Hey Philanthropy, You Can Fund Policy Work! No, Really! – A Conversation with Marc Solomon of Civitas Public Affairs and William Foster of the Bridgespan Group – Transcript

Kirk: [00:00:00] Welcome to, let’s Hear It.

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Eric: show.

Kirk: And we’re back.

And we’re here. We’ve all arrived. You’ve arrived. I’ve arrived. Mr. Brown has arrived. It’s, let’s hear it. Welcome in everybody. It’s another episode. I’ve arrived. I’m ready to depart. You [00:01:00] came in so fast today. It’s almost like you were flying on the back of a tortoise. That’s how hard, that’s how hard you hit this podcast today.

That’s me. It was incredible. I go

Eric: fast, brother, man.

Kirk: I am a wizard. Flames. Were flying a air, flames were flying. Mr. Brows ready to play. So this is so good. What we’re about to talk about this is, I was like, okay, this, how big would the room be? Of the people that would want to assemble for a conversation about how philanthropy could shape policy.

’cause this is some of my very favorite stuff. And I think we were both raised in the same school of how philanthropy and policy can interact to make the world a better place. But I was like, do you want me to tell you, tell people what we’re Please do. Yes. Because I

Eric: think we’re

Kirk: inviting everybody to join us on Policy Nerd Island, and I can’t wait.

We need to get there fast. It’s great.

Eric: My guests today this [00:02:00] time were Mark Solomon, who’s a partner at the C at Civicus Public Affairs, and William Foster, who’s a managing partner of the Bridgespan Group. Very fancy group, the Bridgespan Group, you’ll note, and they have just co-authored this paper called Betting on the Tortoise Policy Incrementalism and How Philanthropy Support can Turn Small, sustained steps into Big Impact.

Hard to say. And by the way, they co-authored that report with Eric Chen and Zach Slo, and it’s hard to say in the title, but Oh goodness. Policy is so important and foundations have a tendency to be shy about it, and we can talk about that after I. After we listened to this conversation, but I just loved having the chance to talk about policy, how foundations should support it, about how it works and about what your expectations need to be in order to get things done.

Kirk: So in, in one of the things you’re about to hear, only 5% of philanthropy today. Lives in this domain is something that I heard you guys discuss, which is [00:03:00] an astonishing number to hear about. So this is William Foster and Mark Solomon on. Let’s Hear It, and a special shout out to Eric Chen and Zach Slovic who both contributed to this report.

This is William and Mark, and let’s hear it. Let’s listen and we’ll come back.

Eric: Welcome to, let’s Hear It. You’re in for a treat, folks. Today my guests are Mark Solomon, a partner at CITAs Public Affairs, and William Foster, the managing partner of the Bridgespan Group. They have just co-authored a extremely interesting paper called Betting on the Tortoise Policy Incrementalism, and How Philanthropy Support Can Turn Small Sustained Steps into Big Impact.

They co-wrote this with Eric Chen and Zach z Lobi. Mark William, thank you so much. For coming on to the show,

Marc: great to be here. Indeed,

Eric: and I should mention that Mark, his book Winning Marriage, the inside story of how same sex couples took on the politicians and public and won was called The Definitive Political History of Marriage Equality by Slate [00:04:00] Magazine.

And that book will feature into our conversation today. So I just thought I’d. Throw that in there. Also, William, if I understand this correctly, you were an RJ Miller scholar at Stanford?

William: Yes, I was. Wow. A piece of digging up the past.

Eric: I dug I used the incredible thing called the internet, but RJ Miller was an early board member at the Hewlett Foundation.

I had the privilege of interviewing him while he was well into his nineties. For a project at Hewlett. So I had the opportunity to shake RJ Miller’s hand. So there we go.

William: Wonderful.

Eric: Okay, so let’s just dive into this paper, which I, this is the stuff I love to talk about, and so I’m really thrilled that we get to have this conversation.

Okay. Why did you write the paper? I’ll start with you, William.

William: Yeah, so first of all, I wrote paper in part to work with Mark. I was excited to do that, but the thing that put these questions, at least in my mind and Mark can share as well, is that. In our work at Bridgespan advising philanthropists who are quite ambitious, we just saw this gap, right?

This [00:05:00] gap between how much philanthropists were thinking about policy work as a core focus, which was not at that much and what, and the proportion of kind of enduring. Impacts in the world that came from policy work. On the one hand, the things we remember, the civil rights movement, environmental protections, even on the conservative side tax limitations, all of these things that our profound effects on society are part of what philanthropy and nonprofit leaders work on in our public debate.

And yet. We didn’t see it happening that much with philanthropists. We did a study looking at big bets, and we found that fewer than 5% of the biggest philanthropic commitments went to anything broadly in the policy sphere. So we were just interested like why this gap? What’s holding folks back and is effective policy work still possible?

Which led us down this path of working together with CITAs and really seeing [00:06:00] this pathway around incremental work that was effective, appealing to philanthropists, and we wanted to go deeper in it.

