Conversations on Creating a Blueprint for Better Giving from Skoll’s Latest Forum
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Celia Cruz of Brazil’s Instituto Beja speaks alongside co-panelists. Photo courtesy of the Skoll Foundation.
At the Skoll World Forum, which took place earlier this spring, systems change anchored discussions across disciplines from climate change to democracy and healthcare. Skoll celebrated changemakers who lead local solutions, as we covered in last month’s focus on the winners of the Skoll Award for Social Innovation — in particular, Wawira Njiru, founder of the Kenya-based organization Food for Education.
Hosted by Jeff Skoll’s foundation for two decades and counting, the annual forum draws a nexus of leaders, delegates and social entrepreneurs to Oxford in the U.K., then challenges them to help meet some the world’s most pressing problems. One of the main themes to emerge this year was systems change, both on the ground and as a larger barrier to responsive and sustainable philanthropy.
Big picture, conversations centered on how systems work, and exploring ways to change stubborn power structures. The Skoll and Roddenberry foundations led deep conversations on what it’ll take to innovate within philanthropy, for example. And Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors hosted interactive themed table discussions on how climate funders and partners can change systems and meet the moment in equitable and transformational ways, while staying nimble enough to respond to lightning-rod issues like misinformation.
At one discussion led by Nidhi Sahni, partner and head of U.S. region and advisory services at Bridgespan, three philanthropic leaders shared their perspectives on how philanthropy can build a new blueprint for lasting systems change. Celia Cruz, CEO of Brazil’s Instituto Beja, championed the idea of creating a collaborative philanthropic ecosystem that can deliver resources across dimensions. Bernadette Moffat, executive director of ELMA Philanthropies Services (Africa), strongly advocated for recognizing what the sector’s convening power can accomplish, and engaging at the local level. And Hilary Pennington, executive vice president of programs at the Ford Foundation, shared an impact journey that resulted in a paradigm shift to multi-year, trust-based funding.
Here’s what they shared about learning and unlearning ways to break the barrier of entrenched systems that predictably deliver the outcomes they were designed to produce.
Building collaborative philanthropic ecosystems
Celia Cruz is just a few months into her new role as CEO of Instituto Beja, a Brazilian-based organization that seeks to build robust ecosystems to solve systemic problems. Her approach to systems change is grounded in a decade spent at Ashoka, whose theory of change is rooted in the work of social entrepreneurs, as recently covered here in IP, and another decade at the civil society organization ICE, which works to strengthen the national social impact investment and impact business ecosystem in Brazil.
Cruz and Instituto Beja are focused on philanthropy’s potential to build the kind of infrastructure that leads to sustainable change. The philanthropic ecosystem Instituto Beja envisions is much more collaborative and combines the power of knowledge, advocacy and innovation.
Cruz believes Brazil’s daunting systemic challenges across racial, gender, political and environmental lines also present a “huge space to grow” that can be tackled in part by harnessing the untapped potential of inequity – a sentiment shared by American philanthropists like MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos, and Steve and Connie Ballmer.
Accessing Brazil’s own high-net-worth individuals, for example, could dramatically change the dynamics of the country’s philanthropy. Cruz said that Brazil boasts more than 400,000 millionaires. If only 10% of them form foundations that fund at a level of $1 million annually, she explained, philanthropic capacity would rocket by $40 billion. By comparison, the country’s current council on foundations comprises 170 members that collectively invest $1.2 billion each year.
Cruz said a more collaborative philanthropic ecosystem could help upend the status quo by driving resources where they belong. Brazil is currently home to more than 800,000 civil society organizations, but they are mostly run by volunteers with no access to philanthropic capital and receive only a small sliver of government funding.
Cruz also intends to leverage the Ashoka model by connecting the local efforts of social entrepreneurs working in themes like water and journalism to broader, national systems change. Instituto Beja will apply the impact investing structures Cruz learned at ICE to build philanthropic ecosystems. A successful version of that began by identifying actors with the capacity to create change like accelerator incubators, government, philanthropy and corporations. It resulted in a collaboration of 11 funders that committed to a five-year effort to provide long-term capital both locally and nationally in Brazil.
Building local systemic change
Bernadette Moffat, who leads ELMA Philanthropies Services (Africa), has been a part of the foundation throughout the 18 years of its “young life” — through which it has continually aimed at improving the lives of children. The ELMA group of foundations was founded two decades ago by African-born music producer Clive Calder, who recognized the potential of working on the continent.
Moffat said that funders in South Africa are “often driven by very specific issues” that leave philanthropy writ large outside of the systems that underlie what she called “most unequal society in the world, a situation where the majority of populations are excluded from economic benefits despite 30 years of democracy.”
