Getting to maybe
The cover photo of a butterfly poised for flight represents the so-called ‘butterfly effect’, the idea that seemingly trivial events can have a great impact on complex adaptive systems. The tiny movement of air from the flapping of a butterfly’s wing, for instance, might somehow contribute to the emergence of a tornado. For scientists, the butterfly effect illustrates the idea that sometimes a tiny force – even far away or long ago – can ultimately have a surprising impact on a large system.
Because I’m deeply interested in cause and effect in philanthropy, I’m fascinated with the butterfly effect in social change – even with all its ambiguity. I often wonder who was behind the major events of human history. Not obviously and immediately, but three or four steps behind, especially the indirect and obscure role of philanthropy in seeding unexplained social change.
For example, I was surprised to learn recently that in the 1950s my friend and colleague Cora Weiss, of the Samuel Ruben Foundation, had an unsuspecting hand in determining the course of a Kenyan student’s life. In 1959, Barack Obama Sr received a scholarship from the African American Students Foundation (AASF), whose executive director Cora then was, to attend the University of Hawaii. Would the United States have a black president today if the AASF had not provided that initial small grant to his father? Would most foundations today be able to predict the most unlikely ‘butterfly effect’ of one of their grants? Probably not, but unlikely things still happen.
Building resilience
But the butterfly effect potential is not the only advantage of small grants. More important is the predictable slow, adaptive process of building resilience in the complex social system that drives social change. The work of the Resilience Alliance, and books like Panarchy and Frances Westley’s Getting To Maybe: How the world is changed [1] are making real progress in translating the lessons of resilient ecosystems in nature to the complex adaptive systems in society.
What initially looks like a catastrophic failure in natural ecosystems − a forest fire, for example − eventually serves to strengthen the resilience of the overall system (soil, hydrologic and forest) by restoring biodiversity at all levels. The same is true for social systems. If they become too dominated by one species or set of ideals, they become vulnerable. Social movements attempt to stimulate social adaptation by uncovering hidden weaknesses before they lead to total system failure. They are the wildfires that restore resilience to social systems in danger of collapse.
For example, the non-violent movement against the military coup in Honduras last year initially alarmed some people who feared that it would make matters worse, but it quickly gained popular support because it aimed to restore the democratically elected government. This spontaneous uprising of ‘people power’ then inspired the Greengrants’ Central America Advisory Board to shift resources from local environmental projects like community forestry to further bolster this broader effort to stabilize society.
Paul Hawken’s renowned book Blessed Unrest likens this process of building resilience to that of the human immune system – a self-organizing complex, adaptive biological system that can learn from its mistakes to anticipate threats that don’t yet exist.
Global Greengrants Fund has developed a small grants strategy, led by local activist advisers, to help the global environmental movement build social resilience slowly and patiently, so that it evolves with confidence. It is effective both as a search for the elusive ‘magic bullet’ of the butterfly effect and as a strategy for social change rooted in an understanding of three interrelated and coevolving bodies of thinking about social change: resilience science, social network analysis and social movement and collective behaviour theory.
Small grants as a strategy
First of all, ‘small’ grants are often, and wrongly, defined from the perspective of the donor rather than the recipient. For some funders, small grants can be as large as $100,000. Unfortunately, the average-sized international grant is much too large to trickle down effectively to the community level, where absorptive capacity is limited. Grants of all sizes are needed, but the most overlooked part of the spectrum is small grants. This is where the greatest potential for leveraged growth is. At Greengrants, we believe that in the developing world a grant must be under $5,000 to be considered a small grant. We think of our small grants as roughly equivalent to one full-time equivalent annual salary for a community organizer in the developing countries in which we make grants, where a little goes a long way.
Too often, foundation leaders incorrectly assume that small grants are not strategic, but an expedient for small foundations with small assets and small staff capacity. This issue of Alliance dispels that idea and shows how a well-conceived small grants strategy can have a huge impact when executed with discipline on a visionary scale.
In Resilience Thinking, Brian Walker and David Salt describe how ‘landscapes and communities absorb disturbance and maintain function’ in a continuous ‘cycle of resilience’. An understanding of the four phases of the cycle of resilience (exploitation, conservation, release and reorganization) helps Greengrants’ advisers realize how and when to release resources to support the social movements that enable change. Social movement organizations – like those that Greengrants supports – are spread through the four phases of the cycle, but the majority are clustered in the ‘reorganization’ phase because they tend to emerge during or immediately after a disturbance to some part of the dominant system (like rapid growth of the movement to democratize the World Trade Organization following the ‘Battle of Seattle’ riots in 1999). In social movement theory, such a moment would be a ‘political opportunity’ – the unexpected weakness of the opponent to change, and therefore a fertile time for successful movement advancement.
