and environmental change around the world. this is about an hour and 15 minutes. >> good evening, everyone. my name is mary jo, and i'm vice president for communications and public affairs here at the boston foundation. it's my pleasure to welcome you here this morning, and thank you very much -- or this evening, sorry. you can tell where my head's at. thank you very much for joining us. um, i just want to make sure that for those of you -- i don't know everybody in the audience, i see a lot of familiar faces, but for those of you who don't know about us, the boston foundation is greater boston's community foundationment we were founded in 1915 which means that we are approaching our 100th anniversary, and you're going to be hearing more from us about that very soon. we have more than 900 different funds here at the boston foundation. we're delighted to have lots of donors who do work with us, and

we work closely with them throughout the year. we also do a tremendous amount of discretionary grant making, we make the combined $80 million of grants to the boston community and throughout the area every year, and we also play the role of a major civic leader for ourty and our region and our -- for our city and our region and our state. we publish research, we bring people together to discuss important issues many of which are brought to us by our very well known boston indicators project, and we help inform and drive public policy on a whole range of strategies that the foundation feels are the things that really, um, are high leverage for our community. so we're honored tonight to have with us all three authors of the book "to more than give: the six practices of donors who changed the world." this book, we feel, is a really important contribution to the literature of philanthropy and

social change. we also think it's a very important book because our ceo, paul grogan, is profiled in it as well as the work of the boston foundation. [laughter] so you're going to, you notice a couple of bright lights here in the room, and that's because c-span is actually taping this tonight for its, for use on it booktv, and we're also live streaming this ourselves, the boston foundation is, for people who couldn't attend in person. so as i mentioned, we are honored to have the authors of "do more than give" here with us this evening, leslie, john and mark kramer. all of them are associated with fsg which was founded in 2000 as the foundation's strategy group which is a consulting firm that specializes in strategy, evaluation and research. today fsg works across all sectors and, frankly, around the globe. i was talking to john tonight and hearing about an effort perhaps to open an office in

mumbai, they're in geneva, they're partnering with foundations, corporations, nonprofits, governments and agencies to develop effective solutions to the world's most challenging issues. fsg helps organizations individually and collectively achieve social impact by discovering ways to solve social problems. um, we like to think at the boston foundation that we're doing the same thing, so in many ways over the years we have partnered with fsg, and we're delighted to have that partnership. so tonight we're going to be meeting with these authors and having what i know is going to be a fascinating dialogue. we are proud that paul grogan is one of our panelists, and we're delighted to also have with us blake jordan from the highland street family foundation. and i want to also make sure that you know that after the formal part of our evening, we invite you to stay for some more

food and drink, we're going to have much more food outside in the reception area, and we also have copies of the book, "do more than give." they'll be available right afterwards, and our authors will be available to sign the book if you'd like to have that. um, so with that, i'd like to now introduce one of the authors of the book, leslie crutchfield, who will introduce our other speakers as we go along, and leslie will start with an overview of the tenets of the book, "do more than give." leslie is an adviser, an author and a leading authority of the high impact of philanthropy. her previous book, "forces for good," was named by economist magazine on its best business books of the year list. leslie is a recent managing director of ashoka and the u.s. and canada fellowship program. in the 1990s she co-founded

and published a national magazine for social entrepreneurs and growing nonprofits. leslie is a frequent media contributor whose work has been featured by cnbc, financial times, "the washington post," the chronicle of philanthropy and the sanford social innovation review. so with that, i'd like leslie to come up, thank you. [applause] >> thank you, mary jo, for that warm introduction. i'm kind of arranging the microphone here, i'm hoping that folks can hear me in the back. okay, i see some heads nodding. good evening. >> good evening. >> on behalf of my co-authors, john, mark and i, we are so delighted to be here at the boston foundation and having an opportunity to talk with you about the ideas of catalytic philanthropy that we write about in our book, "do more than

give." and it's particularly a special evening for us because my co-authors and i have had the opportunity to travel really all around the u.s. and even overseas with groups of donors and philanthropic leaders, nonprofit leaders such as yourselves to share the ideas of the book. but this is the first time we've all been together right near fsg's hometown of boston. and, um, we got together to write this book because we at fsg have come to believe that the way philanthropy is commonly practiced today has got to change. in the u.s. alone, we give $300 billion through donors to deserving nonprofits, and yet when you look at the progress that philanthropy and nonprofits have made towards trying to solve many of the complex problems we all care so much about whether it's, you know, poverty or struggling school

systems, affordable housing and the lack thereof, climate change, you see that we have so far to go in terms of even scratching the surface with some of these problems. so we have these concerning statistics, but we also wrote this book for intensely personal reasons as well. you know, my co-author, mark kramer, for instance, he grew up in a family with a small family foundation. and from early on he could see the good that writing checks to worthy nonprofits could do, but he also got a glimpse of some of the family foundation world and some of the dysfunctions that can exist in family foundations. um, the seeming lack of ability sometimes to learn from peers, really needing to recreate the wheel, dissension sometimes among families about where to give their money, how much to give away. so much so that sometimes he saw foundations that couldn't even come to agreement to meet their

