When he took over as president of the Barr Foundation in 2014, James Canales began a two-year effort to refine the foundation’s approach to climate change, education, and the arts.
One thing was clear from the outset, Mr. Canales says: “We were not going to outsource the shaping of Barr’s strategy.”
Still, the foundation needed some help.
The Boston-based grant maker has a staff of 24, including administrative positions, and plans to make about $70 million in grants this year. It was important to Mr. Canales that his staff shape the strategy, but he did not want the plan to be devised in isolation, by a small group of people sitting in an office.
To get more input in how Barr could best help the environment, he hired the Consensus Building Institute to serve as a “process manager.” The institute gathered experts in the field, guided them through discussions about how the foundation could work to mitigate the impact of climate change, and prepared draft documents that provided an overview for the grant maker to study. Over 10 months, Barr paid the institute $61,800.
Barr also paid another hired gun, Amy Solomon, $10,000 for “scanning work.” Ms. Solomon recently returned to consulting after 12 years as a program officer with the Bullitt Foundation, where her bailiwick included energy, industry, and technology. She took a close look at other donors that have climate, energy, transportation, and sustainable-development strategies to give Barr a “landscape” of funding in the field, Mr. Canales said.
Barr’s use of consultants meant its relatively small staff didn’t have to worry about running meetings with advisers and pulling together research. Instead, they could focus more fully on discussions about the foundation’s new course and “own” the foundation’s agenda, Mr. Canales says.
A Consultant-Free Approach
At the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, program directors are given leeway on how much they spend on consultants. The grant maker declined to say how much it spends on outside strategy work, but its 2014 Internal Revenue Service filings list three program consultants, paid a total of more than $2 million, among its top contractors.
When she became director of Hewlett’s global development and population program five years ago, Ruth Levine noticed that much of the “intellectual work” of conceptualizing strategy was done externally.
But when it came time to design a new grant portfolio to promote women’s economic empowerment, Ms. Levine gave the job to her staff. She hoped that by crafting the approach themselves, they would become more fluent in the program design and respond quickly to grantees’ needs.
Ms. Levine expected quick results. That wasn’t the case — it took about a year to develop the strategy.
“I thought it would be faster and more efficient for us to do the work in-house, but I was definitely wrong,” she says. “It’s a long slog.”
Still, the time and effort were worthwhile, she believes. If a consultant had done the research and planning, it would have taken extra time for her staff to become familiar with the results.
“That work didn’t have to be translated to us,” she says. “We just knew it.”
Correction: This article was updated to fix an inaccurate figure on how much Hewlett reported spending on program consultants. It was more than $2 milllion, not more than $3 million.
