(Illustration by Ben Wiseman)
The venture philanthropy movement, although it found inspiration in Silicon Valley, took hold differently in the United States from how it did in Europe. Venture philanthropy, or VP, applies the principles and tools of venture capital investing to the social sector. Early US-based proponents of VP quickly came into conflict with practitioners of traditional philanthropy, or TP, and made little headway in advancing their model. In Europe, by contrast, the founding of the European Venture Philanthropy Association (EVPA) in 2004 began a process that led to mutual understanding and collaboration between VP and TP practitioners.
Two scholars, Johanna Mair and Lisa Hehenberger, off er an in-depth look at how members of EVPA were able to bring together two dissimilar models that shared similar goals. “Initially, there was quite a lot of opposition between VP and TP, as VP pretended to be a new solution and as people defending TP saw VP as a threat,” says Hehenberger, research and policy director at the EVPA. “But over time, this changed into [an arrangement of] mutual coexistence.” Hehenberger joined EVPA in 2010, after concluding most of her research on this topic. (Mair, a professor of organization, management, and leadership at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, is also academic editor of Stanford Social Innovation Review.)
The researchers studied archival data, conducted interviews with members of TP and VP organizations, attended meetings with leaders of the VP movement, and observed every event organized by EVPA over the course of nearly a decade. They discovered, according to Hehenberger, that EVPA’s ability to serve as a mediating organization was critical to the formation of spaces where proponents of the two models could work out their diff erences. Instead of trying to subvert the use of TP as a philanthropic model—a tactic that may have helped derail VP eff orts in the United States—adherents of VP in Europe pursued change more gradually. The result was a hybrid approach to institutional philanthropy.
At events such as EVPA’s annual conference, organizers created two kinds of “stages” for attendees. There was a “backstage,” as Mair and Hehenberger call it, where people engaged in invitation-only, behind-the-scenes interactions. And there was a “front stage,” which consisted of open-to-the-public, highly visible gatherings. In the backstage arena, Hehenberger explains, “actors” felt safe to “take off their masks” and to break down their respective models into specific operational practices. Here, VP and TP proponents would share stories of failure and success. Then, in their front-stage interactions, they would recombine those practices into a new VP model. In essence, they co-developed that model. “This is why the resistance [between VP and TP] decreased,” says Hehenberger. “They experimented in the backstage, and then went back to the front stage and presented [their findings to a larger audience], and then deconstructed [those findings] again in the backstage.”
Deirdre Mortell, CEO of Social Innovation Fund Ireland and former CEO of the One Foundation, has firsthand experience with representing VP organizations and working closely with TP groups in the backstage arena. Such forms of collaboration work, she contends, because they provide a safe environment where people can focus on common goals as well as personal relationships. “What’s so powerful about this paper is that it spans a number of years and a wide range of countries, organizations, missions, and grants,” Mortell says. “That’s quite a data set from which to draw conclusions.”
Hehenberger suggests that scholars and practitioners can apply insights from this research to other fields in which a new institutional logic has the potential to replace an existing institutional logic. She cites, by way of example, quickly changing fields like nanotechnology and robotics. “We see that [conflict] doesn’t have to happen,” she says. “Two logics can coexist and actually work in symbiosis.”
Johanna Mair and Lisa Hehenberger, “Front-Stage and Backstage Convening: The Transition From Opposition to Mutualistic Coexistence in Organizational Philanthropy,” Academy of Management Journal, 57, 2014.
Read more stories by Adrienne Day.