Eric: Now it sounds like in incrementalism and philanthropy don’t seem to necessarily go together. Foundations like to cut the proverbial ribbon on things.

They like to see action and they wanna know that their money is, they’re getting impact. One of my least favorite words on the planet. So Mark, let’s talk about what the tortoise actually bidding in the tortoise actually means. And what do we mean by policy incrementalism? Is that. How on earth do you sell that to folks who wanna be able to show the big wins?

The big bets wanna show big wins too, right? Yeah.

Marc: I view the work that those of us who are involved in social movements are doing is taking the country from a place where pretty much everybody believes something is impossible to place where. People think the outcome is inevitable and the journey, that journey is [00:07:00] incrementalism.

They’re putting incremental wins on the board, showing something as possible, inspiring others to join up and building a movement, building a critical mass of supporters in a lot of cases, building a critical mass of either municipalities or states and then showing look. This is good for the country.

Let’s all do it. I think in our paper we, one of the folks we talked to, one of the philanthropists, Nick Hanauer, who’s a great social entrepreneur, talks about how he’s always looking for how to take a million dollars worth of philanthropy and turn it into a billion dollars worth of impact, and social policy change is the way to do that.

I certainly don’t begrudge people from enjoying a big ribbon, cutting at a building or a at a university, et cetera, et cetera. But I also think that people who are involved in something like winning the freedom to marry nationwide or increasing the minimum wage dramatically and lifting people outta poverty, those are wins that people, that philanthropists feel [00:08:00] exceptionally great about, and they happen.

Incrementally, they don’t. You don’t go to Washington DC and say, we’re gonna, we wanna increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour, or we wanna win marriage equality initiative. Or you might go there and say that, but it’s not gonna happen. You need to demonstrate proof of concept and build.

Eric: When you talk about incrementalism, you don’t mean slow steady victories.

You mean two, and you’ve talked about this in the paper mark, you say two steps forward, one step back, sometimes two steps forward. Three steps back and then one step forward. What can we talk about what incremental as in incrementalism actually means, and how you keep all of these forces together in the face of fits and starts if you’re lucky.

Marc: Yeah, I’d a few. It’s a great question, and I think there’s core to this work. Whatever the work is that you’re, that you’ve delved into in, in the social movement [00:09:00] is for people to, I. Want the policy change really badly and see glimmers of hope that it can be a reality. For example, in the early days of the marriage equality fights, we got a favorable court ruling in Hawaii in 1992, and the judge basically said, you can’t just dismiss this out of hand.

You need to apply more, a deeper look at it. Now the pushback happened quickly. The Defensive Marriage Act was passed in Congress. Bill Clinton signed it. Nearly every member of Congress voted for it. The amend, the constitution of Hawaii was amended. There was a big pushback, but the seed of this.

Possibility among LGBT people that we actually could get married really was crucial to driving forward. Even through that might’ve been one step forward and seven steps back. But that’s that, and that is what a social movement is. You don’t hit a tipping point until you’ve gone up [00:10:00] a very steep hill.

Eric: You both talk about this concept called the Overton Window. And so William, I’m gonna ask you with that. Because I’m, it sounds, it’s fascinating to me. Can you talk about what it is and whether it’s a French door or like a little tiny people?

William: Yeah. The Overton Window is a pretty basic concept, really, which is what’s the set of topics or conversations that are even considered reasonable versus crazy.

And in any given time in the society, there are things that are in the sphere of conversation or not. The reason that concept’s important for this work is that there’s almost a sequence, right? There’s a sequence of when tangible policy action is possible versus when something’s just not even in the zone of conversation.

And so with gay marriage, I think Mark is talking about this time, we’re all of a sudden, even though there were losses, the topic of gay marriage as a legitimate policy question was now within the Overton window, if you’ve gone [00:11:00] back. 20 years before it wouldn’t have been right. People would’ve said, what is this?

That’s just too far out there. And the reason Eric, this is so important is the kinds of work and the kinds of social movement leaders that can take something from not even being in discussion to now being in the Overton window or one kind of leader. There’s a little bit more kind of breaking things of and going against the grain, et cetera.

I. But then the kind of leaders that take something from once that’s in the Overton window to actual policy tend to be different kinds of people, different kinds of strategies. It’s about building broad coalitions. It’s about finding narratives that appeal to everyone and funny, and yet, I. For so many people, particularly in this age of social media and polarization and tribalism, I think often that distinction is appreciated, right?

That the social movement leaders that got something through really aggressive sort of out there [00:12:00] tactics into conversation are then still what people look to for who will get it to real policy. And it’s just, it generally isn’t.

Eric: Do these movements need you? You’re talking about movement leaders, but marriage equality, to my recollection, did not have a leader did it?

Maybe Mark, I’ll turn that question over to you since you wrote the book.

Marc: I think there were leaders in that movement. I think Evan Wolfson was a core leader. Mary Bento was a core leader, and I think you need someone or someone’s driving a strategy, but you also need a movement. And a movement by definition a whole slew of people who are.

