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Dear NNCG Community,
Welcome to summer, consulting colleagues! I hope that your calls and work-related travel have started to slow down, at least as much as you want them to, and that you are getting some well-deserved rest and fun with friends and family.
Some of you might know that my family has a farm that sells produce and eggs, which is strenuous and decidedly non-lucrative, but also beautiful and fulfilling. Lately, while picking strawberries, I have been thinking about the Philanthropy Infrastructure, as one does. If the philanthropic infrastructure is the network of entities that provide leadership, advocacy, training, thought-partnership, new ideas, capacity support, and connections to grantmakers, then consultants to grantmakers are part of the infrastructure.
But “infrastructure” sounds formal and mechanical, so I want to propose a different metaphor. We are the honeybees of the philanthropy ecosystem. We are pollinators, bringing lessons and experience from each engagement into the next piece of work. We buzz around purposefully, connecting grantmakers to resources and to each other for learning. We gather ideas, research, promising practices, and trends in the field and share them in digestible bites so that our clients can use them to grow. We are individually effective, but our power is magnified further by the collective. Like honeybees, our efforts may not seem coordinated until you look at the aggregate patterns. We are working toward the sweet shared vision of an effective, equitable, ethical sector.
When NNCG was created, the work of philanthropy consultants was nascent, and there was a pervasive distrust of consultants. Consultants, after all, are those folks who - to paraphrase an old joke - “borrow your watch and then charge to tell you what time it is.” NNCG’s membership model of requiring vetting for full membership arose from a desire to give added credibility and a stamp of trustworthiness to the consultants in our network.
These days, it seems to me that consultants to grantmakers have a much better reputation. At the very least, grantmakers truly appreciate their own consultants, even if they are still suspicious of us as a category. But I don’t think that grantmakers yet see us as the essential part of the philanthropic ecosystem that we are. I’d like to change that. I think that NNCG’s promise is to be the hive. NNCG is the place where we can come together at the end of the day to share and compare what we’ve gathered in our pollinating rambles and make it into something even better, together.
Do you have questions, ideas, insights, or jokes? Please feel free to reach out to me anytime at jessica@bearmanconsulting.com.
Warmly,
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