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Learning from Foundations' Mistakes - Nonprofit Quarterly
webnonprofitquarterly.org·nonprofitquarterly.org/learning-from-foundations-mistakes/
Tangentially relevant to AI safety governance discussions around philanthropic funding; offers general lessons on institutional accountability that may apply to AI safety funders like Open Philanthropy.
Metadata
Importance: 22/100opinion pieceanalysis
Summary
This Nonprofit Quarterly article examines common errors made by philanthropic foundations in their grantmaking and strategic approaches, drawing lessons that can improve institutional effectiveness. It analyzes patterns of failure in foundation decision-making and offers frameworks for more accountable, adaptive philanthropy. The piece is relevant to any large institutional funder, including those in AI safety philanthropy.
Key Points
- •Foundations often repeat avoidable mistakes due to insufficient feedback loops and lack of honest self-assessment
- •Power imbalances between funders and grantees can distort information flow, masking failures from foundation leadership
- •Strategic overconfidence and theory-of-change rigidity can cause foundations to persist with ineffective programs
- •Transparency and external accountability mechanisms are key to institutional learning and course correction
- •Lessons from philanthropic mistakes are broadly applicable to mission-driven institutions funding complex social challenges
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| William and Flora Hewlett Foundation | Organization | 55.0 |
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# Foundations Embrace Failure: Real Lessons Learned
##### [Rick Cohen](https://nonprofitquarterly.org/author/rcohen51/ "Posts by Rick Cohen")
March 23, 2011
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_“This is the story of a philanthropic initiative that did not meet the expectations of its many stakeholders. Given the challenging social problems that foundations and our grantees try to solve, we should expect that we will often fail to achieve our shared aspirations. When this happens, we should seize the opportunity to understand the causes in order to improve our own performance and benefit other working in the field.”—From the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation report, Hard Lessons about Philanthropy & Community Change from the Neighborhood Improvement Initiative_
The Hewlett Foundation report ( [PDF](https://hewlett_prod.acesfconsulting.com/uploads/files/HewlettNIIReport.pdf)) quoted from above is widely seen as candidly self-critical on the foundation’s $20 million comprehensive community initiative with language in the foundation president’s cover letter describing one of the site’s self-destruction and calling the entire effort a “ [great disappointment](https://www.hewlett.org/what-we-re-learning/evaluating-our-work/hard-lessons-about-philanthropy-community-change).” More recently, Hewlett held what appears to be an [internal competition](https://pndblog.typepad.com/pndblog/2011/01/foundations-fail-at-failing.html) among its grantmaking departments for each to identify one grant that fell short of expectations and provide an analysis of what went wrong and what the foundation should learn from the experience.
Other foundations and other institutions are increasingly congratulating themselves for their new openness to “embracing failure” – being willing to talk about mistakes, admit them, and try to learn from them. Examples of proponents of learning from failure include the Annie E. Casey Foundation (as evidenced by Casey VP Robert Giloth’s edited volume, _Mistakes to Success_( [PDF](https://www.hudson.org/files/publications/Mistakes%20to%20Success%20transcript.pdf%29,)), the [Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation](https://blog.ncrp.org/2009/06/learning-from-mistakes-bill-melinda.html), the [Case Foundation](https://www.casefoundation.org/blog/painful-acknowledgement-coming-short), the [William and Flora Hewlett Foundation](https://www.hewlett.org/newsroom/newsletter/foun
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