We’ve now come through the annual report and annual meeting season for foundations and nonprofits, and one thing is clear: We love our projects. Page after glossy page showcases inspiring and innovative new initiatives that lift up our residents and brighten our communities. In philanthropy, we love the new “new thing.”
Candidly, we at the Fund for Our Economic Future also are mesmerized by what’s possible in a new project. We find inspiration in the anecdotes of lives touched and especially in the hard metrics touting tangible program benefits, individuals served and efficiencies gained.
As some of the most philanthropic communities in the nation, Cleveland, Akron and the rest of Northeast Ohio are often the first to develop and implement new projects.
But this then begs a larger question: If we’ve been implementing innovative, successful projects for so long, why are we still suffering from such economic distress? There is much to celebrate in our communities, but, sadly, the economic data suggest that we still are leaving too many people behind. How come all of these great, tangible projects don’t seem to be adding up to transformational impact?
One thought is, perhaps, we are using the wrong frame while making philanthropic investments. Too often, we use philanthropic dollars to identify and incubate new projects that are separate from the larger civic systems in which they operate. A great case in point is in workforce, where there are countless programs helping individuals. Many of these programs deliver the kinds of inspirational results that make great fodder for annual reports, but fail to scale or spread to the point that they deliver meaningful impact at a community — let alone regional — level.
But what if the new “new thing” was improving the old thing? An alternative frame for philanthropy might be to experiment with innovations that can subsequently be embedded in larger civic systems. A recent blog post by Jeffrey Walker, a successful venture capitalist who now serves as chair of New Profit, a highly acclaimed philanthropic venture fund, as well as a vice chair for the United Nations, makes this case compellingly. He calls on foundations and others to stop trying to replace existing systems with new projects; rather, our role is to provide the transitional dollars to identify practices that reshape existing systems — what he calls “transitional philanthropy.”
Rather than highlight Jeff’s examples, I’ll share two great examples right here in Northeast Ohio. The first is WorkAdvance, a national workforce demonstration project with sites we supported in Northeast Ohio that tested how a seamless set of services, with an added focus on post-employment assistance, can better connect disadvantaged job seekers to in-demand jobs and put them on a path toward career advancement, while helping employers find the talent they need for their businesses to prosper. Later this summer, we will be publishing the vigorously evaluated results of this work.
A second example is TalentNEO, a collaborative initiative we are supporting that seeks to better align Northeast Ohio job seekers with career opportunities and uncover hidden talent for employers by focusing on fundamental workplace skills that can be surfaced through tests rather than educational degree attainment. TalentNEO recognizes that there are many pathways to employment, and people from diverse backgrounds may already possess the skills they need to contribute productively as employees.
Project permanence is not the objective of WorkAdvance or TalentNEO. Instead, the goal is to identify practices that can be embedded into existing workforce systems. Already, learnings from the WorkAdvance demonstration are being adopted in Cuyahoga and Summit counties and the Mahoning Valley, and the State of Ohio is building the TalentNEO skill scoring into its OhioMeansJobs website.
Of course, there is no guarantee that the innovative principles will translate fully into larger systems or that they won’t be quashed by larger forces. To increase our chances of success, transitional philanthropy requires that we include partners in the planning of an initiative from the very beginning and agree on what we are measuring and how — rather than simply throwing an innovation over the wall after a grant and hoping it gets picked up by the key stakeholders. Indeed, the really hard work begins when the project concludes. Philanthropy must commit to lifting up the evaluation, and communicating the results, by taking the time to convene, educate and engage these partners. Often, many players must align to produce meaningful change, and that requires a set of collective skills foreign to many of us.
Fortunately, the field of effective collaborative networks (aka Collective Impact) is evolving rapidly, and we are understanding better than ever how to ensure innovative principles get translated well. My colleague at the fund, Chris Thompson, has devoted years to understanding the success conditions for effective collaborations. We will soon be publishing a collaboration guidebook that builds off of our Northeast Ohio experiences. Indeed, a funding requirement for many of our grantees is that they now go through collaboration training.
The Northeast Ohio region is beginning to see good economic development results through collaboration. Philanthropy is partnering with the Ohio Third Frontier Program and regional intermediaries like JumpStart, BioEnterprise, MAGNET and other local entrepreneurial support organizations to promote entrepreneurship through a linked civic system. Although our region still has a way to go in business development, our fund is partnering with JobsOhio, Team NEO and the organized business community to develop a business development system that lifts the collective performance of chambers, economic development authorities and local economic development departments.
So, while systems innovations may not make good copy for an annual report, it is exactly the kind of unglamorous work that will make the biggest difference over time.