Dear Friends,

Within the past few weeks, I have read with interest the observations of a number of active bloggers in the arts field whom I have come to respect and admire: Nina Simon, Diane Ragsdale, Clay Lord and Barry Hessenius. Each of them has blogged on aspects of the Irvine Foundation’s new arts strategy and, in doing so, has contributed to a robust dialogue that has played out on their respective blogs as well as on Twitter.

And that’s what prompts my contribution to this discussion: I will comment only lightly on the substantive issues they have raised related to our Arts strategy as my colleague, Josephine Ramirez, who directs our Arts program, plans to post a more substantive comment on those issues in the next week or so. There is another aspect of this discussion that I do want to comment upon and invite others to engage on with me and my colleagues in philanthropy.

From my early days as Irvine’s CEO, and with great support from our Board of Directors, I have placed a premium on transparency, both with regard to our work at Irvine and for the broader field of philanthropy. I have certainly not been alone in this quest (Brad Smith at the Foundation Center is probably our field’s leading champion), and I think it’s a fair observation to say that the field has come a long way in the past decade.

On November 11, The Washington Post ran a collection of five pieces by leaders in the nonprofit arts sector touching on issues raised by the current plight of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Long a premier cultural institution in Washington – located across the street from the White House – the Corcoran is struggling to forge a sustainable future. Irvine President and CEO Jim Canales was among the leaders invited to share their views; he wrote about the importance of a constructive partnership between an organization’s chief executive and its board. His contribution is reprinted here:

Having served on and chaired many nonprofit boards, as well as having been chief executive of a large foundation for nine years, I know that when partnerships between a nonprofit’s board and its chief executive work well, they create the conditions for high performance. A constructive partnership:

I described in my last letter some of the institutional planning work underway at the Irvine Foundation this year. Related to that effort, and as part of our continuing commitment to learning from the Foundation’s various stakeholders, we conducted a stakeholder assessment survey to receive feedback about our work. I am using this quarter’s letter to share more about this survey as well as what we learned from it.

In-depth, confidential interviews were conducted by a third-party consultant with more than 60 leaders in our fields of work, the nonprofit community in general, and philanthropy. The interview questions focused on awareness and perceptions of the Irvine Foundation; the perceived impact of our work, broadly and in our program areas; and feedback on direct experience and interactions with the Foundation. We also asked questions about the challenges and opportunities facing California.

A persistent tension in philanthropic work is balancing a long-term commitment toward key programmatic goals with the need to remain sufficiently agile and adaptable in a rapidly changing environment. In our experience at Irvine, striking the right balance between these two potentially conflicting approaches can ensure we are having the greatest impact with the resources we are privileged to steward.

Eight years ago, when Irvine’s Board of Directors adopted our current grantmaking programs, we agreed that the Foundation needed to be committed to these core programs for the long term, which we defined then as at least a decade. In view of the ambitious nature of the goals in our Arts, California Democracyand Youth programs, we knew that a long-term orientation was essential. At the same time, we believed then — and still do today — that, at some point, reflecting on our progress, taking stock of the changing California landscape and considering the implications would be prudent.

As we plan for 2013 and beyond, Irvine’s board and staff are engaged in this important process. We have resisted characterizing our work as a “strategic planning” process because we are not intending a wholesale shift in priorities and focus, nor do we plan to divert significant attention from our current activities. Indeed, as a result of an institutional commitment to ongoing learning and refinement, each of our programs has undergone thoughtful, strategic reviews in recent years, and we have adapted our strategies accordingly. At the same time, approaching a decade of work in these three areas affords us an opportunity to ensure that Irvine remains responsive in the face of rapidly changing opportunities and challenges in California, all with an eye toward maximizing impact.

I have written before about the importance of developing an honest and engaged partnership between nonprofit boards and staff leadership. Unfortunately, we sometimes see stark reminders of the tragic costs when such a partnership is lacking. The Penn State tragedy is such a case. I recently authored an op-ed in the Chronicle of Philanthropy to encourage nonprofit leaders to learn from this tragedy and do everything in their power to ensure that it never happens again. The full text of that op-ed is reprinted below. You can read it on the Chronicle website here. I welcome your comments.

Posted on The Chronicle of Philanthropy website on July 16, 2012

Damage Done by a Culture of Deference: Leadership Lessons From the Penn State Tragedy
By James E. Canales

The child-abuse scandal that unfolded at Penn State University over the past decade and half is a tragedy of epic proportions. Nobody can disagree with that after the report last week by the former FBI director Louis Freeh provided clear evidence that the crimes committed by Jerry Sandusky could have and should have been averted.

What is particularly distressing in reading the 267-page report is how the lessons nonprofit leaders should have learned from previous scandals continue to go unheeded.

While a number of individual foundations have long focused on assessing the impact of their grants, in recent years the field of philanthropy as a whole has become more interested in this challenging aspect of foundation work. In that context, we were glad to contribute an article in the current issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR), as part of a special supplement sponsored by the Aspen Institute Program on Philanthropy and Social Innovation on “Advancing Evaluation Practices in Philanthropy.” The supplement includes a variety of perspectives on this important and complex subject.

In the article, my colleague Kevin Rafter and I describe our approach to assessing Irvine’s performance using a framework we developed in collaboration with our board of directors eight years ago. The framework provides a method to evaluate our impact across the Foundation, focusing in large part on our programmatic work but also acknowledging that there are other ways to assess the Foundation’s performance. Our SSIR article discusses the lessons we have learned from our foundation-wide approach to performance assessment, and the challenges we continue to face in doing this work.