Jen Ford Reedy Transcript

Kirk: [00:00:00] Welcome to Let’s Hear It.

Eric: Let’s Hear It is a podcast for and about the field of foundation and nonprofit communications, produced by its two co-hosts, Eric Brown and Kirk Brown, no relation.

Kirk: Well said, Eric. And I’m Kirk.

Eric: And I’m Eric. Let’s Hear It is sponsored by the Prebys Foundation, a foundation creating an inclusive, equitable, and dynamic future for all San Diegans.

Check out their amazingly good podcast, Stop & Talk, hosted by Grant Oliphant and Crystal Page. You can find them at stopandtalkpodcast.com.

Kirk: You can find Let’s Hear It on any podcast subscription platform.

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Jen: on Apple Podcasts so that more people can find us.

Let’s get onto the show.

Kirk: Hey, happy summer, almost. Actually, it’s not. You know, it’s so counterintuitive, it’s not even quite summer yet. It will be summer when this is dropped, though, right? It’s just coming right up.

Eric: Any minute now, and then days will just get darker.

Kirk: It goes too fast. It goes too fast.

Eric: I hate it.[00:01:00]

Kirk: Yeah. Yeah, it

Eric: goes too fast. Can’t we plateau?

Kirk: Believe me.

Eric: I’ve already achieved my own personal human solstice, and I’m just getting darker.

Kirk: Yeah, really. I thought you were gonna say you’ve achieved, you’re just a long, bright, sunny day. That’s what I think you are. You’re just a long, bright, crystal clear, sunny day.

Eric: Au contraire, sunny day, mon frere.

Kirk: So we’re on a very interesting trajectory with Let’s Hear It. Aren’t we, though? And I’m getting a little nervous about it, I have to say. I should

Eric: imagine. I would think so.

Kirk: But I think, what I like about our conversation today is that we’ve got a real expert on tap to lead us through this conversation, who comes at this with an enormous amount of personal and individual credibility, both in terms of their career trajectory, but also because of the work they’re doing.

I can’t wait for this. And honestly, I know I [00:02:00] give you a hard time, but I think it’s finally time I need to say thank you. What? Thank you for… Because this is such an important and nuanced conversation. And by the way, coming from Minnesota, a state that I’m headed to in about two weeks for some family time.

So tell us all about what we’re about to hear, ’cause this is a great conversation, and I would dare say incredibly salient, incredibly timely for our field.

Eric: I would say I did this for you. Because our guest is as Midwestern nice as a human being could be.

Kirk: And there’s a lot in there, by the way.

There’s so much in there. It’s so great.

Eric: There is. Her name is Jen Ford Reedy. She’s the president of the Bush Foundation in Minnesota, and she’s just written a book called Please Be Good at Philanthropy.

Kirk: That’s great.

Eric: Now, obviously we had Glen Galaich on, and his take was, stop being so crappy at philanthropy, and Jen’s approach is please be good at philanthropy. [00:03:00]

It is a Midwestern polite way to talk. But the book itself is actually quite pointed and very straightforward about how to do philanthropy well and what the pitfalls are of doing it poorly. And so we had a terrific conversation that I enjoyed immensely. Jen was incredibly fun to talk to. And yeah, I hope people get a lot from this conversation.

Kirk: And Jen, thank you for coming on Let’s Hear It. Jen brings an enormous amount of credentials to this conversation, not just having been at Bush since 2012, but at the Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation before that, was at McKinsey before that. You’re about to hear from a top-notch, top-tier leader, strategic thinker in this field.

So this is Jen Ford Reedy, president of the Bush Foundation. We’ll listen to Jen on Let’s Hear It, and we’ll come back.

Eric: There’s a problem hiding in plain sight in philanthropy. [00:04:00] Nobody has to be good at it. There’s no license required, no regulatory body watching, not really, no market that punishes you for doing it badly.

You can start a foundation, write some checks, get celebrated for your generosity, and never once have to answer the question, you got a nice tax deduction, what did society get? My guest today, Jen Ford Reedy, has spent more than a decade leading the Bush Foundation, and she’s been churning over this problem ever since.

Her new book, Please Be Good at Philanthropy, is a straightforward, respectful call for better philanthropy. She argues that good intentions are not enough, that philanthropy can cause real harm when done badly, and that the field needs to get a lot more honest with itself about whether it’s actually delivering.

It’s a book for newcomers and veterans alike, and it’s really, really good. Jen Ford Reedy, welcome to Let’s Hear It.

Jen: Thank you. It’s lovely to be here. I loved that intro. I hope I didn’t mess up by chuckling throughout, but

Eric: No

Jen: way, that was great. [00:05:00] Very entertaining intro. No,

Eric: we’re gonna do laugh tracks later afterwards.

Jen: Okay. We can record laugh tracks at the end and insert them throughout. Excellent.

Eric: Okay. Yes, we’ll do it. So thank you so much for coming on the show. Now, your book is so perfectly timed. I believe that we’re in some kind of a large-scale conversation about philanthropy. We’re gonna get into why you wrote this book and what you think people really need to take away from it.

But first I wanna talk about you a little bit. Okay. You’re currently president of a foundation, but you weren’t born that way. And then professionally, you spent nine years at McKinsey.

Jen: Yes.

Eric: Which seems to have been an interesting proving ground to learn about the wild, wonderful world of philanthropy.

Can you talk a little bit about those days?