5% payout. and that seemed absurd given the complexity of problems that are crying out for answers, so that's one of the things that propelled mark to go start fsg a decade ago with harvard business school professor michael porter. now, it was started as foundations strategy group to help foundations do just that, develop better strategies, more effective approaches to solving social problems. and, of course, fsg has grown to much more than that in that time. now, for john kenya, my other co-author, he came from a different perspective. john had spent more than two decades in the private sector. he had risen to become a partner at not one, but two premier strategy consulting firms. and while it was amazing experience to be able to help these global fortune 500 companies gain more market share and develop his strategy skills, it wasn't meeting john's

deep-held desire to make a meaningful difference in the world. so he left all that to join fsg just a year after it was founded and helped grow the firm to where it is today. and for me to this book i bring my own experience, quite different. i've spent my whole career in the nonprofit sector launching and leading nonprofits for the first decade. and for the second decade, working in philanthropy and writing about trying to find new ways to solve these problems through research and analysis. and the practices of donors who change the world that we write about in "do more than give" really were inspired by the six prices originally revealed in "forces for good," my first book. and one of the most frequent questions i would get as i was out speaking with audiences much like this, well, how can donors apply these practices? mark had just published two years ago a seminal article

called catalytic philanthropy, and this inspired us to join together and say how can we find examples of foundations, donors whether they're corporate foundations, community foundations like the boston foundation, private family foundations or even generous individuals and families that have really catalyzed change and gotten real results. so that's what drove us to write this book. the donors that we had a chance to study really approach the practice of philanthropy differently, and it looks a little bit like this. um, we call it catalytic philanthropy, and it contrasts to the common practice of giving in a couple really significant ways. i mean, if you think about it, the common approach to giving is, you know, you select a worthy charity, you give a grant. at the end of the year, if you're a formal foundation, you get a report. we all know it's often difficult for foundation staff or board

trustee members to find time to read the reports, and the goal of this whole process is to give away money. catalytic philanthropy, by contrast, looks different. it starts with the goal. the goal of the catalytic philanthropist to solve problems to get at solutions to some of these complex challenges we face in society. and so instead of engaging in a linear process, catalytic philanthropists look for ways to leverage government, to change policy, advocate for reforms that can have statewide, if not national, even global scale of impact. um, they look for ways to partner with their grantees, the nonprofits, the other foundations in the world and leverage their expertise and their resources to create change. they look for ways to work with the private sector, tapping into their business know-how, working

with and through the companies, creating shared value, a new concept that mark and michael porter have written about recently in harvard business review. and last but not least, engaging directly with people, the individuals, the residents in the communities of the places that you serve whether you run a nonprofit or part of a foundation. and they look for these leverage points or these tipping points as malcolm gladwell might refer to it to really create as much change as they can, as possible. now, the reason why catalytic philanthropists approach things this way is because they have what we think is a keen understanding of the nature of the problems that we're trying to solve today. and if you think about it, you know, there's kind of three ways to think about problems, right? some problems are simple. like baking a cake, right? if you get the right amount of

flour and sugar and butter and you put it together and some other ingredients and you put it in the oven, take it out at the right time, you're going to get cake. it's kind of a simple -- it's a linear process, right? other problems can be described as complicated, and we draw on this framework, actually, from the authors of a really seminal book on social change called "getting to maybe" that was published in canada a couple years ago. a complicated problem would be like sending a rocket to the moon. involves incredible feats of engineering, physics, so many interplaying factors at work. but if you build the machine just right and you launch it to the moon, you can count on gravity to behave the same way. now, social problems are different. these authors describe them as complex. we use the analogy of raising a child, right? i have this picture of this little kid here. to me, he looks like he's

dressed up like peter pan which reminds me of my daughter. it's almost halloween, i have a 7-year-old daughter at home, and she wanted to be a cheetah for halloween last year. so she was a cheetah for halloween, then she wanted to be a cheetah every day for the next 30 cay days at school, and i actually said, no, why not? when you try and influence some things, they talk back. children are emergent, and sometimes you get the exact opposite reaction of what you were expecting when you try and influence. and that's the way, of course, social and environmental problems are. they're emergent, constantly shifting, and so leaders have to be adaptive. and when we have the panel with paul grogan who really is featured in our practice of leadership, we'll hear more about that. now, we're going to get a chance to hear from two donors based right near the boston area and how they're catalyzing change in

your neck of the woods. but i wanted to share one story from the book because we think it's really ark typical, it represents so many of the six practice that is we write about, these six practices are really linked to those four cogs in that set of gears i showed you before advocating for change which means trying to work with and through government, blending profit with purpose, working through the business sector, forging networks, empowering local people. and the last two practices are sort of the internal management leadership characteristics that enable these donors to be so effective working across the four sectors of society they lead adaptively, and their approach to evaluation is more of a learning mindset rather than a retrospective evaluation mindset. ..

of, and jacobs were quite heated. in fact when they propose that the first to grant the to the equivalent of the cato institute that shot down not surprisingly so they struggle to find an issue they could get around and what they came upon is that if they could help people help themselves through economic development, then it would

satisfy joe's compassionate conservative desire to give people a hand up, not a hand down and help some of the most vulnerable disadvantaged people in the community. so with the jacobs foundation did this turn this in a brownfield settled with an abandoned aerospace factory in the neighborhood where they've located their offices and they managed to turn this site into this, the market was a vibrant commercial economic zone creating hundreds of jobs bringing in, and keeping income in the community. and their story is pretty amazing. how did they do it? how did they go from this to that? well, kind of interesting way they didn't start out by making any grants even though they had a foundation. the first thing jacobs did is went out to the community.

