NATIONAL CIVIC REVIEW, vol. 87, no. 2, Summer 1998 © Jossey-Bass Publishers 111

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Strategic Grantmaking andCommunity Building

Building community is a central and critical challenge of our time. Resilient,creative communities, made strong by encouraging and valuing the contri-butions of diverse citizens, are essential to our remaining a strong, resilient,creative people who protect and value human freedom and human responsi-bility.

Rapid change and strong societal forces are threatening to break downAmerica’s communities. The traditional community of place and its residents’sense of calling it home are further affected by the redefinition of communitythat is now occurring, encompassing “communities of interest” such as thatfostered by the Internet and other alternatives. In the midst of these develop-ments, an unexpected new pressure on communities is the devolution of deci-sion-making authority for welfare and other federally funded programs.Devolution suddenly transferred more responsibilities to largely unpreparedcommunities and their states.

Many people in communities are striving today to rise to this challenge ofour time. Many foundations are trying to find how best to invest their dollarsto support building community. Together, community builders and their sup-porters are seeking ways to achieve lasting, significant impact. They seek notonly protection and preservation but healing, renewal, and more: an explosionof meaning and satisfaction in human social relationships, a bounty of com-mon human enterprise for the good of all.

Community builders and their supporters face daunting barriers. Today,walls are both a metaphor and a concrete expression of how we divide ourselvesin the face of the conditions of modern life, rather than unite. The walls nowrising in America are the physical image of division. The walls of prisons—thestates’ growth industry, creating economic security for towns wherever new onesare built—lock people up. The walls of gated communities—also on the rise—lock people out. Children grow up behind both. In Oklahoma City, childrendied as walls came tumbling down in the destruction of an entire edifice, moti-vated by fear and hatred.

Just as people in communities and grantmakers both are striving toachieve effective community building, they both are also learning. This learn-ing is vital because more than will and goodwill are needed to build communi-ties in the face of the powerful changes, forces, and divisions breaking themdown. Skill is also necessary.

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Philanthropy can make significant contributions to developing, applying,and transferring skills and knowledge to attain and sustain positive and trans-formative community change. Foundations are increasingly giving communi-ties more than dollars for projects. They are facilitating positive change by alsosupporting technical assistance, leadership development, networking, facilita-tion of planning and visioning, communications, action-oriented research, andpolicy education for, by, or on behalf of communities’ projects.

Communities can and do teach other communities. Communities that aretesting and implementing strategies for problem solving and positive changecan become learning laboratories for change agents in other communities, aswell as learning laboratories for researchers, educators, students, evaluators,print and electronic journalists, and policy makers at all levels. Foundationscan support the learning-laboratory function.

A number of mainstream foundations, including the W. K. Kellogg Foun-dation, are concentrating on strategic planning, strategic grantmaking, andstrategic evaluation. Strategic, an overworked word, refers to multiplying theimpact and the good from funded projects by connecting them into largerefforts and other arenas. One purpose of strategic grantmaking is to increasethe power of community-based demonstrations to inform the field and informpolicy. The combination of what people in communities are actually doing andwhat decisions public and private sector policy makers are making can con-tribute to moving tested problem-solving strategies into the mainstream.

Another purpose of strategic grantmaking is to increase the likelihood thatthe funded project progresses on a sound course of development and ultimatelyis institutionalized and sustained within the community. Several foundationsare striving to learn how community change occurs and how charitable invest-ments, technical assistance, and leadership development can be timed and tai-lored to stages of change so as to provide greatest support for both immediateand long-term success of what a community is trying to accomplish.

In the course of giving communities more than checks, foundations makegrants to organizations with special skills, knowledge, and networks suitableto supporting communities. Two such organizations are the Center for Com-munity Change (represented by Pablo Eisenberg in this issue of the Review)and Cherish Our Indian Children, a grassroots organization in Montana.

In the course of being strategic, we at the Kellogg Foundation do not wantto miss what is bubbling up in communities. We have a tradition of respon-sive grantmaking, and we strive to ensure that we continue to practice it. Webelieve an essential part of the art of strategic grantmaking is to preserveresponsiveness and avoid top-down prescription of a template for funded pro-jects.

Because seeking to be strategic pushes grantmakers toward designing mul-tiproject initiatives—always with defined purposes and often launched withrequests for proposals—there is a tension between remaining responsive andgrowing more strategic. At the foundation, we manage that tension by pur-

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posefully including unsolicited proposals strictly generated from the field inthe mix of our grants. Further, we gain some of our learning by funding andevaluating clusters of projects that are grouped together because they arebroadly similar rather than because they were proposed under a single RFP.Finally, even in initiative programming announced through RFPs, we seek torecognize, honor, encourage, and trust the uniqueness of the approaches andsolutions of each community to its own problems.