Fighting and pushing and, but I’d say the reason I think leaders are really important is that there were crucial times in that movement where a lot of people were pushing back on US advocates to stop. Yeah. One time I remember so well is, was right after John [00:13:00] Kerry lost the presidency in 2004. Our opponents put a bunch of initiatives on the ballots and it wasn’t, it was.

It was Democrats who were telling us to stop. It was actually the late Senator from San Francisco. Dan Feinstein was like too fast, too soon, too much. I remember the day after John Kerry lost and we had to gather as a movement and figure out what the pathway forward was. And so you do need people who are, were helping conceive of the, both the vision and strategy and how you’re gonna get there.

To help guide a social movement,

Eric: not Evan Wilson is certainly not a household name. People wouldn’t, unless you’re in the movement, wouldn’t understand or see him as being associated with or marry. So the, so it sounds to me like you don’t need a figurehead to be the face of your movement.

Marc: You can.

Yeah, I think that’s right. And there aren’t many of those these days. It’s sort of Martin Luther King or et cetera, et cetera, et and people often say, okay, who’s the Martin Luther King of our movement? And there, you’re right, there is no Martin Luther King of our movement or the fight [00:14:00] for 15 or criminal justice reform and on it’s

William: it’s just isn’t, yeah.

Go ahead and Mark. It’s not even clear to me that in general that would be helpful, right. That, that in building these coalitions, different people come in. Motivated by different values, but in agreement on a specific goal. And it’s not clear that having that sort of personalized in, in, in one leader would be good.

I agree.

Eric: Yeah. You talk, you both, you talk about narrative shift a lot in this paper and this, since this is nominally a podcast about communications, narrative plays such an important part in these movements now. One of the things in the marriage equality work, you talked about this narrative shift between kind of rights and access to whatever, the ability to make medical decisions and things like that.

There were incremental things versus this understanding of love and marriage. Can you talk about how that shift occurred, how that narrative shift occurred, and whether it was Evan and Mary and a few other people in a room saying, this is the [00:15:00] narrative or how you got to that place?

Marc: Yeah, it was out of necessity.

We were losing at the ballot again and again, and it was the final nail in the coffin on these ballot initiative was Proposition eight in California when the same election, when Barack Obama became presidents, our side lost the ability to marry in California, and it was the first time that we’d had marriage and it was actually taken away in other states.

The sort of social conservatives and right wingers pushed initiatives in places where it was barely even conceived up. But in California, couples were getting married and so we really looked at how we were talking about what we were doing. We’re like, we can’t do this again. Our side spent 35 40 million, 40, 40 plus million dollars on the initiative, and we lost.

And what became clear as we. As we really looked at it carefully and worked with some really top-notch research firms and listened carefully to people, [00:16:00] listened to regular voters, and to talk about the issue is that we were talking about marriage in ways that other people don’t talk about or think about marriage.

We were talking about, as you said, the benefits and protections that come along with marriage. Now it’s, it is a nice thing to not have to think about that as a, as a. As part of a different sex couple. You get this big basket of stuff once you get married. But what people think about when they think about marriage is love and commitments and we weren’t doing a good enough job of that.

And so we had the, we did have this one big aha moments. It was in research when. People were asked why it was in Oregon. Actually. People were asked why in a poll, why they thought, why they wanted to get married, why straight people wanted to get married. And it was overwhelmingly loving commitments was the number one answer.

And then they were asked why they thought gay couples wanted to get married. And the number one answer was that they didn’t know. And the number two answer was rights and [00:17:00] benefits and loving commitment was way down. 50 points lower. So it’s like we were talking about two different things and I. If we wanted marriage instead of some package of benefits, we needed to talk about why we wanted marriage and not just talk about it, but show the love and commitment of our relationships.

Eric: We’re gonna take a very quick break. We back with Mark Solomon and William Foster. Right after this, you are listening to, let’s Hear It, a podcast about foundation and nonprofit communications hosted by Eric Brown and Kirk Brown. If you’re enjoying this episode, you may just be a rule breaker. Tune in to break Fake Rules, a new limited series podcast with Glen Gallic, CEO of the Stukey Foundation.

Hear from leaders in philanthropy, nonprofits, government media, and more to learn about challenges they’ve overcome by breaking fake rules and which rules we should commit to breaking together. We are also sponsored by the Conrad Previs Foundation. [00:18:00] Check out their amazingly good podcast, and we’re not just saying that.

Stop and talk. Hosted by Previs Foundation, CEO. Grant Ola. You can find them at stop and talk podcast.com. And now back to the show. And we’re back. We’re back with Mark Solomon, a partner at CITAs Public Affairs, and William Foster, managing partner of the Bridgespan Group. They’ve just co-authored this really terrific paper called Betting on the Tortoise Policy Incrementalism and How Philanthropy Support can Turn Small, sustained steps into Big Impact.

