As anyone who knows me well is aware, I'm a strong believer in giving back to one's community. It's something that I've been able to incorporate into Elephant's Bookshelf Press, with perhaps the most obvious example being Steven Carman's Battery Brothers, for which all the profits will go to the Starlight Children's Foundation, which fulfills wishes of sick children and works to improve the lives of kids and families overall.
We all belong to many communities. It's not just about where we live or where we work, but also the places where we thrive and help our peers survive. In that light, I'd like to call attention to R.S. Mellette, who was recently recognized for his volunteer efforts with his local chapter of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators.
R.S. is an important part of the EBP family, but he's also become a huge part of the SCBWI community out in California. I wanted to call attention to his dedication to writers; it's at least as strong as his faith in readers. Great job!
Showing posts with label philanthropy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philanthropy. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Book Review: The Art of Film Funding
This review, which I wrote, appeared previously on a different Web site. If you want the link to the original, please leave a comment below and I will contact you directly. If you want me to view it without publishing your name, I'll gladly do that. I keep no list of readers, so I won't sell it anywhere.
So you have a great idea for a movie? Join the club. The more important question is do you have the means to produce it.
In The Art of Film Fundraising, Carole Lee Dean explains that it's not enough to have a great script or a visionary director. "If you don't have funding, you don't have a film," she writes. "You might be able to pull off a small project with the help of [credit cards], but if you do not learn the art of funding, your film career is going to be very short."
While many books on film funding focus on whether a film should be made, Dean's book assumes that the reader has already answered that question in the affirmative. With that out of the way, she then poses ten questions (Why are you the right person to make the film? How many hours per week can you put into the film?) that potential filmmakers should ask themselves to determine whether they are truly committed to seeing a project through to completion.
In her book, Dean, who has produced more than a hundred television programs and started From the Heart Productions, a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to funding films that are "unique and make a contribution to society," discusses the myriad ways to finance a film, including a detailed section on foundation grants. And while the book focuses exclusively on fundraising for film projects, the lessons Dean shares with her readers are more broadly applicable:
o Know who your potential funders are;
o Develop a strategy based on each individual funder;
o Keep your options open and seek multiple sources and types of support;
o View rejections as opportunities to learn and improve.
Throughout, Dean includes excerpts of her conversations with professional filmmakers, who provide a practitioner's perspective on the realities and technical aspects of filmmaking. The interviews not only provide useful tips but also illustrate how filmmaking has changed over the last couple of decades, as well as why fundraising for filmmakers is more important today than it was fifteen to twenty years ago. She asks filmmaker Morrie Warshawski, for example, where the best place to look for funding is, to which Warshawski replies: "It is too big a question to answer generally. If you are making an independent narrative feature film, you probably don't want to go to private foundations. On the other hand, if you are making a social issue documentary, then you absolutely do want to go to private foundations."
The book is divided into easy-to-follow chapters on such topics as what to include in a film proposal, how to research funders and write grant applications, and how and what to look for from individuals and businesses. Indeed, Dean's recommendations tend to be straightforward and practical (e.g., invite potential donors to fundraising parties at which snippets of a film in progress are shown), and the book often reads like a collection of helpful magazine articles rather than a book.
If Dean had simply published the book's fifty-page appendix of Web links, contact names, addresses, phone numbers, and other resources, The Art of Film Fundraising would be a valuable resource. But with all the additional information she provides, Dean has put together a toolkit that any independent filmmaker or nonprofit looking to produce a documentary film will want to keep close at hand.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Taking Philanthropy Seriously, edited by William Damon and Susan Verducci
This review, which I wrote, was originally published at another site. If you want the link to the original, please leave a comment below and I will contact you directly.
For a 2005 article in Germany's Der Spiegel, a Kenyan economist was interviewed about the effects of Western development policy in Africa. Before the interviewer could finish his first question, about increased aid to countries on the continent, the economist interrupted, "For God's sake, please just stop. [Aid for the purpose of eliminating hunger and poverty] has been damaging our continent for the past forty years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid."
While such a statement might shock the typical philanthropist, whose intentions are almost always benign, if not noble, it probably wouldn't surprise William Damon and Susan Verducci. In Taking Philanthropy Seriously: Beyond Noble Intentions to Responsible Giving, Damon, a professor of education at Stanford University, Verducci, senior research associate at the Center on Adolescence at Stanford and coordinator of the GoodWork Project, and their fellow essayists describe a field that is filled with people who make their living mediating between donors and recipients but whose "own values and agendas...consciously or not, may diverge from those of the donors and those of the recipients."
