I have written before about the importance of developing an honest and engaged partnership between nonprofit boards and staff leadership. Unfortunately, we sometimes see stark reminders of the tragic costs when such a partnership is lacking. The Penn State tragedy is such a case. I recently authored an op-ed in the Chronicle of Philanthropy to encourage nonprofit leaders to learn from this tragedy and do everything in their power to ensure that it never happens again. The full text of that op-ed is reprinted below. You can read it on the Chronicle website here. I welcome your comments.

Posted on The Chronicle of Philanthropy website on July 16, 2012

Damage Done by a Culture of Deference: Leadership Lessons From the Penn State Tragedy
By James E. Canales

The child-abuse scandal that unfolded at Penn State University over the past decade and half is a tragedy of epic proportions. Nobody can disagree with that after the report last week by the former FBI director Louis Freeh provided clear evidence that the crimes committed by Jerry Sandusky could have and should have been averted.

What is particularly distressing in reading the 267-page report is how the lessons nonprofit leaders should have learned from previous scandals continue to go unheeded.

As we gather this week to see fireworks and enjoy picnics, we also might pause to reflect on what it means to celebrate the Fourth of July in California. In many ways, our state epitomizes the vision of America: a land of immigrants, a place of opportunity, an openness to change and innovation. While the state of California possesses the diversity — in people, landscapes and economies — of a large country, we’re also a place with residents who share many of the same aspirations and values.

A recent series of reports, Looking Forward, from USC’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII) and the California Immigrant Policy Center provide an interesting snapshot of California’s population. I was struck by two facts in particular: 48% of California’s children have at least one immigrant parent and 43% of Californians speak a language other than English at home. It’s also notable that immigrants comprise more than one-third of California’s labor force (34%), they are more likely to be employed than non-immigrants, and they are more likely to create their own jobs through self-employment than native born workers.

On a related topic, CSII’s new report on young adult immigrants engaged in civic organizations reveals that they share the educational and employment aspirations of other young Californians, while expressing greater optimism about their own potential to “make a difference in the broader society” through their civic involvement.

As we celebrate where we live this month, it seems our trademark optimism and entrepreneurial spirit not only endure, but also regenerate.

While a number of individual foundations have long focused on assessing the impact of their grants, in recent years the field of philanthropy as a whole has become more interested in this challenging aspect of foundation work. In that context, we were glad to contribute an article in the current issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR), as part of a special supplement sponsored by the Aspen Institute Program on Philanthropy and Social Innovation on “Advancing Evaluation Practices in Philanthropy.” The supplement includes a variety of perspectives on this important and complex subject.

In the article, my colleague Kevin Rafter and I describe our approach to assessing Irvine’s performance using a framework we developed in collaboration with our board of directors eight years ago. The framework provides a method to evaluate our impact across the Foundation, focusing in large part on our programmatic work but also acknowledging that there are other ways to assess the Foundation’s performance. Our SSIR article discusses the lessons we have learned from our foundation-wide approach to performance assessment, and the challenges we continue to face in doing this work.

Social justice organizing is a complex undertaking every step of the way. And as we look back at victories, figuring out which factors contributed to success can be difficult. So, I and many others welcomed the clear, succinct and compelling account of two decades of organizing in Los Angeles after the 1992 civil unrest recently published by the University of Southern California Program for Environmental & Regional Equity and Liberty Hill Foundation.

Their report, “L.A. Rising: The 1992 Civic Unrest, the Arc of Social Justice Organizing, and the Lessons for Today’s Movement Building,” captures how organizing strategies and institutions evolved during these decades, and distills ten innovative elements of the organizing approaches that were critical to their success. While these elements emerge from the realities of Los Angeles, they certainly can be applied to today’s public engagement efforts in the Central Valley, Inland Empire and elsewhere in California. I also was gratified to see that the authors shared implications for funders of social justice organizing, identifying practices that best sustain the ongoing involvement of residents in shaping their communities.