And that’s found at the Bridgespan website. And we will put a link to it at the, in our show notes. So getting back to talking about narrative, you also talk about the fight for 15 narrative, which was the fight for the $15 minimum wage. Let’s, William, can you talk just a little bit about what that fight was, what the narrative was, how you came up, or how the folks who put this work together came up with that and how it’s been so successful?

William: Yeah. That’s some work that Nick [00:19:00] Hanauer is doing, and it’s an example of a narrative that was stuck. And a sort of losing proposition. So for many years the question about minimum wage has been this dichotomy, if you will, of being compassionate or supportive of those I. Burning the least versus taking risks with economic growth and the health of the economy.

And while people care about both consistently in place after place, when the minimum wage debate is framed in that way, the overall health of the economy and jobs wins out. People say we value that more than the compassion for those that earn the least by 70 to 30 margin. And what the fight for 15 is doing is really trying to shift that to say.

We’re gonna grow the economy from the middle out, which is actually a framing that the Biden administration has now adopted with both backed by data, but with this sort of strong notion that in fact, by putting money [00:20:00] into the pockets of average people, of consumers, like that’s the root to growing the economy.

And that seems to be a winning formula. And across all of these kinds of policy changes, there are examples of that. The sentencing reform work was very similar when it was safety versus compassion and second chances. Safety always won. When it became being smart on safety, smart on crime, with prosecutors saying, Hey, there are smarter ways to do sentencing.

That whole narrative changed, and I think the thing about it, Eric, is across all of this be marked in my finding is that winning policy changes. Generally come from a new angle. It’s like whatever the debate was, it was stuck. That’s why there wasn’t movement. And by coming in at a new angle. That appreciate the deeper truth and that appeals to 70% of people.

That’s the winning formula and it’s counter-cultural, right? Like we live in an era of tribalism [00:21:00] where people say, I believe what I believe and I want to bludge on the other side till they accept what I believe. And that doesn’t seem to be the winning formula. The winning formula seems to come in from a new angle with something that really frames it in a way that the vast majority, it doesn’t have be a hundred percent of people, but where a strong majority of people can say yes, I believe that.

Eric: This is so interesting because on the one hand, people don’t know diddly squat about the economy. And they also like favor tax breaks for the wealthy because someday they hope they’ll be able to be wealthy and they’ll get those tax breaks. And so these kinds of arguments don’t feel to be, as the analytic arguments about a good economy don’t seem to carry most of these things, and yet the $15 minimum wage seems to have it.

It feels to me like you’re right, it’s coming in from some other part, but it’s something in addition to that. There must be some other kind of. I don’t know whether it’s an existential or some kind of human connection that even folks who would otherwise [00:22:00] oppose smart middle class economic policy, for example, can get behind this.

Mark, do you have thoughts about this and campaigns that you’ve worked on and how these pieces come together?

Marc: I do, I think, and it all goes for incrementalism. It. You need to prove, you need to prove your concept. The messaging in the early parts of a campaign will can get you far, but it can only get you so far.

If you’re making this middle out argument and then they pass a $15 minimum wage in Seattle and all of a sudden businesses just bulge from Seattle, then the message isn’t gonna work. It was the same thing with marriage in equality in Massachusetts, like our opponents promised that the sky was gonna fall.

There were literally sharp cheaters on the roofs across. Boston the day that the first round of same sex couples got married in Massachusetts because they, our fundamentalist religious opponents and the Catholic hierarchy promise, the sky was literally gonna fall. So we had to show it. And that is the beauty of incrementalism and that’s the beauty of our sort of [00:23:00] our.

Federalist system of government and you can show in a place like Seattle where it’s a more progressive population and you can you what’s where he hour is based. You can pass a ballot initiative and say, you know what? Jobs haven’t exited. The Chamber of Commerce isn’t right on this law. And then you are able to, then you can get more business leaders to make the case.

I think. As important as message are messengers. And if you’re just having unions say, this is middle out economics, that’s one thing. But if you’re having business leaders say, that’s actually, this was fine in Seattle and we’ve seen it work across the country and so I’m for it and I or I already raise my minimum wage to $15 an hour, and I think everybody should do it.

I think it’ll. Create more consumers in our city or our state. And I think

William: messenger is that, it’s a super key point, which gets to one of our findings about strange bedfellows. But when you look at criminal sentencing reform, when public defenders were saying, have compassion and give second chances to, to, to the [00:24:00] incarcerated, again, it just didn’t, it only appealed so far.

But when prosecutors said, this isn’t how to, this isn’t how to be smart about increasing public safety. People trust that messenger with a surprising messenger and one with distinctive credibility on that topic. Most of the public doesn’t have, most policy makers don’t have the expertise to actually understand the impact of policies.

Eric: Yeah, that’s a really good point. The, you talk about, so we’re talking about policy and politics, and the part we haven’t dis discussed so far are the courts. Sometimes follow the politics. Sometimes they follow the policy and sometimes they’re just nuts. And marriage equality, of course was consecrated, if you will, in the courts, not through a constitutional amendment, for example, which is almost impossible to get.

