The Aspen Institute, founded in 1949 and dedicated to solving the world’s biggest problems by “driving change through dialogue, leadership and action,” offers lectures, fellowships and gatherings, including, perhaps most notably, its Aspen Ideas festival. While Aspen Institute doesn’t have a huge footprint in the world of philanthropy, many of the leaders it hosts do.
Aspen’s main platform for supporting the sector is its Program on Philanthropy and Social Innovation (PSI), which runs, among other things, the Aspen Philanthropy Group, a networking and peer education forum of CEOs from 29 major U.S. foundations. Participants include the Hewlett Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Skoll Foundation, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Doris Duke Foundation.
Jane Wales, who founded PSI in 2008 and currently runs it, has been creating opportunities for philanthropic leaders and those from other sectors to network and learn from each other for decades. Before working at Aspen Institute, she cofounded the Global Philanthropy Forum and had a long and impressive career in nonprofits, government and media. She has built a reputation for bringing people together and inspiring collaboration, something philanthropy often attempts, not always successfully.
Inside Philanthropy checked in with Wales, a veteran “philanthropy whisperer,” to learn more about her journey and about Aspen Institute’s PSI.
From Ancient Greece to modern giving
I first heard Wales speak about PSI this June at the Aspen Ideas festival. This annual confab of fabulous people gathers in the verdant valley to listen to scholars, writers and policymakers discuss the most pressing issues of the day. It’s a fun, festive, rather luxe week of conversation, connection and contemplation — and this year, the chance to blend your own smoothie by pedaling a stationary bike with a blender stand attached, courtesy of one event sponsor, Danone.
The institute is also well known for an ongoing, smaller, invitation-only gathering called the Aspen Leadership Seminar. The Aspen Seminar operates on the premise that difficult decisions are moral, not technical, and that reading Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and other thinkers with a group of diverse strangers will spark the values assessment and creative thinking needed to address these quandaries.
Wales first learned about the Aspen Institute in 1984 when she was invited to attend an Aspen Leadership Seminar as a fellow. At the time, she was the national executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility, an arms control organization focused on nuclear weapons. The seminar experience energized her.
“I came away utterly refreshed and wrote my strategic plan on the plane on the way back,” she said. “It’s just a great frame of mind for thinking strategically.”
Wales stayed connected to the Aspen Institute even as she went on to other professional roles, including chair of the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Cooperative Security Program, associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and concurrently, senior director for science and technology at the National Security Council.
She also cofounded the dialogue-based North American Forum, worked as acting CEO of Nelson Mandela’s The Elders, created convenings while working at the Clinton Global Initiative, and hosted the National Public Radio show World Affairs.
That’s a dizzying list of credits, across sectors. It shows her dedication to doing good, in part by creating connections. One thing in particular that struck me as distinctive about Wales’ long, high-powered career is how often she has held or created roles focused on conversational collaboration.
I also found myself doing the math and realizing, “Wow, she has been working for a very long time,” something that had not occurred to me before reading her bio. As someone who writes about aging, I found her breadth and depth of experience to be a great example of the advantage that older workers bring to our growing multigenerational workforce (a big focus of many aging-related funders, as we’ve written before). To use language from the Reframing Aging movement, she has gained momentum and accumulated knowledge — both of which are sorely needed to address today’s unprecedented challenges.
Promoting the power of philanthropy
In 1998, Wales moved from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco to take a new job as president and CEO of the World Affairs Council (now called World Affairs). She suddenly found herself surrounded by 30-something techpreneurs in Silicon Valley, fired up to change the world. They’d started companies and sold them, generating tremendous personal wealth. They had agency, vision and a powerful sense of social responsibility. But not much focus on philanthropy.
“Money played one role for them: It was a metric of their success,” said Wales. “They were wearing the same jeans, riding the same bicycles. Maybe some got Porsches. To the extent that there was an awareness of philanthropy, it was perceived as something you do later in life, much later, or even after you die. They just were less aware that money could be used to advance their social goals.”
Wales and a few high-net-worth friends, including John and Tashia Morgridge and their daughter, Kate Greswold, of the Tosa Foundation, and the late Juliette Gimon of the Hewlett family, launched a networking and learning group, which they called the Global Philanthropy Forum. Its goal was to educate tech leaders about philanthropy and build a network of givers. “We focused first on global issues because small gifts, like $10,000, could make a large difference internationally. They could dip their toe in the water that way.”
Global Philanthropy Forum started as something of a hobby. “Very quickly, it became clear that this was too much work to be done at 3 a.m. out of my basement.” In 2001, Wales brought the Global Philanthropy Forum into the World Affairs Council, where it benefitted from staff support. The program took off. Hundreds of highly successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists started their own foundations or donor-advised funds, focusing on climate change mitigation, poverty alleviation and ending the practice of kidnapping to conscript children into warfare or wedlock.
Wales had moved to San Francisco with the idea of staying for a couple years, but by 2008, she’d been in the Bay Area, working at World Affairs, for nearly 23 years. It was a great job, but as she said, “That is a long time to do anything.”
When Aspen Institute’s then-CEO Walter Isaacson offered her a new job, she took it. Her charge: bring education, networking and peer learning within the philanthropic and nonprofit sector to Aspen.
Bringing the movement to the mountains
At the Aspen Institute, Wales established the Program on Philanthropy and Social Innovation. One of PSI’s first efforts was the creation of the Aspen Philanthropy Group, which today meets twice a year. She also started a similar group for leaders of place-based foundations in the Midwest and South. “Jane Wales is just the master of pulling people together,” said Ann Stern, president and CEO of the Houston Endowment and a member of the Aspen Philanthropy Group. “Every time I go, I come back with my head about to explode with ideas and new ways to be collaborative. One of the things that was such a surprise to me coming into philanthropy is that it’s such a collaborative space. I came out of healthcare, where no one would share. This space is such a community of people wrestling with how to do things better.”
A new initiative of PSI is a group for nonprofit (and some for-profit) social purpose leaders, gathering around a traditional, text-based Aspen Seminar. I know what you’re thinking: “Do harried nonprofit leaders really have five free days to read excerpts of Aristotle and talk about them with peers, who might also be competing for the same grants?”
Some do, said Wales. “It is a really fun process, and very far from their inbox, so it’s a valuable break. They reflect on their values, and then on the fifth day, we say, ‘Let’s focus on you — leaders of major nonprofits — what’s getting in your way? What fills your day? Are there problems to address or solve that your colleagues can help with?’”
The Aspen Seminar is always an intentionally heterodox group, which also combats polarization. “You see that they come to their ideas thoughtfully. You may not agree with their conclusions, but you see how they got there,” said Wales, who experienced this herself as a fellow back in 1984.
Other projects Wales has created at the Aspen Institute include a new convening for leaders of community foundations, a program to bring transparency to government-collected tax data on nonprofits, and the Intersector Project, which looks at multisector success stories, identifies why they work, and is now drafting recommendations for more.
Finally, Wales co-chairs the Generosity Commission, created by the Giving Institute out of a concern that more money is being given by fewer donors, a trend in philanthropy that we have been covering at IP.
Wales spoke about the concentration of giving — and of doing — at the Aspen Ideas festival this June. Just as fewer people are giving (ever-larger) sums, fewer volunteers are donating their time. Wales worries about this “concentration of agency,” as she calls it, and its impact on democracy. Volunteering connects people and is tied to resilience; what does the decrease in volunteering portend, and what can leaders do about it?
I look forward to hearing the insights generated about this problem from the leaders connected to PSI, and hopefully in a session or two at next year’s Aspen Ideas festival.
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