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November 2010 E-newsletter

December 2009

Letter from the President

Accountability is turning out to be a key word of the fall season among funders and charities.  In part, this is related to media and political attention being paid to the costs of doing charitable work. The CBC’s inquiry into fundraising costs, and the discussion about compensation and costs in the voluntary sector that was launched in the federal House of Commons by Bill C-470 have both put a spotlight on how charitable organizations are governed. These have increased the pressure to demonstrate good governance standards, including showing more transparency in decision-making by board members. There has also been no lessening of the pressure created by the financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent events to demonstrate that the assets of charitable organizations are being well-managed and properly invested according to benchmark standards and guidelines.

A number of new initiatives and tools to support accountability and governance practice are luckily being made available to help the governors of charitable organizations facing these pressures.  PFC’s Guide to Good Governance for Canadian Foundations is being distributed this fall. We have now posted the Resources section of that guide in the Member Area of our web site so that it can be consulted, downloaded and shared. I hope that PFC members will consider including a copy of this guide in the kit of every incoming board member!

Canadian foundation boards and investment committees will be interested in a new Investment Management Code of Conduct for Endowments, Foundations and Charitable Organizations, developed by the CFA Institute in the United States. This Code was developed by an international working group of foundation and investment industry representatives, in which I participated on behalf of PFC and Canada. The Code is intended to give an ethical framework to guide investment activities and sets out five ethical responsibilities that are universally applicable to members of a charitable organization’s governing board, regardless of its nature. I believe the Code is a very useful complement on the investment side to broader guidelines for ethical practice in a foundation context, such as those adopted by PFC and agreed to by each PFC member. I encourage you to consult it.

Imagine Canada is working on a new standards initiative in the areas of financial management, human resources and governance which will eventually make it possible for charitable organizations to be certified for their adherence to good practice. This is a welcome step forward in the Canadian field and will be of help both to funders and to the broader donor public. Expect to see more on this initiative in early 2011.

As usual, this newsletter carries news about PFC events and the work of members across the country. Don’t forget to sign up for our December 1 symposium on New Thinking about Funding the Charitable Sector and please send us your session ideas for the 2011 conference…we need your input!

Note: With this issue of the newsletter, we are moving to a PDF version that will not include the URL links that are embedded in the HTML version. Increasingly we find that members are looking at the newsletter online and it makes most sense to include the links there. The PDF version will continue to be available and can be printed for ease of reading on the go.

Hilary Pearson
hpearson@pfc.ca

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Grantmakers Roundup

On Visualizing Foundation Strategies

At the end of October, the Center for Effective Philanthropy in Boston and the Monitor Institute announced a joint venture to develop and broaden the application of a new tool, the Strategy Landscape™, created by Monitor with help from the Rockefeller Foundation. This is a tool that has to be seen to be better understood but it has fascinating implications for groups of funders who share a common granting interest (for example, climate change) but who don’t know who is funding what strategy in the area and how many resources are being devoted to each strategy.

Monitor explains: “As one foundation executive recently noted, “When funders come together for a day to talk about an issue, we spend 80 percent of the time talking about what we do, which leaves us with only 20 percent of the day to discuss what we could and should do in the future.”

The Strategy Landscape™ aims to turn this ratio on its head. The Landscape is an online, interactive data visualization tool that makes it easy for users to see and understand patterns of grantmaking and strategies across multiple funders. Participants are able to see and develop a shared understanding of the larger funding landscape that they are a part of, and to recognize their position within that ecosystem. More specifically, the tool can help:

It would be fascinating to see an application of this tool to specific areas of grantmaking in Canada. Perhaps a group of Canadian funders will be willing to be the first Canadian pilot! 

 

Tools and Resources for Assessing Social Impact (TRASI)

In late September, the Foundation Center launched TRASI, an online portal of helpful resources for impact assessment. TRASI includes articles, podcasts, videos, and a searchable, expert-reviewed database of over 150 approaches for measuring the impact of nonprofit and philanthropic programs. TRASI has links, posts, blogs and all kinds of online resources that can anyone interested in impact measurement down some fascinating paths.