Jen: Well, I’ll just say, the training you get at McKinsey, which is a consulting firm for people who don’t know, so you get to work with lots of different kinds of organizations on lots of different kinds of problems, can be useful training for a lot of different things.

I’d also say one thing that was amazing about getting to spend a long time at McKinsey is [00:06:00] that you actually get feedback. Like people tell you, are you good at stuff or not? So I was regularly getting feedback on stuff that I thought I was pretty good at, you know? And you actually get used to the idea that you always have an opportunity to get better.

You have an opportunity to get better, and you start actually getting kind of addicted to that idea that you can do better. So I think there are parts of that that are still in me, and feeling like we don’t do that so well in philanthropy. But in general, the skillset you get at McKinsey, the ability to analyze problems, something you can use for good or for ill, it’s just a skillset.

And there are a lot of ways where I’ve had to build on, or shift how I was thinking about problems coming from that more business-oriented, analytic approach. And there were a lot of ways where I was humbled coming into philanthropy, and that’s a big part of the book too, saying, if you’re coming in, you’re probably good at something.

But that doesn’t mean you’re just naturally good at philanthropy.

Eric: Well, I think you become a much [00:07:00] better singer and funnier joke teller when you come into philanthropy, you know?

Jen: It’s extraordinary. It’s one of the things that gets in the way of us being good, right? For a whole variety of reasons, we don’t get very good, honest feedback.

Yeah. And that’s certainly one of them, that you don’t wanna bite the hand that feeds you or could someday feed you. So you’re not getting… You have to work hard. You have to be intentional and put effort in if you’re actually gonna get meaningful feedback that lets you know whether you’re good at what you do or not.

Eric: Well, okay, so I wanna talk about the Bush Foundation, ’cause it’s really a very interesting foundation.

Jen: So we say it’s not beans, it’s not beer, and it’s not presidents. It’s a different Bush. Our Bush is Archie Bush.

Eric: Yeah.

Jen: Who’s one of the guys who built 3M into a major corporation. He and his wife, Edith, established the foundation in the ’50s, and he was truly a good guy.

We are very lucky in our origin story that Archie was really a generous [00:08:00] guy, and he left us with enormous flexibility, with intention, in the founding documents, talking about the dead, dead, dead hand of the donor. Which, if you’ve used that phrase, it means you’ve done some of your research in understanding how foundations and trusts can go awry, and he didn’t want that for the Bush Foundation.

He wanted us to be relevant and useful. And so we have very little restriction technically. And then a really inspiring donor example to work from, which is a lovely place to get to operate from. And

Eric: Yeah.

Jen: our orientation is around problem-solving, so we’re not organized around specific issues with specific goals of what we’re trying to accomplish in those areas.

We’re organized around the capacity of the communities that we serve to solve problems, whatever those problems are, whatever’s important to communities. So we work in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and 23 Native [00:09:00] nations, and really, in a variety of ways, are just supporting problem-solving capacity and then really big-thinking problem-solving efforts to address issues.

Eric: Right. When you first got to the foundation, obviously you had had insight into philanthropy from having worked as a consultant at the Death Star. Well, maybe some of my best friends work at McKinsey, but yeah, so it’s a model. And so you had insight, but nobody, I think, really understands what a foundation is like until they’re actually in there, drinking the free drinks from the refrigerator and other things like that.

Jen: Yeah. I did have a stop in between, where I worked at a community foundation, so that helped a lot. And so it really helped that I’d worked in philanthropy before I was the leader of a foundation, which is remarkably not the case for so many people coming into philanthropy. Even at the presidential level, we do not value philanthropic experience even in our hiring process.

So, you know, [00:10:00] the number of people whose first gig in philanthropy is running a foundation is pretty amazing, actually.

Eric: It is. We actually had two at the Hewlett Foundation, but they were very impressive. You know, they both did it really well.

Jen: They were really smart people, and they were people with a learning orientation, both those folks.

But it is strange. It’s a strange thing about our field. Yeah. And that’s fine. I mean, you can have a profession where there’s a bunch of credentials before you can work in it, and then there are real negatives about that, in terms of making it hard to get in, keeping people out. And if you really wanna have a field where you have true diversity

of

Kirk: Yeah.

Jen: backgrounds and people work in it, then it’s nice not to have those barriers to entry. But if that’s the case, then you’ve gotta be great at training people once they get in, to make up for not having expectations coming in or good support once you get in. Means we’re just all learning on the job.

Kirk: Yeah.

Jen: And relearning on the job, right? Right. As each new person comes in, [00:11:00] in a way that makes us less effective as individual practitioners, less effective as institutions, and less effective as a field.

Eric: All right. So you come in. Now you’re the president of the foundation. Yeah. So you’ve worked at a community foundation, and you also worked at a consulting firm.

How did you think about it? Oh, okay, if I were the president of a foundation, I don’t think I’d have a clue about what to do. But you seem to have done a pretty good job so far. So how did you find this role, and how did you find this field once you were deeply on the inside of it?

Jen: Well, I had probably more experience with philanthropy in general because of getting to serve a number of foundations at McKinsey and outside of McKinsey, and then my foundation experience.

But I also knew Bush. I’d actually been a partner with Bush, so it gave me insight into what I wish Bush did differently. Because I was in the orbit and actively working in partnership. There were some things that, to me, were [00:12:00] very clear, of a, “Oh, I see ways that this could be stronger.”