So how do you feel now about this very wild card? We, people, for example, thought that the right to abortion would be the sacrosanct for eternity and turned out not to be the case. Where do the courts fit in [00:25:00] right now? To what extent do you think that they actually follow the politics or the policy, and how does your work get upended or supported in one way or the other by a court system that has sometimes the last word?

William: Two thoughts on that and then Mark, you should jump in. One is to, to some degree, courts are influenced by opinion, both public opinion and the opinion of fellow. Judges and so it’s not as though they’re not influenceable by streams of public thought as one. And the second is incrementalism plays out in the judicial pathway every bit as much as in the legislative pathway.

If you think about abortion restriction, obviously there was a major Supreme Court ruling just now, but over the 20 preceding years, the degree to which access was restricted to abortion moved bit by bit through, through many different, but cumulatively significant. Pathways, whether it was about the kinds of facilities that could have abortions, the kind of relationships they needed with tertiary hospitals, the kind of [00:26:00] windows of time in which abortion could be allowed.

So it’s, even though it was largely in the courts or at least legislation, then went with subject to court rulings it. It’s a great example of it, and the truth is that abortion. Increases in abortion access. The next chapter of work will similarly not be won by one massive piece of federal legislation or singular Supreme Court ruling, but will likely be won by ballot initiatives, constitutional amendments, individual pieces of legislation, and individual court rulings like we just had, I don’t know, this past week.

Eric: Mark, you wanna add to that?

Marc: I agree with everything William just said. I think Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, and I think this is absolutely true, that courts don’t generally get in front of public opinion, and she said it much more eloquently of course, but the strategy on marriage in particular was we knew we were gonna have to win ultimately at the US Supreme Court or in Congress, but we thought more likely the [00:27:00] Supreme Court, but we also knew that to get there to, to.

To be in the place where Justice Ginsburg was suggesting we needed to have a critical mass of states and a critical mass of public support and a diverse mix of public support. And so by the time we got to the US Supreme Court, we had 37 states that were, that allowed. Same-sex couples to marry. We brought a.

More conservative case around ending the federal ban or the federal government not recognizing marriages of same sex couples in the Windsor 80 Windsor Supreme Court case. So it’s fact chain incrementalism. It’s one foot in front of the next, in front of the next, and you are, you’re hoping to push a snowball up a hill.

And then you hope to get to a point where it’s big enough at the top of the hill that everybody better luck out. In the last couple of minutes that we have left,

Eric: oh, I really wanna talk about this effect that, that your approach to incrementalism can have for philanthropy. How should funders be thinking about their issues?

How [00:28:00] do you. I don’t know, prepare them for the long haul that any of these large, important changes or frankly protecting your large important wins will be what are the kinds of conversations that you have and how do you really get them to understand how long this stuff takes and what the trajectory of it is?

William: And Eric, the thing about here is the what increment what? Understanding the importance of incrementalism opened up for a philanthropist. Is actually the idea that policy work can be strategic and planful and measurable. So yes, it takes a long time, which might be intimidating or a negative, but the overwhelming positive is it’s not just about fighting the good fight.

If you think about things as being singular battles at the national level with massive forces of raid on different sides, it seems it seems unpredictable and that anything you do is just a drop in the bucket by breaking it down to incremental steps, even if they buy out over [00:29:00] many years. All of a sudden you can actually assess your results.

Mark said, when you’re losing with one narrative and you have multiple losses, it causes reflection in a new approach. And if you’re gaining traction, it allows you to double down. And the gay marriage example is a perfect example whereby having. Legislative path and a judicial path across 50 states, there were a hundred battlefields.

And you can strategically assess where the odds are best and you can know if over a five year period you’re you have no wins, like you’re probably not on a good path and that. That truth about incrementalism makes policy work for philanthropy so much more accessible than just donate to a bunch of people who are like-minded big.

Give bigger donations next year than last and hope you know something that happens.

Eric: Mark, what do you think?

Marc: I agree. I think William and I agree on on, on so much and it has been a real joy getting to work with William and the Bridgespan [00:30:00] team on this project. I think that. The opportunity for philanthropists is to create fundamental change that affects lives of real people over the long haul, so that to change a law.

Let’s just use the fight for 15. If you’ve increased the minimum wage and being crucial in that effort, you are helping people for the long haul in, in, in really impactful ways, and you can quantify it. And that’s much different from as, as great as it is simply. Funding a program that is providing financial support for individuals.

Same for the freedom to marry, or same for not keeping people locked up in prison for longer than they need to be and on. So I think the excitement of this work is, and the excitement for philanthropists is to be able to be part of making real fundamental change. And the cool thing is, even though it’s [00:31:00] a long haul, it’s a long process.

You can. I think core of the work is building momentum every single day. So even momentum can be getting a great op-ed placed in a paper about, by an. Unlikely author making the case. It can be getting the first domestic partnership ordinance passed in San Francisco in 19, in the 1990s and on.

