IMPACT - April 2008
Learning from the past, building for the future.
Janine Lee, a founding board member and previous chair of GEO, was working as a senior leader at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in the late 1990s. At the time, large numbers of nonprofits were coming to the foundation with requests for emergency grants – “just to keep their doors open,” Lee said.
Thinking there had to be a better way to support these organizations and help them become more sustainable, Lee sought out other grantmakers who were thinking differently about philanthropy. Almost immediately, she linked up with Barbara Kibbe, who was running the Organizational Effectiveness and Philanthropy Program at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
With a few other like-minded grantmakers joining in, Lee and Kibbe began talking about how to build more support in the field for capacity building, as well as for general operating support and other strategies aimed at helping nonprofits become more effective. It was out of those conversations that GEO was born.
“None of us imagined GEO would grow to the scale it is now,” Lee said, recalling how amazed she was when more than 100 people attended the first GEO conference. “Sometimes, you just have to catch the tail of a comet and go,” she said.
A Forward-Looking Change Agenda
Now, ten years later, GEO has more than 1500 individual members representing 300 grantmaking organizations. In San Francisco, the organization unveiled an ambitious change agenda and refined mission. Among the priority issues for GEO looking forward: leadership development; learning for results; supporting nonprofit capital structures; and inclusiveness and stakeholder engagement.
Current GEO board members Dara Major and Gregg Behr joined Lee on the pre-session panel to offer their take on GEO’s change agenda and future plans. Major, formerly of the Surdna Foundation, highlighted the importance of GEO’s ongoing work to provide grantmakers with new tools and information to help them respond to the urgent fiscal challenges facing nonprofits today.
Citing a recent Center for Effective Philanthropy study showing that most foundation funding is awarded in small, restricted, short-term grants, Major said: “This approach causes all kinds of constraints for nonprofits. And so the question for GEO is how do we encourage a new awareness of those constraints, and of what needs to happen within our funding institutions to change the paradigm.”
Behr, president of the Grable Foundation, spoke to the importance that GEO has placed on inclusiveness as a priority for philanthropy. He noted that the field has reached consensus that diversity is a “net good” but that GEO wants to push the issue further. “We want to look at diversity in terms of it being not just a good thing to do but an effective thing to do,” he said. Among the questions at the heart of GEO’s future work: how incorporating diverse voices in philanthropy can improve results for foundations and the nonprofits they support.