I’ve been meditating a lot lately on my practice of grantmaking.  Maybe it’s the creep of middle age, or the prevalence of all things yoga these days, but I find myself reflecting more frequently on the state of this field that found me two decades ago and became my sort-of chosen career. You see I am old enough a philanthropoid to remember the days when this wasn’t really a “career choice” so much as a stop-over in most people’s “career trajectories.”  We chose each other; definitely a reciprocal love affair of many years running now. But as I am having this mid-career assessment of my love object, I find we are, as many couples of longstanding do, having the very same conversations and telling the very same stories as we were twenty years ago.  In fact, I confess, that sometimes I am in meetings and I get confused: “didn’t I attend this meeting in 1994? Wasn’t this the same agenda we had in 1999? Weren’t we asking ourselves these same questions in 2002?”.  As Susan Sontag used to say, and I paraphrase, the pleasure of forgetting is that you are always learning everything anew again. However, in philanthropy, there is a real danger to forgetting.  We change our priorities so much and so frequently that eventually we forget where we have been, the lessons we learned, and why we decided to change in the first place.  Institutional memory in philanthropy is a very low-valued commodity.  Diversity, evaluation, collective impact (or what we used to call simply, “collaboration”), leverage: important concepts all, but I am sure I can find numerous conference proceedings containing all therein over the past two decades. I am looking for the truly new in my relationship.  Is it social impact bonds? Social media donor sites? I don’t know, but I need a jumpstart to my relationship.  Send me your ideas.