Social movement dynamics
Global Greengrants Fund makes small grants to grassroots environmental movement groups in developing countries because we have found that it is the best way to deal comprehensively with the vast array of environmental conservation and social justice problems facing the world today without merely moving them from one location to another. But we have to manage transaction costs carefully – which is another reason why our distribution network of 125 insightful advisers is crucial. NGO Source estimates that the fixed cost for each foreign grant made by US foundations is $5,000 to $10,000 or even more. As a result, very few US foundations can justify grants of less than $10,000 – even when the empirical evidence is clear that smaller grants often provide a better social change return on investment. Consequently, very few foundations make grants small enough to be absorbed by local grassroots groups.
We aim to plug that gap. Greengrants’ average grant size is consistently about $4,000, and our fixed ‘transaction cost’ is about $2,000 – even with our volunteer network. But we are responding to the call to ‘think globally and act locally’ by making hundreds of small grants across the globe simultaneously. This year, we will make about 750 grants under $5,000, totalling about $3.8 million.
Most social change grantmaking strategies – coincidentally or deliberately – seem to align around some combination of the four dominant theories of social change that have emerged among social science scholars researching the dependant variables in social movement success:
- Mobilizing structures (institutions, NGOs, think-tanks, policy institutes, churches, unions, networks)
- Resource mobilization (financial, human, material)
- Framing (public and media relations, policy alternatives)
- Political process and unexpected opportunity (shifting alliances among political elites that can create unexpected weaknesses to exploit)
Funding the unanticipated
Putting grantmaking authority in the hands of a global network of local social movement leaders seems like the best way to mobilize resources and to enable people to respond successfully to the rare and fleeting unanticipated political opportunity. The ability to make such a response depends on several things – profound understanding of the dominant culture and the relationship with a movement subculture, rich personal experience in the movement itself, and, most importantly, ‘intuition’. Most philanthropists lack these qualities, so at Greengrants we have harnessed the existing global network of environmental and social movement leaders who have this combination of skills to serve as the decision-makers and distribution network for our grants in 120 of the least developed countries.
Funding unexpected opportunities implies an ability to act quickly. In April 2000, our China coordinator Wen Bo notified us that Central Chinese TV had allocated a slot to show a one-hour documentary about the environment on the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. But Wen Bo needed a $500 grant to pay a fee to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation within 24 hours so it could be translated. We contacted CBC and paid the fee the same day. We don’t know how many Chinese people saw the programme, but with a population of 1.3 billion and only one TV network in China, the potential leverage for a quick $500 is huge. Opportunities like that don’t come along often, but when they do donors must be prepared.
Mastery and intuition in grantmaking
As in chess, philanthropy and social movements have their ‘masters’. In social movements, they are the local leaders who seem to have an uncanny strategic sense of what to do next and how their opponent will respond. They have the resilience that comes only from a lifetime of learning and recovery from repeated failure – what is called ‘system disturbance’ in resilience theory. They evolve rapid feedback loops that unconsciously guide them to ‘see around corners’. This intuition enables them to recognize weaknesses in dominant social and political patterns that constitute the opportunity for movements. However, they seldom have instant access to the extra resources that can bring success when they do hit upon a potentially decisive opportunity.
Social networks – structural trust for political purpose
The Greengrants global network of local activist advisers emerged out of necessity in the mid-1990s when we wanted to make small grants, quickly and cheaply, in some of the most remote places on earth – the Amazon, Siberia and the Russian Far East, and the Indonesian archipelago. So we went first to Rainforest Action Network, whom we already knew we could trust, and soon after created a hive of loosely linked global activist networks including Pesticide Action Network, International Rivers Network, Friends of the Earth and Earth Island Institute – five medium-sized global campaign-oriented networks who together began to distribute about half a million dollars a year for us. After several years of growing success with the model, these five networks then suggested that we expand the distribution network to include local leaders on the more distant fringes of their networks by creating regional advisory boards in Brazil and Russia, and eventually around the world in 13 regions from West Africa to China to the Pacific Islands.
