Monday, March 5, 2012

Are Foundations Creating Barriers to Positive Change?

This is a great article from TruthOut about why the environmental movement is failing (their words not mine - I'd say falling short but not "failing").  The key focus of the article is aimed encouraging grant makers and funders to re-think how they give and and how they measure success. While the article focuses on the environmental movement, I think many points translate to animal protection movement as well. 


Here is excerpt. "In his important monograph Just Another Emperor: The Myths and Realities of Philanthrocapitalism, former Ford Foundation director Michael Edwards cautions that one of the downsides of increasingly infusing the nonprofit world with business ideals is that social change organizations are expected to churn out good, quarterly metrics. Extreme advocates of these ideas expect social change organizations to report mounds of data and compete with one another for funding based on "numbers" and "deliverables." 


Read more here