The Giving Review: A conversation with the Finding Common Purpose Foundation’s Andrew Wolk (Part 1 of 2)

This article first appeared in the Giving Review

Andrew Wolk, founder and lead donor of the Finding Common Purpose Foundation, has spent more than two decades in the world of social entrepreneurship, nonprofit consulting, and philanthropy. After an earlier career in business, he started several nonprofit groups—including, in 2004, Root Cause. A Boston-based consulting group, Root Cause advised foundations, nonprofits, corporations, and government agencies on strategies for addressing social problems. It worked with George Soros’ Open Society Foundations on what became the Campaign for Black Male Achievement. Wolk also founded the Social Innovation Forum and Interise, and he has taught social entrepreneurship at Boston University, MIT, and Harvard, among other places.

Over time, Wolk became increasingly disillusioned with and critical of the field in which he had established himself—and of his own role in it. Amidst the exciting initiatives, innovative programs, and claimed social impact, he began to question whether all the considerable resources and effort were broadly producing meaningful outcomes for people. He stepped down as Root Cause’s chief executive in 2020.

His Finding Common Purpose Foundation seeks to shift the attention of philanthropy, government, and other institutions toward measurable outcomes in Americans’ lives. It supports community-based efforts to identify shared goals, track progress publicly, and coordinate resources and institutional action toward achieving them. Its approach grew out of Wolk’s examination of more than 500 place-based organizations.

In his Common Purpose: Building a Movement to Renew the American Promise earlier this year—consciously modeled on Thomas Paine’s Common Sense on the 250th anniversary of American independence—Wolk makes the case for what he calls an “Outcomes Movement.” Despite enormous public and philanthropic expenditures, he argues, too many working Americans remain unable to afford the necessities of a secure and flourishing life. “We cannot fix what we don’t measure,” he declares. He proposes judging national progress by whether more working Americans are actually thriving. He calls for a set of objectives and measurable results—particularly concerning wages, housing, child care, education, and health—to help inform that judgment.

Wolk was kind enough to join me for a recorded conversation earlier this month. The just less than 23-minute audio file below is the first part of our discussion; the second is here. During the first part, Wolk talks about his disillusionment with philanthropy and the nonprofit sector and his proposed “Outcomes Movement” to improve people’s lives.

Wolk describes the social sector measuring success merely by grant awards dramatically announced, people supposedly served, high-profile conferences attended, and money raised, rather than by actual meaningful changes in real people’s lives. Being sure to note that he’s proud of those many valuable things that Root Cause and his other groups accomplished, he tells me, “for a long, long time,” it was important to him to be “speaking at conferences, raising money to get grants, doing podcast interviews like this.”

When did Wolk start to become disgruntled? Sometime during his work on the Campaign for Black Male Achievement, he was presented with a specific figure: only four percent of black boys in Detroit’s public schools were reading at the third-grade proficiency level, a number that had remained essentially unchanged for a decade. “It was that moment when I read that four percent,” he recalls. “Yeah, it was definitely that moment. …

“I am amazed at how difficult it’s been over the course of my career to get people to distinguish between the word ‘data’ and outcomes,” according to Wolk. Outcomes are “people’s lives improving, and how do we know that?” Finding Common Purpose’s Outcomes Movement “is not a framework to help you do your institutional work better,” he says, or to improve the performance of any individual foundation or nonprofit operating in the sector. Rather, it’s to try changing conditions across an entire community.

With its pooled-fund structure, Wolk describes, Finding Common Purpose is currently making grants in seven geographic areas throughout the country, addressing housing affordability, child care, education, wages, and economic mobility, among other things. He makes clear that none of his criticism of philanthropy or social entrepreneurship should be read as a dismissal of any direct-service, safety-net support given to people in need.

Who decides what outcomes matter—donors or grant applicants or grantees? Do or should they negotiate about those goals or that which should be part of the “community dashboard”? “We don’t do any of the bargaining,” Wolk answers. “The community should do the bargaining.” The goals should be locally determined, and publicly stated and available. “We’re not telling them what to do, but we do have a lot of experience,” he continues, “and so we guide them and it becomes a partnership in some way. …

“We have so much to learn, so much to learn,” he later says. “I just want to be really clear. The only place we’re starting is the outcome side, and we have so much to learn how to really work with the community and be really careful about that.”

In the conversation’s second part, Wolk discusses the professionalization of philanthropy and the nonprofit sector, defends the work of individual charities, and looks forward to what he sees as an opportunity and an obligation for givers to reconsider their role in helping more Americans.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-giving-review-a-conversation-with-the-finding-common-purpose-foundations-andrew-wolk-part-1-of-2/