And, you know, you come in and you talk to all the staff, you talk to stakeholders, you talk to board. You’re going around and learning everyone else’s experience, and there were some things that were very clear. There were some things that were real ahas for me. And I’ll tell you one particular aha, which is probably quite related to coming in with a McKinsey-esque orientation into philanthropy: we have done a Bush Fellows program since 1965.

I mean, way back when Archie Bush was still here, he designed this program. Wow. That was the kind of program he wished he could have had as a leader. It’s an amazing program. It’s $150,000 to leaders to invest in themselves. I mean, it’s amazing, right, this program? And I came in and thought, “Well, we’ve always done that program, we’ll keep doing it.”

It’s hard to measure and we don’t really know if it’s having an impact. That was kind of my orientation coming in. Then I went around the region talking to people. Over and over and over, I would run into people who were Bush [00:13:00] Fellows who would say what a transformational experience it was, saying, “It fundamentally changed what I thought was possible in my life.”

And to me, it was kind of… Hearing the people say it in the same words, even over and over, I was like, “Oh, it’s hard to measure, but there’s something really powerful there.” And I think part of it is thinking, “Oh, we’re a place-based foundation, right? We’re this place. We can only be in this place what the people in it believe they can be, and are willing to work to be, and have the skills to do that work.”

And realizing, “Oh, actually, if we could do all our grant-making in a way that actually helped people think bigger about what was possible, that may be the highest-value thing we could do, even if that particular aspect of the work is not measurable. So it was one of my first lessons in shifting away from a [00:14:00] definition of impact that limits you, in ways that undervalue, in some ways, the spiritual parts of the work, which are sometimes

the most powerful, right? It’s the hearts and minds and belief part of the work.

Eric: Yeah, for sure. Well, you know, it’s interesting. My old boss, Larry Kramer, at Hewlett, which was a very analytic place,

Jen: Yeah.

Eric: he absolutely warned against the precision of numbers, the false precision of numbers.

I mean, you could come up with an expected return of some kind of investment or something like that, and it was a number, it had a decimal point in it. Yeah. And you’re like, whatever. But sometimes we also have to fall back on the old Potter Stewart thing, which is, we’ll know it when we see it.

We’ll know it when we see it. What I think your point is, is that you’re also telling stories about the effects of the grants and the people who participated in them.

Jen: Yeah.

Eric: And that kind of communications component is important.

Jen: Yeah.

Eric: And we’ll get to that in a minute. But I wanna turn to the book, because first of all, it is a very Midwestern title.

Please Be Good at [00:15:00] Philanthropy. That is published by a not-so-Midwestern-sounding publisher called Disruption Books, which I also find to be an elegant partnership there. You start this book by saying that the field is, in a very polite way, under-oriented toward being good at what we do.

We’re falling short. What do you say the most common ways that foundations fall short are?

Jen: I mean, I think, in really fundamental ways, we don’t have definitions of what it means for us to be good at our jobs. We just don’t. It’s that fundamental, that I think the question is, are you good at philanthropy?

How do you know? Yes. And there are a whole bunch of reasons why those are really hard questions to answer. We’ve already alluded to some of them. It’s also hard because we’re trying to do things that are hard to measure, right? But in a very basic sense, we don’t have a performance management mindset, or performance-[00:16:00]improvement mindset, in a way that’s really basic for other kinds of organizations.

And there are parts of this book where I thought, if you’re really coming in from outside of philanthropy, you’ll read it and just be like, “Well, yeah. Sure, definitely you should do that.” And I was like, no, actually, in our field, this is not what we normally do. This is not how it happens. And I think there are all different reasons for that, like trying to measure ourselves based on the impact we have out in the world, which is really hard to measure.

Yeah. So then you can get sort of obsessed with that and not actually understand what you’re doing. I think one really significant cultural thing for our field has been, for a long time, for a lot of people, feeling like it was noble to make it about the grantees, right? It’s not about us. It’s not about us.

It’s not about us. And that was with really good intent. But what it means is… well, one thing it means is that we’re black boxes, right? People don’t understand us ’cause we don’t talk about ourselves and what we do. [00:17:00] But it also means we don’t have the skills or the habits or the processes to actually be able to say, “This is what we do, and this is how you know we’re doing it well or not.”

Eric: You know, that’s so interesting. So I think this combination of maybe false humility, coupled with, I don’t know what else, this lack of enemies in nature that you talk about, no regulators, no enemies, means that we’re missing those skills, that we can’t run fast, and we don’t have sharp teeth, so we haven’t evolved into something that’s effective.

Yeah. Especially in communications. So we’re gonna take a very quick break. Don’t go anywhere. We’re gonna be back and dig into this book, because there is so much to talk about. We’ll be right back with Jen Ford Reedy right after this. You’re listening to Let’s Hear It, a podcast about foundation and nonprofit communications, hosted by Eric Brown and Kirk Brown.

If you’re enjoying this episode, you may just be a rule breaker. Check out season three of Break Fake Rules with Glen Galaich, CEO of the Stupski Foundation, as he chats with [00:18:00] inspiring leaders in philanthropy, government, media, and more about breaking the fake rules that don’t work, so that we can build a future that does.

Check them out wherever you get your podcasts. And now, back to the show.

And we are back with Jen Ford Reedy, whose new book, Please Be Good at Philanthropy, from Disruption Books, is such an interesting and wonderful little companion piece to the other big book that’s just come out, Control, by Glen Galaich. He’s a funder of ours, just, for full disclosure.

