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This report has three central messages:
In this chapter we suggest potentially fruitful avenues to consider to stimulate awareness of USG-foundation interactions, to support dialogue with foundations, and to further understanding of approaches that might leverage foundation and other philanthropic resources more effectively.
Disseminating information from this report or related sources to policymakers, planners, and administrators can enhance awareness of existing USG-foundation interactions and spur interest in potential partnerships. This could be done through issue briefs or by extracting components of the report for specialized audiences. For example, the executive summary could be provided to high-level policymakers, the “primer” on types of interactions (Chapter II) could be used as a followup for responsible stakeholders to frame specific domestic or international philanthropic efforts, while details about forming and sustaining partnerships could be provided to their staff members or administrators in the field.
Sharing the report with philanthropic decision makers outside of the federal government, such as foundation leaders or other philanthropic entities, may spur additional interest in the various possible intersections, interactions, and partnerships. Issue briefs could be circulated to foundations and their associations and affinity groups, or distributed at conferences.
Foundations devote time and resources to considering how to improve the effectiveness of their work, and they might welcome a dialogue with the federal government designed to inform such considerations. Much work has been done to improve how foundations might partner effectively with one another.[1] Opportunities for partnerships with government have received less attention. Yet foundations often undertake efforts to involve stakeholders from many sectors, including government, in defining and addressing problems. For example, in 1999, grants from RWJF, the California HealthCare Foundation, and the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation helped to found the National Quality Forum, a public-private partnership aimed at strengthening health care in the U.S. The Forum’s National Priorities Partnership includes the CDC, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Foundations may be interested in joining with USG to consider specific issues and opportunities for interaction and partnership between the two sectors. Options for dialogue could include holding panel sessions at conferences featuring representatives of each sector, convening meetings or seminars to discuss partnership experiences, or inviting foundation representatives to review and comment on federal initiatives or programs that might include a role for foundations or other philanthropies.
Much could be learned from more in-depth examination of cases where USG-foundation interactions have developed over time and are seen by informed parties as positive models. The present study relied primarily on a document review and interviews with select high-level decision makers. Interviews with multiple individuals at different levels of the organization, ideally, would shed more light on the processes at work across the lifecycle of the initiatives. Such an approach could reveal how USG-foundation relationships are developed and how decisions are made at different levels of the organizations; how one type of interaction may evolve into another; what challenges were encountered across the lifecycle of the initiative; and how challenges were addressed.
It would also be useful to expand the in-depth examination to include other stakeholders. This could provide the perspectives of foreign governments, NGOs, international corporations, local businesses, researchers, and members of the target populations for philanthropic interventions. In nearly all the cases studied here, such organizations and individuals appeared to play an important role in the development and implementation of health and social service initiatives, but their roles and reactions were not studied.
Finally, the methodology of the present study is not appropriate for assessing the efficiency, effectiveness, or value added by any kind of USG-foundation interaction, or the relative usefulness of the different types of interaction. While it would be difficult to arrive at a definitive assessment of these issues, a more systematic examination of the various types of interactions—perhaps through surveys of key USG and foundation stakeholders—could reveal the prevalence of the different types of interaction, the successes and challenges associated with each, and the perceptions of informed stakeholders about their relative utility.
[1] See, for instance, Philanthropies Working Together: Myths and Realities, by Robert Hughes (2005), of RWJF, or the work of philanthropic affiliations, such as the Council on Foundations, the Philanthropy Roundtable, and Grantmakers for Effective Organizations.
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