was a very low-income multicultural urban area and asked to local residents what they wanted and what they thought they needed and they feel like they got some really interesting answers. for instance they heard that the local residents wanted a grocery store where they could buy a piece of fresh fruit. they wanted a big downtown where they could deposit their paychecks. they wanted a sit-down family restaurant where they could have a meal with their family not another fast-food joint. they wanted all the things that middle and upper income communities have, but they lack because of the poverty and disinvestment in the area so that is what the foundation gave them the didn't make any grants to the social service agency or underwrite its food stamp program or job training program. they bought this abandoned aerospace factory site for

2.4 million, put in a couple more million and eventually leverage more than 20 million from the national and other donors to create this community enterprise. they tried to source as much as possible so working with contractors, laborers, architecture and the local community to build up wealth and keeping come in the community and they also asked the residents to help them design and think about how to structure the site. as a result they've created jobs, generated in come in the center. by the way it has a grocery store and food for less is one of the anchor stores, it has a starbucks but it has a lot of family-run businesses as well. jacobs is also unique because this foundation is a spend down foundation. they want to deeply their assets within a generation or two and that is when show came up with

another innovative idea. they said the hell can we transfer this to the community so they decided they wanted to go public but they couldn't sell stock so most of these low-income vulnerable residents could do it so for six years they had located and eventually passed legislation in the state of california and anybody who knows california politics knows how hard that is to do to create a new legal mechanism so they get of the first community development i.t. yo. a third of this is owned by local residents. the stock price was set about to enter the box and you couldn't do it you could do a layaway plan literally transferring the ownership over to local residents. and by the way this has returned 10% from a recession as many have done. so a very stable, positive investment in this community to really what's interesting about

jacobs they committed to this cause all of their resources and time and energy and their problem-solving skills into this one issue of the advocate for change in the gulf policy past getting their political chip throwing their weight behind the effort. they blended profit with purpose. jacobs brought his business know-how for building a fortune 500 company and knowledge and marketing, finance, engineering. the work through non-profit networks in the coalition to the work to develop the site and pass the policy change. most importantly they empower the people. they went off and listened, talked to local residents to understand what it is the needed and been involved in the solution not being residences' clients of a nonprofit part of the problem in doing this they

led it actively and learn to create change. michael walker is going to moderate we are going to go more deeply into some of these practices and learn about how foundations right here in boston in the greater boston area are upon some of these practices to solve problems right here at home to begin with that i would like to now ask my co-author john to come up. john is a managing director and a board member and the organization and he's also going to introduce paul and bleak. thank you. [applause] >> hello everyone. good evening. you know, leslie and mark and i are out doing a lot of these different sessions since the book published and we are

heading to all different points of the country and indeed the globe to talk about the concept around the six practices that changed the world. and one of the great things for me in terms of doing these sessions is actually having the opportunity to talk in person in a public forum with some of the donors as catalytic and also to actually come together and in forums like this to actually cast a spotlight on some of the catalytic donors that are not profiled in the book. so tonight, we absolutely delighted that we have paul, coas president of the boston foundation and blake jordan of the family street foundation which has been -- was founded 20 years ago by david jr and has

been doing grant making and other catalytic activity in the boston area for 20 years. so, paul and blake, thank you very much for being willing to share your experiences and an open forum. paul, we thought we would start with you. you know, was lee went through the six practices of the donors that changed the world and chapter 7 in the book is called leading edge up stiffly and the chapter actually starts out with a story about you, talking with the ceo of four of the major boston hospitals, and the chapter goes on to share held the boston foundation has been involved in helping the low-skilled individuals in the boston area trained in the connected with higher-paying jobs, higher skilled jobs, and many people who've read the book

actually told us their favorite chapter in the book. and i'm not just saying that. [laughter] i have a sneaky suspicion that the reason they say that is because it's one of the few published stories about philanthropy where the head of the foundation is not having any fun. so i would love if you could actually share that story as you shared it with us generously when we first talked about it. and not only the story itself, but the broad picture of how this fits into the boston foundation's work around creating a sense of urgency around workforce development in the boston region. >> sure, thank you. the boston foundation has been interested in education and work force development, economic opportunity for a long time. and we had put together in my early years of the foundation a very successful work force program called skill works which

really change the paradigm of the workforce at least here at the foundation by putting the employ years in a fundamental role and inviting industry is to define their needs and provide free flexible capital to forge the partnerships that would establish letters of economic opportunity for low-skilled workers. and among the most promising sectors that the program focused on was the healthcare sector which of course is an enormous in boston, and i think the job creation in the health sector will probably be less robust going forward than it has been but it's been a major source of job growth and there were lots and lots of low-skilled people employed by our hospitals. the problem is most of them are stock at the bottom of the ladder without the skills for education to advance and the hospitals had knocked placed

must become much emphasis. so we thought this was a fantastic opportunity and the health peace has been very successful so as you say there brookies hospital chiefs together and in one of these rooms for a very nice dinner to discuss taking this to skill in the health sector based on the success on the first round and, you know, and they did come. that was good. but it was a curiously inert evening. we were excited about this and talking about this and talking about that and our ideas and we emphasize it's a real opportunity for these institutions to collaborate together. we love collaboration. and i got a particularly muted response from the ceos. [laughter] and was just -- it was one of those things. i tried a, b, c, and it's still very early in the evening i

