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Role Models of Rigor and Vision

Barbara Kibbe and The Skoll Foundation

By Michael C. Gilbert, June 2005

This article was first published in the June issue of the Nonprofit Online News Journal.
 

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I have been a fan of Barbara Kibbe since she first started making a splash at the Packard Foundation in the mid nineties. By the time I came down to her part of the world to do the opening keynote for the Silicon Valley Conference on Nonprofits and Technology in 1998, her position as Director of the Organizational Effectiveness and Philanthropy Program at Packard put her smack in the middle of the field. She would eventually direct over $100 million of capacity building funding, much of it related to technology, leaving a legacy of vision and critical thinking across the sector.

She is now taking that vision in new directions as Vice President for Program and Effectiveness at The Skoll Foundation. It was an honor to meet her for the first time back in 1998, and to finally catch up with her this Spring, to learn more about her new work, and share a little bit of it with you.

Ms Kibbe spoke in glowing terms about The Skoll Foundation and its founder, Jeff Skoll. He went to school with Pierre Omidyar of eBay and was the first employee of the company. He founded The Skoll Foundation in 1999 and continues his own social entrepreneurship with projects such as Participant Productions, which finances movies that make a difference.

Looking at The Skoll Foundation web site, I found myself immediately taken with them. Just the definition of "Social Entrepreneur" that is found on every page delighted me: "society's change agent: pioneer of innovations that benefit humanity". I have been dissappointed in the past to see the closely related term "Social Enterprise" usurped by the invaluable, but narrower concept of income generating businesses owned by nonprofits. So, it was fantastic to see Social Entrepreneurship developed with rich and interesting terms, including: ambitious, mission driven, strategic, resourceful, and results oriented.

In her work at Skoll, Ms Kibbe oversees two areas. She directs the Social Sector Program and is responsible for initiatives related to the effectiveness of the foundation itself. She also continues to write for the field and serve on the board of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. The following is drawn from my recent conversations with Kibbe, and various related web sites.
 

Social Sector Program

Ms Kibbe's work on the Skoll Social Sector program reflects her longstanding commitment to the infrastructure of civil society. There are no programmatic "silos" at Skoll, no exclusive geographic focus, and no specific "issue" focus. For me, that means that they have a chance to work against the atomization that plagues our sector. For her, it means they have the flexibility to tackle systemic issues.

She said she was pleased with the freedom she has at Skoll to build new areas of knowledge, along with the pathways or vehicles for putting them to use. In her work at Skoll, sometimes this takes the form of new organizations or initiatives, sometimes new infrastructure or technology, and sometimes straightforward capacity building grants. You can get a great snapshot of this diversity by looking at Skoll's 2005 Social Sector Grantees. Ms Kibbe and her colleagues work to support visionary people who may not yet have scaled their efforts in an atmosphere of experimentation and risk.

I found a few grants in their Social Sector program to be of particular interest to me: Skoll is funding the development of new assessment tools and comparative data on philanthropy through the Center for Effective Philanthropy, to which I have previously pointed in Nonprofit Online News. They are helping Community Wealth Ventures, a program of the much admired Share Our Strength, to create an incubator for franchise business opportunities for nonprofit organizations. Part of a grant to the Tides Center will help them assess the feasibility of expanding their nonprofit fiscal sponsorship program to a global scale. A small grant to the Alliance for Nonprofit Management supports discussions about merging with the National Council of Nonprofit Associations.

I admire the vision and rigor that seems to inform these grants. The vision is one of effectiveness and innovation in the social sector, rather than feel good issue funding. The rigor means that they are funding specific, measurable steps toward creating systemic change. I don't know for sure how much of this is Jeff Skoll and how much is Barbara Kibbe, but the combination is terrific.
 

