The foundation is critically dependent on capable grantees and should work with them as respected experts in their fields.
Scientific methodology should be a cornerstone of nearly all of the foundation’s efforts.
Measurement, evaluation and learning are part of our DNA. From the start, we have been outcomes-driven, and through the years, we’ve relied on rigorous inquiry and adaptive management to guide our work. The scope of the challenges we prioritize guarantee that results are never certain and that conditions are constantly and unpredictably changing. Comprehensive investigations, well-vetted theories of change, and honest evaluation of our impact help us make informed decisions and reveal lessons from our successes and failures.
Gordon and Betty Moore “believe that science and the type of rigorous inquiry that guides science are keys to achieving the outcomes we want. Scientific methodology should be a cornerstone of nearly all of the foundation’s efforts.”
Upholding our founders’ values and beliefs, we practice adaptive management a systematic method for project management. It integrates design, management, monitoring and evaluation to provide a framework for testing assumptions, adaptation and learning. We believe that when those closest to the work, including our own staff and grantees, use adaptive management, they can improve effectiveness and impact. Institutional curiosity, innovation and a willingness to be open to change and failure are necessary skills for this approach.
The Four Filters
To evaluate possible ideas, programmatic activities and any significant potential endeavors, we consistently ask four questions:
1. Is it important? Successfully addressing the issue will result in large positive benefit or avoidance of substantial negative consequences.
2. Can we make an enduring difference? Significant enduring impact can be achieved that would not be achieved without Foundation support.
3. Is it measurable? To track progress and confirm outcomes, measurement against goals is necessary. It is often difficult to implement, but key to our quantitative approach to philanthropy.
4. Does it contribute to a portfolio effect? Synergy can increase impact and a portfolio can decrease risks.
Investigate
Through standalone grantmaking and formal investigations, the foundation explores potential areas of opportunity to determine if and how the foundation can make an enduring difference.
By staying well-informed in our areas of focus and making decisions on the basis of knowledge, analysis, external input and objective due diligence, our program teams cultivate a pipeline of ideas that can be accelerated if funding is available.
Measure and evaluate
The Four Filters question, “Is it measurable?” is core to every funding decision we make. Given the complexity of problems we aim to tackle, we often embark on work knowing we will need to expect a time horizon of decades, rather than years, to achieve the outcomes we seek.
Early in the foundation’s history, former President Ed Pehoet, Ph.D. emphasized, ‘’each program that we fund should have a set of measurable outcomes within a decade – and I think it’s a good time frame to think about. Shorter than a decade-off is too short. Longer than a decade becomes too abstract. . . I think if you can’t measure something in 10 years probably it means it may be too big a problem or the measurements just aren’t there.”
Monitor and adapt
Defining those long-term outcomes doesn’t mean we wait a decade to measure progress. Instead, we look for intermediate results that signal whether we are on track to what we hope to achieve, and we invest in research to better understand whether our theories of change hold. In both instances, our findings may help to validate our strategic plans or alert us to the need to adapt our strategies to changing knowledge or circumstance.
For example, nearly eight years into our XX-year, $XXX million Wild Salmon Ecosystem Initiative, we funded a scientific analysis of the relationships between salmon diversity, habitat and ecology. That research affirmed that the abundance and diversity of wild salmon were not put at risk by salmon management practices reinforcing the critical importance of the strategy.
Exit responsibly
Measurement and evaluation also help us to assess when our investment in a given area may have a diminishing return. Our long-term initiatives are built upon comprehensive plans that theorize how our funding across multiple strategies will lead toward the ultimate outcome we seek. When we launched the Data-Driven Discovery Initiative in 2013, our aim was to research through support of data-driven scientists and their innovative approaches.
The initiative was responsive to research and analysis that showed a significant gap in public and private funding for data science efforts focused on the natural sciences. By investing in this area at an early stage, we helped researchers apply data science to their work and generated broader use of data science in the natural sciences across the country.
Five years into the initiative, a comprehensive external evaluation and assessment by an external expert panel in 2018 revealed that the landscape of funding for data science had shifted significantly during the course of the initiative. Those findings led us to reevaluate our funding approach. We shifted funding to solidify the gains of the initiative and boost the development and use of data science tools for the natural sciences, with the intent to close the initiative in 2021.
