Grantmaking Lessons from the Buffetts

The September 2009 issue of Fast Company magazine has an article about Warren Buffett and his children, to whom he pledged $1 billion apiece for donating to charitable causes at the time he pledged $30 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  Buffett puts his money in the hands of others to give away because he doubts his own abilities to do so effectively.  Giving it away is harder than it looks.

 Three years later, here’s what the Buffett kids have learned:

Give to What You Know
Prior to receiving the billion dollars from Dad, Howie Buffett, an Illinois farmer, set out to save endangered cheetahs after seeing some on safari in Africa.  After spending $7 million to buy land and establish a cheetah reserve in South Africa, he got a nasty bite from one of the cheetahs and decided to rethink his strategy to conserve wildlife.

After witnessing the grinding poverty in the communities surrounding one of the wildlife reserves, Howie had an “aha” moment.  He realized that “he couldn’t keep investing in conservation ‘without levels of human needs being satisfied first.’  He then decided that he could be most effective by investing in one of the fields he knows best: agriculture.”  This led to funding for such efforts as crop research into drought-resistant maize and training for subsistence farmers in Ghana in soil-management techniques.

Learn to Say “No”
Shortly after Warren Buffett announced his gifts to his children’s foundations, Peter Buffett and his wife, Jennifer, were flooded with requests, and found themselves saying “no” a lot more.  The word is significant to them, as it underscores one of their giving areas – “helping adolescent girls in developing countries, who often don’t feel empowered to use that word and find themselves the victims of inequality.”  The cause is especially personal for Jennifer, whose father declined to pay for her college education while funding college for her brother.

Peter and Jennifer’s NoVo Foundation has a clearly defined mission of helping girls in developing countries to say “no” to early marriage and unsafe sex and “yes” to education and its economic and empowerment benefits.  And their mission also helps them to say “no” to well-meaning folks whose requests don’t meet their criteria.

Fund Real Needs, Not Wishes
Susie Buffett supports public education in Omaha, Nebraska, through her Sherwood Foundation.  Her father’s largesse roughly quintupled the Foundation's annual grants budget to $50 million.  Daunted by the task of giving away that huge sum, Susie invited the entire Omaha school system for wish lists. The requests came flooding in, and the funds went pouring out.

While Susie felt good to say “yes” to so many people, she realized that “this approach was scattershot and didn’t effect real and profound change in public education.”  She is now focusing on more holistic and systemic solutions.  For example, a grant of $8 million is enabling the school system to modernize all 83 school libraries in Omaha.  In addition, the Sherwood Foundation has redoubled its efforts in early-childhood education, and is funding programs for at-risk infants, toddlers and preschoolers.

In closing, it’s all sound advice for investing your charitable dollars, no matter how much you can give.

To read the full article: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/138/daddy-givebucks.html