2006 Annual Meeting - Philanthropy: Art or Science?
Keynote Address: Dr. Emmett Carson, President & CEO,
The Minneapolis Foundation
Dr. Emmett Carson’s
biography
Dr. Carson opened the program portion of AGM’s annual meeting
by taking on the question of Philanthropy: Art or Science? He
addressed this theme in three parts:
• Why this question matters
• How the current love affair with philanthropy as science
is both helping and hurting the field
• Why we need more art in philanthropy.
He began by noting that this question is important because how
we see ourselves and how we practice our art has a direct impact
on how people see us. It also influences how we explain what a
“successful” grant is, and, indeed, why we gave particular
groups grants at all.
Art, he said, bets on people. It is innovative, creative, transformative
and subjective. He pointed to various objects and paintings in
the gallery where we were seated, noting that you look at these
works of art and you either love them or hate them – there
is nothing in between. Art speaks to you at a fundamental level.
The problem with philanthropy as art though, is that you cannot
convince someone of beauty. You either believe or you don’t
believe. There was a hey day of philanthropy as art – an
era of big ideas and sometimes spectacular failures. The need
to convince both ourselves and others of philanthropy’s
importance and success began leading us toward philanthropy of
science.
Science, which measures, looks at cause and effect, effectiveness,
numbers and outcomes is also important. It has helped us ask the
important question of how do we know something worked? How do
we know we are having a positive impact? These are important questions
to ask ourselves and our field.
But we must be careful that we not allow science to narrow us.
Too often, science in philanthropy – in terms of evaluation
and outcome measures – is being used to say “no.”
Grantees are being asked to measure everything and some foundations
are restricting their grantmaking to those things which can be
measured.
It is also important to leery of benchmarking – the current
practice of measuring one “foundation’s effectiveness”
against other foundations’ surveys of grantee perceptions,
etc. As Dr. Carson put it, “If you are the best of the worst,
you are still bad.” And, in that same vein of looking at
funder-grantee relations, there is a fundamental question that
needs to be answered: are grantees customers or vendors? These
are two different relationships and should be measured with different
tools.
Finally, he noted, we should be careful about how we’re
incorporating “science” into philanthropy, because
we fundamentally don’t believe it. For example, if we really
believed science, a grantee that was wildly successful would get
their grant tripled. We would look at that success and reward
it. Instead, it is more likely that grantees who do very well
on their grants will have their grants tapered down.
In the concluding section of his address, Dr. Carson made the
analogy of philanthropy as a domesticated elephant. He talked
about how elephants in the wild are unstoppable. Big bulls will
measure their foreheads against massive trees, back up and then
crack! bring the trees crashing to the ground. No other predators
– not lions, rhinos or anything else – get in the
way of elephants.
Elephants raised by humans, however, are tethered from a very
early age, so they learn that the rope around their ankle makes
it impossible to move. Then, even as they get older and much bigger
– to the point where they could pull up the rope and stake
– they have been conditioned to associate that rope with
an inability to move, so all you have to do is tie a rope around
the elephant’s ankle and it will stay there passively.
Philanthropy in this country, concluded Dr. Carson, is a domesticated
elephant, hobbled by public opinion, threats of legislation, etc.
Instead, philanthropy needs to emulate bumble bees (who fly even
when the best aerodynamic engineers say that their bodies should
make it impossible to fly at all), and butterflies (who can flap
their wings in Asia and cause a tornado half a world away). We,
as a field, need to exhibit the energy and vision of bumble bees
and butterflies. We need art, creativity and passion.
That isn’t to say that there isn’t a place for science
as well. Science makes real what artists can dream. Philanthropy
needs to be about the dream as well as the means to that dream.
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