In pursuing positive outcomes for future generations, we seek grantees who have the technical expertise, field knowledge, and front-line perspectives to achieve the lasting change we all seek. Our founders recognize this important aspect to meeting the organization’s goals; Gordon and Betty Moore see the foundation as “critically dependent on capable grantees,” and that it should “work with them as respected experts in their fields.”
Foundation staff learn from our grantees every day. Their knowledge and know-how enriches our collective understanding over time. To be successful, we understand that we must become deeply informed by the ideas, knowledge, and aspirations of those communities closest to the work – both geographically and topically.
1,222
– Gordon Moore.
Seeking counsel and expertise from the communities where we work
Our initiative to advance marine conservation in the North American waters of the U.S. and Canada critically depends on the expertise of Alaska Native Tribes, First Nations, and Inuit.
The Native American Rights Fund acknowledges the importance of Tribes exercising self-determination and elevating their participation in decision-making about activities in the Bering Sea. The combination of traditional Indigenous knowledge and modern science can point the way to effective and practical responses to changing sea conditions due to climate change.
We support the work of Bering Sea region tribal organizations who have long dedicated time and effort to protecting marine resources, and who have been clear about what is at stake: “The rapidly changing climate and the associated loss of sea ice in the Bering Sea have drastically impacted our hunting and fishing opportunities and our food security. We are bearing witness directly and experiencing the negative impacts of this reality daily. As the Bering Sea becomes ice free, increased shipping, pollution, the potential for offshore oil and gas drilling, large-scale mining, destructive commercial fisheries that trawl the bottom of the ocean floor, and the introduction of invasive species threaten our food security, cultures, and communities.”
First Nations lead prevention and rapid response to oil spills in British Columbia
Among our grantees in British Columbia, First Nations have taken the lead in geographic response planning for when shipping incidents occur. In 2016, the tugboat Nathan E. Stewart, on its way south from Alaska, ran aground off British Columbia’s Athlone Island and spilled more than 100,000 liters of diesel and engine oils into Gale Creek near Bella Bella, a town of 1,450 people in the territory of the Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) First Nation. Reporting on the spill, the Heiltsuk Tribal Council explained, “We watched diesel pour into our waters and onto the shores of our ancient village site of Q’vúqvai – onto clam gardens abundant with clams, other shellfish, and near shore fish species that our ancestors stewarded for millennia and our community relies on for food sustenance. Many hours passed before spill response equipment arrived. When it did, equipment that was not broken was poorly deployed and failed to contain the spill.”
Since then, Coastal Guardians and other Nation members have mapped dozens of sensitive and culturally important sites, and created geographic response strategies for each of them to safeguard against and respond quickly to future shipping incidents. This is an extension of the way in which First Nations have stewarded the region’s resources for millennia. Many other First Nations throughout coastal British Columbia are conducting similar planning and preparedness efforts.
Stewards in face of climate change
Farther north, and east, Moore funding supported the Inuit Circumpolar Council Canada to develop recommendations on how best to protect and manage the Pikialasorsuaq (or, “North Water”) polynya (an area of year-round open water surrounded by sea-ice cover), which straddles Canadian and Greenlandic Arctic waters and is one of the most biologically productive regions of the Arctic. But climate change is bringing with it profound change—and the Inuit of the Pikialasorsuaq are the best positioned to monitor and steward the ecosystem.
“We’re already up there, and we’re already seeing it,” Okalik Eegeesiak has said. As chair of the Pikialasorsuaq Commission, she has explained that plans to protect the area should be rooted in this knowledge.
Relying on research and skills from field experts
Our Science and Patient Care programs similarly depend on grantee expertise. Scientific and health care breakthroughs often depend on marshalling the skills and knowledge that individuals have gained in a particular field.
As Gordon Moore has said, once “you give good people the opportunity…they go out and do the innovations.”
In that spirit, beginning in 2002 through 2016, the foundation supported a partnership with Caltech that included 29 grants that ranged from $1 million to $28 million. Caltech had a large degree of independence in identifying the projects to propose to the foundation for funding—though all were for basic research and discovery science in the life or physical sciences. A summative evaluation found that nearly all of the grants funded under the Caltech Commitment realized or would realize their intended, often ambitious, outcomes. In the details, we saw a spectrum of success--when swinging for the fences, sometimes we strike out.
