Unanticipated failure is often to be expected as an inevitable part of the discovery process, part of learning what not to do again and, thus, part of making progress. Try many things freely, but discard just as freely. In this discovery process, philanthropies must often invest in countless efforts, experiments, and model programs before anything can be attempted on a larger scale. Today, some newcomers to philanthropy actually come from venture-capital companies and are applying their business acumen to what they call venture philanthropy. Although new to philanthropy, they are following in the footsteps of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, and Morgan, who also infused their philanthropic enterprises with the expertise, energy, and imagination that served them so well in business.
Venture philanthropy brings a welcome new set of strategies to grant making.
Unlike traditional philanthropies, which make grants to a great many capable organizations with promising proposals, the new philanthropists work intensely with relatively few nonprofit organizations. And while established foundations commonly invest in creating knowledge that may not pay dividends for years or even decades, venture philanthropies tend to restrict their investments to worthy causes with outcomes that can be readily measured. But in philanthropy, as in all fields, solutions of one size do not fit all problems. At the same time, both new and old philanthropies have much to learn from each other. Rather than allowing themselves to be pushed into a competition, they should initiate cooperative and collaborative relationships.