Philanthropic Leadership in Uncertain Times (Skoll)

Highlights from a confernce attended by Dan Crisafulli from Skoll on the future of philanthropy

"In light of my philanthropic audience, I emphasized the importance of core operating support in scaling innovation. Providing core support that is aligned with an organization's strategy for maximizing impact – rather than project funding that can distract and distort – is probably the biggest thing a foundation can do to help build a scalable institution. "How big would Microsoft be if Bill Gates had to create different products for each of his investors?" I asked.

Another speaker evoked the collective power – in support of innovation - that would be unleashed if foundations applied 100 percent of their balance sheets toward impact, rather than the more typical 5 percent. A quite reasonable suggestion, against which you'll find no argument here.

As a closing note, I encouraged foundations to approach social entrepreneurs with a healthy dose of humility. Posing the question, "does social innovation originate with foundation officers?", I encouraged the audience to look beyond deterministic, top-down models of social change and instead think about empowering the innovators. Well-intentioned as we may be, we're only investors in innovation – social entrepreneurs have the solutions.