Overall, the Caltech projects leave a notable imprint on science, industry, government, and, ultimately, the public. We estimate that as many as half of the grants developed new technologies or methods that represent potential ‘trigger points’ for future transformation.
As one illustration, the Caltech Tectonics Observatory developed new methods and software to advance understanding of earthquakes, tsunamis, dune migration, glacier displacement, landslides and sand fluxes on Mars.
Jean-Philippe Avouac, professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology and a grantee through the foundation’s Caltech commitment, leads the Tectonics Observatory. “We see a larger and larger fraction of the world’s population living in seismic hazard areas with no preparation, especially in developing countries,” said Avouac. “We don’t understand earthquakes very well — it’s the only natural hazard that we have no clue how to predict at this time.
“We need more collaboration and ambitious projects bringing together specialists in geology, seismology, remote sensing, sensor physics and mechanical engineering,” Avouac added, “who often don’t speak the same language and don’t interact much given the way academic activities are organized and funded.”
Our Patient Care Program has a focus on diagnostic excellence. Errors in diagnosis are the most common type of medical errors reported by patients, accounting for nearly 60 percent of all medical errors and an estimated 40,000-80,000 deaths per year.
The foundation has invested $85 million over six years to improve diagnostic performance. The Diagnostic Excellence Initiative focuses on three strategies: infrastructure, people and technology. Together these strategies aim to achieve the overall outcome of reducing preventable serious harm and death from diagnostic errors by 15 percent. The development of people in this case is key, and the initiative will continue to engage in efforts to prepare leaders in the field.
In these varied ways, the foundation depends on the expertise of grantees and the communities we support to achieve our aims of long-term change for the good.
History of the
Marine Microbiology Initiative
000,000,000
This is a fairly long deck that is a good, quick summary of the content below
uiam sed esto is modit mi, unt unturem dolorer chicabo rrovitatio tota quodit ventiisi temo bea nescili tamusdam exeruptate nonsequis endandignis doloriatiam, cor aut esenecti is asint laboremqui dollore volut laceptatur sent.Ro tem ventem quianis quid mos as et ant atiae verum laciet labor modia pos quidus, optaturesto blant.Eque opti ut quam volore reperiat.Ecae velenit, consero rpore, ius as maiore, corempos net litas assequosam, optatet, ut ad quam estium repudae omnis aut lautet andanimagnis excessundae. Puditia nulparum in nitiur.
Quiam sed esto is modit mi, unt unturem dolorer chicabo rrovitatio tota quodit ventiisi temo bea nescili tamusdam exeruptate nonsequis endandignis doloriatiam, cor aut esenecti is asint laboremqui dollore volut laceptatur sent.Ro tem ventem quianis quid mos as empos net litas assequosam, optatet, ut ad quam estium repudae omnis aut lautet andanimagnis excessundae. Puditia nulparum in nitiur.
Quiam sed esto is modit mi, unt unturem dolorer chicabo rrovitatio tota quodit ventiisi temo bea nescili tamusdam exeruptate nonsequis endandignis doloriatiam, cor aut esenecti is asint laboremqui dollore volut laceptatur sent.Ro tem ventem quianis quid mos as empos net litas
“Quote from one of the participants in this inititiave. that is compelling and forward thinking”-
Name Here
Title
assequosam, optatet, ut ad quam estium repudae omnis aut lautet andanimagnis excessundae. Puditia nulparum in nitiur.Quiam sed esto is modit mi, unt unturem dolorer chicabo rrovitatio tota quodit ventiisi temo bea nescili tamusdam exeruptate nonsequis endandignis doloriatiam, cor aut esenecti is asint laboremqui dollore volut laceptatur sent.Ro tem ventem quianis quid mos as empos net litas assequosam, optatet, ut ad quam estium repudae omnis aut lautet andanimagnis excessundae. Puditia nulparum in nitiur.
Quiam sed esto is modit mi, unt unturem dolorer chicabo rrovitatio tota quodit ventiisi temo bea nescili tamusdam exeruptate nonsequis.
annual report
The foundation is critically dependent on capable grantees and should work with them as respected experts in their fields.