Philanthropic Effectiveness

I have a long standing interest in the subject of philanthropic effectiveness. Sad to say, I think a great deal of philanthropy is designed for the emotional pleasure of the donors. We accept this as given with smaller donors, but in my experience it is just as true for large donors and even institutional philanthropy. We tend to hope, of course, that donors take pleasure in being effective, but often the hard questions needed to determine effectiveness are never really asked.

The Skoll Foundation is asking the hard questions. Skoll is not alone in that regard. We've had the pleasure of working with grantmakers, both old and new, who are increasingly interested in determining their effectiveness. But Skoll's emphasis is distinct. The organizations they fund must have benchmarks in their field and they must track carefully against those benchmarks. Their capacity building grants help to build the frameworks of benchmarks used by their grantees.

When I spoke to Barbara Kibbe, she was busy managing a process at Skoll that would lead to the development of the criteria for determining the success of the foundation's work, some effectiveness metrics based on those criteria, and a mix of conventional and unusual assessment tools. I'm hoping she will share those publicly.
 

On Capacity Building

When I am interviewed, I will often answer the questions I'm asked by pointing to something I've written. Since Barbara Kibbe's leadership has also been reflected in her written work, she did much the same thing.

In response to my question about the lessons she has learned that she would like to apply and build upon at the Skoll Foundation, she pointed me to a paper of hers entitled, appropriately, "Lessons Learned from 15+ Years of Grantmaking to Support the Organizational Effectiveness of Grantees".

In that paper, she identifies three options a grantmaker can pursue to minimize risk by addressing the capacity needs of the grantee organization:

• Ask about capacity during the review process.
• Offer capacity building funds or refer them to another competent funder.
• Build and apply your own capabilities in organizational development.

More specifically, Ms Kibbe describes ten lessons learned from her years at the Packard Foundation, as a founder of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, and as a consultant and executive director:

• Management challenges are normal.
• Grantmakers should ask for thoughtfulness, not specific thoughts.
• Coaching on consultant selection is better than selecting consultants.
• There is no quick fix. There is no permanent fix either.
• Commitment in times of change can bring big dividends.
• Support honesty and authenticity in the grantee/grantor relationship.
• An internal champion is vital to capacity building.
• This work takes longer and is harder than we think.
• Planning, training, assessment or evaluation will not help in a crisis.
• Not enough is known about effectiveness funding or its impacts.

The other major work Ms Kibbe referenced in our talk was a paper she wrote with Paul Light and Elizabeth Hubbard called The Capacity Building Challenge. I recommend this paper in its entirety, along with its companion pieces in the Practice Matters series. In it, she offers a funder's response to research done by the Brookings Institution's Nonprofit Effectiveness Project.

Ms Kibbe draws four practical lessons from the Brookings research. She describes them in a four part model that functions as a cycle of improvement of, in turn, grantmaking practices and grantee outcomes: Define, Decide, Align, and Reflect.

These four steps are developed in much greater detail in the paper, but I will summarize them here because they reveal the approach that (1) A grantmaker interested in capacity building must define their terms with greater rigor than ever, in particular these terms are: effectiveness, capacity, capacity building, and outcomes. (2) Then they need to make some key decisions, in particular they need to decide on their: targets, scope, focus, and strategies. (3) Alignment is very much about making things clear and explicit and this process is no exception. Some of the things that need to be spelled out between a grantmaker and a grantee include: assumptions, hoped for outcomes, targets, rationale for decisions, and values or operating principles. (4) Finally, there must be a process of reflection, before moving on to the next iteration. Questions that should be asked include: What was learned? What changed in the organization(s)? What would make the effort more effective?
 

What's Next

I get the sense that Barbara Kibbe is as much in her element as she has ever been. She is working with a grantmaker who shares her vision of sector wide changes and systemic impact, along with her commitment to rigor in thinking, communication, and decision making. This Summer, the Skoll Foundation will start to move to a new level of such rigor in its own programs and grants. I look forward to seeing those lessons shared and enjoying the example that I hope they will set.

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please consider making a donation to Nonprofit Online News.
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