But anyway, he kinda drops this depth charge. He’s very, very pointed about what philanthropy does wrong and why. You’ve taken a slightly different approach around the prescriptions for how philanthropy can get better. And one of the things that has chapped my hide completely is this new report from the Center for Effective Philanthropy that shows this phenomenal disconnect between what foundations think they’re doing and what grantees [00:19:00] are experiencing.

And for me, anyway, this is a huge wake-up call for foundations to do better, to better connect with grantees, to help them understand what their needs are, and fill those needs. And I’m just wondering if you’ve heard, what your own response is to this research, about what your counterparts in philanthropy are saying about it.

Jen: I mean, I think it’s traveling. I think people are reading it and understanding. And I think you’re right to bring it into the conversation as potentially a case in point of how feedback loops are not happening the way you actually need them to happen, to be good at anything, right?

There’s always some part where, when there’s this is what nonprofits think about philanthropy and this is what foundations think, there should be some degree of disconnect, because we’re actually doing two different jobs, and we’re doing it in partnership, right? We’re each bringing different perspectives, different purposes.

But I think what the CEP report helpfully shows is a degree of [00:20:00] disconnect that suggests something is really off in how we’re understanding the problem, how we’re getting and processing information as partner organizations, as co-conspirators, or whatever the relationship is between foundations and their grantees.

We need each other, and so we need to understand each other’s experience. We need to understand each other’s purpose, and we need to understand how we work in alignment to get to the shared purposes that we have.

Eric: All right. So you write in the book a lot about trying to listen and hear and get information, notwithstanding the disproportionate power relationship between grantees and their funders.

Jen: Yeah.

Eric: What are you doing? How are you advising people to get that kind of honest feedback, to learn the real stuff?

Jen: Well, there’s not one answer to that, which is true of every question you would ask about foundation practice, right? That’s part of the book, actually saying: we tend to should each other a lot.

You should do this, you should do that, you should do that. And it may or may not apply, given what we’re doing. So I feel like the main advice [00:21:00] is, for what you are trying to do, foundation X, what do you need to know to be smart enough to do that well? What do you need to know to understand the risks that you’re creating for other people?

What do you need to know about whether people want this intervention or not? What do you need to know about what it would actually take, in terms of having the supports and the incentives and the resources, to actually make the change happen? I mean, I think talking to community has, within the field, sometimes been a “you should” category.

And I just feel like it’s strongly, if you use a competence frame, like: do you wanna be good at what you do? Do you wanna actually have the impact that you say you wanna have? Well, you can’t do it without really listening and understanding. Yeah. And the specifics of that will be very different, whether you’re doing something global, whether you’re doing something local, whether you’re doing something about curing a disease, whether you’re doing something about how people are experiencing the criminal justice system.

It’s different. But I think we [00:22:00] have a number of resources, groups that have come up that are specifically about trying to help foundations get good feedback, and I reference them in the book, throughout the book. I try to point people towards folks who can give counsel, because it does take effort, and so you have to believe that it’s central, I think, for some folks to feel motivated to do it.

Eric: Well, you talk a lot about this kind of formal-learning mentality, which I think is really interesting. And you cite so many resources. There’s lots of information out there and resources, organizations who can support people doing better philanthropy. And obviously, someone is taking them up on it, or else they wouldn’t exist.

But my sense from reading the book was that foundations really can… I mean, they should, for the most part, find ways to learn as much as possible. Learn, yeah.

Jen: Yeah.

Eric: And that sometimes you go to a foundation, all of a sudden you become the expert, the genius, because you have the [00:23:00] checkbook, but that’s really not the case.

Uh, how do you learn, and what are the things that you encourage your counterparts at other foundations to do, in order to learn more about their work?

Jen: Well, some part of it is the intentional acknowledgement, right, to say what you’re saying: we have to learn, keep learning, in order to be effective.

I think within Bush, I can say we do it at all different levels. So it’s like, every year, this is our engagement priority. We’re not doing enough in western North Dakota, or we’re not doing enough with this cultural community. What do we need to learn? How are we going out and having the conversations?

How are we understanding issues? Also, how are we actually doing internal learning? We’ll have someone come in and do a workshop for us on what we don’t understand about… There’s big-picture, strategic learning we do at different times. How do we learn how people are experiencing a program?

So when we’re doing a five-year strategy or review of a program, how are we out talking to stakeholders to understand: is this working, is it not? There’s the, how do we anonymously survey people, at different times, to get [00:24:00] feedback. It’s at all different levels, and I think once you start doing it, you get a little addicted, I think,

to feeling like, oh, we can get better if we actually have the information that helps us get better. And sometimes it’s little things, like I mentioned earlier, the Bush Fellows Program. We’ll have an open mic session at the board meeting where a Bush Fellow comes in and can say anything they want to the Bush board, right?

Ah. So we try to pick people from different parts of our region working on different issues and say, “What do you think the Bush board should know?” And they can say anything. And then, you know, we have a board retreat coming up in August. We’ll be out in Sioux Falls meeting with people, the board directly meeting with people, and board and staff together learning on panels about issues we’re trying to explore.

So it can be all throughout.

Eric: Well, this is amazing, ’cause you’re generating this level of inquiry and interest and competence internally. This is coming from within and not from without. And as you say, there are very few constraints on philanthropy. There’s no particular accountability, [00:25:00] and foundations feel, especially now, like they’re in some kind of defensive crouch.

But you argue in the book that this is mostly self-imposed. So I’m just so curious. There are so many ways to think about what we could do about this. What would create the pressure? I don’t know. Are there constraints or accountability mechanisms that we ought to be putting on philanthropy to get them to be more competent?

