No Moat Philanthropy Part 2: Bringing the Outside In  

Jen Ford Reedy is President of the Bush Foundation. On the occasion of her fifth anniversary leading the foundation, she reflects on efforts undertaken to make the Bush Foundation more permeable. Because the strategies and tactics she shares can be inspiring and helpful for any grantmaker exploring ways to open up their grantmaking, we are devoting our blog space all week to the series. This is the second post in the five-part series.

In the past five years, we have been working hard at the Bush Foundation to go beyond transparency to permeability.  In yesterday’s post, I described our work to ensure we are sourcing and supporting the best ideas from the communities we serve.  Today I’ll share Principle #2 of No Moat Philanthropy and the ways we are working to ensure our work is informed by and improved by many different perspectives.

Principle #2: Bring lots of perspectives into your strategy design and decision-making

Five years ago, it said on our website to let us know if you had a good idea that aligned with our strategy, but there was no clear way for people to do so. We had formal advisors on our initiatives and advisors on the ground in North Dakota and South Dakota, whom we kept secret. While we talked a lot about co-creation, in practice it was hard to develop and nurture true partnerships with organizations given our very specific agenda and the power dynamics in our funding relationships.

Now, to ensure we are being shaped by more people and more perspectives, we:

Create learning cohorts to shape our strategies. In the early stages of learning about a new area, we invite others to learn with us and shape our thinking. For example, to inform how we should best integrate the arts into our work, we created the Community Creativity Cohort, providing organizations a $100,000 operating grant and asking them to attend a few workshops and provide counsel (see learning paper “Lessons from the Community Creativity Cohort”). As we develop our strategy to support individualizing education, we have an advisory group of regional experts in Native education to help us understand how our strategy can be most relevant in Native communities.

Use external selectors. Historically, we have engaged community leaders to select Bush Fellows, and we have expanded that practice to other programs, including the use of state-level advisory committees to select Bush Prize winners and working through state-level intermediaries to promote and award our smaller-scale Community Innovation grants.

Hire staff and recruit board members differently. We have made numerous changes to our staff hiring and board recruitment practices to attract people from a variety of backgrounds with different perspectives. For staffing, we have always hired from a variety of professional backgrounds, and while we continue to do so, we are also now focusing on diversity in race and cultural background. In three years, we increased the percentage of Bush staff who identify as people of color from a 14 percent to 50 percent. From a Board perspective, we set (and met) specific five-year targets for Board composition, focusing primarily on geographic and racial diversity.

Host internal Fellows. In addition to staff diversification, we created an internal Fellows program designed to routinely bring new and different perspectives into our work. The Ron McKinley Philanthropy Fellows program, now operated by the Minnesota Council on Foundations, hires professionals from communities underrepresented in foundation leadership to work at foundations for three years. We have hosted 11 Fellows and hired four of them into permanent positions.

Build staff and board intercultural competence. If we really want to understand perspectives other than our own, we need the skills to do so. We invest heavily in staff development and board learning and have placed particular emphasis on intercultural competence. We hope that training, combined with out-of-the-office interactions and learning experiences, make us more aware of our biases, better able to truly understand the lived experiences of others, more effective in truly engaging and working with people across the region, and better able to make smart decisions and design strategies that actually work.

In combination, these tactics have given us more opportunity to hear different perspectives in our work and better skills to truly understand different perspectives in our work. Tomorrow I will share Principle #3, how to continuously and intentionally connect with new people.

--Jen Ford Reedy