Alliance Online - December 2007

Exploring the landscape of collaboration

Caroline Hartnell

EVENT First Woburn Place Collaborative Annual Colloquium
Date 6-8 December 2007
Venue Long Ditton, UK

The character of foundation intervention, the nature of collaboration, and the raison d’ętre of the Woburn Place Collaborative (WPC) itself were among the topics addressed by the 35 participants of the First Woburn Place Collaborative Annual Colloquium in early December. The discussion proved both stimulating and enjoyable.

WPC is the UK forum for grantmakers and foundations who, as consultant Steven Burkeman put it, are committed to social justice philanthropy (in his view, the only morally legitimate institutional philanthropy) and who want to work more closely together. Social justice foundations, he argued, need to ‘fight their corner’ and campaign together for what they believe in. They can learn from their grantees, he said, and use that experience and their position at the centre of networks as the basis of initiatives to tackle wider issues.

Ruth Cadbury, of Barrow Cadbury Trust (BCT), developed this idea, which she referred to as the ‘funder plus’ model. In the case of BCT, being a funder plus means three things: promoting the voices of the grassroots; adjusting your language in order to get your messages heard by those in power; and campaigning and coalition-building.

Julia Unwin, director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, cautioned that funders’ ‘knowledge’ may be flawed. Because of their money, they occupy positions of power and ‘people don't tell truth to power.’ Generally, funders need to be more aware of which side of the power divide they are on. Her concerns about accountability were echoed by Mark Rosenman, Project Director at the US Union Institute & University. ‘If great concentrations of wealth are not to operate through voluntary organizations but to engage directly with government, where is accountability?’ he asked.

Starting with the global picture

Society is at a crucial turning point, said keynote speaker Jonathan Porritt, director of Forum for the Future. The world’s population is increasing rapidly against a backdrop of ‘abrupt and irreversible climate change’ (the words used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Porritt believes that there is a 10-15 year window for action, but if we are to exploit this and move towards a low-carbon, equitable world, climate change will need to affect everything foundations do.

There are other destabilizing threats, he pointed out: the growing price of oil, collapsing ecosystems, and the availability of water. Foundations should be looking at what’s happening in society, said Porritt, and asking if they should be colluding with a model of capitalism that seems to be on its last legs.

Two striking points came out of the ensuing discussion: we need political change as well as grassroots activity, so foundations should engage with government and business as well as with civil society. They should also make better use of their assets. Charlie McConnell, CEO of Carnegie UK Trust, among others, stressed that ‘we are failing to use our potential in influencing the market as foundations by using only say 5 per cent of our assets as funds for programmes’.

Are we fit for purpose?

In assessing whether they can achieve long-term change and contribute to a more just and sustainable society, said consultant Diana Leat, foundations need to ask themselves some hard questions. More than anything, they need to question the buzzwords. Is innovation always great? Is there anything the voluntary sector isn’t good at? Is the term civil society just a catchall for anything we’re in favour of? Is leaving it to the grassroots always the answer? We talk of sustainability, but does every organization deserve to be sustained? What is capacity-building for? As for the mantra of effectiveness, don’t we do some things just because they're right?

Geoff Mulgan of the Young Foundation took up the theme of innovation. The social sector learns relatively little from the much more mature systems of innovation in science and business, he said. He focused in particular on the role of intermediaries who, in other fields, play a critical role in linking ideas to uses. But they are largely absent in the social field. Instead individual projects are funded separately, and not always adequately.

There is also much talk in the foundation world about systemic change, he said, but without anyone being very clear about what that entails. The sector needs to engage with thinking about systems and complex causality as it works out how foundations collectively can have ‘a major, sometimes transformative, influence’. He argued: ‘we need to move from big concepts like civil society to the very specific areas [he cited migration] where the relatively small resources of foundations could make a transformative difference over a period of say five to ten years.’

Collaboration

As far as collaboration is concerned, opportunities identified included the possibility of foundations doing things better by collaborating with partners with complementary ‘competencies’; leveraging more funding; and better meeting the needs of the people they want to help.

On the threats side, there is the danger of mission drift and blurred accountability, especially when there is little leadership and clarity of purpose. All agreed that collaboration is very time-consuming. It is more likely to work if the parties spend time building trust, and developing common objectives and approaches. It also requires compromise, argued Diana Leat, so foundations should go into it only if they need something from someone else. Another point raised was that trustees need to buy into the idea. CEOs might spend a lot of time developing collaborative work only to be faced by trustees’ reluctance to delegate or share decision-making power.

Consultant David Carrington had a slightly different take on collaboration, suggesting that foundations should adopt a joint venture approach as a default position rather than seeing it as the exception. Foundations have money, but their competencies are not limitless. They need to involve talent from all sectors.

Five priorities

The Open Space sessions that took up a large part of the first day of the Colloquium produced five priorities for collaboration within WPC. Open Space is the brainchild of an American, Harrison Owen, who noticed that at conferences the time when people are really passionate and engaged is in the coffee breaks. His aim was to reproduce this buzz in sessions. The five priorities are:

Changing public opinion and thought leaders.
Getting a better understanding of what difference foundations can make.
Harnessing more of our capital and income capacity, including joint investment ventures.
Influencing systemic change over the longer term.
Developing joint grant schemes, joint advocacy, and the dissemination of what works.

The joint investment fund idea was discussed at some length. Several people stressed the importance of how foundations use their assets. When investing, said David Carrington, foundations need to look at the net financial return, with environmental and social costs factored in. A new fund for investment in the 25 poorest wards in the UK has raised Ł75 million from business, family foundations and individuals but nothing from major foundations, which are stuck in the ‘maximizing financial returns’ mould, he said.

Trustees play safe on investments, it was suggested, because they often lack advice and are on the line if things go wrong. Against this, Stephen Pittam pointed out, over 20 years of ethical investment Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust has outperformed the market significantly. Despite the difficulties, it was generally agreed that this is an area for WPC to explore and that it would be worth bringing trustee groups together around it.

The mechanics of collaboration

Many questions remain to be resolved about the operation of WPC: will all participants have equal voice, no matter how much money they put in? How loose will the terms of any collaborative project be? Foundations can be part of WPC but they don’t have to fund every WPC project; however, WPC does insist that members fund at least one joint project a year. What if they don’t? It has been agreed that the Association of Charitable Foundations will provide a secretariat for WPC, but what happens if foundations won’t pay the newly introduced membership fee of Ł1,500? Answers to these and other questions were not forthcoming but may become clearer after the next WPC meeting in April.

The Colloquium ended with a session on working internationally. Sukhvinder Stubbs pointed out that many of the challenges faced in the UK – and their solutions – are transnational. Migration is a case in point. The Barrow Cadbury Trust Global Exchange Programme is about bringing southern ideas to the North to improve domestic work in the UK. Gerry Salole, chief executive of the European Foundation Centre, said the EFC is currently working on a typology of foundations that will cut across national boundaries and lobbying the European Union for a European Statute for Foundations. Hywel Jones, Director of the Network of European Foundations (NEF), spoke of NEF’s catalytic role in getting collaborative projects in Europe off the ground.

Why do we need to engage with people from other places at all? There is the shared policy environment, and the global nature of problems. In any case, ‘Don't we all have something to learn from others?’ asked Gerry Salole.

For more information
Contact ACF Chief Executive David Emerson at David@acf.org.uk

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