In mid-July, William Penn Foundation leaders briefed over 200 individuals from across the Philadelphia area on the foundation’s new strategic plan.
“It was a great session,” executive director Shawn McCaney told me a few days after the convening. “There was applause for two things: the caterer and our announcement that we were reducing our grant application from 20 pages to six questions.”
While I can’t vouch for the caterer, it makes sense that attendees cheered the second news item, since nonprofit leaders are notoriously short on time and often lack the funds to hire a professional grant writer. But organizations need to know about the opportunity in the first place, which is why William Penn Foundation’s (WPF) revised grantmaking strategy also includes a request for proposals process so its leaders can cast as wide a net as possible.
WPF’s strategy lands in a post-pandemic environment where funders have pledged to be more responsive and dial back a top-down grantmaking approach. That said, it’s always difficult to gauge the true breadth of change given the sector’s inherent opacity. If anything, nonprofits have reported that funders have been backtracking on certain pandemic-era pledges, so it’s always instructive when a leader like McCaney, who oversees a foundation that has $3.3 billion in net assets and disbursed $154 million in grants last year, candidly discusses its revamped approach.
The largest foundation devoted to giving in the Philadelphia region, WPF “had historically been very directional in our grantmaking,” McCaney said. “We would have these long conversations with grantees about how they could advance our goals and objectives. We are trying to be less directional through the request for proposal process and this new planning approach. Instead of saying, ‘Here’s the way to reduce illegal dumping or expand access to cultural opportunities,’ we’re saying, ‘We want to hear what you think the best approach is.’ It’s a way of shifting solution-making to the community.”
Shifts driven by demographic change
WPF was established in 1945 by Otto Haas, founder of the chemical company Rohm and Haas, and his wife, Phoebe Waterman Haas, a noted astronomer and one of the first women in the U.S. to earn a Ph.D. in the field. Otto’s son, John Haas, set up the Wyncote Foundation, which, like WPF, supports organizations in the Philadelphia area, in 2009.
WPF previously organized its grantmaking across three programs. Now, it has five: Arts and Culture, Children and Families, Democracy and Civic Initiatives, Environment and Public Space, and Workforce Training and Services.
Leadership undertakes a comprehensive strategic review process every 10 years. WPF’s previous strategic plan concluded in 2023, and stakeholders approached the subsequent work with pandemic-era lessons still fresh in their minds. “We had dialed back the administrative infrastructure and made grants more quickly,” McCaney said. “I also think the board appreciated seeing grantmaking that had an immediate effect on people.”
WPF’s strategic planning process commenced in January 2023 as the third generation of Haas family members began handing over the reins to the next generation. (The foundation is governed by a corporation composed of Haas family members and a board of directors that includes family members.)
These heirs helped set the tone for the exercise. Speaking to the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Peter Dobrin last month, Katherine H. Christiano, the 38-year-old great-granddaughter of Phoebe and Otto Haas and WPF board chair, said that it’s with the family’s fourth generation’s support that the foundation is “really prioritizing opportunities for communities that have experienced a lot of racial inequity and a lot of other forms of injustice.”
McCaney explained that fourth-generation family members sought to advance this goal by boosting transparency in the foundation’s decision-making, increasing its accessibility and elevating community voice and leadership. “They wanted to support efforts that reflected what communities want,” he said.
This rising generation of Haas family members isn’t alone in this regard. A big trend we’re seeing among family foundations navigating demographic shifts is that younger heirs attuned to issues of social justice want to dispel the notion of the foundation as an impenetrable ivory tower and reimagine it as an engaged community partner willing to interrogate long-standing power dynamics.
In the first phase of the strategic planning process, WPF leaders spoke with internal staff and developed a set of corresponding recommendations. Next, WPF partnered with consultants who cross-checked these recommendations with community members, public officials and other external individuals, and refined its strategy accordingly. All told, the process solicited feedback from over 350 individuals.
“A more immediate and direct impact”
The strategic planning exercise yielded two big findings. First, individuals encouraged WPF to refrain from launching new initiatives and instead focus on strengthening existing institutions. They also implored WPF to center its grantmaking on what McCaney called “tangible, positive change in the near term.”