To make lasting, generational change, Moffat advises against advancing the kind of personal objectives that often result in things like a “fancy child development center than can help 50 children at most.” Instead, funders should embrace the sometimes-hidden complexities of systems on the ground that can reach many more children. It’s “not a joke,” she observed, that “you could do amazing work for 80 years and not change one ecosystem.”
Real change, she said, starts with paying attention to those closest to the problem, the people who “deal with the issues everyday.”
For example, when ELMA began executing on a goal to set young people up for the kind of long-term success that can lift generations out of poverty, it began by examining local systems on the ground. ELMA found that caregiving played out not in institutions, but in the home-based work of mothers and grandmothers, women who were excluded from traditional government and philanthropic funding. ELMA made helping them its starting point.
The key, Moffat said, is for funders to use their convening power to bridge government and civil society, and act as “useful interlocutors” to find common ground on sometimes polarized objectives. The caretaking cohort soon benefited from a collaboration of local like-minded thinkers, funded by two South African foundations.
To bring the idea to scale, the search began for other partners. Moffat said the process taught her that the role of global philanthropy sometimes means derisking partnerships for organizations that are hesitant to commit to smaller-capacity, local organizations. It also means treating civil society organizations as full partners and accepting their leadership.
If stubborn systems are to change, Moffat warned, philanthropists would also be wise to check their egos at the door. “You are not the only player, you are not the most important player, your money is not the most important thing,” she said. “Honoring local champions” is what matters.
Disrupting the status quo around power and trust
The final leader at the table, Hilary Pennington of the Ford Foundation, shared some of the insights she has gained in the course of a career spent working in intergenerational change, and with a foundation that’s a recognized leader in social justice philanthropy.
Experience has taught Pennington important lessons on the ways systems work that begin with the issues of power and pace. The dynamics that establish and protect privileges like patriarchy or monopolies, she said, involve a complex set of actors beyond philanthropy, like business and government. Despite the urgency of keeping up with a world on fire, perpetuating the status quo has predictably resulted in a glacial pace for systems change. The reality of that is “a problem that we all have to come together and be honest about,” she said.
For the 80 years of the Ford Foundation’s existence, Pennington said, it hasn’t “fixed a single problem it set out to help” despite myriad efforts. “Looking back, everything Ford counts as a win has taken “20, 30, 40 years or more to achieve.” That aligns with research on how long big shifts tend to take on the kinds of systemic issues philanthropy takes on, from same-sex marriage to eradicating polio. Of the efforts discussed in a Harvard Business Review piece on audacious philanthropy, 90% were in progress for an average of two decades or more before realizing success.
Early on, Pennington said Ford was a big believer in helping to develop evidence and models that could then be scaled by government. When it shifted its focus to taking on inequality in “all its forms” in 2015, it took a hard look at what it had done, “where it succeeded, and where it failed.” The foundation “came to realize that evidence and demonstrated effect doesn’t move the needle, yet alone change systems,” Pennington said. Since a range of new high-net-worth funders were adopting that focus at the time, Ford let it go.
In reexamining traditional philanthropy and its own funding model, Pennington said Ford realized that its foundational belief in investing in “individuals, institutions and ideas” meant changing the rules on how it supported the constituencies making change.
The foundation conducted an analysis with Bridgespan and saw that 70% of its funding was being delivered via one-year project grants. Many of the grantees were renewed for 10 or 15 years — but not without reapplying annually. That took away their ability to plan for the long term or meet development needs like staffing, and helped create a scarcity model that stymies collaboration.
Ford’s intention to change the dynamics of power and trust for its grantees led to BUILD, a grantmaking approach it developed with Bridgespan that provides five-year commitments of unrestricted funding combined with targeted organizational development support. The one stipulation is an organizational spending plan for grantees on how to make themselves stronger. Now, over five years in, a full 70% of Ford’s grants are for multi-year, general operating support — both inside and outside of the BUILD portfolio.
Pennington said that while this is a step in the right direction, Ford “should not be praised too much” for making the change. “What happens when those [grants] run out?” she asked, noting how thin the practices remain across a sector in which short-term programmatic support remains the standard.
Empowering the people who make change, she asserted, will ultimately take an ecosystem of funders over multiple years, “but we have to change the norms.”
Much of Ford’s current systems change work follows the framework of educator and systems scientist Donella Meadows, and focuses in particular on the “end of the spectrum.” Specifically, that involves challenging the rules of the game and power dynamics, and helping to change hearts and minds. For example, Ford focuses on things like challenging the rules of predatory leading — and, like ELMA, getting the people who are most affected a seat at the table when decisions are being made.
Summarizing the session, moderator Nidhi Sahni urged philanthropists to consider “unlearning” things to help a new blueprint for change emerge. What are the assumptions we need to challenge, she asked. How are we collaborating, and listening to learn, not convince, by getting out of our own echo chambers?
