Posts by Beth Owens

Let’s be clear: The Coronavirus pandemic is deadly serious, and we all need to observe the CDC’s latest guidelines for keeping ourselves and others safe. There’s good reason that Lowell’s home state (WA) and Mario’s (OH) are on virtual lockdown, and we have great respect for Governors Jay Inslee (D) and Mike DeWine (R) for making these calls. These two elected officials are demonstrating precisely what courageous, adaptive leadership looks like!

When we talk about organization building, we know some people think we sound like one of those podcasts designed to put you to sleep. But this past week Lowell got an epic lesson in how organization building can have life-and-death importance for millions of people.

Well before the tsunami election of 2016, we were reading, writing, and speaking about the seismic shifts rocking and rending American society—from the technologies that are fundamentally altering the nature of work to the wealth and income inequality that is cleaving us into factions with completely different financial prospects. But neither of us are economists. And we’re sure as hell not Nobel Prize winners. That’s why we were eager to read Good Economics for Hard Times, the new book by…

In last month’s update, we mentioned that we were looking forward to reading Ford Foundation President Darren Walker’s new book, From Generosity to Justice: A New Gospel of Wealth. We both chose to listen to the audio version while we got some much-needed holiday exercise. The original “Gospel of Wealth,” penned by Andrew Carnegie in 1889, implored…

Wouldn’t you like a good way to take a deep look into your organization—to discover how you’re doing, identify ways to get better, and create open introspection that helps people learn and improve? If so, please take a look at the Performance Practice, a resource from the Leap Ambassadors Community. According to Ingvild Bjornvold, who oversees the continuous-improvement process for the Performance Practice, “I doubt there’s a nonprofit out there that…

Have you seen the new Netflix documentary “Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates”? If you haven’t, you should! The film does a great job of illustrating how philanthropy can be, in the words of educator Paul Ylvisaker, “society’s passing gear.” It also offers great lessons for donors who don’t have Gates’s stratospheric wealth.

Last month’s update, “Fool Me Ten Times, Shame on Me,” struck a chord with many of you. This month, we’ll stay with the theme of unforced funder errors and share five more examples of 💩 that funders routinely step in.

This week, Lowell will conduct the first of a series of learning sessions for an entrepreneur at the very beginning of his philanthropic journey. He’ll ground the session in borrowed wisdom from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Tom Reis: “All new philanthropists get a black eye. That’s fine—and can actually be a good learning experience. But if they get ten black eyes, they’ll say, ‘To hell with it!’ So help them avoid repeated black eyes. Help them learn from others’ mistakes.”

One of Lowell’s foundation clients is in the midst of a generational succession and looking with new eyes at some long-established practices. Two practices under review are the foundation’s default…

In the fourth installment of our continuing series of mini essays on the “Five Habits of Highly Effective Funders,” we turn this month to this core habit: “Effective foundations help grantees strengthen their organizations, not just programs.” Thanks to a productive meeting we attended last week at the Ford Foundation, we’re charged up with new insights to share. The leaders of Ford’s BUILD initiative convened the meeting with…