There was a really interesting article in the New York Times yesterday that had a headline attention grabbing headline of Foundations Find Benefits in Facing Up to Failures. I had two reactions: "how refreshing" and "well, sure."

Sunlight deliberately set out to be experimental - to throw ideas and projects on the wall and see if they stuck and if they didn't, to stop and figure out why. This was key to our grant making strategy as well. When you hope to be on the cutting edge you expect some things not to work. So we figured we'd win some, lose some. That seemed right to us. Fascinating how risk averse some of the truly big foundations have been and unwilling to admit, until recently, that some things just don't work.