The instances where philanthropic capital has built public infrastructure and civic spaces, advocated for and achieved new legislation, or provided services not offered by the state do not always spring readily to mind, but they are vital to the vibrancy and effectiveness of a civil society and third sector we all rely on. This interview series, in partnership with WINGS and Propel Philanthropy, celebrates the funders who are the often unsung heroes of this equitable social impact ecosystem and looks to those of tomorrow.
We showcase funders who have had the far-reaching vision to invest and achieve success in some of our critical issues: from data infrastructure to building local resources, from disaster preparedness to the advocacy we need for a stronger future — and we invite curious funders new to this type of social investment to take their first steps towards funding more and better social impact infrastructure.
Yanni Peng, Narada Foundation
Andrew Milner: What SIIOs does Narada Foundation support?
Yanni Peng: Some of the most notable ones are the China Foundation Center and the China Foundation Forum. We have been supporting the China Foundation Forum for 16 years continuously from its setting up.
Can we start with the China Foundation Forum. What led you to support that in the first place?
It was established in 2008. The background is that, in 2004, the Chinese government issued a new policy which, for the first time, allowed non-governmental actors to set up foundations so a lot of new private foundations or corporate foundations were set up. For example, Narada Foundation was set up in 2007, and Tencent, the huge IT company also set up their foundation around that time. The newly set up foundations wanted to learn how to do philanthropy work because it was a new area and they wanted to get to know each other and to network with each other and to learn how to do projects together. So that’s why private foundations thought that was very necessary to set up a platform and that’s why the Narada Foundation was one of the organisations that initiated the China Foundation Forum. So it was set up by Narada and seven other foundations in 2008 and, since 2009, it has held annual conferences, a very big event. In recent years, it has attracted over 1,000 participants, including chairpersons, CEOs of different foundations from across the country, and it also started to organise capacity building for the foundations‘ new CEOs. The new CEOs training programme has been running for three years. CFF has also organised study tours to Europe, which are funded by Mercator Foundation from Germany. And because the Narada Foundation is positioned as a kind of ecosystem builder for the philanthropy sector in China, we think it’s very important for this kind of platform to be built and to function well in order to support the development of the whole sector. That’s why we continue to support it.
We’ve funded it continuously in the 16 years since it was set up. Every year, we give them a grant, sometimes it will be a bigger amount, sometimes it’s a small amount depending on their needs and also their work. For example, this year we’re going to give them quite a big amount of money, RMB 2.7 million because the China Foundation Centre’s work is now merged with this China Foundation Forum.
So it’s in a development phase?
Yes. Now the China Foundation Forum is quite influential as an infrastructure organisation, it connects over 2,000 foundations in China. Besides making grants, Narada was also involved in the governance. I am on their board, for example. We also link them with other funders so basically, we provide a mixture of different kinds of support to them.
What do you think the China Foundation Forum has achieved?
Firstly, it links foundations together, especially newly set up foundations, because we now have over 9,000 foundations in China, whereas in 2007 it was around 1200 so it’s been a very rapid development and the new foundations are very eager to learn and to be connected with each other and the connection is across China from city level to the national level, because we have these levels of administrative unit in China with foundations operating at each, at city, provincial and national level. I think this is the biggest achievement. Second is the capacity building. The Forum runs these capacity building programmes for the CEOs, as I mentioned, and every year it has maybe 30 participants. CFF has been implementing the learning exchange between Chinese foundations and European foundations. And the Forum also does some advocacy work, for example, the Chinese government revised some policies related to the philanthropy sector and the China Foundation Forum organised a lot of discussion sessions for foundation practitioners and wrote up some of the recommendations and sent them to the Ministry of Civil Affairs to express practitioners’ concerns and offer suggestions before review and revision of the policy.
So in effect, the China Foundation Forum has been instrumental in developing an independent foundation sector in China?
Exactly. It’s also now an independent non-profit organisation. It was registered in 2017 and now has a team of 16 people.
Are you the sole funders of the forum or do other foundations donate to it?