Through cautionary tales and case studies, Damon, Verducci, and their fellow authors make the point that intentions alone are not enough of a basis on which to make grants and go to great lengths to illustrate the challenges inherent in the grantor/grantee relationship. As Damon writes: "Beyond this general noble intention and the legal codes that enforce it, philanthropy has few agreed upon standards of judgment or conduct and little in the way of a definitive knowledge base of proven strategies.... [T]here is a reluctance in the field to prescribe the 'best' ways of accomplishing philanthropic work or to designate an authoritative set of guidelines that people entering the field have an obligation to master."
Largely comprised of essays from leading academics, third sector professionals, and former government officials, Taking Philanthropy Seriously examines the currents moving through contemporary American philanthropy, many of which — like venture philanthropy — aren't that new, and also traces the ethics and politics of more traditional giving, from the Greeks and Romans through the Rockefellers and Gateses.
Other essays describe challenges inherent to the philanthropic sector that often go overlooked, including the relative lack of training given to foundation staff. How does one become a program officer in the first place? Ask Laura Horn and Howard Gardner in a chapter titled "The Lonely Profession." And how do program officers decide which organizations are worthy of a grant and which are not? Those new to philanthropy might be surprised to discover that many program officers fell into philanthropy by chance, or were recruited from fields or organizations already supported by their current employer. Others were grantees who hankered to learn how it feels to be on the giving side of the equation, while still others are just "passing through" and expect to leave the profession as soon as they have acquired a better understanding of their chosen field.
Regardless of how or why they entered the field, program officers often are daunted by the challenges of their job. "While some grantmakers manage to find lasting satisfaction in their work with the support of good mentorship, professional reflection, enduring stamina, and unusual patience, many other grantmakers eventually burn out," writes Tom Tierney, chairman and founder of the Bridgespan Group. As a result, many good practitioners leave philanthropy, or worse, notes Tierney, stay and let their work suffer.
The essays in the final section of the book offer strategies for building what Damon calls a "domain for responsible giving," where long-standing debates about how much foundations should be required to pay out (most of the essayists seem ambivalent) and whether venture philanthropy has helped the field (a qualified yes) are explored.
While the book's title might suggest that foundations tend to act heedlessly, the essays instead focus on how a foundation's good intentions require careful examination. The noble intention of Damon, Verducci, and their fellow essayists is to point out aspects of the practice of philanthropy that could be improved. Damon admits that some might consider this approach "curmudgeonly," but his larger point is that philanthropy will only reach its full potential by admitting and examining its weaknesses better than it does at present. Or, as Mihaly Cskszentmihalyi, the well-known author of Flow and other books on the psychology of creativity, writes in the volume's concluding chapter: "To point out such [weaknesses] is a sign not of pessimism but of faith in a better future."
For a 2005 article in Germany's Der Spiegel, a Kenyan economist was interviewed about the effects of Western development policy in Africa. Before the interviewer could finish his first question, about increased aid to countries on the continent, the economist interrupted, "For God's sake, please just stop. [Aid for the purpose of eliminating hunger and poverty] has been damaging our continent for the past forty years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid."
While such a statement might shock the typical philanthropist, whose intentions are almost always benign, if not noble, it probably wouldn't surprise William Damon and Susan Verducci. In Taking Philanthropy Seriously: Beyond Noble Intentions to Responsible Giving, Damon, a professor of education at Stanford University, Verducci, senior research associate at the Center on Adolescence at Stanford and coordinator of the GoodWork Project, and their fellow essayists describe a field that is filled with people who make their living mediating between donors and recipients but whose "own values and agendas...consciously or not, may diverge from those of the donors and those of the recipients."
Through cautionary tales and case studies, Damon, Verducci, and their fellow authors make the point that intentions alone are not enough of a basis on which to make grants and go to great lengths to illustrate the challenges inherent in the grantor/grantee relationship. As Damon writes: "Beyond this general noble intention and the legal codes that enforce it, philanthropy has few agreed upon standards of judgment or conduct and little in the way of a definitive knowledge base of proven strategies.... [T]here is a reluctance in the field to prescribe the 'best' ways of accomplishing philanthropic work or to designate an authoritative set of guidelines that people entering the field have an obligation to master."