Jen: I don’t know. It’s hard to think about accountability mechanisms for effectiveness. That’s part of the trick. I think part of what we haven’t done, though, is to create even the expectation that you should be good at philanthropy, right? So even within the field, when someone’s brand new to a new foundation position, or brand new in philanthropy, we will celebrate them.

Because now they’re giving money. As opposed to saying, “Oh, welcome to the field. You’re gonna have to learn stuff.” I think that [00:26:00] the fact that it’s mostly an apprenticeship for people coming into foundations, right? They come in and they’re told, “Well, this is how you do it.

We make $10,000 grants.” “We make them quarterly. This is our process.” And then you’re like, “Oh, okay.” And then you learn to do that really well.

Eric: Yeah.

Jen: And you do exactly what you’ve been taught philanthropy is, ’cause you only know what you do in that organization. I think part of what I’m hoping with the book is, if you can orient people from the beginning to have consciousness that every single thing your foundation is doing is a choice.

Eric: Yeah.

Jen: Everything’s a choice. So job number one is to go in and understand those choices and learn to do that. But then you can think about whether those choices are serving you. Right. And if you have clarity on what your actual purpose is, then you have a way of asking those questions: do these choices make sense relative to our purpose and what we’re trying to do?

Kirk: Mm-hmm.

Jen: I also think, you know, those of you out in California, where you are, you are [00:27:00] in the hotbed of smart people who have made money doing one thing, who are coming in believing they’re gonna disrupt philanthropy. Yeah. Right? And I think there are a lot of us who are like, “Please, please, please.

There’s stuff you have to learn.” But if we, as the institutional field, if we, as the professionals, aren’t even good at saying to people coming into our institution, “You have stuff to learn,” how are we creating a broader expectation, almost culturally, throughout the country, that this is a skill you have to learn?

So that when there’s the big announcement that somebody’s gonna create a foundation, the reporters are asking questions like, “Well, how are you gonna learn how to do that? How are you testing?” As opposed to just, “What change are you gonna do? And we’re gonna celebrate you for having that intention.”

Or, you know, the ability to expect reports on what happens to those things that are announced with fanfare [00:28:00] and the ability to ask the follow-up questions, and have more attention to each other, and attention to foundations generally, that’s more about, well, what impact did you have?

How did it go? How did people feel about it? How do you

Eric: Yeah.

Jen: give more people kind of the questions or the orientation to not just celebrate intent, and not just celebrate intent or intent and good wishes, to say, “That’s great that you have that, but as we’re gonna talk about the work of your foundation, it’s not gonna be on those terms.”

Eric: Talking about the work of the foundation, you write about how talking about successes is important, ’cause we wanna be able to know it worked, and we wanna be able to take stock of how we’re doing. Are we earning our tax break? Yeah.

Jen: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eric: Yeah. But what didn’t go right is equally as important, because you have to be able to help alert people about, “Don’t waste money on this strategy,” or, “If you wanna [00:29:00] really pursue a strategy like this, you can learn from the things that we did that didn’t

go according to plan.” You write about some of these great philanthropic moonshots that didn’t pan out.

Jen: Yes.

Eric: And I’ve always said, a road-closed sign is one of the most important signs in transportation.

Jen: That is very true. That’s good.

Eric: So for whatever reason, they don’t see the value in helping their colleagues know what not to do.

Can you talk about how we can be better about sharing what doesn’t work?

Jen: I think there are lots of different dimensions to that, and one is, in general, we don’t put a lot of time into understanding and sharing the results of our evaluations, good or bad, right? But then the bad part does get complicated when something doesn’t work, for a lot of reasons, including not wanting to hang your grantees out.

We had a teacher-training initiative, and there are case studies that’ll be on the website for this book. The book doesn’t come out till July, but once it’s out, those resources will be available, and we wrote a case study on it saying, “This did not work. It did not work.”

And I was on a panel, [00:30:00] with people who work in foundations, about this work, with some of our grantees, our partners, and they’re saying the good things that they did with the money, which are true. There are always pockets of success within something. And I’m saying it was a failure.

And oh my gosh. The discomfort of people in the room who kept wanting to say, “But it’s not a failure because…” And I was like, “We’re the one who did it. We’re okay saying it was a failure. We’ve told our partners this is how we feel.” But it feels…

Eric: Yeah, I

Jen: mean, we’re a high-empathy field, maybe, but it feels like you’re taking other people down with us, and I think that’s part

of, again, this: can we distinguish us and our role from what our grantees do? Because we were saying it’s a failure based on what we intended it to be, what we did. And if you can make that distinction about your own performance as a foundation, good or bad, then I think it can be easier to put something out that other people can [00:31:00] learn from that doesn’t feel like it’s trashing the work of good organizations and good people.

Eric: Yes, absolutely. That point is well taken. We used to have a worst-grant contest at the Hewlett Foundation, and it was the worst grant for which we were the most at fault, and from which we learned the most.

Jen: But Hewlett is famously good at putting stuff out there, willing to… and one of the case studies in the book is also from a Hewlett program, you know?

So, when people are willing to put stuff out there that’s the non-success stories, it’s such a contribution. But

Eric: I mean, we were trying to build a culture of learning

Jen: Yeah, from,

Eric: from our own failures. So, if your program won the worst-grant contest, you got dinner with the president.

