Charity leaders at the Independent Sector’s annual meeting, which opened in Philadelphia today, turned what could have been a doom-and-gloom discussion about the financial challenges facing nonprofit groups into a feel-good look into what a new presidential administration might mean for nonprofit organizations.

Miles Rapoport, president of Demos, a think tank in New York, opened the session called “Making the Numbers Work during the Economic Squeeze,, saying that the country is “entering a period of time that is enormously creative, enormously uncertain, enormously new,” and that presents “tremendous organizational possibilities.”

Participants touched on some of the fine points of moving through a recession, such as whether it is prudent to start new programs to attract new sources of revenue when money is tight.

Garvester Kelley, vice president of the mid-Atlantic region.of the ...

Even with all the attention the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has received — especially after Warren Buffett pledged most of his fortune to the philanthropy — even some of the best-informed Americans cannot summon to mind the name of a single foundation.

A poll of community leaders discussed at a session here found that 56 percent of community leaders cannot name a foundation on their first try, and only 15 percent can cite examples of a foundation’s impact on their city or town.

But even though community leaders can’t cite specifics about foundations, they have favorable views of philanthropy. Slightly more than half of the community leaders surveyed as part of the Philanthropy Awareness Initiative — an effort supported by several big foundations to make influential Americans aware of how foundations work — said it would be a significant loss to their community if foundations no...

Newt Gingrich, the former U. S. Speaker of the House, said he was against trying to get philanthropy to find the “perfect planning model” and “dubious” of efforts in the U. S. Senate and elsewhere endeavoring to “fine tune” philanthropy.”

He said he did not see a “single best path” for philanthropy or nonprofit activities, but that that just about everything charities do should be based on information technology.

He also advised foundations to spend 10 percent of their time thinking beyond five years, 20 percent of their time thinking beyond two years, and the rest thinking about the present.

He said that philanthropy needed to support “full-blown experiments” in poor neighborhoods to help people become productive citizens. Excessive bureaucracy, he said, stymied federal efforts at intensive and novel anti-poverty approaches.

Rey Ramsey, chief executive of One Economy...

In the aftermath of a disaster, foundations can bring to bear more than just their grant dollars as they help communities rebuild, James A. Joseph, chairman of the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation, in Baton Rouge, told participants at the Council on Foundations annual meeting. Mr. Joseph served as the council’s chief executive from 1982-95.

Grant makers can help local nonprofit groups in affected areas gain access to experts, data, and information about what has worked elsewhere, and foundations can use their own reputations to advance the work of those organizations, said Mr. Joseph.

“Foundations can use their social capital as a kind of collateral for those whose formal credentials and written proposals understate their potential and reliability,” he said. “A grant is a Good Housekeeping seal of approval that says to the larger community that this foundation has done due...

Robert Rubin, the United States Secretary of the Treasury during the Clinton administration, told grant makers at the meeting that the nation’s economy was facing “the most complex set of circumstances” in his lifetime.

Mr. Rubin, director of the executive committee of Citigroup, the financial-services firm in New York said the abnormally long period of economic growth preceding the current downturn was atypical of the usual cycles in the economy. He also warned that development of new “complex financial instruments” during the boom years and disruptions in the credit markets created a potential “perfect storm” of economic instability.

Foundations, he said, therefore may end up earning less on their endowment investments over the next one to three years when compared with the investment growth achieved in the past 20 years. Meanwhile, he predicted that that foundations could end...

Several reports that offer advice and lessons learned about grant making after a disaster commanded attention during session’s at this week’s conference. Among them:

• Best Practices in Disaster Grantmaking: Lessons Learned from the Gulf Coast, published by the New York Association of Grantmakers, offers advice on what foundations should do after a disaster. For instance, it urges grant makers to reach out to charities in the affected area, rather than waiting for requests for assistance and recommends practices to avoid, such as taking up a great deal of a local nonprofit leader’s time and then not making a grant to the organization.

• The Survivors’ Fund Process for Disaster Recovery, published by the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region, in Washington, describes how the foundation provided financial support and case management to more than 1,000 people in...

What role can foundations play in helping to protect people from nuclear warfare, genocide, and other conflict? Speakers discussed that question at a session here entitled, “Philanthropy and Conflict: Quiet Diplomacy, Public Advocacy.”

Grant makers can help build coalitions of activists to call for the creation of new tools to deter violence, said William Pace, executive director of the World Federalist Movement, in New York. He described how grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur and Ford Foundations, among others, had helped his organization build grass-roots and political support to open the International Criminal Court, an institution based in the Hague that prosecutes people for genocide and crimes against humanity.

“The reality used to be that if you killed one or two people, you were almost always brought to justice, but if you killed 1,000 or 100,000 people,...

“This is not a time for business as usual,” said Stephen B. Heintz, president of Rockefeller Brothers Fund in New York, moderating a session on the role of philanthropy in dealing with global climate change.

Mr. Heintz said that global climate change should not be considered solely an environmental issue and that grant makers focused on causes as diverse as the arts and human rights should take steps to deal with global warming. “It’s time for every foundation to find their path to helping solving this global destruction,” Mr. Heintz said.

Betsy Taylor, founder and chairman of 1Sky, a charity in Takoma Park, Md. dedicated to raising public and political awareness of climate change and some possible solutions, said her organization has attracted 47 youth groups, including some evangelical groups that are pressuring Republican lawmakers to pass legislation to curb climate change....

Proponents of socially responsible investing told participants at the Council on Foundations meeting that factoring social and environmental issues into their funds’ investment decisions doesn’t have to mean lower financial returns — but will require a new mind-set.

The fight for socially responsible investing is a fight against the prevailing emphasis on short-term financial results, said Peter S. Knight, president of Generation Investment Management US, in Washington.

When Generation Investment Management analyzes businesses to invest in, it looks at traditional financial factors, such as market position and competitive advantage, but also at social and environmental factors. The investment-management company believes that over time businesses whose operations are socially and environmentally responsible have a competitive edge.

But for that kind of approach to become more...

In a session titled “What Issues Lie In Our Future?” a group of philanthropy experts discussed where philanthropy might be going as the 21st century progresses.

For Akwasi Aidoo, executive director of Trust Africa, a foundation in Dakar, Senegal, the country to keep an eye on in the future is actually not on his continent.

“Unless you have been in Africa in the past few years you cannot understand that China is in Africa in the biggest way possible,” Mr. Aidoo said.

Grantmakers and charities working in Africa would be well advised to learn about the influence, power, and priorities China is increasingly bringing to Africa, he said.

Susan Raymond, senior managing director of Changing Our World., a consulting firm in New York sketched out some of striking demographic and technological changes under way.

Nano technology—basically very small machines that she said could one day “a...