiplicity of methods in both our work and our assessment of its impact. This rich variety of approaches—and the robust dialogue and debate that go along with them—powerfully represents the diversity that makes our sector strong.
In the spirit of this dialogue, I will be blunt: philanthropy is at an inflection point. During the last decade, our sector has become mired in a false choice. We have been trapped in a binary discourse that categorizes grantmakers as either strategic or undisciplined, either focused or haphazard, either rigorous or sloppy. Too many of us have bought into a polemic that fails to account for the ways in which social change transpires. Worse still, by pressing our grantees to see the process of social change in this same inauthentic light, we inadvertently undermine their efforts when we should be empowering them...