DOI
10.9707/1944-5660.1716
Key Points
This article discusses how and why The JPB Foundation, a nationally focused private philanthropy in the United States, promoted multistakeholder innovations as it evolved its strategy for early childhood health equity. Through coordinated grantmaking, its cross-sector partnerships over the past decade shifted the science, clinical practice, and public discourse on early life stress.
Building on field learning and trusted relationships, JPB and its partners paved the way for a reimagined paradigm of care that brings ecosystem stakeholders together to overcome competing frictions inhibiting their mutual flourishing. Working collaboratively with grantees as their champion and thought partner, JPB formulated an agenda to facilitate stakeholders’ codependent functioning to make tailored care of higher quality feasible at a greater scale and scope than currently exists. This change in working with grantees resulted from a shift in JPB’s beliefs and thinking, which led to a more ambitious attempt to transform both equity and performance at the scale of full populations.
Promising results from proof-of-concept studies show that feedback loops built into the new paradigm of care can support more enlightened decision-making by stakeholders, including foundations and evaluators. New, explicit information flows can, moreover, dissolve the tension between the management of aggregate performance benchmarks and uniquely tailored care for the individual family. These new flows also position the public, private, and social sectors to push and enable one another to improve equity and performance simultaneously.
Foundations seeking to apply systems, innovation, and design thinking to challenge existing assumptions about the scope of their learning and impact will benefit from this case study.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Patawaran, W. (2024). A Systems and Innovation Approach to Attune Grantmaking for Early Childhood to What Matters Most at the Point of Service. The Foundation Review, 16(2). https://doi.org/10.9707/1944-5660.1716
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