Giving Compass' Take:

• Jean Case shares how the Case Foundation learned and grew through acknowledging their painful philanthropic failures. 

• How can you/your organization better engage with failure? 

• Learn more about building success on failure. 

The program in question, PlayPumps, was one of the most ambitious and exciting initiatives launched at the Case Foundation. Our goal was to bring clean drinking water to ten sub-Saharan countries and hundreds of villages. We loved the technology–a way to generate clean wells by using children’s merry-go-rounds to pump the water. Think of the merry-go-round as a windmill on its side. We knew people need clean water, and that children love to play. It seemed like a win-win.

There was a lot of early excitement about this new technology. Dozens of partners joined us in supporting the effort. There were some hiccups early on, but we patiently worked with partners on the ground to get things right, and we felt good about the progress.

But as the years passed, questions continued to pop up, and we realized that the program wasn’t meeting the high standards it required.

With my heart in my throat, I decided to make the most public pronouncement possible–to name the failure in a written piece, which I titled “The Painful Acknowledgment of Coming Up Short.” After I finished writing it, I had a moment of fear as I recognized what a big step it was to announce to the universe, “We failed!”

A new suggestion emerged from some of the respondents–the creation of a “safe table” for partners to come together to talk about their failures so that they can share their learnings. The idea took hold, and some of the early meetings became large gatherings. They were “fail fests” where we openly recognized that in trying to innovate and solve big problems, we wouldn’t always get it right. They represented a commitment to make failure matter by allowing others to learn from our mistakes.

Read the full article about philanthropic failures by Jean Case at Fast Company.