Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

David Grant, President and CEO

I have been reading Michael Sandel’s book Justice, which stems from his popular course of the same name at Harvard.  In between chapters over the weekend, I have been reading proposals from nonprofit organizations seeking funding from Dodge in the new year.

In both cases, the predominant question on my mind has been Sandel’s subtitle: What’s The Right Thing To Do?

The book, by the way, would be a great holiday present for anyone you know who appreciates having his or her assumptions challenged.  Just when you think you know what “the right thing to do” is, Sandel asks you to look at it another way.

He begins with some fascinating questions of judgment and, inevitably, politics, using real life situations.  Should there be laws against price gouging in the wake of natural disasters?  Should Purple Hearts be awarded for psychological injuries?  Should the CEO’s and top executives of banks bailed out with taxpayer money get bonuses?

And he uses hypothetical situations.  If you were the engineer on a runaway train, with five people working on the track in front of you, and you could turn onto a side track where one person was working, would you?  Most people say yes.  If you were watching the runaway train from a bridge and could push one person onto the tracks to save the five people working further down them, would you?  Most people say no.  In each case, there is a choice: either one person will die or five people will die. Yet we make different judgments.  It is not just about numbers and outcomes.

Sandel’s theme is that there are three main ways to think about justice: maximizing welfare, respecting freedom, and promoting virtue.

I began to cast the proposals to Dodge in these terms and realize our social investments of limited resources require us to reflect on these matters.  How shall we compare a local arts group with a local soup kitchen, for example? Do we support the educational organization that brings freedom of choice and opportunity to a small number of underserved students in a dramatic, transformational way?  Or do we back efforts to incrementally improve an educational system that affects thousands of students?

Sandel unpacks that last idea: the utilitarian idea of “the greatest good for the greatest number” – both its strengths and its weaknesses. That chapter helps me understand why at some gatherings of foundations, there are strong pleas for the whole field to drop everything except a focus on mitigating climate change.

At Dodge, we use the themes Creativity and Sustainability as if they were virtues.  But I imagine Sandel countering: “Do you value the creativity it takes to create a new weapon?  Is everything worth sustaining?”

Clearly not.  I appreciate how Sandel frames the process of responsible moral judgment as “a dialectic between our judgments about particular situations and the principals we affirm on reflection.”  It reminds me again of the importance of “Quadrant II” time in organizations – that precious time we set aside and protect for important matters that are not urgent.  It is our time to reflect on lessons learned from action and guiding principles for future decisions.

It is both disconcerting and liberating to understand anew through reading Justice that the right thing to do is not always clear to a single individual, let alone a group, no matter how much thoughtful attention you pay to a given situation or choice.  But as he writes, “Thinking about justice seems inescapably to engage us in thinking about the best way to live,” and for us at Dodge, that takes us to the heart of our mission of fostering a more livable world.

We will never, in Sandel’s words, “resolve (our) disagreements once and for all.”  But these discussions “can give shape to the arguments we have, and bring moral clarity to the alternatives we confront.”

Another cycle of grantmaking is underway.

David Grant, President and CEO

Let me make an abstract idea from the last entry more concrete through some examples.

In the previous parts of this series, I used Jim O’Toole’s “Executive’s Compass” (below) to postulate that “The Good Society” lies in an area on that map, not at a point. I pictured a circle where the four values on his axes are pursued, sometimes aggressively, but not so exclusively and persistently that other values are ignored and diminished. That last sort of activity would be outside of the circle and work against the good society. My earlier example was the pursuit of “efficient,” industrial agriculture (the right side of the map) in the name of cheap food and the devastating impact that has had on many rural communities (the left side of the map).

It seems to me the “sustainable” society is one that not only keeps its activities within the circle but also connects those efforts to each other so that they enhance each other rather than compete. It’s easy to see, for example, that community life can be enhanced by focusing on an efficient transportation system, or equity might be best served by providing economically disadvantaged children with access to courses in business entrepreneurship.

I posed the idea last time that organizations that see the system as a whole and help make these connections are critically important to the pursuit of sustainability. Let me cite two here that Dodge has helped in their early stages. (more…)

David Grant, President and CEO

It was very gratifying to get three such thoughtful responses to my Part 1 entry posted two weeks ago. All three respondents wanted to use James O’Toole’s formulation of “The Executive’s Compass” (below) as a springboard into other ways to consider the questions of what The Good Society is, and what Philanthropy’s role in it is.

I think they are right, and we should eventually move beyond the “Compass.” In future entries, I want to find and post the graphic Christopher Nye describes, and I want to explore the resonance between his suggestions for what philanthrophy should be doing and the idea of philanthropy having to place itself on a “constrained/unconstrained” axis of the matrix Sean Stannard-Stockton suggests.

Before we do that, though, I want to linger over the idea of “balance” that O’Toole’s “Compass” has inspired in all of us. (more…)

David Grant, President and CEO

I would like to pose a question and then, slowly, with your help, answer it.

The question is: What is the role of Philanthropy in creating The Good Society?

For our purposes, let’s focus on organized philanthropy and then narrow even further to look at private and family foundations: How should foundations like the Dodge Foundation think about what they do in relation to the concept of The Good Society?

Of course, the question begs another: What do we mean by The Good Society? That’s what people in the world of schools and curriculum design call an “essential” question, because it doesn’t have a single right answer but the pursuit of an answer can be profoundly educational.

It strikes me that if a foundation is interested in the question, its answer will be very important indeed. It will likely determine the direction of the grantmaking as well as the strategies employed to reach the foundation’s goals.

So, mindful that there will be multiple, nuanced visions of The Good Society, let’s look at one of them and see how it affects our thinking about philanthropy’s role.

My source is The Aspen Institute’s Executive Seminar and more specifically James O’Toole’s book The Executive’s Compass. (O’Toole is Research Professor at The Center for Effective Organizations at USC; he was Vice President of The Aspen Institute and now serves as The Mortimer J. Adler Senior Fellow there.)

The Aspen Seminar is built around important thinkers in Western political science and social philosophy, presenting them as part of an ongoing “great conversation” about three essential questions: What is The Good Life? What is The Good State (government)? and What is The Good Society?

(more…)