One such path led us to a series of four thoughtful reflections on social impact measurement written by Mario Morino of Venture Philanthropy Partners. His four-part series is well worth reading. One of his ambitious proposals: “we could design an initiative—let´s call it Doing Good Better, to borrow an evocative (if overused) phrase—to put in place the building blocks for making outcomes-based management the norm in our sector. Our motivation should not be the “elegance” of outcome metrics and management systems. We would do this for one reason and one reason only: to create meaningful, measurable, sustainable benefit for those served!” Read the rest of the series for his ideas about how to make this happen.
 

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Interesting Reading

On Social Finance

The online Fall issue of The Philanthropist focuses on social innovation and social finance. There are many excellent articles on these topics. On the topic of funding charities and nonprofits, there is a particularly good overview of the current scene in Canada Why You Should Care: How Charities, NonProfits and Foundations can Benefit from Social Finance by Nora Sobolov, one of the panelists at the upcoming PFC symposium on this topic on December 1 in Toronto. Another excellent and provocative piece by activist academic Ted Jackson takes on the topic of New Strategies for Financing Civil Society in Post-Recession Canada.

 

Is Philanthropy A Profession? Should It Be?

In a timely discussion sponsored by the Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, a group of foundation staff and observers debated the question of whether philanthropy is or should be a profession. This question was posed by Karl Stauber, a long-time foundation executive, in an essay in The Foundation Review. To quote Mr. Stauber’s conclusion (the full essay is worth reading): “Philanthropy is not a profession, and it should not become one. We should be rigorous. We should learn from our work. We should help our partners and be helped by them. But a wisdom-focused approach may produce better results than a science-based on".

A full transcript of the interesting debate on this topic can be found on the Bradley Center site.

 

On Strategic Planning: A blog Worth Reading

If you are interested in thoughtful and clear writing on strategic philanthropy, keep checking Phil Buchanan’s blog on the site of the Center for Effective Philanthropy. He has just written a series of four reflections on Open-Source Strategy that makes some great suggestions about how to go about doing more creative strategic planning in a foundation context.


On Talent in Philanthropy

In 2008, Gara La Marche, at that time the newly-appointed CEO of The Atlantic Philanthropies, gave a talk on talent in philanthropy to the Foundation Impact Research Group at Duke University. He debated the familiar question of whether to hire generalists or specialists (concluding reluctantly that the entrenched position is in favour of specialists). But he also went on to explore many of the issues that face people who work in foundations: the occupational hazard of structuring your work around what you do most which is turning things down, the promising implications of thinking of yourself as a talent scout, the importance of taking sabbaticals and many more issues. He concludes: “those who have the rare privilege of directing a foundation’s funds to good projects, people or causes need to be curious about the world around them, constantly learning; humble about the derived and temporary power they hold, alert to ways of checking and countering it; and capable of thinking strategically, making ongoing adjustments based on emerging knowledge and changing circumstances.”

The full text of his very thoughtful remarks is posted on the site of The Atlantic Philanthropies.
 

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Members in the News

Congratulations to the Youth and Philanthropy Initiative of the Toskan Foundation which was awarded a Canadian Best Practice Award in Civic Education on November 5 from the Institute for Canadian Citizenship.

The annual Donner Awards were presented on November 4 at a celebration in Toronto. The William H. Donner Award for Excellence in the Delivery of Social Services was presented to Educational Program Innovations Charity Society from North Sydney, Nova Scotia.  The Peter F. Drucker Award for NonProfit Management was given to Alice Housing from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

 

PFC on the Web

New on the PFC Web Site: Learn about what PFC members are doing through our Great Grant stories. Featured this month is the Paloma Foundation and their Youth Shelters Learning Partnerships.

Did you know?

We have a dedicated section for members called Foundation Practices and Tools. Have you visited it lately? Here are some resources you will find:

New in the member area is a page for member postings. Do you have information  or news that you would like to share with members? Let us know! Visit today to see what other members have posted.

New Postings

Forgot your password? Contact info@pfc.ca.
 

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