The recently completed World Cup reminded us again that soccer, played at the highest level, really is a beautiful game. However, those of us gearing up to coach our children in youth leagues this fall appreciate that the beautiful game can get ugly very quickly. No matter how many times during practice that you tell Ava she will be playing left striker or Isabelle that she is right middie, once the game starts on Saturday all bets are off. You quickly have a mob of pig-tailed, eye-blacked fourth graders clumped up and flailing away at the beleaguered ball like it was the devil himself. Then some poor girl takes a cleat on the ankle and starts howling, at which point the ref blows her whistle, gets both sides sorted out, and the madness starts all over again. I try not to over-coach during games, so I bite my tongue when all this is playing out, but in my head I’m shouting to myself: “FOR GOD’S SAKE LADIES, SPREAD OUT! PLAY YOUR ROLES LIKE WE TALKED ABOUT IN PRACTICE!! STAY IN YOUR LANES!!!”
I have come to appreciate that the role confusion and cluster-kicking that is part and parcel of pee wee soccer can be an apt metaphor for a set of temptations facing philanthropic foundations. The growing norm of actively collaborating with other funders in order to achieve “collective impact”– and perhaps the desire not to go out on a limb by ourselves – can leave us feeling compelled to fund whatever grantees and issue areas our foundation partners are supporting, and for them to do likewise with us. Our commitment to supporting grantees can lead us to gloss over the complications of the power relationship that inevitably exists between funders and recipients. In the name of being helpful, we help ourselves to a seat at a grantee’s table, and we then proceed to get into their business at a level of detail at which we have no business doing. Our determination to bring about systems changes or advance justice as we happen to define it can find us plotting campaign strategies almost as if we were working in a political party’s war room instead of funding tax-exempt, charitable activities.
What is lost if we succumb to these variants of the pee wee soccer phenomenon are the unique contributions that philanthropy and individual foundations can and should be making in a free society – e.g., supporting the development of ideas and approaches that may not have wide adherence at present (and indeed may even be unpopular); equipping promising leaders and their charitable organizations with the resources and degrees of freedom they need to bring their work to fruition; and cultivating vantage points that may enable society to see issues that currently vex and divide us in a better light. In philanthropy, as in soccer, things work better when we remember our roles and stay in our lanes.