haven't brought up the main course yet of the evening is just complete catastrophe. but it turned out to be an unsuccessful evening that actually contributed mightily to the successful results. because i was saved in the end by the then head of that israel paul levy who said that the dinner you are going about this all wrong. when you've got in this room, and maybe it shouldn't be this way but it is, is competitors. we are competing fiercely with each other. why not use that, why not challenge us in a new competition to create the structures in our hospitals to advance these workers. and the evening kind of ended on that note and we said okay. if that's where we have to start, that's where we have to start. and we went forward on that

basis of providing very flexible capital to the hospitals to create these ladders of opportunity that the in-house training but also develop ties to institutions of higher education and in fact what this program achieved was in each of these hospitals in very different ways according to their different cultures and practices created a whole new h.r. infrastructure in their hospitals oriented to this low-skilled population, which was absolutely new for them and they now have highly organized process is the persistence of a plea advancing people many immigrants and minorities into middle class jobs, $50,000 above which benefits. so does show the you can have a disappointing beginning and get to a better result in the end. >> thank you. now, the process that you described and what we have

really observed under your leadership doing any number of different instances is different than a way a lot of the foundation's project at work. on the one hand, you are not dictating to people. you tried dictating but it didn't work. on the other hand, you are sort of helping to shape the conditions for the change the you want to seek to happen. you were helping to shape conditions. and to get people come as you did with these hospital chiefs, sort of all of their current wave thinking, which is sort of stuck and thinking in the new and different ways and innovative, again this is not sort of natural behavior for many foundations to either seek to dictate or see that we can help shape the conditions could change. it's a way of leading that

resource defined as seductively -- as adaptive leadership. how do you think foundations are well-positioned or not to be adaptive leaders in society? >> i think they are very well positioned because of our freedom, our independence. it does represent a third way, not government, not business to try things out. and the problem is that a large enough swath of the foundation is seizing that freedom and using it. we have too much really conservative risk behavior. people want to support the tried and true and they don't want to take chances, and i think that is unfortunate. i think that we are enlarging that fraction of philanthropy that is really trying to do the hard ones as you said that third category of complexity.

and it's interesting, you know i've never heard of adaptive leadership before i read the article, and we are just trying to get stuff done. and it's interesting that you are looking at this and kind of providing a vocabulary for it which i think it's terrific. but the mind set was how do you solve this problem, almost forgetting about who you are and what you have to offer but what would it really take to move this issue and then thinking about what you have that could either directly or leverage indirectly marshal all of the resources and tools the would be needed to move the needle on a complex problem, and that's just we've learned the foundation up with lots of people from other walks of life and that's the way of other people think. how do we solve this problem. and it has led us to really

rethink the role of the foundation, which was primarily a steward of philanthropy in the grand maker. now we've developed all these other tools. the research which has absolutely been crucial and part of the success in the workforce was retraining the work force as economic development in the self-interest of the players facing the better to change rather than the help for the needy which unfortunately was that kind of coloration of workforce programs and still is the reason using research and data about demographic issues to refrain an issue in the vocabulary, public forums like this to bring leaders together to talk about it, keeping issues in public view while working with the press, being willing to engage deeply with the public sector. again, our view was none of the problems we are now interested in solving can be solved without the public sector come and get much of the foundation world doesn't want in a thing to do with a public sector, and yet they think they can achieve

these great things without being involved with government. so it was really starting not just who we are but what's this problem, what's it going to take and then matching that to what we have and what we don't have, how do we get somebody else of bringing that to the party? >> it's interesting. what you're describing is a different way than who did get grants to read this how we actually solve the problem and therefore what do we need to do about it. if you are a foundation and you want to sort of act and function in this way, you talked about some of the things that you've done here at the boston foundation bringing in people from different walks of life and different backgrounds and experiences, but if you are a foundation and you don't get sort of fact to treat conditions and need actively how foundations think about becoming active leaders? >> i don't know how they think about it other than to be clear about what they want to accomplish and how they will

know when they get there and if you never do that at the front end of an undertaking you can't get back to it. you won't be in the position to know what impact you had so that is just a clarify and discipline that our board insists on with us and we try to insist on with our nonprofit partners. but one thought occurred to me in terms of the change in the mind set. i got the feeling that the culture was very much that the object of all of this is to support the nonprofits, that that's why we are here. and i don't believe that. nonprofits are intermediaries on the way to solving a problem or not and they are not in san themselves and i fink again much of the foundation or the donor

world to be defined as the end rather than the means. in the case of the hall commission did it lead us to directly from these john and hospitals, these multibillion-dollar organizations and the war directly asked what in this money make our difference if we gave it to some little health organization and the would be a pretty thing to do. but if what we wanted to do was create ladders of opportunity for overtime very large numbers of people to make it into the middle class you couldn't do that by giving grants to local organizations. you have to go where the jobs were. so that is again example of the discipline of let's think about what we were trying to do and be willing to endure the questioning and maybe the criticism from our own board or nonprofits in the community why are they giving money to brigham hospital.

look at the money but the fact is if we didn't harm the entrepreneur is inside of the organization without side money to drive the changes they wanted to drive in their age or process it never would have happened and everyone has told me that. >> let's turn to you now. while the boston foundation is very visible in the community the foundation has been an important part of the fall of the public landscape for 20 years you've been executive director for the last three years and have been involved in a lot of different efforts interesting in the work of the foundation has done that he pursued one of the practices of some interesting programs for friday and use philanthropy and we would like to hear logos.