Largely comprised of essays from leading academics, third sector professionals, and former government officials, Taking Philanthropy Seriously examines the currents moving through contemporary American philanthropy, many of which — like venture philanthropy — aren't that new, and also traces the ethics and politics of more traditional giving, from the Greeks and Romans through the Rockefellers and Gateses.
Other essays describe challenges inherent to the philanthropic sector that often go overlooked, including the relative lack of training given to foundation staff. How does one become a program officer in the first place? Ask Laura Horn and Howard Gardner in a chapter titled "The Lonely Profession." And how do program officers decide which organizations are worthy of a grant and which are not? Those new to philanthropy might be surprised to discover that many program officers fell into philanthropy by chance, or were recruited from fields or organizations already supported by their current employer. Others were grantees who hankered to learn how it feels to be on the giving side of the equation, while still others are just "passing through" and expect to leave the profession as soon as they have acquired a better understanding of their chosen field.
Regardless of how or why they entered the field, program officers often are daunted by the challenges of their job. "While some grantmakers manage to find lasting satisfaction in their work with the support of good mentorship, professional reflection, enduring stamina, and unusual patience, many other grantmakers eventually burn out," writes Tom Tierney, chairman and founder of the Bridgespan Group. As a result, many good practitioners leave philanthropy, or worse, notes Tierney, stay and let their work suffer.
The essays in the final section of the book offer strategies for building what Damon calls a "domain for responsible giving," where long-standing debates about how much foundations should be required to pay out (most of the essayists seem ambivalent) and whether venture philanthropy has helped the field (a qualified yes) are explored.
While the book's title might suggest that foundations tend to act heedlessly, the essays instead focus on how a foundation's good intentions require careful examination. The noble intention of Damon, Verducci, and their fellow essayists is to point out aspects of the practice of philanthropy that could be improved. Damon admits that some might consider this approach "curmudgeonly," but his larger point is that philanthropy will only reach its full potential by admitting and examining its weaknesses better than it does at present. Or, as Mihaly Cskszentmihalyi, the well-known author of Flow and other books on the psychology of creativity, writes in the volume's concluding chapter: "To point out such [weaknesses] is a sign not of pessimism but of faith in a better future."
Monday, June 18, 2007
Review: Richistan
This appeared in USA Today on June 17.
By Russ Juskalian, Special for USA TODAY
Somewhere in the world, 100-foot yachts are derided as "dinghies," it takes five people and a handful of e-mails to remove a mouse from the kitchen and "true wealth" starts at a hefty $10 million.
That's "Richistan"
The term, which journalist Robert Frank defines as a "parallel country of the rich," is also the title of his new book about its inhabitants, whom he calls Richistanis. The book got its start in 2003, when Frank, who reports for The Wall Street Journal, picked up a fresh, full-time beat: the new rich.
"I immersed myself in their world, hanging around yacht marinas, slipping into charity balls, loitering in Ferrari dealerships and scoping out the Sotheby's and Christie's auctions," he writes.
Meet Jeeves 2.0
It's telling that Frank's first chapter, "Butler Bootcamp," is not about the rich themselves, but about the men and women who care for the rich: "household managers," aka butlers. Strike the image from your head of a stuffy, balding, accented man named Jeeves, Frank writes. The rich actually prefer their household managers to be something more akin to a "chief operating officer for My Life Inc."
"Jeeves 2.0" should be able to manage a budget of a few million dollars a year, prepare Excel spreadsheets documenting all facets of the house, program security and household technology systems, take care of travel plans, and oversee the systematic management, cleaning, and organization of a 30,000-plus-square-foot house that employs dozens of full-time and part-time workers.
Household managers of this caliber have become such a sought-after luxury that trainees pay as much as $13,000 or more to hone their service skills at specialized institutes. Graduates of these programs command starting salaries in the $80,000-to-$120,000 range (including free housing and other perks).
The new Gilded Age
The reason household managers are so sought after is that the ranks of the rich, in America in particular, are expanding at a startling rate. From 1995 to 2003, the number of millionaires in America doubled. During the same period, the number of households worth $5 million, $10 million and $25 million, respectively, all doubled. In 2005 alone, America minted 227,000 new millionaires.
