Burning Down UNESCO: A Guide To Innovative Fundraising

Howard Burton

• Verlag: Open Agenda Publishing Inc.
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781771701310
• Thema: Business
• Thema: Nonprofit Organizations & Charities

By a curious set of circumstances, Howard Burton found himself hired as a fundraising consultant at UNESCO's Paris headquarters. Overwhelmed by the bureaucratic double-speak and smug complacency that he encountered everywhere he went, he decided to use his clear-eyed analytical skills to ask a very different sort of question: What, exactly, was UNESCO doing that was actually worth funding in the first place? Filled with his customary dry wit and penetrating observations, this book is another insightful and provocative work of societal commentary from the author of First Principles: Building Perimeter Institute and Exceptionally Upsetting: How Americans are increasingly confusing knowledge with opinion & what can be done about it.

1. The Intrepid Idealist

There’s a feeling of unease right from the very beginning. Having successfully penetrated the clunky, ‘70s-style security system (a sentinel posted outdoors to redundantly point me towards the reception desk inside the front doors), I surrender my passport in exchange for the right to pass through the turnstiles and stand in front of a dreary bank of elevators adorned with interlocking white, amorphous shapes positioned over a series of raised letters that proudly declaim: Cultivons la Paix.

I reflexively narrow my eyes sceptically at this, my first direct encounter with what I later associate with a typically UNESCO phenomenon: strident declarations of the obvious tinged with an unmistakable whiff of sanctimony and self-righteousness: Congratulations: you are now waiting for your elevator in an officially anti-war building, safe in the knowledge that you are comfortably surrounded by fellow morally elite, peace-loving souls who unhesitatingly support the frustratingly controversial goals of eradicating world hunger, educating children and opposing genocide.

Somewhere else, one imagines darkly, there are mirror institutions which serve the interests of the unbridled famine-fixated war-mongers (The Pentagon? The International Monetary Fund? The OECD?)—places, presumably, where banks of elevators are ominously equipped with black sculptures that are defiantly emblazoned with messages like: Cultivons la Guerre. Just not, of course, in French.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

It is late 2010 and I have just been hired by UNESCO’s Bureau of Strategic Planning to begin a five month consultancy. Officially, my charge is “to explore and potentially develop a spectrum of ‘innovative financing’ mechanisms to assist UNESCO in its quest to adapt to a changing economic climate”, as the euphemism so tersely goes. Supported by annual contributions from 193 Member States, many of whom are showing mounting reluctance to make even inflation-adjusted increases to their annual levies, UNESCO now finds itself under considerable budgetary strain and there is a real and pressing financial pressure to go beyond the current paradigm by seeking out new and different (i.e. “innovative”) funding mechanisms.

As someone who had spearheaded the creation and development of a new scientific research institute that successfully managed to unlock close to $350 million in both private and public funding, I might well be just what the doctor ordered to enable the United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organization to climb out of its current financial morass. Or so, presumably, went the thinking by the powers that be in Strategic Planning-land who had decided to engage me.

While it was hardly my childhood dream to become a professional fundraiser, it’s worth stressing at the outset that, placed in its proper context, I have a good deal more appreciation for the whole process than most people I know. Don’t get me wrong: the tawdry mechanics of kowtowing before megalomaniacal philanthropists, arm-twisting stodgy bureaucrats, or desperately searching for common ground with rampaging corporate interests holds about as much appeal to me as a double root canal, but it’s simply part of the price to be paid to ensure the creation or continuation of essential programs.

More generally, I’ve come to appreciate in my more philosophical moments that, like early morning workouts in unheated swimming pools, the inherent unattractiveness of the fundraising experience in no way diminishes the fact that it is, deep down, good for you. Very good, in fact. After all, there’s nothing like the flinty reality of budgetary allocations to focus the mind on what has succeeded and what hasn’t, what is out-performing and what is under-performing. And there’s nothing like having to make the case for additional financial support before a potentially unsympathetic audience to impose a more independent perspective on one’s strengths and weaknesses.

In short, a candid examination of funding priorities is inextricably tied to the entire concept of strategic development by forcing an objective assessment of the relative merits of an organization that might otherwise be postponed, perhaps indefinitely.

The private sector understands this instinctively as the unrelenting economic Darwinism of the marketplace blithely imposes its presence on all participants. Rigorously objective self-assessment is a must in a world where current success is no guaranteed predictor of future growth, and it is well understood that the competition will unceasingly toil away at targeting your weaknesses to gain more market share for themselves. Today’s complacent are tomorrow’s dinosaurs, and any period of falling profits or dipping stock prices will swiftly result in the baying of investors for a comprehensive strategic re-evaluation and/or the heads of those in charge. Adapt or die. Or sometimes, sadly, adapt and die. One never knows.

But however challenging it might be to discover the winning strategy, at least in the corporate world the litmus test for success is brutally clear: make money. There is some natural ambiguity between the short term and the long term (how much should one invest in research today in the hopes of generating greater revenues tomorrow?), but on the whole, it is not terribly difficult to discern which companies are currently succeeding and which ones are struggling.

