Giving Compass' Take:

• Professor Gerald Rosenfeld shares the difficulties he sees for foundations today, from biased hiring practices to evaluating impact. 

• How can foundations better collaborate and support each other? What opportunities to share knowledge and understanding is the sector missing?

• Learn how some foundations came together to help solve the affordable housing crisis.

We screen out potentially good, talented people much too early. We have a template, and we match skills against the template. If the skill set doesn’t match the template, that person goes away, and I think it’s a bad idea…. [Emotional intelligence] is one of the most important things, and it’s hard to screen for that. Résumés don’t talk about that. Only human interaction talks about that.

Financial services is well known for [underrepresenting women] by count, and presumably inhospitable in certain ways. It’s an incredibly vexing problem, and one that many people much smarter than I think about all the time and don’t have fast solutions. We, the men, used to say, ‘Well, it’s a pipeline problem. There aren’t enough women in business schools, and therefore just wait five or 10 years, and the problem will be fixed.’ Guess what? It’s five or 10 years or 15 or 20 years since we’ve been saying that, and it hasn’t been fixed.

Many financial service firms have built up the percentages of women that they hire in their entry classes…but look three years later, five years later, the drop-out rate or the lack of retention rate is simply too high. And it’s not that the women get fired. It’s that somehow there is a lack of compatibility around the culture of the place.

It’s hard to give away money well. That’s the number one lesson that I learned. People think foundation work is easy. You’ve got a pot of money, and the IRS makes you give it away…. The thoroughness of the evaluation, the ability to see how the money will be leveraged into action and into positive change is the thing that was the most eye-opening.

Read the full article about Gerald Rosenfeld at NYU School of Law.