It's a boom so big that Frank is not alone in calling it the new Gilded Age, or Frank's preferred term, the "third wave." The first two waves were the Gilded Age, after the close of the Civil War, and the Roaring Twenties (1920s).
Frank speeds through the causes of this current boom, namely, IPO stock offerings, sophisticated — and global — means for moving money around, a foreign savings glut and the general effects of globalization and technology adoption. But he's far more interested in showing us how "the other half" lives.
While Richistan might not be the most informational book on the shelves, Frank's candid look at how the ultrarich live is thoroughly entertaining. Unlike other such accounts (sometimes labeled as exposés), Frank indulges in neither idolatry nor condemnation of his subjects.
Wealthy ways
We meet a group of formerly middle-class characters who somehow struck it big in everything from the tech boom of the late 1990s to things as esoteric as selling ceramic villages, creating a new type of mozzarella cheese or inventing the Dogloo (an igloo-shaped doghouse). Frank writes that many of the rich came to their wealth by becoming "masters of the banal."
Unlike inherited Old Money of the past (aristocratic families that can be traced to Europe), this new crop of arrivistes inhabits a bipolar world. On one hand, many claim to be down-home, simple, middle-class folks. On the other hand, they have taken conspicuous consumption to new heights — or lengths, in the case of 450-foot yachts.
And in comparing Old Money with New Money, Frank draws on material that is sure to delight both the vicarious and the voyeuristic.
There are squabbles in Palm Beach, clashes over $400,000 golf club memberships and general one-upmanship all over the place.
New model of philanthropy
Richistan doesn't set out to make any serious waves in the world, but it closes on an interesting note. The new rich have a different approach to philanthropy that might in fact make big waves — and Frank's notice of this is surely an early account of more to come.
Instead of donating money to major charities with sizable overhead costs, many of the new rich have devoted the second part of their careers to running their own philanthropies based on business principles, some as for-profit organizations.
They are trying to eliminate inefficiencies, doing analysis to find out what is the best investment per dollar with regard to progress made with their donations, and running teams to do their work that must present detailed business plans of the work.
Andrew Carnegie (the Gilded Age iron and steel tycoon), for all his faults, started a philanthropic trend that has persisted to this day.
Perhaps the new rich will significantly improve on the dream that Carnegie pioneered, and in doing so, leave the world a better place.
As Frank prescribes for the rest of us, "We can only hope."
By Russ Juskalian, Special for USA TODAY
Somewhere in the world, 100-foot yachts are derided as "dinghies," it takes five people and a handful of e-mails to remove a mouse from the kitchen and "true wealth" starts at a hefty $10 million.
That's "Richistan"
The term, which journalist Robert Frank defines as a "parallel country of the rich," is also the title of his new book about its inhabitants, whom he calls Richistanis. The book got its start in 2003, when Frank, who reports for The Wall Street Journal, picked up a fresh, full-time beat: the new rich.
"I immersed myself in their world, hanging around yacht marinas, slipping into charity balls, loitering in Ferrari dealerships and scoping out the Sotheby's and Christie's auctions," he writes.
Meet Jeeves 2.0
It's telling that Frank's first chapter, "Butler Bootcamp," is not about the rich themselves, but about the men and women who care for the rich: "household managers," aka butlers. Strike the image from your head of a stuffy, balding, accented man named Jeeves, Frank writes. The rich actually prefer their household managers to be something more akin to a "chief operating officer for My Life Inc."
"Jeeves 2.0" should be able to manage a budget of a few million dollars a year, prepare Excel spreadsheets documenting all facets of the house, program security and household technology systems, take care of travel plans, and oversee the systematic management, cleaning, and organization of a 30,000-plus-square-foot house that employs dozens of full-time and part-time workers.
Household managers of this caliber have become such a sought-after luxury that trainees pay as much as $13,000 or more to hone their service skills at specialized institutes. Graduates of these programs command starting salaries in the $80,000-to-$120,000 range (including free housing and other perks).
The new Gilded Age
The reason household managers are so sought after is that the ranks of the rich, in America in particular, are expanding at a startling rate. From 1995 to 2003, the number of millionaires in America doubled. During the same period, the number of households worth $5 million, $10 million and $25 million, respectively, all doubled. In 2005 alone, America minted 227,000 new millionaires.
