White House Aide Urges Foundations to Take More Risks

While President Obama was on Washington’s Capitol Hill reflecting on his first year in office during his State of the Union speech Wednesday night, another top White House official was in Los Angeles offering her views on the challenges for government, foundations, and other nonprofit organizations.

Sonal Shah, head of the White House’s Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, urged foundations to take greater risks, saying one of the lessons she learned in her first year is that the federal government is not easily able to finance experiments with new efforts to treat social problems.

“It’s hard to take risks when you have 535 board members,” she said, referring to Congress’s role in overseeing government spending.

She said we need some “creative destruction” to figure out what ideas were worth government investing in - whether it be to reduce child mortality, improve education, or solve other social problems.

“Just as business tries ideas, and some things stay and some things fall away, we need more risk taking by foundations.”

In a speech to a conference held by the University of Southern California’s Center on Philanthropy and Public Policy, Ms. Shah said that when she took the job, she thought her office would have been able to move more quickly but learned that resistance to cultural changes and legal constraints made it hard for government to be agile and try new approaches to finding and financing the most effective and innovative nonprofit groups.
She also said that much of her work has been hobbled by a lack of detailed data and statistics about nonprofit groups and how public policies affect them and the people they serve. Without reliable data, she says, it is often hard for her and her colleagues to get support for ideas that might help nonprofit groups.

Ms. Shah also urged nonprofit executives to be more aggressive and collaborative in pushing the federal government to adopt policies that will be effective in solving social problems. She said White House officials need to hear from nonprofit organizations more often.

“We will do our part, but we need you to do your part, ” she said.


Source: Chronicle of Philanthropy