by David B. Smith
October 25, 2011
I recently had the pleasure of joining the Aspen Institute Roundtable on Assessing Community Information Needs. This forum convened about thirty thought leaders, including community organizers, public media experts, foundation executives, journalists, researchers, and civic engagement theorists. The main topic of conversation was the Richard Harwood’s new white paper, “Assessing Community Information Needs: A Practical Guide” along with discussion around the Knight Foundation’s toolkit focused on assessing a community’s information infrastructure.
Harwood’s report is pillared by “Four Guideposts for Assessing Local Information Environments” and builds out “Nine Strategies for Taking Effective Action.” I strongly encourage you download the report, check the quick reference guides (as a teaser), and then dive in to the larger report.
Rather than rehashing his thesis, I wanted to highlight a few key takeaways I had from the deep discussion we had over lunch at One Dupont Circle (and include a few of my unspoken thoughts on these topics).
The first is around the risk adverse nature of the nonprofit field, mainly driven by the funding methodologies of foundations and government alike. To put this a different way, we need to CELEBRATE OUR FAILURES in a way that would make Silicon Valley proud.
Tech founders and venture capitalists alike celebrate their failures as scars of courage that are almost essential to securing future support. This is where they talk about their big ideas that just couldn’t find the right market, couldn’t hit the tipping point, or just were ideas well before their time. They all know that the vast majority of organizations and investments will fail, but they make these bets knowing that when they hit, they hit huge. This encourages everyone to dream larger, strive harder, and fail in spectacular fashion.
In the nonprofit sector, we fear failure and hide it whenever it happens. I feel a driving force behind this mentality is the way in which we secure and maintain funding. Foundations and governments are extremely risk adverse and generally wait to provide support for ventures until they could survive and thrive without their money. This creates a field where the known brands get more resources than they know what to do with, and the true innovators fizzle with the passion of their founders.
Jean Case of the Case Foundation has ~1@BODYURL[id=114kcurl288]@on this topic from the perspective of both nonprofits and foundations.
To truly move the needle, the nonprofit and funding community needs to find a way to embrace risk, invest in innovation, and encourage failure. This might be creating a new system where larger institutions can “acquire” smaller hubs of creativity while not stifling them with their bureaucracy; it might be creating venture philanthropy funds that focus on high-risk, high social reward portfolios; or it might be as simple as changing the relationship between funders and organizations to facilitate honest communication, reflecting on failures, and encouraging the pushing of envelopes that might not seem prudent.
The second point (and probably more relevant to the white paper) is around process versus outcome. Harwood preaches “innovation over good planning” and suggests community institutions need to convene around aspirations without preconceived direction in mind. I completely agree with this strategy, and the only way to gain authentic voice and create community ownership is to allow the “community” to define itself, its aspirations, and its theory of change. However, after spending the last decade working with various communities aiming to define their own agendas, this does not jive with the structure of most national, regional, and even local funding institutions.
In my experience, foundations are more and more focused on outcomes, and I don’t just mean measurable results. Many foundations have specific issue based agendas that drive their portfolios, positioned in a way that says, “we know what is best for your community, so do this and we’ll fund you.” While most of these agendas are worthy of investment and often lead to more active and empowered populations, the bottom line is that these are not community-based strategies as the process of creating the agenda was left behind.
This might just be my take, but I believe Harwood’s paper is describing a process of effective action that begins with the process in mind and allows the issue to be determined by the local community. This shift in mindset builds authentic community and leads towards ownership and collective action. It moves the traditional experts (nonprofits, government or foundations) from the agenda driver to the facilitating convener.
My intent is not to rail against some of my best friends in the foundation community, but it’s to offer an encouraging word for those rethinking their community strategies. Rather than identifying YOUR issue and then funding community-based strategies to further that end, why not focus on building the civic capacity of communities to determine THEIR own issues and map their own path of success. After all, we can continue to spend money running local campaigns over and over and over again, or we can invest in building the capacity of communities to identify, rally, strategize, act, accomplish, and sustain their own agendas over time. To do so, we might have to be willing to fail more often and occasionally see our investment take a step back on our issue today for two giant leaps forward for prosperity tomorrow.