In the non-profit universe, on the other hand, the definitions of success and failure are invariably much more subtle, and often considerably more opaque. Multinational educational and cultural organizations are not in the business of generating profits or increasing shareholder value and thus must work considerably harder at developing clear and objective assessment mechanisms. How to determine the relative impact of a full spectrum of educational programs? How to measure an increase in scientific capacity amongst under-developed states? Sometimes the programs that are the most expensive to maintain actually have the greatest overall impact. Sometimes they don’t. It’s hardly a straightforward business. Yet it is indispensable. A company that has a poor quarter might be required to lay off workers. A country that can’t properly educate its citizenry condemns itself to perpetual poverty.

And there is another important structural difference between the two worlds. In the corporate sector, a company that consistently underperforms will ultimately die. If one can’t meet one’s sales quotas, if one’s market share begins to shrink below sustainable levels, then the enterprise will be forced to make significant readjustments. And if this restructuring doesn’t right the boat and no last-ditch solutions are found, it will eventually go under.

Multinational organizations, as everyone knows, rarely go out of business. While this is in some ways a good thing—providing the necessary continuity in programs, policies and infrastructure for those involved—the absence of this formidable evolutionary threat inevitably generates a sense of smug complacency within the organization, twinned with an increasingly inefficient bureaucracy as any new “reform” that somehow manages to see the light of day invariably finds itself doing little more than structurally re-iterating the status quo.

To this rather dispiriting picture, I’m convinced, fundraising can ride, rather surprisingly, to the rescue. If budgets are withering across the board, then the prospect of securing new, additional resources enables a bracing sense of competition and an opportunity to candidly assess past performance. Rather than simply dawdling along according to the long-established status quo of algorithmic disbursements, one is now forced to say explicitly: We need extra resources to do this and Without more money, we won’t be able to do that, while making a clear, penetrating case for the objective merits of specific initiatives and candidly assessing what has gone wrong in the past. Put another way, the process of engaging in strategic fundraising initiatives forces an organization to step back and frankly assess the question: What do we do that is actually worth supporting and how do we find a way to do much more of that? And so it is that financial constraints ironically enable substantive progress, forcing honest self-appraisal and turning otherwise detached senior leaders into active champions, unanimously converging around established meritorious initiatives.

That, at least, is the theory.

But of course, for most organizations none of this happens at all. Instead, there is a great deal of knee-jerk caterwauling about how they are being criminally underfunded by an evil combination of heartless, unthinking bureaucrats and populist politicians, complete with misty-eyed reminisces of the glory days of yesteryear when sufficient funds were unthinkingly transferred into their capable hands without any of this demeaning business of being forced to justify their allotments in terms of efficiency or efficacy or any of those other humiliating buzzwords.

For these people, fundraising is naturally viewed as nothing more than yet another depressing consequence of living in our lamentably unenlightened age: grovelling before the modern-day Medicis (philistine billionaires and depressingly well-funded private foundations) in an effort to extricate relatively paltry sums from those who unjustly find themselves with far more money than they have a right to, and a good deal more than they know what to do with.

I’ve seen this sort of reaction many times before when I was setting up a theoretical physics institute. You might naively think that the advent of hundreds of millions of dollars of new monies towards basic research and scientific outreach would be met with considerable enthusiasm by those who publicly aver the importance of scholarship and intellectual inquiry. You might equally imagine that other more entrepreneurial types would seize on this precedent and actively construct additional innovative partnerships between the private and public sector in a wide variety of exciting and impactful areas. You would be wrong on both counts. As a general rule, it seems far easier to shake one’s head and envy those lucky bastards with their sugar daddy than to reflect on what lessons are to be gleaned about one’s own organization that was so inexplicably overlooked.

But back to UNESCO: budgets were tight and fundraising was desperately needed. Good. I was engaged as a consultant with the Bureau of Strategic Planning and thus might well have a sufficiently broad-based remit of investigating possible ways forward. Very good. Given my views on the strategic importance of fundraising, this seemed completely appropriate and clear evidence of a profound resonance between my values and those of UNESCO. After all, where better to make strategic impact than the Bureau of Strategic Planning? I was clearly in the right place.

I was trying hard to be positive. The truth was that my expectations weren’t terribly high. Before taking the consultancy gig I contacted several people I knew who were well-versed in science and education policy in a multinational context, and the preliminary feedback wasn’t entirely encouraging.

“UNESCO? Why on earth would you want to work there?” was, it must be admitted, a fairly common reaction.

A shrewder soul than I might have taken this as a dire warning of things to come, a shot across the bow of my optimistic little boat, a recognition of an intractable dysfunctionality well beyond the scope of whatever salutary bit of objective reckoning I might be able to bring to bear on the situation.

But I am a particularly stubborn fellow.

True, on the very few occasions when it had forced itself on my consciousness, UNESCO had long struck me as patently irrelevant. The fact that, during the better part of a decade spent building a new scientific institution with a strong educational and cultural mandate, I had precious little reason to ever constructively interact with the United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organization was in itself, it must be admitted, a rather ominous sign.

So, too, was the fact that the place had only very narrowly avoided selecting Farouk Hosni as its new Director-General in September 2009, finally plunking (31–27) in fav...