Scientific methodology should be a cornerstone of nearly all of the foundation’s efforts.
Measurement, evaluation and learning are part of our DNA. From the start, we have been outcomes-driven, and through the years, we’ve relied on rigorous inquiry and adaptive management to guide our work. The scope of the challenges we prioritize guarantee that results are never certain and that conditions are constantly and unpredictably changing. Comprehensive investigations, well-vetted theories of change, and honest evaluation of our impact help us make informed decisions and reveal lessons from our successes and failures.
Gordon and Betty Moore “believe that science and the type of rigorous inquiry that guides science are keys to achieving the outcomes we want. Scientific methodology should be a cornerstone of nearly all of the foundation’s efforts.”
Upholding our founders’ values and beliefs, we practice adaptive management a systematic method for project management. It integrates design, management, monitoring and evaluation to provide a framework for testing assumptions, adaptation and learning. We believe that when those closest to the work, including our own staff and grantees, use adaptive management, they can improve effectiveness and impact. Institutional curiosity, innovation and a willingness to be open to change and failure are necessary skills for this approach.
The Four Filters
To evaluate possible ideas, programmatic activities and any significant potential endeavors, we consistently ask four questions:
1. Is it important? Successfully addressing the issue will result in large positive benefit or avoidance of substantial negative consequences.
2. Can we make an enduring difference? Significant enduring impact can be achieved that would not be achieved without Foundation support.
3. Is it measurable? To track progress and confirm outcomes, measurement against goals is necessary. It is often difficult to implement, but key to our quantitative approach to philanthropy.
4. Does it contribute to a portfolio effect? Synergy can increase impact and a portfolio can decrease risks.
Investigate
Through standalone grantmaking and formal investigations, the foundation explores potential areas of opportunity to determine if and how the foundation can make an enduring difference.
By staying well-informed in our areas of focus and making decisions on the basis of knowledge, analysis, external input and objective due diligence, our program teams cultivate a pipeline of ideas that can be accelerated if funding is available.
Measure and evaluate
The Four Filters question, “Is it measurable?” is core to every funding decision we make. Given the complexity of problems we aim to tackle, we often embark on work knowing we will need to expect a time horizon of decades, rather than years, to achieve the outcomes we seek.
Early in the foundation’s history, former President Ed Pehoet, Ph.D. emphasized, ‘’each program that we fund should have a set of measurable outcomes within a decade – and I think it’s a good time frame to think about. Shorter than a decade-off is too short. Longer than a decade becomes too abstract. . . I think if you can’t measure something in 10 years probably it means it may be too big a problem or the measurements just aren’t there.”
Monitor and adapt
Defining those long-term outcomes doesn’t mean we wait a decade to measure progress. Instead, we look for intermediate results that signal whether we are on track to what we hope to achieve, and we invest in research to better understand whether our theories of change hold. In both instances, our findings may help to validate our strategic plans or alert us to the need to adapt our strategies to changing knowledge or circumstance.
For example, nearly eight years into our XX-year, $XXX million Wild Salmon Ecosystem Initiative, we funded a scientific analysis of the relationships between salmon diversity, habitat and ecology. That research affirmed that the abundance and diversity of wild salmon were not put at risk by salmon management practices reinforcing the critical importance of the strategy.
Exit responsibly
Measurement and evaluation also help us to assess when our investment in a given area may have a diminishing return. Our long-term initiatives are built upon comprehensive plans that theorize how our funding across multiple strategies will lead toward the ultimate outcome we seek. When we launched the Data-Driven Discovery Initiative in 2013, our aim was to research through support of data-driven scientists and their innovative approaches.
The initiative was responsive to research and analysis that showed a significant gap in public and private funding for data science efforts focused on the natural sciences. By investing in this area at an early stage, we helped researchers apply data science to their work and generated broader use of data science in the natural sciences across the country.
Five years into the initiative, a comprehensive external evaluation and assessment by an external expert panel in 2018 revealed that the landscape of funding for data science had shifted significantly during the course of the initiative. Those findings led us to reevaluate our funding approach. We shifted funding to solidify the gains of the initiative and boost the development and use of data science tools for the natural sciences, with the intent to close the initiative in 2021.