I just think it’s a great, it’s a great opportunity, a great bet for philanthropists and I encourage them to, more of them to join the excitements and opportunity and frustration and steps forward and steps back, but it’s exciting work.

William: And I would just add that it’s one of the wonderful dimensions of American society, right?

That our policies are not cooked up by some people in the nation’s capital who are the deepest experts and most highly trained in that particular field. Our public policy tends to emerge from the sort of raucous experimentation that takes place in communities all across our [00:32:00] country, which is not true of every nation, but is true here, and means that civil society, both nonprofits and philanthropy.

Have a distinctive calling and that’s been true for 200 years.

Eric: Yeah, and I, if I would. Use the, whatever the moderator’s privilege of actually offering an opinion. The two things that seem so important to me here are that these changes, which are hardly, they were hardly givens, marriage equality fright for 15 or criminal justice reform happened in the context of a very polarized political system.

They happened. And the other part is that they were not accidents. They were planned and they were planned and they were funded, and they were parts of strategies that succeeded. And there’s an old saw in improv comedy, which is, if this is true, what else might be true? And I think that’s the sort of thing that we can all take a lot of hope from, and I take a lot of hope from you.

I loved this paper. I thought it was so interesting. Mark Solomon, partner at CITAs Public Affairs, [00:33:00] William Foster, managing partner of the Bridgespan Group. Your paper betting on the tortoise policy incrementalism and how philanthropy support can turn small sustained steps into big Impact Co-written with Eric Chen and Zach Slo.

Big. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. What a great conversation, and I can’t wait to talk about this more.

Marc: Thank you for having us very much. Thanks, Eric. And we’re

Kirk: back. Welcome back, Kirk. How have you been? So it’s all the good stuff. This is policy, this is incrementalism, this is philanthropy. But this notion of turning small, sustained steps into big impact that notion.

How do we get more philanthropy to understand how exciting that notion is? And you touched on it briefly, like philanthropy wants to take big swings and be part of these big things, but man, the big gains all show up as a result of these, the steady progress of these small steps.

Eric: It’s funny ’cause philanthropy wants to do two things.

One, yeah. Once the big [00:34:00] victories, they’re like, gimme some of that marriage equality stuff. That was a big winner. Give it Doug. Give that to me. Okay, great. That’s right. You’re gonna have to do policy work and you’re gonna have to be patient and you’re gonna have to be able to live with the setbacks.

You’re gonna have to live with California and Defense of marriage and all these terrible things that you are like, oh my God, why are we doing this? You have to be able to work your way through some of that stuff and stay in it for the long haul. So patience is a big thing. And then just the policy work itself is a big thing.

A lot of foundations will say, oh no. We can’t do policy. That’s illegal. That’s not true. I was thinking of it as, as I was brushing my teeth this morning, Kirk, I was thinking about what metaphor I could apply. I’m so proud of you. Yeah, thank you very much. What metaphor I could apply to this conversation?

And I thought of one. Okay. It’s like you see a speed limit on the freeway and it says 65, and you go, Ooh, I don’t wanna get caught speeding, so I’m gonna drive two. And that’s what a lot of [00:35:00] folks think about with regard to policy. Or actually even worse, they go, oh my God, there’s a speed limit I’m gonna get on a road that doesn’t have a speed limit.

It. The only problem is it’s pockmark dirt. You actually can’t drive on it. You’re never getting anywhere, but it’s no speed limit, so I’m not gonna get a ticket. So that kind of stuff is how. Philanthropy often reacts to policy. Not only that, they will sometimes put in their grant agreements. You cannot use our money for lobbying.

Kirk: Yeah. Which is,

Eric: Stupid. It’s, okay. It’s whatever check your doctor for your, if your own symptoms vary. But the fact of the matter is that most. Nonprofit organizations can use some of the money as long as it’s not earmarked for policy. Some of it, they can use all of it because the policy is not articulated in such a way.

There’s so many rules about this stuff, but the fact of the matter is that so much money and philanthropy and grant making and all that other [00:36:00] stuff can go towards policy and foundations just ah, I’m scared about this, so I’m just not gonna do that. That’s too bad because that’s where the real value in philanthropy is making these great big wholesale shifts in how our world operates.

Just think about marriage equality, but that’s just one example out of very many.

Kirk: Given Mark’s background in marriage equality. It was so interesting to hear him reflecting on this, and I, can I make a pitch? Can I add more to-do items to your, to-do list, because I know you love it when I do this.

Yes. Have, let’s get, I’m totally likely. Let’s get Mark, let’s get Mark back and have him talk about his book. Let’s have him talk about his book, because that, just, that whole process around marriage equality was so interesting and. It actually goes to the heart of another part of this that you talked about that was so interesting is this notion, okay now you’re gonna wrap your head around this.

