What does success look like?
What does success look like?
Last week I started writing about my ideas of how to capture the difference we make as a foundation. One of the things I have been thinking about this week was the question of how we define success. This is what I have come up with in a first draft version:
We could define success as tangible improvements in young people’s material, relational, and subjective wellbeing.
Such simple definitions, however, betray the reality of the complexity of young people’s lives and what it takes to shift the things that define them. The factors enabling wellbeing are many, necessarily subjective, and they are deeply entangled in what the World Economic Forum describes as the polycrisis we are facing. Hence we could work for 50 years on relevant issues without seeing any tangible changes in young people’s wellbeing – which would not necessarily imply that we haven’t been successful. We could, together with our partners and other global and local actors, move things in the right direction, without this having led to a measurable effect as so many forces work against our intent.
Hence, there will be no clear ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the answer on whether our philanthropic work is being successful if we only look at the goal of improving young people’s wellbeing. Success can take many shapes or forms, some of which we probably cannot even imagine now.
That means that rather than to define success, we need to think about where to look for it. One element of that will be to see if the activities we fund are making a difference and if we learn from them if they don’t (this is part of the monitoring and evaluation for each grant). Another element will be if the systems we work in are showing signs of moving ‘in the right direction’ (this will require us to look beyond individual grants and synthesise across our portfolios). And finally, the experienced reality of young people who live in the localities where the efforts of our diverse portfolios coalesce plays a key role (this will require us to directly listen to them). To decide if what we measure and hear is 'good enough' to be called ‘successful’ will be a matter of conversation among relevant stakeholders.
The question of what is 'good enough' is a subjective one. So who should answer it? The traditional answer would be the foundation board. But one can also argue that we have a responsibility to do the best we can for the young people whose wellbeing we want to improve - hence they should also be involved in the discussion on whether the difference we make is 'good enough.' And then there are of course our partners, the ones who receive our funds and other partners we engage with for other reasons.
Let me know if you have any feedback to these reflections. Just reply to this email.
The Paper Museum
From Richard Power's powerful novel Bewilderment, where he tells the story of a scientist and his son who is struggling to conform with what was expected from him in this world.
Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don't even know what the experiment is testing.
My wife would have known how to talk to the doctors. Nobody's perfect, she liked to say. But, man, we all fall short so beautifully.
Why have I added this to my Paper Museum? I'm reading this book with a mix of enjoyment and, hm, bewilderment. It's touching something very deep about being human. Hard to describe. More to come.
Reference: Powers, Richard. 2021. Bewilderment. W. W. Norton & Company.