Each community owns its problems and its solutions. At the same time,communities around the nation have interests in common in the broad socialcontext, and issues as well as public and private policies that explain or con-tribute to their problems and either impede or facilitate their solution. Foun-dations and other grantmakers can help communities each pursue uniquesolutions but also band together to share approaches and to address social,marketplace, and public policies that mutually affect them.

In a small way, this role of philanthropy is evident in several foundations’support for the National Civic League’s meeting on the Role of Philanthropy inBuilding Community. The Kellogg Foundation also supported the attendanceof grassroots community builders to enrich the dialogue. We are supportingexpanded distribution of this issue of the Review in order to bring more peo-ple into the dialogue.

At the Kellogg Foundation, our journey to strategic grantmaking has beena journey of learning. I tell the story from the perspective of health program-ming, for that is my field, but it is the story of the foundation as a whole.

Will Keith Kellogg formed the foundation in 1930. He was influenced inhis thinking about what to do with his fortune by attending a White Houseconference on children and youth. Saying “I will invest my money in people,”he established the mission to help people help themselves. These are powerfulideas. Mr. Kellogg was a visionary.

These ideas last. We remain faithful to them today. The vision in them isthat people are innately, fundamentally valuable and capable, and that peoplehave the capacity to solve their own problems. The work was with people incommunities from day one, for example helping those in rural southwesternMichigan counties establish local public health departments and consolidateschool districts.

Helping people help themselves through community-based solutions isvery labor-intensive work. The grants may be comparatively small, in relationto the kinds of grants often made to large institutions. The community-basedorganizations may, similarly, be comparatively small. In the mid-1980s, thehealth programming division of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation undertook acourse of such labor-intensive work to help communities focus on solvingproblems for particular groups: the elderly; adolescents; and mothers, infants,and young children.

One of the significant lessons we learned was that some communities’ workevolved on its own from problem-focused models to more comprehensive

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approaches. This evolution was an indicator of both capacity and need to meetbroader problems for more people and make broader linkages. Learning fromour fieldwork, we began to realize that community-based efforts needed to beconnected to larger resource bases while still retaining their community-basedcharacter. The larger resource bases were necessary for increased comprehen-siveness and for sustainability. By the same token, institutional efforts clearlyneeded to be linked to community organizations to be meaningful, effective,and sustained.

Our own thinking in health programming evolved to an understandingthat lasting solutions required the expertise and resources of both communi-ties and institutions. Our concept moved from the community-based, prob-lem-focused model to the community-institutional partnership, entailingapproaches of broader scope. Community organizations and large institutionsare not necessarily natural allies and usually have little experience in partner-ing together. Thus we found ourselves moving toward working strategically tofoster exploration in the field of new possibilities and new relationships with-out forcing false, time-limited connections between communities and institu-tions that did not last beyond the life of the grant.

We have seen many exciting results. For example, the health professionsschool at East Tennessee State University formed new relationships with rural,medically underserved communities in which the immediate task was todevelop the infrastructure and arrangements for medical and nursing studentsto train together in outlying areas. When the students, the people in the com-munities, and the faculty and administration of the institution had to deal withtheir issues together, they formed bonds; learned lessons; and came to mutualtrust, valuing, and understanding not otherwise possible. Their work togetherhas now evolved into creation of an actual system of care.

With the coming of devolution, the Kellogg Foundation saw the need fora new departure in how we encourage communities and institutions to cometogether. Traditionally, we do not fund research. We saw, however, that peoplein communities could be ill-equipped to respond to both devolved govern-mental responsibilities and the impact of major changes in federal law. Theycould benefit from research with a fast turnaround time, in order to inform andaddress the new decision making by localities and states. But they certainlycould not buy the research themselves or its translation into terms meaning-ful to community people and community issues.

The foundation’s devolution initiative involves several programming areas,including health. Through it, the foundation is fostering a network of part-nerships among state and community citizens’ organizations on the one hand,and national research institutes and policy education organizations on theother. The intent is to gather and analyze accurate and timely informationabout the impact of devolution on programs and people, and to translate andtransfer that information into the hands of people in communities tostrengthen their capacity to participate in informed public decision making.

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The devolution initiative is, we believe, one of our strongest responses tothe issue explored in this edition of the National Civic Review: the proper roleand effective contribution of philanthropy to building community.

GLORIA SMITH

GUEST EDITOR

Gloria Smith is vice president for programs in health at the W. K. Kellogg Foundation.

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