Note: As I mentioned last week, I am at the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations conference this week curating a group of bloggers. The third blogger is Mae Hong, Vice President of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. Her guest post is below. And for a full rundown on the conference check out #2016GEO.
I can’t get the Buffalo Springfield lyrics out of my head:
“There’s something happening here.
What it is ain’t exactly clear.
I think it’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down.”
“Hey, What’s that sound?”
These were the sounds coming out of GEO’s 2016 National Conference in Minneapolis this week:
Philanthropy Embracing a New Lexicon
Values. Trust. Transparency. Reflection. Love. These are the words that were heard over and over in the plenaries, breakout sessions and hallways. I can remember a time when these words were considered squishy for our field. I would have been embarrassed to go to a workshop on these topics. But if this year’s conference brochure were a word cloud, these would leap out in 200+ point font. Noticeably scarce (though not entirely absent) were words like Measurement. Tools. Strategy. Systems. Performance. Our willingness to incorporate the former words is an acknowledgement that the latter are meaningless without them. Closing plenary speaker Heidi Brooks summed it up this way: “What you love is a big clue to how you can be most effective.”
Courageous Nonprofit Leaders Telling Us What They Really Think of Funders
GEO holds the voices and experiences of nonprofit practitioners in the highest regard, and nearly every session strived to incorporate a nonprofit perspective. Most nonprofit leaders, when invited to address a gathering of hundreds of funders, are predictably and understandably meek. I suspect it is a physiologically-based survival instinct not to provoke anyone with the power to harm. But speakers like Vu Le, Alicia Garza, Deepak Bhargava and Michael McAfee spoke in no uncertain terms about what we as a sector need to do differently: “Stop using communities of color.” “Rewrite the social contract between funders and grantees.” “Grantmakers need to get out of the way.” “Philanthropy doesn’t have room for my energy.” Their words demonstrated a conviction that they have a bigger stake in their work than whether any potential funders will be offended. Good for them. I wish every nonprofit leader were so confident, and that we as funders would help build that confidence in them.
Funders Sighing a Collective, “Finally . . . We’re Talking About Equity.”
GEO’s work for the last three years would inevitably lead here. Research, publications and conferences around stakeholder engagement, movements, and networks all pointed to one indisputable truth: philanthropy cannot be effective unless it confronts equity. No single topic at the conference had as much air time and real estate as this. Funders who had the prescience years ago to see that this would be the looming issue for our sector expressed relief and appreciation to have the space to unpack and understand equity, no matter how messy, uncomfortable, and unpredictable these conversations would inevitably get. The morning before the conference began, GEO held a meeting to kick-off a newly formed Advisory Group to help it think through its role on this topic. Chaired by Rev. Starsky Wilson (GEO board member and the moderator for Tuesday’s stunning plenary on the topic), this group will guide GEO in how to best support the field to embrace equity as an essential precursor to effectiveness.
So do these sounds mean that “There’s something happening here?” Can we sustain our conference-induced resolve to translate these ideas into lasting behavior change as a field? Or will this become, as my fellow GEO board member Peter Long, President of the Blue Shield of California Foundation, likes to say, “philanthropy’s latest belly button?”
To keep my optimism high, I am reminded of a scene from the 1996 movie, Jerry Maguire. Renee Zellweger’s character, Dorothy Boyd, after a successful date with Jerry Maguire (played by Tom Cruise) is gushing to her sister the following morning: “I love him for the man he wants to be. I love him for the man he almost is.”
Well, Philanthropy – here’s to finding love in who we want to be . . . who we almost are.
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