You’re philanthropy. You’re like, oh, we can do policy. That doesn’t mean we’re going to jail. We actually can, we can actually fund things that gets laws changed. But we’re gonna do this in a lot of innovative ways. We’re gonna do it in some local settings. We’re gonna do it [00:37:00] through different mechanisms.

You guys talked about some of the ways that happens, but the process is gonna be messy. You’re gonna have some wins, and then you’re gonna have some failures. You’re gonna have some wins and losses. You’re gonna make progress. Then you’re gonna fall back. And don’t you think that’s another part for philanthropy?

It’s just hard to wrap your head around, like, how do you’re taking this precious asset. How can I take my philanthropy, deliver it to the world, the way that creates better outcomes? At least the part of philanthropy we care about. But half the time or a third of the time, you’re actually gonna feel the pain of losing ground.

You’re gonna actually take steps back. That’s, I think that’s really hard to. Wrap your mind around,

Eric: Change is not clean and it’s not linear. Yeah. And if that’s what you’re looking for as a philanthropist, you’re gonna make, I don’t know, you’re leaving a lot of opportunity on the table. Let’s just put it that way.

And you nobody’s gonna jail. I promise you. It’s like hell. What are you in for? Mo? How about you? Oh, my grantee didn’t take the 5 0 1 H election on the, I was like, no. It’s anyway, [00:38:00] again, but consult your doctor and your tax attorney your mileage may vary, but there’s so much that we could be doing that we’re not doing ’cause we’re afraid of something that we shouldn’t be afraid of.

Kirk: But Mr. Narrative, in the process of doing all this bits and fits and starts and small steps narrative.

Eric: Wait, where’s Mr.

Kirk: You, you’re Mr. Narrative because. That process. You get to change what? The Overton window. Oh, thank you. Oh my God. We got to talk about the Overton window. Okay. Are you

Eric: kidding me? That’s the best.

I hope that’s the best. I hope you’re taking your Omo, Sartan or whatever blood pressure medication you should probably get on. Kidding me,

Kirk: please just trade every. Program officer at every foundation in what is the Overton window. And we have watched in our lifetime that Overton window move in a lot of interesting directions.

And we could point we talked about with marriage equality, you’re talking about with, how do you approach minimum wage? We’ve seen it changes in really positive ways. We’ve also seen it [00:39:00] changes in some truly apple ways. Yeah. And that’s playing out in front of us right now. But this notion of what you make accessible to even talk about and by the way, we got one of the all time great.

Comments in this podcast, this interview talking about what we’re doing. This is so good, Eric. This is also good. We’re going from taking things that feel impossible. We’re turning them so they feel inevitable. Yes. That’s the work here, right? That’s right. Anything you get there by doing the basic tiny steps, you just build this

Eric: up one piece at a time.

It is also true that by talking about your work in the context of inevitability, and of course I am hearkening back Yes. To our great conversation with a Chenko Osorio. We are. Framing our work in ways that people that open the Overton window. I love the Overton window. It’s my favorite window. It’s so good.

I it’s so great. If you’re gonna have a window, it should be the Overton window. That’s right. I’m going to Home Depot and I’m ordering a whole bunch of Overton windows and I want them to put them in my house tomorrow. ’cause I Good. Love that

Kirk: window. [00:40:00] It’s that great window. So good. Okay, so I’ve got, I got two of my two, not just one, two of the of the random ones today okay.

Go. First is can we do a naming charette? A naming charette? Because I was thinking incrementalism, so that’s accurate. It’s precisely pinpoint, and of course this is Brit bed, so we gotta be accurate. It’s like you could put a laser, this is laser pinpoint accuracy.

I was like, is it really incrementalism? And then you actually got there at the end of the conversation, but started talking about momentum. Ah, started talking about momentum. And so isn’t really what we’re talking about here is momentum philanthropy. Isn’t this about how you build momentum for major change?

So yes, it’s, yes, it’s these tiny steps. But yeah, there’s something about incrementalism. I feel like it almost it takes the juice out of how important this topic really is.

Eric: I actually think inevitability is better because momentum shifts and sometimes you end up with reverse momentum. That’s [00:41:00] fair.

A concept fair, but I think inevitable is that we are getting there and the trick is, can we get there as fast as we need to get there? And can we stay under, can we continue to understand that the outcome is inevitable? Our goal is to be able to stomach the downturns. It’s a little bit like, I don’t know what the stock market, that over any given period of 10 year period, the market’s going up.

The trick is, do you lose your cookies when it goes down by 20% and it start to freak out, right? I think that’s, it’s a little bit like in some of these things. Now, mind you, if you are an advocate for women to be able to have an abortion. The inevitability of that has re, has, we are in a historic downturn in the market.

Whereas I do believe that we will achieve our inevitable outcome, which is that this will be a universally endowed somehow, yeah. [00:42:00] We are not in that moment and we have to. Obviously understand that there’s gonna be a lot more work that has to happen to get to that place. We were lulled into a sense of security that we should not feel lulled into, and I think this goes for any, anything, any policy victory, any court’s victory that we achieve.

