INSP - Foundations striving for organizational effectiveness

Defining goals and related resources, and determining if goals are reached – INSP is one of several initiatives that are attempting to tackle these and other issues of organizational effectiveness. Three of these featured at a session organized by INSP at the EFC’s annual conference in Brussels in June.

Entitled ‘Organisational effectiveness in foundations – from individual aspiration to collaborative action’, the session included presentations from INSP, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) and WINGS (Worldwide Initiatives for Grantmaker Support). All three of these initiatives have taken on the task of building connections among professionals and researchers and providing for peer learning of foundation executives. Presentations of the specific approaches and operating modes of these collaborative endeavours served also to highlight the differences between the three projects.

Whereas INSP is the result of discussions among a group of funders from Europe and the US and has been targeted at an international audience from the very beginning, GEO originated in an affinity group of the US Council on Foundations and has been approaching the effectiveness question mainly in relation to the grantmaking model of philanthropy prevailing in the US. Not surprisingly, therefore, GEO initially focused mainly on the question of grantee effectiveness and on ways to strengthen the organizational capacity of NGOs rather than foundations. However, this has changed, explained executive director Kathleen Enright, and the question of effective use of philanthropic resources on the foundation side is now receiving much more attention.

According to Volker Then (Bertelsmann Foundation), INSP has put foundations in the centre from the very beginning, and has tried to integrate the different operating modes of foundations in different countries, which means encompassing both grantmaking and operating foundations. This has made it at times difficult to find a common language and a common understanding of some key concepts.

WINGS, too, has been a global network from the beginning, said Barry Gaberman (Ford Foundation) – as its name suggests. The network now has more than 90 membership associations serving grantmakers and support organizations serving philanthropy. WINGS reflects its global approach in its own processes: the secretariat, currently hosted by the Council on Foundations in Washington DC, will be hosted by the EFC in Brussels from  January 2003.

The subsequent discussion showed that all three projects are at a relatively early stage and only gradually starting to transform their discussions into useful products. The great interest shown by the audience in Brussels made clear that all three come at a timely moment.

For more information please visit:
www.insp.efc.be
www.geofunders.org
www.wingsweb.org