What makes the Greengrants network of grantmaking advisers especially robust, says Harald Katzmier of FAS Research, is a culture of peer accountability and structural trust, which further enhances the pre-existing social capital among these networks. Moreover, the network is characterized by extreme generosity where those who need money for their own work (the advisers) will freely share their insight to help the money pass them by to benefit others further downstream who need it even more. According to Katzmier, this unique structural trust helps stabilize the network from the core (100 donors) to the semi-periphery (150 staff and advisers) to the periphery (5,000 grantees) into a sustainable virtuous circle.
Several interconnected global networks of intermediary grantmaking funds like Global Greengrants Fund have emerged in the last 20 years to provide support to several global movements simultaneously. These include the International Network of Women’s Funds, Global Fund for Women, the emerging Greengrants Alliance of Funds (CASA in Brazil, Samdhana Institute in South East Asia, and FASOL in Mexico), and an informal network of human rights funds supported by the Ford Foundation’s $100 million International Initiative to Strengthen Philanthropy. Although not explicitly set up to make small grants, many of these funds are aware of the value of small grants because they understand that grant size matters in supporting social movements.
Our assumption at Global Greengrants Fund is that we know very little for certain about how social change – the irreversible shift in social norms – actually happens because the variables are too complex and dynamic. But we do know that social movements have historically played a strikingly important role. Furthermore, community organizing for social movements has traditionally been the only tool available to the powerless. We therefore focus on what the evidence suggests does make social movements successful: putting financial resources in the hands of the master strategists of social movements – the self-empowered leaders that can take full advantage of unexpected political opportunity when they sense it, even if they cannot fully explain it.
Defining ‘small’ grants – how much is enough?
These variables are always important at every level, on every issue, but this is increasingly recognized at the global scale. Nicky McIntyre and Annie Hillar of Mama Cash explain Mama Cash’s new strategy to make fewer but larger grants partly in terms of conserving resources that can then be reallocated to other factors such as technical assistance to strengthen mobilizing structures, issues framing and responding to political processes. Their argument is persuasive, but the new approach is not certain to work any better than the small grants strategy that emerged for Mama Cash by responding to the needs of the global women’s movement over the last three decades.
Nonette Royo of the Samdhana Institute in the Philippines describes the advantage of small grants in ‘building a trusted repository of local knowledge’ to help increase the odds of success of the rapidly expanding climate change strategy called REDD – Reducing Emissions from forest Degradation and Deforestation. ‘Time and time again, small grants have been proven to be the crucial element for those activities to also have impact,’ she argues.
Assessing the impact
Maya Ajmera of the Global Fund for Children maintains that a metrics model must include both quantitative and qualitative data, in implicit recognition of Einstein’s observation that ‘not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted’. As I said earlier, we don’t understand the complex adaptive systems of society well enough to know what philanthropy should do to shift social norms on a global scale to solve intractable problems such as violence, poverty and injustice. If we don’t know what to do, it’s especially challenging to measure impact and compare results. But we must still try – with an open mind and the humility that result from self-confidently acknowledging our ignorance of social processes. If we don’t measure, we can’t learn. But we must avoid overemphasizing metrics that might unintentionally inhibit creativity, innovation and risk taking. Furthermore, evaluation costs money so we always need to ask: are we learning enough to justify the cost, or are we only reaffirming things that are already obvious or irrelevant? We should strive to do as the technology analyst Ester Dyson says, ‘always make new mistakes.’
One more thing
There is an unmistakable relationship emerging between three interdependent trends in philanthropy – donors who make flexible small grants to the leaders of social movements, investors who make micro-loans to develop livelihoods, and those who specialize in prizes, awards and fellowships to individual social entrepreneurs. All three approaches seek to identify, leverage and scale the efforts of those who have the ability to see around corners – those with the sustained dedication, effort and insight that reflects a mastery of social change. We all want to support the kind of people whose good work would not stop if you paid them to quit. That’s what small grants can do best.
1 Getting to Yes: Negotiating agreement without giving in is the 1981 classic by Roger Fisher and William Ury of the Harvard Negotiation Project. Getting to Maybe: How the world is changed is Frances Westley’s 2006 book about resilience which reminds us that we cannot get to ‘yes’ without first getting to ‘maybe’.
Chet Tchozewski is president of Global Greengrants Fund, which he set up in 1993. He serves on the board of directors of the Council on Foundations and chairs the Global Philanthropy Committee. His pioneering work in international small grantmaking earned him the Council on Foundations Robert W Scrivner Award for Creative Grantmaking. Email chet@greengrants.org
