As always... brilliant thoughts from the mind of Aaron Hurst (with the potential exception of the likely lawsuit from Vin Diesel over the rights to the XXX franchise).

It has been striking recently how many major foundations have been going back to the drawing board to revise their theories of change and grant making strategies in order to position their philanthropy to have a greater impact in the world. It's not clear how much of this reinvention was catalyzed by shrinking endowments in the economic downturn, or to what extent this represents major societal trends toward measurable results, innovation, strategy, technology, and overall, new ways of doing business. But, it seems that many of these ideas parallel the actual movement of the field, and all of this content should be mandatory reading for the public stewards of our community-focused billions. The five dimensions of issue advancement are particularly salient.

My only request would be to take 10% of your impending $500 million and build out a major advisory and assistance function for your grantees. Philanthropy almost always stops short of actually ensuring the social return on their investment by handing over the money, crossing their fingers, and hoping for the best. Some of the best foundations in the country, however, are modeling their engagements after the venture capitalist's approach, whose very continued existence depends on their investments actually producing the desired outcome (profit for them, impact for us). With their lives on the line, VC's are highly motivated to ensure that their investments have, among other things, the right talent on the bus and the management systems to ensure that those people produce results.

How about this.... you have to give the entire endowment over to someone else and head out of town if after five years you can't demonstrate game changing social ROI that beats the market average in at least a majority of your investments? With the innovative strategies you have already outlined, combined with a commitment to ensuring that grantees develop the organizational capacity to achieve their potential, I wouldn't think that you would have too much to worry about in terms of this ultimatum.

Aaron, very thought-provoking. Having dealt with a large number of foundations myself, and as someone currently in the CEO role of an organization that is, among many other things, a grant-maker, I have a few thoughts:

1. I love the org advancement and issue advancement frameworks, as well as the grant structure and staffing model.

2. As a grantee, I'd be a bit leery about the blogging requirement as a well-intended but potentially laborious method of knowledge dissemination. I think you're on the right track there -- especially as regards open-source approaches to sharing.

3. As a grant-maker and grantee, I'd be worried about the lack of focus on particular social or environmental issues. The number of potential applications would be daunting without some focus on specific issue areas. And for those considering applying, the same concern would apply. This might also present a problem for those who would be approached to endow the foundation.

4. While some foundations approach this by investing in issue-neutral ways by focusing on a construct/mode instead of an issue -- e.g., social innovation -- they tend to do so in a narrower way than the 9 things the xxx foundation would invest in.

All of that said, I think you've added something here that's worth sharing broadly, and I'd be particularly interested in the reactions of those at places like New Profit, Edna McConnell Clark, Casey, etc.

Thanks for writing this!

How can I apply?!

Seriously, I'd love to partner with a funder who understood that partnership involved both a large financial commitment and an ongoing relationship.

Aaron - great thoughts! Examples of what I might add -

Lead with mission - how will the world be different in 10 years because of our new foundation? Do we believe that seismic change in one content area has priority over another - why/not?
Follow with values - learning, cooperation, passion.
Practice values - walk the talk and then enable our partner grantees to do the same: our staff: participate and lead conversations on their work/observations and share openly about challenges and accomplishments;
work in teams and identify ways to connect within and outside the foundaiton;
spend 3 months every three years working with/for a grantee.

Our grantees:
participate and lead conversations we sponsor and support on their work/observation and share openly their challenges and accomplishments;
participate in and contribute to annual gatherings to share and connect;
participate in cross-site visits and mentoring relationships with emerging organizations.

I will think more on this - love your passion, always.
jb

What a thoughtful, systemic approach! Thank you.

Have a look at our website - www.interise.org. We are using the fourth lever of your investment strategy -- "Efforts to convert learning into curriculum to "train the trainer" -- to scale our mission impact.

We license our small business development curriculum to partners across the country, train them in using it, and provide the technical support, upgrades and evaluation they need to deliver it to the highest standards. This approach has taken us in three years from 2 to what will soon be 35 communites nationally.

