Designing for learning: One foundation's efforts to institutionalize organizational learning

Abstract

The workforce challenge facing the social sector is not one of a lack of bodies to fill jobs; rather it is the lack of funder investment in grantee and nonprofit talent. This has yielded chronically weak recruitment, retention, and retirement in the sector, and trends are ratcheting up the urgency of the situation. The author offers a Talent Philanthropy Framework as a means to address this challenge and proposes 10 guiding principles that can be used to encourage and empower nonprofits to strengthen their talent and increase performance and impact. Foundations with a stake in the organizations they support are most appropriate to take the lead given that government and individual donors are generally more interested in programs.