In pursuing positive outcomes for future generations, we seek grantees who have the technical expertise, field knowledge, and front-line perspectives to achieve the lasting change we all seek. Our founders recognize this important aspect to meeting the organization’s goals; Gordon and Betty Moore see the foundation as “critically dependent on capable grantees,” and that it should “work with them as respected experts in their fields.”
Foundation staff learn from our grantees every day. Their knowledge and know-how enriches our collective understanding over time. To be successful, we understand that we must become deeply informed by the ideas, knowledge, and aspirations of those communities closest to the work – both geographically and topically.
Seeking counsel and expertise from the communities where we work
Our initiative to advance marine conservation in the North American waters of the U.S. and Canada critically depends on the expertise of Alaska Native Tribes, First Nations, and Inuit.
The Native American Rights Fund acknowledges the importance of Tribes exercising self-determination and elevating their participation in decision-making about activities in the Bering Sea. The combination of traditional Indigenous knowledge and modern science can point the way to effective and practical responses to changing sea conditions due to climate change.
We support the work of Bering Sea region tribal organizations who have long dedicated time and effort to protecting marine resources, and who have been clear about what is at stake: “The rapidly changing climate and the associated loss of sea ice in the Bering Sea have drastically impacted our hunting and fishing opportunities and our food security. We are bearing witness directly and experiencing the negative impacts of this reality daily. As the Bering Sea becomes ice free, increased shipping, pollution, the potential for offshore oil and gas drilling, large-scale mining, destructive commercial fisheries that trawl the bottom of the ocean floor, and the introduction of invasive species threaten our food security, cultures, and communities.”
First Nations lead prevention and rapid response to oil spills in British Columbia
Among our grantees in British Columbia, First Nations have taken the lead in geographic response planning for when shipping incidents occur. In 2016, the tugboat Nathan E. Stewart, on its way south from Alaska, ran aground off British Columbia’s Athlone Island and spilled more than 100,000 liters of diesel and engine oils into Gale Creek near Bella Bella, a town of 1,450 people in the territory of the Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) First Nation. Reporting on the spill, the Heiltsuk Tribal Council explained, “We watched diesel pour into our waters and onto the shores of our ancient village site of Q’vúqvai – onto clam gardens abundant with clams, other shellfish, and near shore fish species that our ancestors stewarded for millennia and our community relies on for food sustenance. Many hours passed before spill response equipment arrived. When it did, equipment that was not broken was poorly deployed and failed to contain the spill.”
Since then, Coastal Guardians and other Nation members have mapped dozens of sensitive and culturally important sites, and created geographic response strategies for each of them to safeguard against and respond quickly to future shipping incidents. This is an extension of the way in which First Nations have stewarded the region’s resources for millennia. Many other First Nations throughout coastal British Columbia are conducting similar planning and preparedness efforts.
Stewards in face of climate change
Farther north, and east, Moore funding supported the Inuit Circumpolar Council Canada to develop recommendations on how best to protect and manage the Pikialasorsuaq (or, “North Water”) polynya (an area of year-round open water surrounded by sea-ice cover), which straddles Canadian and Greenlandic Arctic waters and is one of the most biologically productive regions of the Arctic. But climate change is bringing with it profound change—and the Inuit of the Pikialasorsuaq are the best positioned to monitor and steward the ecosystem.
“We’re already up there, and we’re already seeing it,” Okalik Eegeesiak has said. As chair of the Pikialasorsuaq Commission, she has explained that plans to protect the area should be rooted in this knowledge.
Relying on research and skills from field experts
Our Science and Patient Care programs similarly depend on grantee expertise. Scientific and health care breakthroughs often depend on marshalling the skills and knowledge that individuals have gained in a particular field.
As Gordon Moore has said, once “you give good people the opportunity…they go out and do the innovations.”
In that spirit, beginning in 2002 through 2016, the foundation supported a partnership with Caltech that included 29 grants that ranged from $1 million to $28 million. Caltech had a large degree of independence in identifying the projects to propose to the foundation for funding—though all were for basic research and discovery science in the life or physical sciences. A summative evaluation found that nearly all of the grants funded under the Caltech Commitment realized or would realize their intended, often ambitious, outcomes. In the details, we saw a spectrum of success--when swinging for the fences, sometimes we strike out.