Since 2007 we have focused on knowledge capture and conversion of knowledge into resources that we can share with our licensees.

Our major capacity building foundation has made all of this possible but giving us the basis for stable growth and in building a recurring revenue model that has taken us to 80% earned income.

And we owe special thanks to the TapRoot Foundation and our volunteer team who helped us develop a name and brand to accompany this growth.

Aaron - as always, you are hitting all the right notes: a leadership focus that is first and foremost on discovering solutions that work + cost-effective talent and talent management + learning that teaches those that want to do the same, and provokes/disrupts those that don't = scalable social impact.

My only suggestion is to insist that all grantees participate in a transparent (virtual and/or in-person) learning community, supported by a technology platform to share metrics and data (obviously funded by Foundation XXX), where four rules MUST be followed: 1) you must agree to engage the learning community in support of your measurement, data collection and data sharing efforts, and that these efforts must lead each grantee to clear "cost-per-achievable-outcome" determinations; 2) you must engage the learning community in your efforts to measure strategy/program quality (not quantity), from the perspective of those served/targeted, in order to ensure that measurement of "effects" isn't left bereft of the analytically-necessary measurement of "causes"; 3) you must participate in the learning community by engaging in skeptical, critical and thoughtful analyses of cause-and-effect; and 4) you must participate in innovation by promising to challenge final conclusions and findings, allowing others to challenge yours, and posing revised or new program/strategy tweaks and/or designs, that need to be tried and tested moving forward.

This would be the tool, technology and learning rules (process) that will support three of your five investment areas: 1) data and insight, by supporting and requiring engagement in a learning community anchored in the ongoing sharing and refinement of metrics, data, interpretations and conclusions; 2) bright spots, by allowing for an organic and more evolutionary process of not just identifying and disseminating proven solutions, but continuously enhancing them, which i believe is more true to reality - "proven" is always, just for now...nothing works forever; and 3) disruptive technology, by providing a technological/virtual/digital space for interpretations of data and findings, encouraging data-reflective rogue interpretations, and insisting on new and/or re-designs based on these interpretations. These tweaks, innovations and designs will filter through the learning network, and the best innovations, ideas and solutions will come to the fore, as will their leaders.

Interesting. While I understand the question you were asked was to create your ideal foundation, if you had to figure out the best way to further an issue/solve a problem - would creating a Foundation be the best way to do it? How would those Foundation assets be managed? Would that also help further the mission?

Without tackling those topics, you could be doing more....

Josh's observations about whether a foundation is the right vehicle for creating change are interesting, but I think the purpose of Aaron's thoughts are to force those of us in the business of running foundations to run our operations better.

I'm not sure Aaron's intentional lack of issue focus would work in the long run. Ultimately, most excellent foundations are accumulators of expertise and insights into particular kinds of social change and in addressing particular needs in society. Change doesn't happen all at once in a particular organization, but usually through the existence/building/execution of networks of ideas and institutions.

Foundations--yes, even Gates--lack the resources to fully address entire social problems or to fund entire networks, so they must chose. Funding, ultimately, is about making choices. Aaron's generic list of what kinds of activities fit as "fundable" for his XXX foundation could span community economic development to medical research. Foundations rarely are good at working problems so diverse. Ultimately, even the XXX foundation will find itself gravitating towards those issues that it begins to know best, learning along the way. If XXX just funds what is cool and innovative, it will find both a lack of clear internal coherence about what to fund and what not to fund and it will likely find that real social change driven by its dollars is not occurring.

Hands down, Apple's app store wins by a mile. It's a huge selection of all sorts of apps vs a rather sad selection of a handful for Zune. Microsoft has plans, especially in the realm of games, but I'm not sure I'd want to bet on the future if this aspect is important to you. The iPod is a much better choice in that case.

Ich lese Blogs. Es ist sogar besser als Lesen von Zeitschriften oder Bücher.