When Failure Leads to Magic
By: Priscilla Enriquez, JBMF President & CEO
One of the things I often talk about when lifting up the values of spending down is how liberating it has been. For us longtimers in philanthropy, we’ve bought into an infrastructure we have created, refined, invested in, bestowed as fundamental. We will question conflicting information to desperately cling to a logic model or theory of change. It’s not completely honest. Yet, clinging has created barriers between funders and community, a wide wealth chasm that has not resulted in dynamic change but a systemic power imbalance. And, in my experience, community — the very people philanthropy seeks to support -gets the short end of the stick.
I’m no debby downer as, yes, I have seen these constructs work, but I’m no fangirl.
Take a Pause
Kataly’s F-Word series allowed me to reflect on a time when JBMF had a failure, which I call a defining moment for our foundation. Accepting failure means accepting you are human and at times vulnerable, and if anything, I think our team has recognized that since we launched our sunset. So this failure, this defining moment, involved first taking a pause. This seems to be a throughline for me in many parts of my career in what I see now as a strength.
Excited and eager to dig in as JBMF’s new CEO in 2019, I was ecstatic to begin the Foundation’s strategic plan to sunset. After a period of organizational capacity building, we began our strategic planning process and did all.the.things: we listened to community in over hundreds of listening sessions; hired smart and experienced consultants to shape the plan; had dedicated and deeply engaged staff; we sussed goals, activities, tactics, strategies, outcomes, quantifiable benchmarks, milestones; we had easel paper, tables, graphics, charts, numbers and budgets; you name it, we had it all. It felt like we were moving forward.
Now, one would expect revelry in this rich tapestry of information. Instead, it became a cacophony.
I saw my team dig into silos, hold lots of hard conversations, struggle between landing on quantifiable metrics (because that is what we do) and recognize how real life doesn’t move with “and by year three, 10 nonprofits will triple their operating budgets” outcomes, and folks seemingly protect their work lanes, when in fact (or so I thought) we were supposed to collaborate. The ability to negotiate, listen, and be open became a defense of ideas, solutions, budgets with people in their corners. Does this sound familiar?
There is tension, and then there is what I call resourceful tension. Years later, I see it now as resourceful tension. The initial finished version reflected a comprehensive logic model that was to underpin our strategic plan. It had everyone’s contributions, check. It fit the framing of a logic model, check. It had serious (serious!) strategic ideas in pillars on a table with arrows pointing in some coherent direction, check. Yeah, we were going ⇒ there! But something was amiss: too linear to be realistically true, too complicated to make sense, there was … inelegance? Devoid of feeling? Truth be told, we really were gaslighting ourselves. We created this. Hard lesson, I created the conditions for this to happen and none of us could feel passion for it. I couldn’t imagine how this logic model was going to guide a spenddown that invigorated me, us, the community. How could I lead something like this?
So I made a hard decision to take a pause. Right in its tracks before that proverbial board meeting looking down at me to adopt a strategic plan. The tension served a purpose. My gut told me to go to my board for direction.
Seek help from your guides.
Faced with a strategy that was not what I had envisioned, thousands of dollars in strategic consulting spent, so much staff work time already invested, I had to face myself that this was not working. I can’t remember the exact moment, but our then-Chief Impact Officer and now-VP and Chief Strategy Officer, Misty Avila, who returned from maternity leave and with fresh eyes, plainly said, we needed to start over. Her assessment was an honest gut punch. She was my first guide and someone I trusted deeply.
The inevitable question loomed over my head: how do I go to my board when I had promised to stick to a timeline and deliver a logic model to guide our sunset? I then reached out to the principal of the consulting firm leading the strategy, and together we talked it through to hold the December meeting as a strategy session and address these concerns. They designed an open process where in the months leading up to December, we would gather small groups of the board to connect about the sunset, strategies, and frankly, just get to know each other better. This pre-work was foundational.
