Evolving Requires Avoiding the Traps of Ignoring, Hoarding, and Stagnating

As a longtime transparency champion, and a professional librarian, PEAK’s Learn, Share, Evolve Principle resonates deeply with me. Since my journey into philanthropy was made through the pathway of libraries and knowledge management, I was delighted to discover the joys of PEAK, where grants professionals help their institutions make sense of the copious amounts of data they generate. Later, as a PEAK board member during the period when we were introducing the Principles for Peak Grantmaking, I was inspired by the move to help members act on these new Principles and find ways to measure philanthropy’s collective progress in these efforts. But the Principles can be elusive to manifest, operationalize, and tangibly define. One illuminating approach to intangibles like values and principles is to consider opposite behaviors as a way to understand what may be needed. So, in this case, the opposites of learning, sharing, and evolving are ignoring, hoarding,