My short talk on the nature of change and foundations as changemakers for the GEO National Conference in Seattle on March 13, 2012.

1. The Closeted Optimist’s
Guide to Change
Foundations as Changemakers
GEO National Conference
March 13, 2012, Seattle, WA
Eugene Eric Kim <eekim@groupaya.net>
@eekim on Twitter

3. We are all trying to change the
world for the better.
How do we do this?

4. Change starts with
the individual.
We all want to facilitate change,
but in order to do that, we must
change ourselves.

5. How many of you have made a
memorable, lasting change in
your life in the past three months?

6. Change is hard.

7. ―Almost always the men
who achieve these
fundamental inventions of
a new paradigm have
been either very young or
very new to the field
whose paradigm they
change.‖
—Thomas Kuhn
Structure of Scientific Revolutions

8. People don’t
change. The old
guard dies...
... and the new
guard’s mindset
takes over.

9. Meyerowitz's (Suggested) Hypothesis

10. Meyerowitz's (Suggested) Hypothesis
Applied Today

11. Change seems to happen in
generational increments.
Will this be fast enough?
What if there’s no new guard?

12. What does this all
mean for
institutional
philanthropy?

13. How does change
happen?
1. You need to want it.
2. You need to practice it.
3. You need structures that
support it.

14. The Mont Fleur Scenarios (1992)
Helped guide the peaceful,
economically successful ANC
leadership transition in post-
apartheid South Africa

15. What would happen if foundations
aligned around a common vision
for how to change themselves and
the world?

16. What would happen if, in addition
to planning, foundations played, in
addition to analyzing, foundations
experimented?

17. What would happen if there were
structures in place that supported
these experiments in changing
how foundations work?

18. ―It is far too late and things are
far too bad for pessimism. At
such times, it is no failure to fall
short of realizing all that we
might dream; the failure is to fall
short of dreaming all that we
might realize.‖
—Dee Hock

19. Acknowledgements
Thanks to Kristin Cobble for her thought partnership, to Amy Wu
Wong for her delightful drawings, and to H. Jessica Kim for her
helpful feedback.
eekim@groupaya.net / @eekim on Twitter
http://groupaya.net/
@groupaya on Twitter
Photo on slide 3 by nattu (CC BY 2.0). Photos on slide 10 by David Shankbone (CC BY 2.0) and
Photo on slide 6 by Raymond Larose (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). from Al Jazeera English (CC BY-SA 2.0) and Wikimedia
Photo on slide 7 from HiLoBrow. Commons.
Photos on slide 8 by aussiegal (CC BY 2.0) and Eugene Eric Image on slide 11 by José-manuel Benitos (GNU FDL 1.2).
Kim (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0). Photo on slide 12 by Trey Ratcliff (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
Photos on slide 9 by Paul Townsend (CC BY-NC 2.0) and Photo on slide 13 by Adam Baker (CC BY 2.0).
from NASA and the National Archives. Photo on slide 14 by World Cup 2010 – Shine 2010 (CC BY
2.0)