>> i have to be on for ten minutes and made a good impression. >> it can but three years ago having its 20th anniversary and we wanted to provide an opportunity and i know it sounds like simplistically wanted to provide an opportunity for everyone in the state and find out what was the large skill initiative that we could actually undertake still looking at the economy and looking at the cut to the cultural institutions we thought we don't we provide grants to open the cultural institutions free of charge in the public and so i came up with a budget and i talked to all of the organizations and came up with this where every friday a cultural institution was open up free of charge to the public and really decided if we are going to do this and make this investment let's just market it to every avenue we can. so we worked as your book states we worked with every partner we could find. so we went to the mass office of cultural affairs and to the department of tourism, every nonprofit.

we created a facebook page kaj woodard, and we wanted to make sure everybody was going to know about this and utilize it and i think that to our surprise it was just overwhelming the response and the first summer we had ten men use and over 80,000 people visit the venues in the summer months which we never imagined. some of the things we never thought about as well with the economic impact of terms of what we were doing to provide support to the cultural institutions and to provide an opportunity for people who during a tough economic time you have to cut back on things when it's the cost for your family and we never realized the impact would have in terms of the people who were not spending to buy their tickets were becoming members of these organizations and bonding of the gift shops and restaurants or buy a lunch in the community and supporting the local community. so we did ten and next summer with steven more these are great. we expanded it to 26 and we did 26 groups over 108,000 people

visit 26 groups and again the feedback, the response was incredible in this summer we just wrapped up hour for our summer program we did 36 venues over eight weeks and we had 163,000 people visit 36 cultural institutions in the state and the thing is also we partnered with great organizations but we also do the museum in places that don't have development teams, don't have marketing departments, and really just try to promote them in every avenue we can and it's been great. >> one of the things i really love about this program is that first of all it is obviously a fabulous bargain. it's just a fabulous program. but in terms of being catalytic your program when on giving grants and sort of opening this up. use it if we are going to achieve maximum impact, we are going to have to think about partnering in different ways and

in the book we talk about blending the profit with purpose and i would love to hear you talk about the innovative partnerships and you've had with media and business. >> we are not afraid to ask for favors and to be partners. we agree with paul leal of park our ships and collaboration's we went to channel five and said could you help us promote this and they said they would be happy to so every thursday night and friday morning you hear don't forget tomorrow is for the fund friday. they were terrific partners. we said can you put these on trolleys and trains and they did to wondered 50 posters for us so everybody taking the computer reseller of the city can see the fun friday's. social media was huge for us. i've been amazed of all of the blocks that are out there and how many people follow and twitter and facebook and the private family foundation has almost five paulson facebook friends that we can now promote activities and keep them informed of what's going on in

the communities and the nonprofit partners so every week we can highlight a different group people should be aware of. it's the combination of it think the traditional media with the business of the social media that sets this on the course that it is and it's been really interesting. >> it's exciting to see how the foundations are using some of the social media to actually have impact and make progress against the cause and use information in different ways so we can probably go all night. want to ask you each one more question and then open up for questions from the audience. but i'm curious the last practice in the book is called worm in order to change and in the book some of the stories we tell or about foundations, donors, even the likes of the bill and melinda gates foundation who want to get better of learning and want to be more real time in their learning of the emergent strategies that the implementing.

but when they got to learn the are frankly surprised by what they learn and find out in fact they do need to change and that is a part of the lesson. so i would love to hear from both of you. tell me a story, one or two, about a time when your foundation actually went out to learning about what you're doing and he was poised maybe even shocked by what you found out and if infected because you as a condition to change what you do because often we find with evaluations will just keep doing the same thing the ring before even though they tell them something different city would love to hearing stories include share. >> i think something all the trustees are quite proud of is the investment that we've made in the activity schools and the creation and challenge a market

places within the state so many years ago after a number of years of supporting the educational programming on a variety of issues they took a step back and reviewed how much of an investment they have been making in a number of activities understanding that we wanted to continue funding education. we all believe it is obviously the basis for all success on the road. so, but really took a look at it and said i don't think that with what we are investing are we really making a change or removing the donilon disalle and could we be more effective and so, what they collectively decided, which i think was a great decision, was to take the nativity school model which i think is at this point starting in new york is like 40 years ago and basically focusing on the middle school age boys from primarily low-income communities, immigrant communities and creating an having a school where it was a longer school day, a better student teacher ratio come summer programming, great alumni

connections and the support systems for the kids and then took that model and said we are not going to do it in boston that we are going to do it in the war ends and places that really need this and don't have the resources that perhaps greater boston does and we've now been doing this about ten years and we've made over 8 million-dollar investment in the schools and i think we are still gathering the information and the data and pleased with what we are seeing so far in terms of attendance and some of their information in the day in the last six years all of those kids graduating and accepted to a private school and all received of least one scholarship to a private school. so we are really pleased with what's happening and we will continue to track it but i think that is where they will come to say we can make a bigger impact if we changed course.

