Front Page
Gifts & Grants
Fund Raising
Managing Nonprofit Groups
Technology
Philanthropy Today
Jobs
Guide to Grants
The Nonprofit Handbook
Facts & Figures
Events
Deadlines
Current Issue
Back Issues
Directory of Services
Guide to Managing Nonprofits
Continuing-Education Guide
Fund-Raising Services Guide
Technology Guide
About The Chronicle
How to Contact Us
How to Subscribe
How to Register
Manage Your Account
How to Advertise
Press Inquiries
Feedback
Privacy Policy
User Agreement
Help
|
|
|
|
|
|
Conference Notebook
May 07, 2008
Council on Foundations
The Grant Maker's Guilt
The exhibit-hall booths have been dismantled and most of the 3,200 foundation leaders who attended this week’s Council on Foundations annual meeting are heading home.
Some grant makers say they are leaving the meeting energized and eager to tackle social issues with a renewed vigor.
But at least one conference attendee says the lavishness of the event at the new Gaylord National Harbor conference center has left him with mixed feelings.
Albert Ruesga, vice president at the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation, in Washington, writes on his blog, White Courtesy Telephone, of the uneasy emotions that he felt as he listened to speakers talk about addressing human-rights abuses in an opulent hotel he says is “large enough to have its own zip code.”
“Sitting in this place, isolated as I am from the hurly-burly of the world, I’m in a fog,” Mr. Ruesga writes. “I forget that the wars we wage most vigorously in the name of human rights are tied intimately to the protection of American consumption—my consumption, and that of my family and friends.”
Council on Foundations
Debating Diversity
Speakers at a plenary session on diversity — the first on that topic ever held at a Council on Foundations conference — sparred over legislation in California that would require big foundations to publish information about the race and gender of grantees, staff members, and board members.
Foundations must do more to improve their track records on diversity, but legislative solutions are “fraught with sandbags and land mines,” said Robert K. Ross, president of the California Endowment, in Los Angeles. He noted that the California bill, adopted by the California Assembly in January, ran into trouble because it was amended to require foundations to provide data about sexual orientation, which then drew complaints about violating privacy rights.
“There is no model definition of diversity,” said Mr. Ross, who also heads the Diversity in Philanthropy Project, a group of about 40 foundation leaders who are pushing for more diversity in the field.
But Ann Wiener, a trustee at the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, in New York, said after some tough discussion her board voted overwhelmingly to endorse the California legislation. She said the foundation world had not come very far on a voluntary basis and “legislation may be the only way to do it.”
The council presented data showing that 87 percent of foundation boards, and 94 percent of chief executives, were white in 2006, compared with 66 percent of the general population.
Rep. Xavier Becerra, a Democratic member of Congress from California, said foundations might invite federal scrutiny if they do not step up their giving to projects that benefit minorities, saying they have an obligation to earn their tax subsidies by working for the public good.
Mr. Becerra called the tax deductions that people claim for charitable donations a “$32-billion earmark” and noted that Congress is seeking ways to rein in spending. “Right now earmarks are under a big microscope, and $32-billion is a lot of money, so do well.”
Adam Meyerson, president of the Philanthropy Roundtable, a group of mostly conservative grant makers, said he rejects any effort to tell foundations how to make up their staffs, boards, or giving. He said there’s no reason to assume a white-dominated board won’t care about helping low-income or minority people.
“There’s a tremendous yearning among current and especially among prospective new donors to make a difference in the lives of low income children and families,” he said. “Let’s not drive away the new philanthropic capital by taking away from donors the freedom to decide how and where to give away their money.”
I. King Jordan, a deaf member of the board of the Theodore R. & Vivian M. Johnson Scholarship Foundation, in West Palm Beach, Fla., urged the grant makers to pay more attention to physical disabilities when they discuss diversity.
“We have to be inclusive in our definition of diversity. I feel like I’m standing out like a sore thumb at this conference,” he said. “I’m the only deaf person in the whole conference.”
Council on Foundations
Different Approaches Needed for Poorer Communities
Foundations that want to help the poor need to abandon short-term thinking and be much more flexible when they analyze grant applications.
That message was delivered repeatedly at a session here led by foundation officials who specialize in grant making in low-income communities.
“We have to be willing to take some risks,” said Kafi D. Blumenfield, chief executive of the Liberty Hill Foundation in Los Angeles. “This is a risky area of grant making. Not all of the seeds are going to sprout.”
The risky nature of working with small organizations in poor communities prompts many foundations to pour their grant making into more established charities.
But Ms. Blumenfield says foundations that take the time to get to know the people who work in those neighborhoods make smart investments and produce meaningful improvements.
The Liberty Hill Foundation, for example, has created boards of people in Los Angeles’ most downtrodden neighborhoods to help advise its program officers and board members on which charities are most worthy of support.
The foundation has also decided to take steps such as accepting grant applications in Spanish to help it reach out to organizations that otherwise do not receive attention from foundations.
But its biggest investment, by far, is time.
“The key is investing and waiting to take the time for change to happen,” she said.
May 06, 2008
Council on Foundations
Who Can Name a Foundation?