My other guides were my own team. Some of them, too, viscerally felt the direction wasn’t jiving. It was not mirroring the reality of what we heard from the community. And I think our pause is a lesson for all foundations. Often, we start at the grassroots with so much rich input and trust, but it gets diluted, even lost, as we lean into our own foundation constructs like logic models. If we did not take a pause, it would be wholly disloyal to the very people and communities we wanted to support but blindly loyal to philanthropic infrastructure. Which side did I want to land on?
Believe in magic
The pause created a pivot to move in a different flow and direction. I led the staff through some big picture revisioning where I could see the treetops emerge. We restarted where we originally started — centering the realities of the Central Valley and with what we heard from the community.
That fall, we met with the board over small lunch conversations which I think helped the most to deepen trust and understanding amongst each other.
By the December 2021 board meeting, facilitated by the principal of the consulting firm originally engaged, two major defining moments arose. As I voiced the challenge at how we were experiencing a polarization of our issues, our then-board chair, Alex, suggested we focus on the nexus of our two issues areas: bilingual learners and the First Amendment. Challenge accepted.
Another board member, Joaquin, encapsulated the vision of our sunset that we all collectively shared as a sunrise. I can’t describe in words the emotions shared in that room that day, but landing on the nexus as a sunrise evoked a kind of unity I hadn’t expected. It was simply magic.
For most of 2022 we took the development of the strategic plan internally and the work organically evolved. Throwing the logic model out the window liberated us from confining frameworks. Focusing on the nexus allowed us to center our issues under the arc of the Valley’s multiracial democracy. The sunrise concept led to creatively describing our periods of strategic grantmaking that a sunrise, symbolically, energized. It felt like the joy art or live music brings — we started with a new concept from our board to create something special.
Everyone on the team got involved- Madeline Porter our director of grantmaking practice drafted our sunrise grantmaking “ethos”. We hired a writer/editor to turn our ideas into a story, and that was Keiona Williamson, former editor at the Sacramento Bee and now our director of journalism sustainability. We centered the voices of our grantee partners whose own words contributed to how we viewed our sunrise. It was Nancy Xiong of Hmong Innovating Politics who said
What we want to build, we won’t see it now, but we will see it in 10 years. I want to be able to celebrate when that 10 year comes, knowing that HIP is contributing to changing the Central Valley and empowering a new generation of leaders to lead.
And even as CEO, I personally got involved and did a lot of the writing and organizing of the plan.
Lasting Lessons
I unequivocally believe that our devotion to a logic model made visible a necessary failure for we would not be here in our now sunrise.
This magic came from allowing ourselves to feel the tension, a grounding belief to take a pause, vulnerability to ask for help from our guides, and allowing ourselves to be open to what emerged from this process.
When I started talking about our sunset as a sunrise, it opened a different frame to view our work. It invited others to come along for our sunrise as it offered an uplifting and poignant view of the Central Valley, a region often described for its deficits and not its assets. It framed our spenddown as an opportunity to partner with us. We showed up differently as our team started using a different kind of language to describe our grantmaking practice as heart-centered, with an abundance mindset, and co-creating with our grantee partners.
As a learner in the philanthropic sector, I have been a cheerleader for all these systems. I have seen the successes of how they can work, but now, I can see how much harm they can also do. And unless you allow yourself to see it, those harms will inadvertently continue.
Were there risks? Instead of a year, it took us two years to land the strategic sunrise plan. Maybe it slowed our grantmaking during that time, but it sure accelerated under the sunrise plan as our blueprint. The team that curated this plan is still with us. Our grantee partners attest to how our human-centered grantmaking ethos feels different from others. We have achieved an additional 1.5x return on every dollar invested in the community. None of us could have predicted these kinds of outcomes in a logic model. But it sure feels like magic.
This piece is part of The F Word, a series from the Kataly Foundation featuring failure stories from philanthropy. As we all know, philanthropy fails all the time. But often, we have the privilege of making mistakes in private. Sharing our failure stories publicly is an exercise in radical honesty for funders; a way to remind ourselves that we do not have all the answers and we are all works in progress. Read all the pieces from the series here.