But again, this was not about the grantees, this was about our own mistakes. All right, I wanna move to another topic.

Jen: Okay.

Eric: There’s this burning question in my mind, and I’d love your take on it. What do you say to one of those bazillionaires who is now sitting on tens or [00:32:00] even hundreds of billions of dollars, money they could not possibly spend in 100 lifetimes, maybe 1,000 lifetimes, about how to use that money for good?

There’s a ton of money, and it feels to me like philanthropy may not necessarily always be the vehicle to move that kind of money, or that traditional philanthropy as we know it may not be the best way, because there’s just so much money.

Jen: Yeah.

Eric: What do you say to one of those folks who just became a billionaire this week through one of those IPOs?

How do they use that money properly?

Jen: Well, first is really encouraging them to use it to the benefit of others. Yeah. I think there’s sometimes where we critique philanthropy in a way that I worry is gonna make people less willing to give. Right. And I do think, of all the things, if we live in a society where people happen to get that rich, right?

Yeah, which we can have our critique about, but I do appreciate when folks are trying to use it for good. So there’s an affirming and encouraging of that. I think the next thing is [00:33:00] saying, congratulations.

Eric: Right.

Jen: That you were so good, or so lucky in some ways, to get this wealth, and I’ll say, if you want to actually do good in the world, this is a different skill than all the skills you used to build up that wealth.

Some of them are gonna apply, but a whole lot of them aren’t, and if you don’t actually shift your mindset, you’re not gonna have the success you hope, and then you may get discouraged. So let’s work upfront to help you understand some of the ways you’re gonna have to bend your brain coming in, which is chapter one of the book, right?

How do you think philanthropically? Just to say, if you’re coming in with a different kind of strategic orientation, you’re gonna have instincts that undermine yourself. And I think there’s an appeal to: let’s help you be a great philanthropist. Yeah. I think you’re trying to ask a different question too, which is just about magnitude.

Yeah. I actually think magnitude is absorbable. I really do. I think that there is so much great [00:34:00] use for philanthropic capital that maybe doesn’t look like the sexy initiatives that we sometimes like to do within philanthropy, but is actually just, no, we have a giant affordable-housing problem.

Like, so much money

Kirk: Yeah.

Jen: could go into thinking differently about construction and just plain building houses for people. Yeah. I mean, we can absorb money. Right. It’s just not through every kind of way of thinking about philanthropy. And I also think we’ve tended, in the last 20 years, with so much emphasis on impact and strategy, to make people feel like they have to do philanthropy that’s complex.

And I was like, real simple, we can put that money to work in really, really good ways if you don’t get too heady about it.

Eric: Well, I would also tell them to read your book.

Jen: Oh, that’s nice.

Eric: Please Be Good at Philanthropy, from Disruption Books. Jen, I [00:35:00] really, really enjoyed this conversation. I really enjoyed the book.

I think it is exactly the tonic for the cold that we have.

Jen: Oh, I’m so glad to hear it. I’m so glad.

Eric: And best of luck with it. It’s out in July. Thank you so much for talking with us.

Jen: Thank you for having me. It was a real delight.

Kirk: And we’re back. So I think we need to really establish and underscore that when we say Bush, we’re not talking president.

Right. We’re not talking beer. Right? I love…

Eric: And we’re not talking beans.

Kirk: I just… And that’s, you’re right in the heart of this Midwestern

Jen: knowing sensibility, the humility. So let’s just say

Kirk: thank you, Jen, for bringing us there. We’re talking about the Bushes that come from having created 3M, which, don’t we owe the Post-It Note to 3M?

Isn’t that one of the many things that we owe to 3M, the Post-It Note?

Eric: Ah, okay.

Kirk: Sure.

Eric: I don’t think people use Post-Its the way they used to, but still.

Kirk: I [00:36:00] know. It’s funny. So Jen brings us to the heart of this discussion, which is, hey, let’s remember philanthropies are created because of, guess what?

Tax treatment. Right. These are actually public resources, so how about we have some conversation about how they demonstrate and document their value, their public-good value. And you had mentioned the Midwestern part of this to get started. This is such a nuanced piece to weave through and thread.

I almost feel like it has to come from a Midwestern perspective and sensibility, because there’s so much to unpack here, and yet there’s a common sense, an enormously important part of this, which is just, yeah, these foundations are stacks of money that are created through public fiat, and guess what?

That means they have to demonstrate public value. How do you do that? It’s a very salient question, I feel like, that Jen is bringing to all of us.

Eric: Right, ’cause if you have some New York schmuck [00:37:00] yelling about philanthropy, who’s gonna listen? And isn’t this conversation just a call and response with the conversation with Glen.

Yes. And of course, the conversation with Elisha, about this disconnect between foundations and their grantees. Yeah. And we see, I would say, the antidote to that disconnect is what Jen is doing at the Bush Foundation, and frankly, her book. If you’re at a foundation and you’re seeing that your grantees feel like you’re out of touch, that you don’t understand what they’re going through, all that kind of stuff, pick up a copy of Please Be Good at Philanthropy,

and read it cover to cover, and when you’re done reading it cover to cover, read it again.

Kirk: Yeah.

Eric: Because in here are the ways that you can learn about how to connect with your grantees, how to be more responsible, how to understand when things are working and when they’re not, how to share information about when they’re not.

Because I’ve said this a million times on this show, a road-closed sign is one of the most [00:38:00] important signs in transportation. And, “Don’t make the same mistakes we did” could be one of the most important messages in philanthropy. And that is not a message that foundations tend to send, and she’s absolutely encouraging that, among other things.