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 longer existed.
That is a good sign, Kevin Klose, president of National Public Radio, told grant makers at the meeting.
“There is a wealth of good feeling about nonprofits and about public service in this country, regardless of what the exact identities are.”
Council on Foundations
How Foundations Can Best Help the Poor
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 Corporation, a charity that helps low-income communities gain access to information technology, shared the stage with Mr. Gingrich and objected to his use of the word “experiment.”
“Don’t experiment with me, meet me halfway,” he said, suggesting that philanthropy should listen to what people in troubled communities say they need.
Council on Foundations
More Than Money: How Foundations Can Help After a Disaster
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 diligence and we find this organization credible, accountable, and effective.”
Foundations, said Mr. Joseph, are in a position to use their networks of contacts to encourage greater collaboration.
“Building coalitions will require that we work with, rather than simply on behalf of, those who suffer most in the crisis – mainly the poor and those who are marginalized because of color or culture,” he said.
With more than $500-billion in assets, foundations in the United States have more power – and more responsibility – than the amount of money they distribute in grants each year suggests, said Mr. Joseph. He encouraged foundation officials to think about how they use the other 95 percent of their endowments.
“Some thoughtful people in the field are beginning to ask: Should a private foundation be more than a private investment company that uses some of its excess cash flow for charitable purposes?” he said. “I am delighted that more and more foundations are beginning to put a larger share of their assets in the service of their mission.”
Council on Foundations
Brace for Tough Times, Grant Makers Warned
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 up facing “tremendous fiscal pressure” as the need for their services increase and government resources are reduced.
“What do to in the face of this is a philosophical judgment,” he said.
Michael Rubinger, chief executive of the Local Initiatives Corporation, the community development grant maker in New York, shared the stage with Mr. Rubin, and said in the face of a protracted downturn “it might be time for foundations to dip into their endowments.”
Mr. Rubin also said he was “skeptical” of program related investments—foundation investments made in support of charitable causes designed to bring a financial return. He said foundations’ missions are better served by achieving the maximum earnings they can safely achieve from their investments with the goal of increasing their grant-making ability.
Mr. Rubinger responded by saying he didn’t necessarily see a trade-off between program related investments and grant making.
Council on Foundations
A Project to Create More Hillary Clintons
Despite Sen. Hillary Clinton’s historic run for the presidency, women are greatly underrepresented in the U.S. political system – -a scenario the White House Project is attempting to change.
Marie Wilson, the group’s president, told a conference session about her group’s efforts to train women across the country to run for political office, calling it an example of nonpartisan political activity that is permitted under the tax code governing charities.
The United States ranks 71st in the world in the percentage of women serving in parliament (here, the House of Representatives). “It is not really a representative democracy,” said Ms. Wilson.
Ms. Wilson, who headed the Ms. Foundation for almost two decades before starting the White House Project in 1998, said many of the women who received grants from the foundation were creating innovative social programs that focused on HIV/AIDS, health care, small loans, and promoting a “living wage.”
“That’s the government in exile,” she thought, and wanted to find a way to give them more power. The White House Project, in New York, has trained 1,700 women over the past three years in the mechanics of running for office, touching on campaigning, communications, and fund raising, Ms. Wilson said.
But it has found the most effective way to persuade them to become candidates is to give them examples of other women who have made that leap — for example, by showing a documentary about Shirley Chisholm, a black congresswoman who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. Many women are reluctant to step forward because they see so few other politicians who look like them, she said.
In that sense, she said, Senator Clinton has inspired more women to want to try politics, showing “you can get to the highest level.”
Council on Foundations
After a Disaster: Advice for Grant Makers
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 the seven years after the September 11 attack on the Pentagon. The report is designed to make it possible for other foundations to copy the approach quickly without starting from scratch. An accompanying report tells the stories of some of the people who received assistance from the fund.
Council on Foundations
Philanthropy and 'Quiet Diplomacy'
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, you almost never were,” he said. “Now we’ve replaced the culture of impunity with a new paradigm.”
John Lewis, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, said his decades-long efforts to engage in discussions with North Korean officials have relied heavily on the support of grant makers.
He described an “explosion” of efforts to engage in unofficial discussions by nongovernmental groups hoping to improve relations between the United States and countries such as Iran and North Korea.
Foundations can also build political and public support for new approaches to ensuring security, said Don Steinberg, a vice president at the International Crisis Group, which is based in Brussels.
Mr. Steinberg described how world leaders had agreed in 2005, for the first time, that governments have a responsibility to protect their citizens from mass violence and that international organizations must take action if governments are failing to live up to that responsibility.
The MacArthur Foundation, Open Society Institute, Ford, and other grant makers had recently helped create a center in New York to promote concrete policies that would enable governments to protect citizens.
Mr. Steinberg said he’d been heartened by the quick response of international organizations to recent post-election violence in Kenya.
“Would we have had a Rwandan-style genocide in Kenya?” he said. “Fortunately, we’ll never know and that’s because the international community did buy into the notion that we are responsible for preventing a genocide. And I, for one, am delighted to live with that uncertainty.”
Copyright © 2008 The Chronicle of Philanthropy