>> great, paul. >> as i mentioned earlier the data has become very central to everything we do hear the boston foundation at the host of the boston indicators project and the commission the great deal of research on the issues that we are particularly interested in the true? ingalls of where we made quite significant changes the with the data was telling us in 2009 a report came out that we have funded by tom kean at the harvard school of education and a team of scholars for a number of universities for the first time in methodologically we compared the academic performances of children in regular boston public schools and pilot schools which are in district charter schools and at the time we of the boston foundation were backing very heavily the expansion of the pilot schools. we thought it was a hybrid model featuring the best practices of the charters but within the system that politically and

substantively could be the basis of the education reform that we were seeking. so we were very disappointed in a way when the study showed that the pilot wasn't producing significant academic differentials over the regular district schools. but the charters were very, very dramatically. and it was interesting that we got a lot of credibility from a lot of people and i can't remember how many people spoke to me about this. i think the expectation was if the report wasn't really positive on the private schools we would. we had a forum like this to might come standing-room-only and this study turned out to be one of the first of its kind in the country with a kind of methodological rigor that it had and it became very influential all across the country and here

as lahoud. we stayed with them and we think that they are still possibilities there. it definitely caused us to realize that expanding charters was the scene of the education reform, the chargers had to be given more support and room to expand and then became our policy position, and the was in the legislation that the governor signed a year ago last january doubling the charter capacity. so, we got some credibility when people say you stood there and you must feel very disappointed. and i think the broader point of the foundations are kind of reluctant to expose their failures or missed steps and they all to be more willing to do so. the most successful businesses are built at least in part on any failures along the way. we shouldn't be embarrassed about it but somehow people in the foundations of our. one of my great mentors, the

vice president of the ford foundation for many years once told me foundations make a mistake they double the funding and in hopes that no one will notice. [laughter] this is the education record. the second one quickly is a report we did in conjunction with the new england healthcare institute called lots of health care, not enough health. the boston foundation has been a great health care foundation really from the beginning. we just played a pivotal role in so many important things like the development of the neighborhood health centers, the formation of the leading advocacy group health care for all. we've been allowed access to medical care to people for the vulnerable populations, but we did this study and there was just some staggering things that came out of the study about, you know, looking at why why are we getting on whole figure in certain critical respects even if the vast expansion of spending on health coming and i actually have a couple of

posters from the report. here is public private spending on health care in massachusetts in $200,963,000,000,000. here's the spending on public health, half a billion dollars. so it is an enormous commitment to spending. and yet the commitment is so large if you look at state spending, the state budget over the last decade roughly you see health care spending has gone up, i'm sorry for those over there, 65%. locally a schools it's got 26%. we've cut poe would help by 11%, and we've cut public high your education by 19%. so there isn't shows that among the fact is just expensive that these health expenditures are naturally crowding out other critical investments the

arguably would meet you healthier. there is a high correlation between good health and a college education for instance and then this one from the center for disease control and, which matches the determinants of health over here and what are the things that make you healthy with where we are spending the money. and it shows that 50% of your health is based on your behavior. another 20% on the environment, another 20% on genetics and only 10% on access to medical care. it accounts for your health. it again, where are we spending the money? 90% of every dollar spent is going to medical services. these are profoundly important and terrifying. [laughter] we knew it was too expensive and health care costs were going up too fast, but this really was shocking to us and it led to a complete revamping of our health care priorities from access to

medical care which we have more or less gone away from and it helps that massachusetts has made tremendous progress on that and we've been deeply involved in that, but we have got to shift the priorities to fitness and prevention and behavior's where that is where the advances in health can start to curb some of these out of control diseases like diabetes related to obesity which is related to poor nutrition and lack of exercise. so those are two cases where we were really profoundly influenced and not knowing the answer going in in the case of education we didn't know and it's had a big impact. >> first thanks to both of you for sharing your story of learning to change but i think particularly with the story about the health care world i think a lot of conditions we talk about that learn in order to change you get very focused on the individual organizations

that you are working with, but it's important to step back and see the entire system and see the entire set of causes, etc., and how they come together and figure of how you fit into that. and to the degree that you can as paul just indicated here, actually surface the information, share the information so that you can actually, even those you are not giving grants to through the information you put out actually helped the system move forward that is profound and that is catalytic the we have a couple minutes for questions from the audience if anybody has anything that they would like to hear from paul and bleak. yes. >> i work for a nonprofit position for human rights and as leslie said the very beginning of the talk we've spent enough time getting the money, reaching

for it and it is a circle and the circle would as a nonprofit person can we do to help encourage the change of the foundations that we rely on for money? is their anything that we can do to help encourage them? >> well i think that they need to be harder on themselves in asking about the utility of the process that they've put through because it is a lot of research that shows they are spending far too much time on the activities that you just mentioned when presumably with the funding community wants is for the maximum effort to be going to delivering the service, solving the problem, what ever you are doing, and this got us very concerned, so several years ago we went through a process of looking at this and asking ourselves questions like that, and it ended with our really