Is that the day you win is the day you start defending that victory because this, the systems, because there are a lot of folks out there who are against it and they’re not giving up either. This is one of those things where inevitability is a very long term un understanding proposition and that’s important to remember as well.

Kirk: That is. So there it is. William r Eric, Zach, creating inevitability how small bets create big changes. Do and think about, ’cause we think about philanthropy and you’ve obviously lived and worked around some of the world’s largest philanthropies, but. This is also family foundations thinking about their $25,000 bets.

There’s, it’s $1,000 at $5,000. It’s giving it all levels and being able to, with [00:43:00] credibility, go to people and say, your small investment can turn into this billion dollars worth of avalanche or change and secure these outcomes forever. That it’s a way to just help people understand they’re connecting their dollars to these changes, which are so much larger than they could imagine.

Yep. Totally agree. So my last one, and then I will liberate you. Oh, but my last one and you alluded to it free, the brown one with the convers. Go ahead. You alluded to it with your conversation about where we’re at with the access to abortion conversation nationally. Right now. Is it possible that the background of your conversation just now at William and Mark, you are actually describing the other thing that’s been happening, which is the incremental process of the wholesale dismantling of democracy.

That we’re talking about this from the context of how you build positive change using all these steps, working through all these different sectors, doing it with a long timeframe, understanding you’re gonna have some win, some losses, but you’ve got a direction. Is it possible that actually the same [00:44:00] project, using the same thinking is actually reaching in almost like, culmination points on the other side of things. What do you think about that?

Eric: It’s a little early in the day for me to start drinking Kirk. Sorry. But it’s a reminder. It’s got all the hallmarks, it’s got the Overton. Yeah. It’s got the, it’s got all the hallmarks. It’s it is a reminder that the bad people out there doing the same thing, or at least, and sometimes they do it better because they’re somehow able to withstand.

A decade or a generation’s worth of setback, but they just keep at it. It’s one of those, the cyborgs and science fiction movie, like all of a sudden he’s wait a minute, that Cyborg still around Damnit. So I think this is one of those things where it reminds us, it is just a real reminder that we have to be very vigilant and we have to be really.

We just can’t waste another, we can’t waste a second, and we can’t waste a penny. And that’s why policy work is so important and why it’s a problem that’s so little of it gets funded. [00:45:00] Yeah, and that’s I would just, again, encourage any foundation within a earshot to reconsider their timidity. Their foundation is not pushing hard enough If it doesn’t know what the speed limit is and it doesn’t know what speed they’re going, they need to again.

And then once you win, keep winning and defend your wins and ensure that you’re supporting an entire movement around the work that you’ve already, I. Supported so that they can continue to do what they need to do because it’s not like the other side of the, oh yeah, okay, we lost, let’s move on to some, another thing.

They don’t do that. They think and, multi-decade timeframes and and, I don’t wanna dey the opposition or whatever you wanna call them and tell us and downplay all the wonderful victories and the incredible hard work and the fabulous work that’s going on every day on, on the progressive side, but.

I’m just looking at some things that have happened and that are happening today in your own question about, is our democracy [00:46:00] act actually in jeopardy? And the answer is, yes it is.

Kirk: Yeah. And

Eric: For those folks who say ah, it’ll be okay. I wouldn’t bank on that. I would actually go out and do all the work possible to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Kirk: And it gets to the heart of this percentage a question, doesn’t it? Because if our field are progressively minded, let’s make the world a best better place. Field is only allocating 5% of its philanthropy to this notion that policy can make the world a better place. I have a sneaking suspicion that the folks looking back at us trying to create a much different view of the world, might have those percentages calibrated differently.

And with that might be part of what we’re seeing is that there’s so much more effort being put into some of this stuff and, in ways that are really disturbing. Yep. Wow. So this is incredible. So this is policy incrementalism and how philanthropies support can turn small, sustained steps into big impact.

What an exciting man. So this is William Foster, Mark Solomon, Eric Chen, Zach slo. You can find the information on the Bridge Bridgespan Group’s website. Download the report, check it out and let’s [00:47:00] hope it has impact. ’cause this is really important work. This is great.

Eric: Totally agree. That was, it was a great conversation.

Kirk: Thank you. We’ll see you next time and let’s hear it.

Eric: See you folks.

Kirk: Okay everybody. That’s it for this episode. Please let us know if you have any thoughts about what you heard today or people we should have on this show. And that definitely includes yourself and we’d like to thank

Eric: our in.

Fatigable producer, Harper Brown,

Kirk: John Ali, the tuneful and inspiring composer of our theme music, our sponsor, the Lumina Foundation, and please check out Lumina’s terrific podcast, today’s students tomorrow’s talent, and you can find that@luminafoundation.org.

Eric: We certainly thank today’s guest, and of course, all of you,

Kirk: and most importantly, thank you, Mr.

Brown.

Eric: Oh no. Thank you, Mr. Brown.

Kirk: Okay, everybody, till next [00:48:00] time.