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.Note that a particular foundation may choose to play a Driver role inone or two initiatives while playing a less-central role in other projects.Driver projects must be chosen with great care.One important cautionshould not be overlooked.The fact that the program staff in a founda-tion exercises good judgment in filtering and recommending grants forapproval by senior management and the trustees does not at all meanthat the same staff is capable of doing a comparably good job as theDriver of grantmaking initiatives.Foundation senior managers should bevery cautious in undertaking Driver roles in particular initiatives unlessthey have personnel with the entrepreneurial and operating skills neces-sary to make a success of such initiatives.The Foundation as PartnerThe second role, that of Partner, can be just as strategic as that of Driver,but it is both less hands-on and less controlling of the initiative.Typically,the Partner foundation shares control and accountability with the grant-receiving organization.As examples, consider the academic field building activities of theRockefeller Foundation in molecular biology, the Ford Foundation andthe Carnegie Corporation of New York in foreign area studies, the Al-fred P.Sloan Foundation in computational neurobiology, the JohnM.Olin Foundation in law and economics, and the Hewlett Foundationin dispute resolution.In each case, the foundation had a specific goal toachieve and a strategy that involved making grants to universities to cre-ate centers, programs, or departments to conduct research, offer newcourses, and finance student fellowships and postdoctoral study.In sodoing, the foundations acted as Partners with the universities.By con-trast, in the example of the Green Revolution, the Rockefeller Founda-tion placed researchers on its own payroll and created a new freestandingorganization to conduct research in its chosen field. 9781568487027-text:Layout 1 6/24/09 10:13 AM Page 63Foundations: What They Do and How They Do It 63The role of Partner is likely to be appropriate whenever a foundationhas a strategic objective that can be accomplished by working with an ex-isting, usually nonprofit, organization that shares with the foundationboth the goal and the strategy for attaining it.The role of Partner is gen-erally more cost-effective for the foundation than that of Driver, de-manding less commitment of time and energy by the foundation s staff.The trade-off, of course, is a corresponding loss of control by the foun-dation.If things go wrong in the implementation of the strategy, thePartner foundation cannot set things right as quickly and easily as if itwere the Driver.And sometimes things do go wrong occasionally very wrong.Themost common problem is a poor choice of leadership by the nonprofitresponsible for implementation or by the foundation itself.Other times,the foundation and the implementation organization are at odds aboutthe goal, the strategy, or both.And still other times, the foundation sown practices may be faulty or its interference in implementation un-warranted.For all these reasons, some foundations are nervous aboutthe risks involved in the Partner role and prefer to be Drivers wheneverpossible.Nevertheless, most foundations choose to operate as Partners, andnot just as a way of saving energy, time, and money.Most foundation ini-tiatives are about promoting change, and the best way to achieve thatgoal is usually to engage and involve the organizations whose behaviorsare to be changed.Thus, when a foundation wants to change academiaby giving new vitality and prominence to a field of study that is cur-rently neglected (as in the examples cited above), the fastest way to pro-mote such change is by partnering with existing universities, which canthen serve as role models for the rest of the academic universe.In recent years, many foundations have sought a hands-on role in spe-cific initiatives that is midway between the controlling role of the Driverand the less-powerful role of the Partner.Some are using the relatively newterm venture philanthropy to describe this approach.Think of it as a phil-anthropic equivalent to the relationship between venture capitalists andthe businesses they support.In this approach, the foundation provides fi-nancing in exchange for significant involvement in and some degree ofcontrol of the program being supported.For example, a foundation that 9781568487027-text:Layout 1 6/24/09 10:13 AM Page 6464 the foundationis basically playing a Partner role might ask for the right to specify partic-ular strategic implementation tasks to be performed by the grantees ac-cording to an agreed-upon timeline, with specified benchmarks andrequired performance reports.The result is that the foundation keeps theimplementing organization on a short leash.The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation s $437 million Grand Chal-lenges in Global Health is an excellent example of such a venture phi-lanthropy role.The foundation works closely with grantee organizationsto develop timelines and benchmarks for success.It also arranges de-tailed evaluations of the programs to monitor their effectiveness and tomeasure the impact on the health of target communities.Thus, the foun-dation is acting as something more than a Partner, though less than afull-fledged Driver.The Foundation as CatalystThe Driver role is difficult for foundations to assume.It is time- and la-bor-intensive, and committing one s foundation to the achievement ofa specific objective is risky and anxiety-producing.It requires a high de-gree of resolve to commit the organization to a particular strategic focusand much deeper knowledge of the field of focus than the other roles.And, of course, when a foundation commits to a particular strategy andfails to achieve the goals it sets, the public failure is psychologically andorganizationally painful.For all these reasons, it s easy, even tempting, for foundations to de-liver most of their resources through projects at the other end of thespectrum lower-commitment grants in which the foundation restrictsitself to the role of Catalyst, scattering resources like Johnny Appleseedin hopes that some of the initiatives supported will bear fruit.There are also good reasons to emphasize the Catalyst role in dealingwith particular types of social problems.Some problems are simply notripe enough to lend themselves to a clear-cut strategic solution.Theymay be too big, too complex, or too unwieldy; they may be relativelynew and little-understood; or they may require intervention by govern-ment agencies or the for-profit sector.In such cases, rather than under-take a high-risk strategic effort that is likely to fail, a foundation is wise 9781568487027-text:Layout 1 6/24/09 10:13 AM Page 65Foundations: What They Do and How They Do It 65to take a Catalyst approach, donating to a number of initiatives in thespirit of experimentation.The Catalyst role may seem less impressive than the grandly strategicroles of Driver or Partner
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