Overall, the Caltech projects leave a notable imprint on science, industry, government, and, ultimately, the public. We estimate that as many as half of the grants developed new technologies or methods that represent potential ‘trigger points’ for future transformation.
As one illustration, the Caltech Tectonics Observatory developed new methods and software to advance understanding of earthquakes, tsunamis, dune migration, glacier displacement, landslides and sand fluxes on Mars.
Jean-Philippe Avouac, professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology and a grantee through the foundation’s Caltech commitment, leads the Tectonics Observatory. “We see a larger and larger fraction of the world’s population living in seismic hazard areas with no preparation, especially in developing countries,” said Avouac. “We don’t understand earthquakes very well — it’s the only natural hazard that we have no clue how to predict at this time.
“We need more collaboration and ambitious projects bringing together specialists in geology, seismology, remote sensing, sensor physics and mechanical engineering,” Avouac added, “who often don’t speak the same language and don’t interact much given the way academic activities are organized and funded.”
Our Patient Care Program has a focus on diagnostic excellence. Errors in diagnosis are the most common type of medical errors reported by patients, accounting for nearly 60 percent of all medical errors and an estimated 40,000-80,000 deaths per year.
The foundation has invested $85 million over six years to improve diagnostic performance. The Diagnostic Excellence Initiative focuses on three strategies: infrastructure, people and technology. Together these strategies aim to achieve the overall outcome of reducing preventable serious harm and death from diagnostic errors by 15 percent. The development of people in this case is key, and the initiative will continue to engage in efforts to prepare leaders in the field.
In these varied ways, the foundation depends on the expertise of grantees and the communities we support to achieve our aims of long-term change for the good.
History of the
Marine Microbiology Initiative
000,000,000
This is a fairly long deck that is a good, quick summary of the content below
uiam sed esto is modit mi, unt unturem dolorer chicabo rrovitatio tota quodit ventiisi temo bea nescili tamusdam exeruptate nonsequis endandignis doloriatiam, cor aut esenecti is asint laboremqui dollore volut laceptatur sent.Ro tem ventem quianis quid mos as et ant atiae verum laciet labor modia pos quidus, optaturesto blant.Eque opti ut quam volore reperiat.Ecae velenit, consero rpore, ius as maiore, corempos net litas assequosam, optatet, ut ad quam estium repudae omnis aut lautet andanimagnis excessundae. Puditia nulparum in nitiur.
Quiam sed esto is modit mi, unt unturem dolorer chicabo rrovitatio tota quodit ventiisi temo bea nescili tamusdam exeruptate nonsequis endandignis doloriatiam, cor aut esenecti is asint laboremqui dollore volut laceptatur sent.Ro tem ventem quianis quid mos as empos net litas assequosam, optatet, ut ad quam estium repudae omnis aut lautet andanimagnis excessundae. Puditia nulparum in nitiur.
Quiam sed esto is modit mi, unt unturem dolorer chicabo rrovitatio tota quodit ventiisi temo bea nescili tamusdam exeruptate nonsequis endandignis doloriatiam, cor aut esenecti is asint laboremqui dollore volut laceptatur sent.Ro tem ventem quianis quid mos as empos net litas
“Quote from one of the participants in this inititiave. that is compelling and forward thinking”-
Name Here
Title
assequosam, optatet, ut ad quam estium repudae omnis aut lautet andanimagnis excessundae. Puditia nulparum in nitiur.Quiam sed esto is modit mi, unt unturem dolorer chicabo rrovitatio tota quodit ventiisi temo bea nescili tamusdam exeruptate nonsequis endandignis doloriatiam, cor aut esenecti is asint laboremqui dollore volut laceptatur sent.Ro tem ventem quianis quid mos as empos net litas assequosam, optatet, ut ad quam estium repudae omnis aut lautet andanimagnis excessundae. Puditia nulparum in nitiur.
Quiam sed esto is modit mi, unt unturem dolorer chicabo rrovitatio tota quodit ventiisi temo bea nescili tamusdam exeruptate nonsequis.