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Point of View

After almost three years of work, Archstone Foundation is ready to announce its new strategic plan. For those of you suffering from TLDR (internet shorthand for Too Long Didn’t Read), I can do it in just a paragraph:

We seek to improve the health and well-being of older Californians and their caregivers through the integration of health and social services. We will strive to accomplish this goal by building more effective cross-sector Teams, providing appropriate Training to all for their roles on those new teams, and supporting the development of appropriate Technology for efficient teamwork. We will measure our impact to be sure that we are making real change in people’s lives and to be sure that our efforts are reducing rather than exacerbating racial, ethnic, and geographic disparities.

The t-shirt version is Three Ts. So now you know? Maybe sort of, but before I describe it in more depth, let me tell you a little about our development process and what we think a strategic plan is (and isn’t).

At its most basic, a foundation’s strategy describes what objectives it is trying to achieve and a series of steps that are intended to get there. These steps, which include — but aren’t necessarily limited to — grantmaking, are more than “intended” to achieve our aims. They are our best guess, honed by a great deal of research, consulting, discussion, and feedback. While there are no guarantees, we believe that making progress on this plan will lead to better lives for older Californians and their caregivers.

As we developed our ideas, we tried to think about the impactful solutions we had seen across much of our historical grantmaking which addressed specific issues, such as elder abuse, falls prevention, and palliative care (among others). The commonalities across those areas seem to be teams that cross the usual silos and boundaries, and training that helps the workforce hone skills they may be lacking to tackle problems of aging.

Finally, since it is the 21st Century and information is power, we added technology. We not only want technology that can facilitate the effective work of teams bridging health and social services, but we also think that technology and access to information are essential to putting the person and caregiver “on the team” and getting them the training they may need to truly make care centered on the person and caregivers. Subsequent posts will go into more detail on each of the Three Ts and give examples of our current grants and future interests.

In addition to the Three Ts and looking for ways to include diverse elders and reduce disparities throughout all our work, we also have two additional elements. First, we have made a commitment to focus an explicit share (10% for now) of our grantmaking on organizations serving diverse elders and working to reduce disparities in their outcomes. To date we have made grants to the American Society on Aging for its Rise Program of leadership training for persons of color in aging services and to SAGE for their LGBTQ readiness program for long-term care facilities.

Second, we have replaced our prior small grants program (~ $15,000) for direct service organizations with what we hope will be more meaningful grants of up to $50,000 to build capacity or implement an evidence-based innovation. To date, we have funded over a dozen organizations, many focused on older adults from diverse communities throughout California. In addition, we are working with Catchafire to offer high-quality volunteer services to 100 grantees and recent applicants to extend our capacity building reach.

Making a Difference at Scale

Of course, like any real choice, our strategy also defines what is out of our consideration. We have our new Capacity Building and Innovation program for direct service organizations, but most funding for direct service provision is almost necessarily outside of our plan. Many of our grants may address policy and practice change work that do not provide services to beneficiaries directly at all, but may nonetheless lead ultimately to large-scale improvements across the state.

It is both humbling and shocking to realize that Medicare alone spends more money in California every morning of every year than our entire endowment. Not to mention Medi-Cal, Older Americans Act funds, and individual charitable giving. Our limited resources need to be focused on the things that are hard for others to do and that will make a difference at scale.

Unless proposals can make a sensible argument about how they can lead over the course of our 10-year timeline to changing the lives of the million or so older adults around California who are suffering from the weaknesses and failures of our current “system” of care, we will regretfully have to pass.

Setting Measurable Goals for Progress

Having a strategy that sets a bold overall objective (improved health and well-being) and steps that we believe are logically necessary to achieve that outcome (Teams, Training, Technology), we can set measurable goals for progress on advancing team care, availability of training, and use of technology, as well as our overall goal. For example, we might say that we would like to achieve a 20% reduction in the percentage of older adults reporting poor or fair health (i.e., reducing this good general indicator of lack of well-being from 20% to 16%). We can use progress on these intermediate measures to adjust our work, changing the resources allocated to each of the Three Ts as well as helping us to be sure that we are changing lives, not just fiddling around the edges.

We can also use the specificity of our model and objectives to enable us to measure racial and ethnic disparities and ensure that we are narrowing disparities rather than perpetuating inequality. To do this really well, we will be looking for a skilled, big-picture evaluation partner who can help us refine our model and measures and give us an independent view of our progress and where we can do better as we go forward over the next decade.

Why Do We Need a Strategic Plan?

You might wonder why a foundation needs a strategic plan at all. The recent grantmaking of Mackenzie Scott (former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos), in which she gave large, no-strings-attached general support gifts (no proposals, no timelines, no deliverables, etc.) to a very wide range of nonprofits, got widespread approval from the nonprofit community, as well as lots of “Oohs” and “Ahs” from the general press.

But in fact, this seemingly random giving does represent a strategy. You might call it financial capacity building. If you give significant dollars to well-run nonprofits whose missions are aligned with your objectives, you can (arguably) expect both more of what they do now (perhaps with greater efficiency) and add new kinds of work to what they do now. (Although like everything in life, even a well-planned capacity building effort does not necessarily leave the grantee stronger at the end. Sometimes, two steps forward even lead to three steps back.)

Our situation differs from Scott’s in that our objectives and geography (California) are a lot more focused, our resources are much more limited ($120 million endowment versus $57 billion), and we are blessed with a staff and board with deep expertise in our area. Given our strengths and weaknesses, we will necessarily be more prescriptive in our work than Scott — both in our focus on the Three Ts and in being more likely to make grants for specific projects rather than general operating support.

We believe that we have discovered some general truths about what delivering better care will require, so we want to include those ideas in our grantmaking. But, by no means will we be issuing task orders for specified deliverables by some set date. We strongly believe in partnership with organizations that share our commitments and, in fact, believe these partners will provide vital leadership and make critically needed contributions as we travel together on this journey.

We Want to Hear from You

We hope to receive ideas from many would-be grantees in the form of advice (feel free to comment in the field below), letters of inquiry, or just conversations.

Moreover, if you don’t come to us, we will be coming to you! We will be “taking our strategy on the road,” talking to influential and effective organizations to look for shared interest in this mission and expertise and resources to contribute to the advancement of these strategies. We'll also provide more information about our strategy on our website in the coming weeks and months.

In addition, we will be looking for opportunities to convene, advocate, and communicate about the challenges of aging in ways that take advantage of our financial independence, nonpartisan status, and expertise.

Our lines are open, and we are listening for your call.

Read more about Archstone Foundation’s Strategic Plan.

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