updates from the foundation

April 13, 2012

As part of our planning process, we have decided to do all of our grantmaking this year under the new mission statement and guidelines. We are eager to unite a variety of board interests under one program, and plan to use 2012 to experiment with a variety of ways to do just that. If you are a previous grantee of the Family Advisory Board, we invite you to read the new mission and guidelines. If you feel like your work might be a match for our new directions, please submit an inquiry! We look forward to hearing from you.”

February 1, 2012

After a year of discussion and planning, in December 2011, the Compton Foundation board adopted a new mission statement:

We ignite change. We support transformative leadership and courageous storytelling to inspire action toward a sustainable, just, and peaceful future.

Our focus on igniting change communicates a sense of urgency and excitement, an impatience with things as they are, and a willingness to take risks to transform the world in which we live.

The work we expect to support will demonstrate innovative ways of understanding and naming the problems we face, as well as provide new methods for collaborating to solve them.

We focus on transformative leadership because we believe that a new way of leading social change work is necessary: one that is based on trusting relationships and shared values, collaborates through networks and coalitions with energy and ease, and values emotional intelligence as well as political and tactical skills.

We focus on storytelling because we believe there is a need for compelling new narratives about who we are, how we should live, and our purpose on this planet. We believe that culture must shift in order to make social and environmental change possible. Culture can only change when artists, writers, musicians, and other creative minds have the space to imagine and communicate, and to connect effectively with analysts and activists.

Starting today we are implementing an online “inquiry” process for organizations interested in sharing ideas that we can consider for a possible grant. We will no longer have specific deadlines for proposal submissions, and we will only invite full proposals from those inquiries that best match our program guidelines and offer the greatest potential for learning about our new fields.

Thank you for your patience as we have assessed and re-imagined how the resources of the Compton Foundation can best be used to foster the vision of its founders. We hope that our new focus will open up space for creative ways of working to advance the kind of change we all hope to see in the world.

With excitement and hope for the future,

Ellen

January 17, 2012

Happy 2012! The new year brims with the potential for change—although whether for better or worse is uncertain. The upcoming presidential election in the US, the continued unfolding of the Arab Spring, the unresolved global economic crisis, and the lack of rain, snow, or anything that looks like winter in most of the western states, remind us that the work to advance a just, sustainable, and peaceful future remains urgent.

At the Compton Foundation, we spent much of last year reflecting on our history and assessing how our decades of grantmaking and learning might inform our future work. We noted many successes and accomplished grant objectives—reports delivered, policy changed, organizations strengthened, relationships deepened, land and water restored, family planning services delivered, civil society institutions rebuilt from the ashes of war. However, while we have seen progress in our traditional areas of focus (peace, environment, and reproductive rights), the fundamental change we want to see on a wider scale, the change that might lead to a radically different world, one filled with compassion and joy, still seems out of reach.

As we head into the new year, we are certain about a few things:

The world is more connected than ever before. The actions in every community, region, and country affect the globe in myriad ways. Our grantmaking must embody this awareness.

Collaboration across traditional sectors and silos, often with folks who analyze, prioritize, and take action in ways that are unfamiliar, possibly on topics that we have generally dismissed as ‘not our issue,’ will be essential for social change to scale and take hold in new ways.

We will need new narratives about our collective future. To quote Grist’s David Roberts, these new stories must ask: “What kind of people are we? What world are we trying to build? What does America mean now?”  He continues convincingly:

“Without any larger shared vision, we just fight the old fights, on the old terms, deploying values, narratives, and policies left over from the past.

What we need now, more than ever, are not critiques of the extant but models of the new — new institutions, new social practices, new identities, new purposes, new ways of measuring and valuing what matters. If we’re ever going to get off the sinking USS Fossil Growth and into lifeboats, we need to know where we’re heading. A new North Star.

We need people who can make a prosperous, enjoyable, sustainable world vivid and real.”

Some of those people will be activists and analysts who have the gift for linking data to lived experience and who can see the often obscure policy changes that can alter the ways we live and the choices we make. Some, by necessity, will be artists—creative minds who can show us the sounds, sights, tastes, and smells of a new world, making what feels impossible simply inevitable.

Please keep watching our website for more information about our evolving new program. By February 1^st we will have more detailed guidelines and a very brief expression of intent process for potential grant partners to use to let us know about the work you are doing to transform the world and to ignite change for a more just, sustainable, and peaceful future.

Our very best wishes for the new year,

Rebecca DiDomenico

President, Compton Foundation