So yes, it probably takes a Midwesterner to be nice about it. But given this time right now, if philanthropy is going to continue to be relevant, and if it’s going to continue to actually accomplish things, the prescriptions in this book are essential.

Kirk: Yeah. Well, you know, we always talk about origin story, and I love that Jen brings this consultant’s instinct for what we’re trying to do with performance, and can bring into that foundation-leader sensibility, about humility and recognizing what’s so difficult to measure.

But can we talk for just a second, though, about how the [00:39:00] Bush Foundation is organized? ‘Cause I think this is so interesting, too, and I feel like this perspective certainly helps inform Jen’s thinking here, is that the Bush Foundation is actually not organized around single issues. It’s organized around this notion of expanding problem-solving capacity.

And this whole conversation around evaluation, and what impact, what benefit are we creating, I feel like it shows up in stark relief against that framework, too, because this foundation is saying, you know… and actually I’m curious to get your take on this, because this foundation is saying, “We’re not coming to the field telling you which problems you should care about.”

Eric: Right. ”

Kirk: And we’re not gonna resource you to solve the problems that our strategic philanthropy has told you are necessary to solve.” And actually, that’s really interesting, because I think some of our core changes and movements of our time have kind of been revealed by foundations actually working at that level.

But this is a perspective that says, “No, actually, we need to engage with people, organizations, communities, regions. Let’s hear from them what problems they’re [00:40:00] trying to solve, and then let’s actually provide resources that help folks solve problems that make their communities better, thrive, et cetera.” That, to me, just feels like a really interesting sensibility, in terms of this whole conversation about trying to understand what impact we’re having and how we characterize that.

Eric: Yeah, I totally agree. Another way of thinking about it is a needs-meeting orientation.

Kirk: Hmm.

Eric: Hmm. You go out to the community and find out what people need, and then you do your best to help them achieve that. And you’re right, most foundations are set up in terms of issue areas. We do environment, we do democracy, we do this, that, or the other.

Which, if you ask me, is often just as useful for the foundation in being able to say no. Because someone will come to them with a great idea. And they’ll say, “Nah, we don’t really fund that. That’s out of our guidelines,” that kind of thing. So it’s a no tool, not necessarily a yes [00:41:00] tool.

And so if you go out into the community and say, “What do you need? What are you dealing with? What are the challenges that you have, and how can we, in one way or the other, support you in being able to overcome those challenges?” That is a totally different mindset. And I agree, not many foundations do it that way.

The Irvine Foundation would set up these initiatives that were designed to address some kind of challenge, that were different from the old program way of doing things. That’s a variation on that. I think it’s really interesting, and I think even a foundation that does have programs could carve off some part of their grant-making and say, “Let’s just meet people’s needs.

Let’s figure out what some important need is, and then just serve them,

Kirk: Yeah.

Eric: instead of deciding from on high that this is a problem and we’re gonna be the ones who solve it.” And there’s one more thing about problem-solving. I’ve said in the past that, in a sense, it sets the foundation up as the hero, and I don’t think that’s how Jen is [00:42:00] referring to problem-solving in this context.

I think it’s really more like meeting folks’ needs, needs that are articulated by people in the community who are dealing with whatever challenges they’re dealing with, or seeing opportunities that might present themselves, and how the foundation can support them in achieving some kind of aspiration.

Kirk: Yeah. And this is what we love about this work, right? Because Jen is having this conversation from sitting within philanthropy and doing this high-impact work and thinking about it in new and different ways. So one of the really poignant questions that comes up for me around this is: well, if you have this foundation and you can operate at such a high degree of private discretion, what competency do you need to demonstrate?

Eric: Yeah.

Kirk: You know, honestly, this is the professionalism plus the nice, because that is such a powerful question, and there’s no way that I know how to ask that question without coming across as just, “Wait, what? Who are you?” You know? Who… [00:43:00] But I think if you’re an expert, you’re sitting in the field, you’ve got…

You understand the nuances of the way the agenda works, you can actually put this question forward. It’s like, how competent do we need to be? And then what do we need to look at to help us understand what that competency looks like? And then I would even go one step further, which is, we do have a field that has a lot of grantee-perception reports, and we get grantee feedback.

But whether or not that feedback is landing, and what changes it’s creating, we often don’t know that part so much, right? Maybe we get the blog post on the website. But really, what’s actually affecting the DNA of how this works? So to me, that’s kind of the hard-edged question sitting under here: what do we owe people?

What’s the transaction we should be saying, “Hey, this is what we’re signing up for,” when we’re talking about philanthropy at scale?

Eric: All right. Well, there’s a lot in there to unpack. One of the things, and I think it’s in the book, almost positive it’s in the book, is that there is no kind of graduate-level course, a degree in philanthropy, that kind of gives you a leg up in [00:44:00] helping you understand how to do it.

Yeah. So you go get an MBA and you work in business. You go get a PhD and you work in academia. And so on the one hand, it’s like, oh my God, really, do we need another educational-industrial complex around philanthropy? The answer is maybe, because there are all sorts of things that you could learn that could make you better at philanthropy, that you learn before you go into the foundation world,

instead of while you’re experimenting with people’s lives. Okay, so that’s the education business. Yeah. And the other thing she talks about is that there’s an amazing number of presidents of foundations who have never worked in a foundation before. So we don’t hire from within and work your way up nearly as much as people do

in other places. And some rather big foundations right now have presidents who have never worked at a foundation, and they come in and go, “Ooh, hoo, hoo, this is gonna be easy because I’m really smart.” And it doesn’t turn out to be that way. It turns out to be so much more complicated than you think.

