The Courage to Let Go of Control

In the day and age of strategic grantmaking, in which foundations seek out organizations that will support their strategy rather than find ways that they can best support the strategies of leading organizations, it is refreshing -- no that’s not right -- it’s absolutely inspiring to discover a foundation with the courage to let go of control.

I started reading A New Role for Connecticut Youth by the Perrin Family Foundation in partnership with the Funders’Collaborative on Youth Organizing, with the assumption that it was going to be a piece about the value of youth organizing.  It does that and does it well, with clear concepts, including a youth engagement continuum and the competencies that young people develop through organizing.

What I didn’t expect was an honest look at what it means for a foundation to invest in youth organizing (or any organizing for that matter). The Perrin Family Foundation is facing the challenges head on:

• The philanthropic sector’s own struggles— to relinquish control, have “uncomfortable” conversations, and build authentic relationships with community members directly affected by their funding decisions— adversely affect social change efforts

• Generating significant, deep, and lasting social change is a long-term process, which often conflicts with a foundation’s desire and need to demonstrate immediate impact and swift results. Community and private foundations both face this challenge

• Many foundations struggle to engage in grantmaking that extends beyond an individual or programmatic impact. 

• The prevailing single-year, project-based approach to grantmaking prevents practitioners from articulating and implementing long-range change campaigns or strategies.

The Perrin Family Foundation’s findings ring so true to me. While at the Mott Foundation, I managed two very different portfolios, one with a clear strategic goal to get the education system to establish multiple pathways to graduation, and the other to build capacity of community organizing groups to improve education. (Mott is a foundation that stays the course – both portfolios are still active today). Luckily the Mott Foundation saw fit to invest in coaching support for me when I inherited the community organizing portfolio, saving the grantees a lot of time and suffering of trying to answer the wrong questions I would have put forth. With the help of Drew Astolfi, I soon realized that my analytical frames, outputs and outcomes, relationships with grantees, and what I listened for to inform me of the strength of an organization varied substantially between these two portfolios.

The first of the challenges described above – about how difficult it is to give up control – is the most important. Strategic grantmaking has gone too far in trying to control the organizations in which they invest, to the point that we are undermining leadership and leadership development in organizations. Strategic doesn’t necessarily have to mean control. We can all benefit from thinking more about adaptive leadership in the philanthropic sector in which we work with organizations, rather than fitting them as a piece within the puzzle of our strategies. I'll be looking to the Perrin Family Foundation to set a new course. Let's call it adaptive strategy.