An admirable achievement is that the China Foundation Forum has attracted support from several large foundations in China. It has an organising committee of 34 members, including foundations at the national level and provincial level across China which are from different backgrounds such as corporate foundations, family foundations, community foundations, independent foundations and public foundations. They also have other funders. Some funders will support their capacity building work, some funders support their advocacy work, and they also get a certain amount from foundations from outside China, for example the Ford Foundation gives grants to the Forum.
You said earlier that sometimes it’s a small amount you give and sometimes it’s a bigger amount. Is there a wrong perception that infrastructure organisations always need big money, constant big money, but actually you can achieve a lot with small amounts sometimes?
In China, the size of the philanthropic giving is much smaller compared to the US and the UK, so the infrastructure organisations have to play with a small amount of money. I think last year their revenue was around RMB8.8 million and that is actually very big compared to other infrastructure organisations we have supported in China. For others, it’s maybe around RMB1 million, some may be two to three million. I think the most important thing is that they have to diversify their income source. This is extremely important in China because we don’t have a lot of grantmaking foundations that focus on field building or ecosystem building. So they have to run projects in order to bring in money.
Why do you think there are so few funders that support infrastructure? How do infrastructure organisations get the message across better of their needs?
Donors tend to support projects that can have a very direct impact that they can see. But for field building, it takes a very long time. China Foundation Forum is 16 years old, and along the way there have been a few times when we thought it was maybe going to fail. So you need patience and you need determination, and it’s quite natural that donors tend to support causes that they care a lot about, issue areas that seem to be more concrete and directly connected to individual beneficiaries. Only when donors have been in the field for a long time do they see that if we do not have this kind of infrastructure, the sector cannot develop well and it has a negative impact on their work.
So what you need is constant funding. You’ve got to keep supporting infrastructure organisations?
Yes. Another thing is that because infrastructure building is good for the philanthropy sector and donors come to appreciate that, they want to benefit from it, but most of the donors don’t want to put their own money in to support it. That is quite common and we have to accept that only a few donors will support this. That’s why infrastructure organisations have to diversify their income sources. You cannot just rely on maybe one or two donors, because even bigger donors will devote only a tiny part of their budget to support one part of an infrastructure organisation’s work, rather than the whole organisation, and that’s where they see the value for themselves.
Can we just talk about the effective philanthropy multiplier? How did that come about and what’s it achieved?
The Effective Philanthropy Multiplier (EPM) is a platform operated by Narada Foundation ourselves. It’s also part of the infrastructure for the sector, we think. Basically it’s to select high quality projects and support them to scale up, and we provide a small amount of grant, but more importantly we provide capacity building and also communications resources, and connections or recommendations to other donors. For three years we provide RMB50,000 every year, about GBP5,400 pounds every year, so altogether RMB150k. That’s very small, but our funding is unrestricted whereas the majority of donors will only support projects.
So it’s not so much the money you provide, it’s more the capacity building and the general logistical support?
It’s capacity building and secondly the communication support. We introduce them to the media because one of the key barriers for NGOs in China is that the general public don’t know their value, so they don’t get a lot of support from the general public. We organise, for example, a media workshop, or media visits to the project sites, and then the media can give publicity to their projects, which attracts other potential donors and enables the government as well as the public to see the value of these NGOs. So communications is really the most important thing in some ways, because they’re largely unknown. We started this kind of support in 2020.
Our support to grantees of EPM has grown organically. At the very beginning, we gave them the grant, and also, we connected them with local intermediaries, for example, local NGO incubators, so they could organise a roadshow in different cities. And at a later stage, in 2017, we started the capacity building work, then in 2020 we started this communications support. So we’ve developed our support to them according to their needs.
And how do you communicate with them about what those needs are?
We have a formal consultation with them at the beginning of every year to look at their last year’s work, what are their challenges and what are their needs, and to determine what kind of support we need to give them in the coming year. And in our team, every year we consolidate all the information and data from our grantees in the EPM and see what are the unmet needs and then what additional support we need to give to them. And from this year, another kind of support is that we brought in consulting companies to advise them on their strategy, their HR management, digitalisation and so on.
What have the results been so far of the EPM? How much money do you see it having raised for the organisations who use it, or what changes has it made?