Both requests can conflict with how the prototypical board member is wired. “I think there’s a tendency in the philanthropic sector to look for the big innovations, the silver bullet solutions,” McCaney said, “and in our experience, well-meaning funders can derail local community issues by imposing their own solutions, ideas and priorities.” The WPF board, which had been accustomed to what McCaney had called “directional grantmaking,” emerged from the strategic planning exercise committed to deferring to the wisdom of the community.
McCaney provided an anecdote to illustrate how this shift played out in a practical sense. While revisiting its Environment and Public Space program grantmaking, WPF leaders discussed whether its work should include funding for new parks or facilities. Community members weren’t sold on the idea and urged stakeholders to hold off on new projects until the city’s current facilities were properly maintained.
The board took the feedback to heart. Moving forward, WPF’s public space work will exclusively focus on improving existing facilities. “It’s exciting to open a public library or build a new park, but what Philadelphia needs is more investment in maintaining what’s already there,” McCaney said. “It’s not sexy, but it’s what communities want.”
I also found it notable that community members stressed that WPF prioritize organizations making a difference in the here and now. On the surface, this sounds like an intuitive takeaway since the pandemic showed board members across the philanthrosphere that supporting nonprofits focused on issues like food security and public health generated an immediate and undeniable impact.
That said, many foundations and the board members that oversee them are committed to policy and systems change. After all, how can funders move the needle on an issue like food insecurity if they aren’t willing to tackle its root causes? Like most board members, WPF’s leaders historically walked the tightrope between addressing present-day needs and identifying solutions that could eventually render the former support unnecessary.
“We have always and will continue to focus on policy,” McCaney said. “Public spending, for example, will continue to be a big focus for us, and it’s an area where we’ve had some significant wins. But there’s also a desire, especially among the board, to have a more immediate and direct impact. And as a local funder, we feel more pressured to act in the near term, as opposed to being focused on big, long-term systems change.”
Boosting accessibility
Before implementing its new strategic plan, WPF accepted unsolicited proposals and responded to ideas or suggestions raised by organizations and grantees. But WPF’s leaders realized that to be a truly accessible funder, they had to kick their doors wide open.
Since July 1, WPF has posted six requests for proposals on its website. Each RFP states the opportunity’s objective, evaluation criteria, the amount of funding available and the timeline for the process. “The big difference with our new approach,” McCaney said, “is that we are being much clearer about criteria for funding decisions and more public about the specific objectives we are trying to advance, which we hope will translate into more ideas and suggestions from a broader array of nonprofit organizations in our region.”
One RFP, “Improving Public Spaces in the Greater Philadelphia Region,” formalizes community members’ suggestion that WPF prioritize stewardship by improving “at least 100 existing public spaces that support recreation, refuge and social interaction” by 2035. “There are few limitations on the project designs or applicants’ approach to addressing this issue,” the proposal reads, underscoring WPF’s willingness to let organizations identify potential solutions.
WPF’s commitment to accessibility and transparency is exemplified by allowing its partner funders to access its grantmaking infrastructure. In mid-July, WPF issued an RFP to help organizations access federal climate, environmental justice and infrastructure funding. It plans to share applications with the Conshohocken, Pennsylvania-based Philadelphia’s Green Family Foundation, where its leaders can review and independently fund proposals.
McCaney is excited about WPF’s new strategy, but he’s also clear eyed about how the changes may land with some organizations. “Making the foundation more transparent and accessible runs the risk of disappointing folks since we can’t fund everything,” he said. “So we are concerned about that.”
He’s less concerned about staff being unable to handle a potential deluge of new applications. Before the strategic refresh, WPF staff were what McCaney called “monks” who wrote detailed grants and pored over lengthy applications. Under the new strategy, staff will emerge from the figurative monastery. “We want our team engaged with the community and building relationships, as opposed to administering and processing grant requests,” McCaney said, echoing a sentiment we hear from leaders whose staff oversees more community-driven grantmaking practices. “We don’t think it’ll be more work, but it will be different work.”
Looking ahead, foundation program staff will host additional community briefings this summer and set up external advisory committees to ensure its revised strategy is resonating with internal and external stakeholders. In the meantime, McCaney reports that preliminary feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.
“The engagement has paid off,” he said. “The objectives we’ve landed on reflect the priorities of the community, which is something we haven’t done well in the past. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to our work, and we’re going to keep that conversation going.”
