Environmental Leadership Program: ELP News: Summer 2002-Leadership in Environmental Philanthropy by Mary Huston

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newsletter Summer 2002

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ELP News:

ELP NEWS: Beyond the Fellowship

Leadership in Environmental Philanthropy

by Mary Huston

Powerbroker. Benefactor. Networker. Matchmaker. Foundation staff play myriad roles in supporting the work of environmental leaders in the nonprofit and academic sectors.

Their roles, however, need not be limited to "best supporting" actor. Their access to financial resources and their broad perspective on the work of many organizations give them a unique ability to seek out innovation and serve as leaders in their own right. In May, ELP convened 20 promising foundation program staff, relatively new to their philanthropic roles, to help develop their individual leadership capacities and explore their challenges in the context of the broader environmental movement.

Co-sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Environmental Grantmakers Association, the two-day Environmental Program Staff Leadership Retreat brought together top young program staff from across the country to nurture a peer community, encourage reflection and dialogue, and provide training in leadership skills and new ideas.

participants at the at the ELP Program Staff Retreat

Sergio Knaebel from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and Kolu Zigbe from the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation share ideas at the ELP Program Staff Retreat.

Participants discussed the many distinctive opportunities that their position offers, including a "birds-eye view" of the work many organizations are doing on the ground. No one organization or scholar can scan the broad range of work happening in a given environmental field the way a foundation staff member can. Applicants and grantees work on a wide variety of issues and can have multiple approaches to the same challenge. Foundation staff are in the unique position to connect groups that might otherwise never know of each other's existence. There are unusual challenges, as well. Most commonly cited is the conflict between real and perceived power of foundation staff members. Through selective grantmaking, foundation program staff appear to have the power to control the environmental agenda. Certainly prospective grantees feel the weight when their organizations' future depends on whether or not they receive a grant from a particular foundation. At the same time, foundation staff -- especially younger or new staff -- rarely have direct control over the grants their Board will choose to make.

At the May retreat, Bill Loewen of Praxis Consulting led a short "power lab" simulation to explore the way social systems contribute to power dynamics and tensions. Following a multi-level simulation, participants identified a number of power issues to discuss in more depth, including the critical nature of managing boundaries in groups, the role access to information plays in shaping power dynamics, and the extent to which creativity in a system comes from the bottom. Cynthia Renfro, an ELP Board member and former Program Officer at the Beldon Fund commented, "I learned a lot from the exercise -- especially about how we perceive ourselves and how the perception is constructed in our own heads (and apparently our collective consciousness)."

At the end of the retreat, participants outlined a proposed series of next steps including a "reunion," additional training sessions, and even a longer term fellowship for foundation program staff modeled on the ELP Fellowship program. All agreed that a primary achievement for this retreat was strengthening a peer community of relatively new emerging leaders in philanthropy. Says one participant, "We need more things like this to be reflective about our role, our lives, and the future of the [environmental] movement."

Mary Huston is an associate director of the Environmental Leadership Program.

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