very significantly moving our print meeting discussion program from project grants to unrestricted operating support. the old system was we had guidelines apply to us and we will fund what we think are the best of what comes in. the new system is we have goals, the things we want to accomplish and the safe for the guarantees that will be crucial to work with in order to solve that problem, and once we identify those, we are willing to give them larger grants over a multi years and for the most part and restricted in the hope that that really would reach more energy to do the work but it's very much in the context more of a partnership man we are funding you and you are at arm's length. it's rather together we are attacking the problem that we want to solve together. but there's a tremendous amount of wasted time and effort in

redundant processing is. the other thing that we would be doing is unveiling something called the given commons next spring which is a web based directory such throughout the whole region which will give dollars to become donors open source access to a terrific amount of the information about grants and will be organized in different ways to facilitate easy use and we hope that because of all of the information the guarantees are usually required to put in an application will be in this directory that will lead to further efficiencies as well. >> does the highland street foundation think about addressing this problem that is identified with the grand freeport malaise. >> i was in development for ten years in my previous life. i know the challenges and i know

how hard it is and i wish i could say i have the answer for you and i can unfortunately a lot of the donors still operate in a very traditional mindset of we need to have extra files. and everything is on line. we let everybody have a password to the final so they can go in any time and change it. we keep it as simple as possible. we can decide what is really the basic material we need. so i hear it and i can empathize with it, but as you know it is the sort of ongoing challenge of how we change the tide with a lot of people how they look at its. >> one of the things we have observed and written about the challenge in much of the non-profit sector is often the funders and guarantees working on very similar issues are asked to measure themselves

differently because they ask for this level of measurement i think to the degree we can get shared measurement systems like the cultural the the project which at this point is something that many in number of different states and funds within the states are actually in the arts and culture field where nonprofits only need to enter their information once and the funders have agreed on basically what are the measures that they are going to be looking for in collaboration with the guarantees and is a much more efficient process and allows a much clearer and transparent understanding of progress being made some interesting progress on that front. there was another question back here. >> thanks so much. this is helpful. i appreciate this point about foundations looking at the unrestricted funds simplifying the process. but i can't that leslie started the presentation i saying ultimately you are looking the

impact comes of the nonprofit leader i'm more interested in looking not so much how simplify the process is such as are they really making the impact. as we are developing the list together let's work on together rather than at the end line coming up with a report. i would like the foundations to sit down with us and say okay where are we going to get and if we really look at ourselves as partners, let's put all of the people together. as we go into it because ultimately that's where we will see the impact and it's not about just supporting the charity is about seeing the impact that you've wonderfully talked about. >> great thoughts on the new ways of partnering so the foundations and profits can collaborative we achieve impact on that. >> i will say i agree with you i can get is all about relationships and partnerships and really having a good sense of what is going on the organization and not just getting in and you update once a

year. we created an community for nonprofits which its run a little bit differently than we work, we do on our side we pick the organizations that we think really have a project that can be accomplished in six months ago and they are paid directly by us. so we are involved in the project all the way from the beginning to the end and we can track it and be part of it and if it is going of course we can raise our hand and say we have to focus more on this. so we piloted it this year and i think we will be doubling the effort next year because it has worked well for us to get a sense of what is going on in that organization. >> i think we have to recognize the foundations and the others often give project support out of a think it is misguided but understandable the desire for the kind of accountability. if we limit our funding to this we will be able to tell whether we made any difference or not.

unfortunately, that has is sometimes crippling side effect in terms of how the nonprofits do the work. if instead you could agree on what you are trying to accomplish together and say we don't care how you use the money we care about the results. you know, another terrible consequence of the project support is this standard idea that's developed in the rating agencies and people get philanthropy and on the board of directors this idea that the smaller the overhead is the better the organization. and again, this is almost like looking at the organization as the end as opposed to the deeds you want done. and we don't care how much money we spent on overhead by a nonprofit, just as the founders of businesses don't care about that kid they care about the bottom line result to dividing we have to really continue to push the mind set just as leslie

lead it out in the construct which is a is all about impact. if you work back from there there are a lot of current practices people realize, as i think we did, rather belatedly i will admit, the way that we were finding the organizations was not particularly instrumental to what we said we wanted them to do. >> great, thanks. one more question. >> i think anybody that regularly is a contributor to charitable organizations find is that each year the list of organizations tends to grow and get along in the pressure to extend the list is constant. and yet what i'm hearing tonight from these six methods of approaching this is that there is a need to focus and concentrate and define your

purpose and goals which seem to me to contact the area of influence that you wish to have. paul, the boston foundation is involve tim health care and education and arts and disaster relief. any number of areas. how do you define the purpose of your organization in such a way that allows it to operate from so many different directions? what is the central focus? can you define that for us in terms of what your focus is that allows that a great number of different avenues? >> the community foundations are unusual in the breadth of their interest. many private foundations understandably narrow their

interests of wanting to go deep in a limited number of areas or perhaps a single interest to the donors or whatever. community foundations are very different because our mission is really a geographical. we have i think a very elegant mission statement but what it basically says is we want greater boston to be a better place with justice and opportunity for those who are here. we want it to be a vital and prosperous place. and as a community foundation, we are interested in the whole life of the community, and we are one of the few open windows where people have been able to come with ideas that may or may not have fit into priorities at the time. and so, we are involved in what from many points of view is far too many things. and the trustees to challenge us on this. now within that the breadth of interest, we have thanks to some of the things i've been