Having just returned from the Council on Foundations’ annual conference this past week in Los Angeles, I was able to join with 1,300 of my colleagues in philanthropy to discuss the challenges and trends we are seeing. Not surprisingly, there was a great deal of conversation about the economy, growing income disparities, the effects of federal and state budget cuts, increasing polarization in our public discourse and other issues of shared concern. At the same time, there were some important, common themes that emerged and that serve as good reminders for how we can continue to enhance philanthropy’s contribution to addressing these various challenges.

One particularly resonant theme throughout the conference related to the power of storytelling. Good stories can shine a spotlight on our grantees’ successes and on the issues we care most about. Most importantly, stories might be the most effective way to encourage others to join us in forging solutions. The power of stories was evident in the conference’s opening video of rebuilding and recovery in Los Angeles, New Orleans and Detroit, showing the central role that philanthropy can play in rebuilding after crises and strengthening communities in the process.

I was reminded of the video’s images of communities working together when PolicyLink’s Angela Glover Blackwell spoke in Tuesday morning’s session on America’s vanishing middle class. Angela is a powerful voice in the national discourse on social justice and she dramatically advocated for society to see the widening gap between the “haves” and “have-nots” as the nation’s problem: “What happens to the people who the country has been too comfortable leaving behind will shape the future of our country,” she remarked, an important reminder of the need to include the disadvantaged in our ongoing narrative about the changing economy. (Please watch a video of Angela commenting on her panel, along with other Irvine grantees who were interviewed about the conference.)

This week, I had the privilege of attending the first-ever National Philanthropic Briefing on the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Community at the White House. The briefing was initiated by the Obama administration through the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, co-chaired by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Assistant to the President and Cabinet Secretary Christopher Lu.

The initiative is part of the administration’s efforts to address economic and social challenges facing the AAPI community, and improve the quality of life and opportunities for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. The historic gathering was attended by more than 170 philanthropic and administration leaders, including colleagues from the California Community Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Liberty Hill Foundation and many others. The purpose was to dialogue and strategize on six critical issues: healthy communities; immigrant integration; housing, economic and community development; civil and human rights; arts and culture; and educational opportunities.

Irvine’s Board of Directors recently took time at their annual retreat to pose the question: What will the most effective foundations of the future look like? On hand to enliven the discussion were three leading experts in the field:

Lucy Bernholz, a highly regarded philanthropy blogger and managing director of Arabella Philanthropic Investment Advisors, discussed forecasts about the social economy that were contained in her Blueprint 2012 report. The social economy, as Bernholz defines it, expands the traditional concept of the space between government and commerce where philanthropy and nonprofits reside to include all of the ways we use private resources to create, fund and distribute public goods. In short, it refers to all the ways that we direct private resources to public goods and Bernholz sees great potential for innovation and collaboration within the field.

Brad Smith, president of the Foundation Center, emphasized the growing importance of data collection, analysis and evaluation within the field of philanthropy. One practice of the best foundations of the future, according to Brad, will be to utilize systems that provide timely and comprehensive data at a global level, leading to increased transparency and an increased ability to identify peers and collaborators on issues.

As part of our Special Initiatives grantmaking, we fund research on occasion that can help us understand the trends and issues facing the nonprofit sector. After all, we can only accomplish our mission through the hard work of the nonprofit organizations that we partner with. Understanding the nonprofit environment helps us do a better job of aligning our grant support with their needs and opportunities.

A great example of Irvine-funded research along these lines was released on January 31 by the UCLA Center for Civil Society. Since 2003 the center has published annual reports on the state of the nonprofit sector in Los Angeles; this year’s report focused on how the recession is affecting  human service organizations. The report, Stressed and Stretched: The Recession, Poverty and Human Services Nonprofits in Los Angeles, shows how reduced revenues from government and individuals has caused nonprofits to do more with less at a time when the number of Angelenos in need of social services is growing. Nonprofits serving the lowest income neighborhoods, and those serving African Americans in particular, have been hardest hit.

Note: This chart excludes special opportunity and discretionary grants, memberships, sponsorships and foundation-administered projects.

We now have three years of data about our grantmaking to low-income and diverse communities. These data show that the Foundation has been consistently focusing just over half our grants on low-income people and/or communities of color. However, we also see variations year to year and by program area. Many of these variations are a result of multiyear grants that are awarded in one year but where activity continues for several years into the future.