Search our Site

One of the most enduring areas of conflict between community-based non-profit institutions and the foundations who fund them is that of the urgency of need versus the how and why of making funding available to address need.  Non-profits facing the 24/7 pressures of providing services to the poor, the sick and the disenfranchised are in the position of having to spend grant money in short term, tactical increments while proving to funders that they are working towards long-term change.  Foundations meanwhile are plagued with having to operate in ways to justify to boards of directors, and increasingly the government that they are strategically impacting the socioeconomic and politically constructed conditions that overwhelm their disjointed efforts. 

In the early ‘80’s I was finance director at a community health center serving monolingual, low-income Asian patients, and subsequently was executive director of a national health policy and advocacy organization for 15 years.  In all that time, the AIDS crisis, the increasing rates of certain infectious disease, rising rates of cancer, stroke and heart disease and the intransigence of TB, all against the backdrop of the ascendancy of managed care, were problems which left no doubt about the urgent need to act in the immediate.  Overall government funding for health and social services delivery was in retreat and the philanthropic community was being forced to face growing demand for a timely and visible response to these and competing demands created by devolution. 

In my over 25 years of professional life in the non-profit sector, picking up the pieces from Reagan’s dismantling of the safety net, Bush Sr.’s recession, Clinton’s welfare reform, and Bush Jr.’s war induced deficit, I have never relaxed from that sense of urgency. Now, as a philanthropy executive I have a constant fear of acting too slowly, of measuring our pace too carefully, of missing the cues that the larger environment’s movements has on the communities we care about.  The ability to act decisively with philanthropic partners has often meant the difference between non-profits that just survived and those that prevailed. 

I worry about becoming irrelevant in pursuit of being “right,” and of becoming lulled by the luxury of spending based on endowment returns. Finally I want to make sure that the constituencies prompting our planning and performance are those that have assets to employ on their own behalf rather than those that deploy assets of behalf of others far removed from the reality of need.   

It would be wonderful if the benchmarking of our work was as much about the timeliness of our response as it was the effectiveness of it over time. This is a dilemma that I know many philanthropy executives and their donors consider seriously.  However, it is a dilemma that we don’t always entertain in the development and execution of our strategies.