describing i think very sharp and focused priorities within our areas of understand the metrics. but if you are going to maintain that a breath of interest but you are going to have priority is where you really want to move the needle would just something you have to constantly reexamine. in this city if you look at the innovations that have been generated and the social sector and the city it's been important to have one kind of central charity at least with the open window that invitation that's been there for the community to come in and so we've got an idea for this thing called city or public television or we have this idea about neighborhood health centers and they are just an astonishing number of very important institution for a whole set of institutions that got their capital from the boston foundation. so i think that is a trade-off with the challenge, the

management and the kind of results challenge of having the breadth of interest that we have, but the other advantage if i can mention one other thing is it allows us to see the connections among things that are often lost in the world and that leads to some interesting things to give one example we are interested in returning robust arts education to schools. we've discovered that that intersects very strongly with our education agenda which is calling for more schools and a longer school day which no surprise creates room to do the things that have been squeezed out of the very rigid regular public school day for met and there are all sorts of things like that inside that i think we do get from being involved in many disciplines and fields. >> paul talk of the need for focus but also leaving open a window thinking about a sort of portfolio of ways that you

invest in the community. and i'm going to give you the final word in terms of how you think about being a catalytic and addressing this challenge to the need that we have all their but also thinking about how you stay focused. >> i agree with statements like one of the opportunities of living and working in a community such as ours is there is an opportunity to collaborate on some a different issues in the community, and so the foundation we have to be a little bit more focus on how our resources are being dirt in the community, but because we are under this sort of social service umbrella of what we are interested in, we can partner with the boston foundation on initiatives and we can partner with them on another foundation with the winter assistance grants and so you may not be able to make the size contribution financially that you would like to a specific

area of need but collectively if you join forces and partner and will get is strategically you can have a big impact and i think that is some of the programs we do together that we have been able to track and see the founders, the number of units created for the extremely low-income families is, you know, great collaboration among a lot of different foundations in the area. i think in terms of just not being hesitant to reach out to partnerships and forming the relationships, and to paul's earlier point, i think going to the state house and, again, sharing ideas and thoughts and forming the relationships of their, reaching out in whatever way that you can to address the cause and really wanting to make a difference in that area it's all about the organization getting credit or recognition or exposure. it's about coming together to address that need and what of revenue you can do that people should explore and not be afraid of that psp mcginn talking about your collaborations' and

networks and work with the boston foundation and others you covered the last practice we didn't talk about which is forging nonprofit networks so we got through all six practices in just under 40 minutes and paul and blake, first of all as a member of the boston community i want to thank both of you for the work of your foundations in making boston a better place and also i just want to thank you for sharing your wisdom and your insight and even your mistakes the group to fight so if we could have a hand for these two. [applause] in hearing from my colleague and partner, co-founder of fsg and probably in my mind the most prolific writer in the social sector today.

[applause] i think about a simon and garfunkel concert where they suggested their names ought to be listed in alphabetical order. we listed the names on the book in alphabetical order and so i am the third author and the last one you get to hear from and i will be very brief because i know that there are glasses of wine out there waiting for you. but i just want to acknowledge that what we are talking about here in the six practices of the high impact donors is kind of daunting. we are asking a lot of you, but i think what matters is not so much that you follow all six practices. i think any one of them that you adopt is helpful, makes you more effective as a donor but even apart from that i think what we are talking about is a different way of thinking about your role whether you are a donor or

running a nonprofit to read and i fink paul said it very eloquently when he talked of focusing on solving the problem. and, you know, money matters but it isn't about the money. and nonprofits matter, but it isn't about the nonprofits about what role you can play in really making a difference in solving the social problem. you know, the shocking data that poll showed us about where the money goes in health care and where it's needed and where it would make a difference. there are so many social issues out there that we just don't understand. we don't have the data, we don't have the information coming in as well meant as we are as donors and as hard as we work as nonprofit directors, unless we are focusing on the right aspects of the problem, we are not going to make progress. and so i think the principle behind the book really is to say

step back. think about the unique attributes you bring, the knowledge, skills, the networks, think about the role that you can play if you really focus in on a problem that you can do something about. it's kind of a spectator sport we sit back and write the checks and other people do the work. what we are talking about is being in the game as a player. and i think you'll find that while this harbor and is more work, it's a lot more rewarding to actually be in their willing of your sleeves, making a difference on an issue. certainly as i look around in this community, and indeed in this country, the urgency for us to find new ways of solving

social problems is greater than a certainly has ever been before in my lifetime and so i think we'll it to ourselves and the causes we care about and the community to step back and think about whether there isn't more we can do, not by digging deeper and writing bigger checks but by using the kebir devotee, our knowledge, our skills, our ability to the change occurs to make a difference if. thank you for being with us tonight. [applause]

some will say we are reactionary. others will say we stand for socialism. there will be the inevitable ties. it's time for a change and so on and so on. we will hear all of those things and many more but we will hear nothing that we have not heard before. >> as candidates campaign for president we look back at men who ran for the office and lost. go to our website common c-span.org/contenders to see who had a lasting impact on politics. >> to stand on the status quo while we seek to refresh the american spirit. [applause] let the opposition to collect their $10 million in secret money from the privileged few, and let us find 1 million ordinary americans who will contribute $25 each to