We look at three kinds of impact; first is the change in the grantees themselves. Have they improved their project design and their project delivery capacity, for example? Do they have a better understanding of how to select or how to collaborate with different stakeholders, because if they want to scale up their work they need to work with others, so do they have a better idea of what kind of partners they want to select? So the first kind of impact we look at relates to their capacity. The second is to do with their objectives: has there been progress on the issues they want to solve? Are they having a greater impact on their target audience? The third element we look at is the EPM as a platform, whether it has attracted more resources, whether those resources have been directed to good projects and whether collaborations between different players on the platform have been catalysed.
As an example, we have been working with the LEGO Group from Denmark for the last three years. They gave us, the Narada Foundation, a grant to select approximately 600 grassroots NGOs in China to deliver a project to disadvantaged children, through their Learning Through Play initiative. That’s one example of the kind of resources that we have attracted through EPM, and we can then direct those resources to our grantees and ultimately reach NGOs at a very local level. It’s a win-win situation, a win for the grassroots NGOs at the receiving end, a win for the Lego company because, previously, they only had maybe 30 NGOs working on this programme, now they can reach more than 600 Chinese NGOs serving the needs of disadvantaged children. And it’s a win for EPM too because we get more resources for our grantees as well for grassroots NGOs. It also encourages other donors to look at the EPM website to see what projects are on there and to identify potential grantees. Potential donors can reach EPM partners directly because their contact details are provided on the EPM website. Also, other donors can see that there are projects on there that are already endorsed by another foundation.
Do you collect annual data on how much money has come in through the EPM, how many NGOs are involved?
Yes. So for each grantee we ask them, what is their annual revenue, what are the sources of their income and how many project sites they have, the number of the beneficiaries, and also the situation of the beneficiaries. We also ask whether they have modified their project design during the year, whether they have had any collaboration with others, with media, with corporates, with government, which have come about through the EPM.[1]
As you were saying earlier, there are not many donors who support infrastructure or field building. When you meet other donors, what do you say to them to try to increase that? What do you think they need to understand about field building and why it’s important?
It’s very difficult. The majority of donors in China are corporates – maybe around 70 per cent of donations come in from corporates – and they have a lot of concerns about working with NGOs, they are not sure whether it is safe to give grants to NGOs and maybe think it’s better to give the grants to GONGOs[2] instead. They don’t know whether the NGOs are capable of delivering the project. So they have a lot of concerns. The most important thing is to demonstrate the value of those NGOs and also demonstrate that by supporting infrastructure, there’s going to be a multiplier effect. At Narada Foundation, we feel this clearly. For example, with our support to EPM or China Foundation Forum and Ginkgo Foundation, the impact is much larger than if we just gave individual NGOs small amounts of money. For example, the grant from Narada Foundation to the China Foundation Forum is not necessarily large. Over the 16 years we’ve been supporting them, the lowest grant is RMB100k for one year and we need to convince other donors in China that by working collectively and supporting the sector, it’s going to be more effective and efficient than doing it by yourself.
So if you and other trusted intermediaries can underwrite that unease that you say corporates have concerning local NGOs, if some credible organisation is in the middle, then it can be more convincing for the donors to give money to smaller NGOs.
Yes, because we have already selected the grantees very carefully, based on our experience and our practice during the past 17 years. If donors have do this from scratch, they need to learn how to select reliable grantees.
This interview is being shared free-to-read as a part of the Propel Philanthropy interview project. In addition to this article series, Propel Philanthropy collects stories demonstrating that modest grants can drive but results. You can learn more here.
Footnotes
- ^ By December 2023, the EPM network had 43 hubs across 34 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities, connecting over 7259 local partners, with a total of 65,036 project sites supported across China, covering a total of 120 million people. In the same year, RMB2.5 billion in funding was generated for social projects and 5.11 million individual volunteers mobilised throughout China.
- ^ Government-organised Non-governmental Organisation, established and funded by government, ie lacking the independence of an NGO.
Comments (1)
We need more active participants in multiplying the benefits for beneficiaries at large. Well said in the interview posted. Keep on the good wiorks.