A Conversation with Seth Borgos

Seth Borgos, who served on the NFG Board for five years, recently left the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock to join the National Campaign for Jobs and Income Support. His former colleague, Cynthia Freeman, interviewed him.

Cynthia Freeman: People often ask how we can evaluate the impact of social change - it's not as simple as a number of shelter beds, or mouths fed, or after-school program slots. What are you looking for as you try to assess the impact a group has made? And what are the markers you look for when deciding to settle in to support an organization for the long haul?

Seth Borgos: Social change takes a long time, and you have to take this into account when you assess impact. It's also true that every group that is serious about social change should have some sense of trajectory for getting from where they are now towards having greater impact. As a funder, the kinds of questions you're thinking about are: Is there a path? Does that path make sense? Does the group make progress on that path? And progress can often include measures susceptible to evaluation. For example, if a group needs to achieve a certain size to have an effect, gain certain kinds of credibility, or build certain kinds of leadership capacities, you can ask questions about these things and evaluate progress. But these things - capacity, leadership - don't make sense in a vacuum. They only make sense as part of a strategy.

In more concrete terms, one of the satisfactions of working at Veatch for 7-plus years is looking at many of the groups we funded and seeing very concrete progress. Organizations that were in the conceptual or building stages in 1993, when I started, are now having an impact on public policy, helping to shape public discourse on important matters, and involving hundreds of thousands of people who were previously disengaged in the democratic process. In the best cases, I can recall conversations with organizers and leaders of groups back in 1993-1994, and see how the sound strategic conceptions that we funded have unrolled in real time. Many of the goals set out in those conversations have been met, which is a source of great personal satisfaction, and validation of the kind of grantmaking we're doing at Veatch.

CF: You're framing these successes as much in terms of social change movements as the wins of individual groups. Is this a big part of Veatch grantmaking?

SB: The frame that the Veatch Board and staff bring to grantmaking, in addition to looking at individual groups, is a really strong emphasis on how the work of individual groups relates to each other and how the work of groups can aggregate to create greater impact. It's important to us to understand how an individual group sees itself within a broader movement-building framework. Part of that is straightforward, a question of who's working with whom, and where the strategic alliances are. The other big piece is how much organizations are learning from each other. In philanthropy there's this mantra about collaboration. I think it's healthy to a point, but it has also become a little bit of a fetish. The issue is not just whether they're working together, but are they learning from each other. Just having an alliance or network does not mean you have synergy. Sometimes funders are pushing collaboration where there's no relational base, and it does more harm than good. I think it's important to ask groups where they see their fit, their contribution in a larger context. Because none of the groups we're funding is going to make social change all by itself.

To put this in a different way, at Veatch we have increasingly over the last seven years looked at support for clusters of organizations rather than just individual groups. What we look for in a cluster is a number of things: one is people in motion, by which I mean people engaged at the grassroots level. The second is strategic opportunity, not only that the issue is right in a moral sense, but that the environment is susceptible to change. Third, we're looking for some sort of strategic vision - a match between people in motion and strategic opportunity in a way that generates change. While some of this is art (you can't totally predict what's going to happen) you can recognize the ingredients for change where they exist…

Excerpted from the Summer 2000 issue of Veatch Report, Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock.

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