And it is true, to be responsible, to be responsive, to be able to listen to the things that people aren’t gonna tell you, it’s hard. [00:45:00] Yeah. And you have to have so much humility when you go into a foundation, ’cause people just tell you you’re fabulous. Yeah. And it’s lovely to hear it, but it’s not true.

You’re not fabulous. You’re normal. You’re like you always were. Yeah, yeah. And so nobody really trains you for that sort of stuff. We’ve kind of degraded in philanthropy over these years, and now all of a sudden grantees are saying, “Our funders don’t understand us.” “Whoa.” “That’s surprising.”

Kirk: Well, this is where Jen brings this incredible range of experience.

And by the way, in terms of that class, Jen is actually teaching a philanthropy 101 class for the Massachusetts Foundation, which is exactly what we need. There we go. We need… that’s right. We need Jen Ford Reedy at the front of the room teaching. And so this is the other piece that is so great here, is that Jen’s not coming forward saying, “Hey, we need some big licensing board,” or, “Let’s create some new bureaucratic giant [00:46:00] compliance regime.”

She’s actually saying, in the absence of these external constraints, how about the internal-discipline part? Let’s talk about a willingness to receive feedback. Let’s talk about the humility. Yeah. Right? Let’s talk about a willingness to learn. Let’s talk about actually listening to communities. And, again, I keep going back to: community is such a really interesting word, because what does that word even mean?

Where do we find the communities that we’re listening to? What do we mean by evaluation? And then how do we admit failure? And I think, for me, the reason why I think messengers and workers and practitioners and experts like Jen are so important is that I also feel like there’s just a crucial kind of care and feeding of the field that’s going on here, because

because we don’t have these kind of external mechanisms that are pushing on us. This changes as a result of foundations looking deep inside and saying, “This is how we’re gonna put this into practice within our particular institution.” And at least in my experience, that really requires somebody who can patiently, kindly, with humility, but also with expert [00:47:00] clarity, walk people through the process, and I feel like that’s what we’re getting here, in terms of what Jen’s bringing forward with her book.

Eric: Absolutely. And these are the kinds of tools that we need more of, no question about it. There are some good books on philanthropy, but not nearly enough. And like I said, this is a kind of soup-to-nuts great primer on how to think about philanthropy, and I’m so glad that she wrote it.

And like I said, it is a counterpoint to Glen Galaich’s book Control. In many ways they’re saying much of the same thing, but attacking it, going at it, from a slightly different perspective, and I think that’s really valuable.

Kirk: Yeah. Well, let’s say a major thank you to Jen for coming on Let’s Hear It, giving us this book, you know.

This sensibility, just ’cause we have a checkbook, it doesn’t… that may make us feel wise if we’ve got the checkbook, but it actually doesn’t make us wise, right? Right. She’s saying if we want the privilege of doing this work, we should be doing enough [00:48:00] to be good at it to deserve the privilege.

And again, that’s so powerful, meaningful, poignant, timely. And honestly, Eric, in this era, to hear such seminal leaders coming forward with this kind of balance of discipline and humility, isn’t it just kinda good for the soul? You know what I mean? Isn’t it just kinda good to know that we have leadership like this out there?

I don’t know. It was… I love it. I love

Eric: it. It’s good for my teeny tiny soul, that’s for sure.

Kirk: That’s great. Well, please go find the book. So this is Jen Ford Reedy from the Bush Foundation, and the book is… give me the title of the book again, ’cause I just love this.

Please Be Good at Philanthropy is just one of my favorite all-time titles for a book, ever.

Eric: And my other favorite thing is that it is published by Disruption Books.

Kirk: Oh, there you go. That’s great. So please go check out Please Be Good at Philanthropy. And I guess, Eric, we should take this on too.

We’re gonna try to be good at podcasting, right? We’re [00:49:00] gonna please be good at podcasting. You’re doing great with it. I mean, not so much. Eric, it’s a little late

Eric: for that.

Kirk: I know. It’s so…

Eric: If we were gonna be good at podcasting, we’d have been good by now.

Kirk: Yeah, I know. It’s true.

True. Well, Jen Ford Reedy, president of the Bush Foundation, thank you so much for coming on Let’s Hear It. Thank you for sharing with us all of your work and your insights. And please go out and find the book, Please Be Good at Philanthropy. There you go. And we will see you next time on Let’s Hear It.

Eric: Read it,

Kirk: and

Eric: then be good at philanthropy.

Kirk: Read it and be good at philanthropy. We’ll see you next time. Bye.

Jen: Okay, everybody. That’s it for this episode.

Kirk: Please let us know if you have any thoughts about what you heard today, or people we should have on this show, and that definitely includes yourself. And we’d like to thank John Allee, the tuneful and inspiring composer of our theme music.

Eric: Our sponsor, the Lumina Foundation.

Kirk: And please check out Lumina’s terrific podcast, Today’s Students, Tomorrow’s Talent, and you can find that at luminafoundation.org.

Eric: We certainly thank today’s guest, and, of course, all of you.

Kirk: And most importantly, thank you, Mr. Brown.

Eric: Oh, no, no, no, no. [00:50:00] Thank you, Mr. Brown.

Kirk: Okay, everybody.

Till next time