How'er We Doin'?
When Ed Koch
was Mayor of New York City a decade ago, he frequently asked New
Yorkers, "How'm I doin'?" With a simple, open-ended
query, he invited his constituents to reflect on his performance.
Whether or not he always took their responses to heart is unclear,
but simply by asking the question he communicated an interest
in their views - and an interest in measuring his success as Mayor.
As a rule,
foundations don't ask for feedback about how they're doing - and
very few public critics offer it. It is not in the self-interest
of grantees or grantseekers, or other foundations, for that matter,
to criticize program design. Moreover, since foundations generally
do not set specific, measurable goals for their grantmaking, it
is hard even for them to gain a clear sense of their accomplishments,
disappointments, and, yes, failures. But for all the inherent
difficulties, it still seems important at some level to ask ourselves,
reflectively, the Ed Koch question: "How'er we doin'?"
What are we
accomplishing as a non-profit venture capitalist? What long-term
challenges has this Foundation chosen to address? How valid are
the strategies we are pursuing? Are we making a difference? Some
checkpoints follow:
The emergent
science of conservation biology tells us that landscapes must
remain connected if Nature's integrity is to be sustained. If
we break Nature into terrestrial "islands" through
sprawl and super highways - barriers to wildlife movements -
species will vanish and ecological functions will be compromised
or lost. In 1996, we began to invest in the Yellowstone to Yukon
(Y2Y) Conservation Initiative. This effort covers a 2,000-mile
stretch of the Northern Rockies with the long-term goal of preserving
a balanced, sustainable future for all of its species,
human and otherwise.
Interim progress
after five years appears positive: new biological research is
supporting the vision of landscape connectivity; in 2000, the
National Geographic Society published Yellowstone to Yukon
in its Destinations Series, recognizing the region as a distinctive
place; more than a dozen foundations are investing in the Y2Y
conservation concept; public agencies and private land trusts
are beginning to engage the logic of the Y2Y landscape strategy;
and an active U.S./Canadian transboundary network of some 160
conservation activists is flourishing.
Will the strategy
of "landscape connectivity" succeed in the face of
expanding, invasive human developments in the Rockies? Only if
local communities recognize the long-term value of the ecological
richness that surrounds them.
Grade: Encouraging and provocative,
but much work remains.
The Northern
Appalachian landscape (also known in the U.S.- but obviously not
in Canada -as the "Northern Forest") is divided into
the artificial jurisdictions of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine,
Québec and New Brunswick. The Kendall Foundation invested
in science last year to try to begin to understand this shared
U.S./Canadian transboundary region in terms of Nature's needs.
With this knowledge, we will likely become longer-term investors
in a vision to keep this bi-national landscape connected (for
Nature) over generations to come.
Grade: A hopeful beginning.
.
Our research in the mid-1990s
exposed the reality that America's national parks are severely
underfunded and their natural resources and physical infrastructure
are deteriorating. This is an anomaly: Americans love their national
parks, but Congress has been starving the parks relative to their
maintenance needs. Another surprise: the national parks are declining
before our eyes, but few Americans recognize this.
We engaged
the financing challenge and, through the National Parks Conservation
Association and the National Park Service (NPS), created the Business
Plan Initiative to strengthen and legitimize the case for added
funding. For the last four years Kendall and several other foundations
have funded graduate MBA and Public Policy students to assist
in developing "business plans" for key units of the
nearly 400 NPS sites. These student "consultants" have
distinguished themselves. A proven strategy is now in place to
bring modern financial analytical techniques to a $2 billion public
agency. Senior officials in the Bush Administration and key Representatives
and Senators are now calling for these "business plans".
The success of this initiative will be measured in increased
public funding for vital national park needs.
Grade: A promising
public policy innovation.
.
Marine ecosystems have been hammered around
the world as fish stocks have been plundered by fishing fleets
relying on new technologies to "vacuum" the ocean. Regulators
have failed to regulate for sustainability. Through a series of
grants dating back to 1994, the Kendall Foundation has supported
many community-based groups and marine conservation organizations
on both the U.S. and Canadian sides of the border.
Our grants
have been exploratory, reactive, and perhaps too often lacking
in strategic vision. In hindsight, we cannot say in what ways
we have achieved success in marine conservation, though we have
been one of the few foundations consistently active in this field.
This assessment
has led us to develop a new strategy for the health and vitality
of the Gulf of Maine's ecosystem. We are now seeking to build
a Canadian/American initiative that focuses more directly upon
local knowledge and recognizes that marine resources must increasingly
be managed on smaller scales.
Grade: A slow start, but charting
a new course.
.
Persuaded that global warming and
climate change currently represent the greatest threat to our
way of life on this planet, and frustrated that the Kyoto Protocol
to reduce greenhouse gases was going nowhere in Washington, we
started a regional climate change program in 2000. Our approach
includes all components of "civil society" - cities
and towns, schools, hospitals, manufacturers, retailers, wholesalers,
faith-based organizations, etc.- in a broad-based, voluntary effort
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The operational center for
this endeavor is Clean Air-Cool Planet, Inc. based in Portsmouth,
NH.
This initiative
is nearly two years old and it is much too early to look for returns
on investment. But given national political obstinacy on this
issue, we sense real political potential in a regional approach.
While we could be wrong, we believe that eventually the entire
country will be forced to abide by emission restrictions that
are even more stringent than those set in the Kyoto Protocol-and
New England could lead the way.
Grade: The sky's the limit.
.
Our focus on national watershed
management innovations may be at once our most ambitious, and
possibly least successful, venture of the last decade. Knowing
that nearly everything that takes place on land is registered
in the quality of the water, we designed and funded a series of
national workshops - in California, Washington, Florida, and Massachusetts
- involving watershed association leaders and state agency representatives
with the aim of energizing a national dialogue centered on watersheds
as the focus for citizen-based conservation initiatives.
We continue
to believe that fresh water will be the defining resource constraint
in the twenty-first century, but we may have missed the mark in
our attempt to bolster a national watershed movement comprised
of citizen stewards. Until clean water shortages reach crisis
proportions - which may happen sooner than most people anticipate
- it appears that Americans will not be motivated to protect their
watersheds. While we are convinced that we have supported some
useful individual contributions to watershed protection, we expected
more from this philanthropic venture. It could be that our timing
was off.
Grade: A somewhat disappointing incomplete.
.
With counsel from many
savvy participants at several "hearings" in 1996, four
Massachusetts foundations (Cox, Island, John Merck and Kendall)
created the New England Grassroots Environment Fund (NEGEF). NEGEF
supports community and neighborhood environmental activists who
normally cannot be reached by our foundations. To date NEGEF has
made more than 500 grants (of up to $2,500 each) to small groups
throughout New England for purposes ranging from sprawl to energy
conservation to solid waste dump sitings. In addition, it provides
coaching, technical assistance, training, and networking to help
these groups leverage their passion with new skills and connections
to statewide and regional resources-and to each other. NEGEF is
now independently chartered, professionally staffed, and funded
by no fewer than seventeen foundations.
Grade: Vibrant and
growing.
So, "how'er we doin'?" What
seems like a simple question yields far more than a simple answer.
As many of our colleagues in the grantmaking community know,
environmental investments require insight, patience, flexibility,
and commitment. Along the path of disappointment and encouraging
surprises, we continue to explore avenues for improvement. In
our effort to get it right, we'll try to remember that the nature
of Nature's challenges demands that we often and critically
ask, "How'er we doin'?"
Theodore M.
Smith
Executive Director
July, 2002
|
