Kerry’s Olson’s career as a philanthropist began suddenly in 1999 as a result of a successful initial public offering, but her commitment to children’s issues is longstanding. “I’ve kind of spent a lifetime focusing on children’s issues in one way or another. As a child, I raised funds for groups like CARE or UNICEF so at a young age I was aware that there was a big world of greater needs than anything I had seen.”
She knew she wanted to start a foundation with the proceeds from her family’s success, and her cause seemed very clear. “I was just very drawn to the issue of children orphaned by AIDS and sub-Saharan Africa being the epicenter of not only the AIDS pandemic, but also the epicenter of orphaning.”
The scope of the problem, an estimated 15 million children who have lost at least one parent to AIDS, gave her pause though. “We had about $12 million that we were putting into the endowment which to me wasn’t a whole lot of money when you’re looking at an issue so overwhelming. It seemed like a very small drop in the bucket. My first question was, ‘Is this even something that it makes sense to be focused on?’”
So she immersed herself in research. “One of the first things people told me that really stuck with me was, ‘It’s not just the big dollars that count. It’s how you do the work that counts.’” Inspired to dig deeper into the issues, she began cold calling foundations and organizations working with orphans and vulnerable children in Africa. “What I learned is that the majority, the vast majority of children orphaned by AIDS are actually living in family care. So much of the response in sub-Saharan Africa is through communities and community organizations that are addressing the crisis at their doorsteps. Yet most of the funding is going to very large organizations that can take very large grants. Unfortunately not much of that money is trickling down to the community level where 90% of the response actually is taking place. So even though so many children are in family care more and more were falling through the safety net.”
The defining focus of the Firelight Foundation, which Olson and her husband David Katz founded, became working with community-based organizations. “We’ve really placed our emphasis on community support that strengthens family care. Over time we are more and more able to reach the key groups that we’d like to reach. Not the large [international charities] that already are getting funding, but the emerging, smaller community-based organizations that are off the radar but doing effective work.”
Olson quickly found herself going against the grain. Building orphanages has been very popular with many donors. “We funded some orphanages but that stopped pretty early on. We were reviewing proposals and we got a proposal from an orphanage, and I just couldn’t fund it. It just hit me that as a parent, if I was too poor to feed and clothe my child, that I might consider placing my daughter in an orphanage just so she could access her basic needs. And once an orphanage is built, it’s a magnet. It becomes the solution, and you have a community that no longer mobilizes around the issue.” Olson’s gut reaction was soon confirmed by experts and academic research. The foundation now does “a lot of advocacy not to build more orphanages because it separates children from families and communities. We produced a document called ‘From Faith to Action’ that’s been very successfully distributed to faith-based organizations around the country to raise awareness about the importance of supporting family and community care. We did it because there’s a big interest growing now in the faith-based community in the US to help orphans and vulnerable children in sub-Saharan Africa. And a lot of the groups are just going out and building orphanages.”
Working with smaller, grassroots organizations has presented challenges. “We learned that you really need to be careful of the absorptive capacity of organizations. A $50,000 grant would be a small grant by many foundations’ standards. But when you’re giving grants to smaller organizations with budgets of $10,000 or $20,000, that could be too much money. What makes these organizations more sustainable is that they’re community-driven, community-owned, not driven from the outside. We have to be really sensitive to maintain local ownership. Going in and not paying attention to something like absorptive capacity or local leadership, or riding roughshod over local decision making and prioritization, you end up undermining what was a fantastic organization. Everything we do we try to do it in a way that is helping strengthen the network and the local infrastructure as opposed to building external dependency.”
Olson and the small staff of Firelight also learned about how to partner effectively with community-based organizations. “We had started out just giving grants, one-year grants. Then we realized that it’s about so much more than money. We’ve had this feedback from our granting partners many times. In addition to the dollars that really are needed, it’s about working in partnership with groups that are facing tremendous challenges and doing incredible work in the face of these challenges. More and more, what we’ve focused on is longer-term support so that groups really can build on their programs. We’ve also built on our monitoring and evaluation and technical assistance support. We give money to support more than just project costs, like administrative or staff support because those things are critical to being able to maintain an effective program and so many funders only want to fund the project.”
Monitoring and evaluation of projects has been a special concern. “When we talk about evaluation, so much of that is donor driven. We have to remember what we really care about: more children and families getting better support. So then we have to ask, ‘how can evaluation be done in a way that’s realistic for smaller, often volunteer-run groups?’ They’re not in a position to do a lot of heavy duty donor reporting. We try to adjust our requirements to match what’s practical for groups but also so that it helps them learn from what they’ve done and build on their programs. It can’t just be about satisfying the donor’s due diligence, it also has to help the organization improve.” As Firelight’s executive director Jennifer Astone notes, “One of the things we’ve done is to adapt a training that uses non-technical jargon to talk about very clear outcomes of programs and to help organizations identify how they are making a change in their community. Most organizations that are reporting to us have a lot more data than they’re reporting.”
Olson is also focused on making Firelight a resource for other donors, and is particularly proud of the role the foundation plays in helping focus attention on effective, but little known, community-based organizations. “We’re trying to build a mechanism and a model that other groups can take on and we have mentored other foundations. Sometimes they come on as a donor [to Firelight], but go on to do funding independently once they’ve learned the model. An important part of our role, I think, is to share our work and be transparent about how we do it so that we encourage others as well.”
For More Information:
Firelight Foundation
From Faith to Action
For more on our effective philanthropists project, click here
Comments (1)
I think Firelight Foundation is also making the communities not to depend on institutionalization. This is proved by the support by Firelight to show the people doing the job on the ground that, actually they are the only strong mechanisms we have for the protection of vulnerable children. The programmes supported by Firelight shows people that they have the potential and ability to protect these children, by bringing back those good cultural norms and values that are fading away in the mist, because they used to make each member of the community obliged to take responsibility to protect all children. I think this was a good presentation really keep it up, and i wish other people could copy from Firelight.
Posted on March 07, 2008Lydia-LCCU