It's a boom so big that Frank is not alone in calling it the new Gilded Age, or Frank's preferred term, the "third wave." The first two waves were the Gilded Age, after the close of the Civil War, and the Roaring Twenties (1920s).
Frank speeds through the causes of this current boom, namely, IPO stock offerings, sophisticated — and global — means for moving money around, a foreign savings glut and the general effects of globalization and technology adoption. But he's far more interested in showing us how "the other half" lives.
While Richistan might not be the most informational book on the shelves, Frank's candid look at how the ultrarich live is thoroughly entertaining. Unlike other such accounts (sometimes labeled as exposés), Frank indulges in neither idolatry nor condemnation of his subjects.
Wealthy ways
We meet a group of formerly middle-class characters who somehow struck it big in everything from the tech boom of the late 1990s to things as esoteric as selling ceramic villages, creating a new type of mozzarella cheese or inventing the Dogloo (an igloo-shaped doghouse). Frank writes that many of the rich came to their wealth by becoming "masters of the banal."
Unlike inherited Old Money of the past (aristocratic families that can be traced to Europe), this new crop of arrivistes inhabits a bipolar world. On one hand, many claim to be down-home, simple, middle-class folks. On the other hand, they have taken conspicuous consumption to new heights — or lengths, in the case of 450-foot yachts.
And in comparing Old Money with New Money, Frank draws on material that is sure to delight both the vicarious and the voyeuristic.
There are squabbles in Palm Beach, clashes over $400,000 golf club memberships and general one-upmanship all over the place.
New model of philanthropy
Richistan doesn't set out to make any serious waves in the world, but it closes on an interesting note. The new rich have a different approach to philanthropy that might in fact make big waves — and Frank's notice of this is surely an early account of more to come.
Instead of donating money to major charities with sizable overhead costs, many of the new rich have devoted the second part of their careers to running their own philanthropies based on business principles, some as for-profit organizations.
They are trying to eliminate inefficiencies, doing analysis to find out what is the best investment per dollar with regard to progress made with their donations, and running teams to do their work that must present detailed business plans of the work.
Andrew Carnegie (the Gilded Age iron and steel tycoon), for all his faults, started a philanthropic trend that has persisted to this day.
Perhaps the new rich will significantly improve on the dream that Carnegie pioneered, and in doing so, leave the world a better place.
As Frank prescribes for the rest of us, "We can only hope."
Thursday, June 14, 2007
The Foundation, by Joel Fleishman
This review, which I wrote, was originally published at another site. If you want the link to the original, please leave a comment below and I will contact you directly.
Few books on philanthropy merit the accolade "instant classic," but The Foundation by Joel Fleishman has all the ingredients to be considered just that — especially by those whose work and lives are directly affected by foundations. And as Fleishman, a professor of law and public policy at Duke University, makes clear, that means most of us.
Indeed, readers unfamiliar with the many roles foundations play in society will quickly learn how versatile foundations can be, whether driving a brand-new initiative, partnering with others, or serving as a catalyst by scattering seed funding among promising projects in the hope that one or two will take root and produce lasting change.
Throughout the early chapters of the book, Fleishman explores themes of effectiveness and efficiency. To be effective and efficient, he writes, foundations need to employ decision-making processes and progress-checking systems that increase the impact of their funding. To be strategic in deploying their resources, they should focus on problems that are ripe for solution while retaining flexibility in how they respond to unexpected opportunities. But regardless of where a foundation decides to focus its efforts, success should always be the goal. And to be successful, an initiative should provide major benefits to the public, expand knowledge in a particular area or field, catalyze social change, take an initiative to scale, and/or help a grantee find a new path to greater effectiveness.
Unfortunately, Fleishman argues, many foundations behave as if they don't care about success — behavior, he notes, that is at cross purposes with the social-benefit mission used to justify foundations' existence as tax-exempt entities in the first place. He bases his observation on the reluctance of many foundations to share information about how they decide which goals to shoot for and the strategies they use to achieve them, as well as on the lack of public — and, often, private — analyses of those initiatives, whether successful or not. "Those foundations that are truly interested in using their resources in ways that will have the greatest positive impact on the world around them," says Fleishman, "should study the stories of the most successful and effective foundation initiatives. They provide models for the future success stories that others in the foundation world should aspire to write."
To buttress his argument, the middle section of The Foundation offers a dozen case studies of high-impact initiatives — selected from the one hundred prepared for a companion volume that is available, free of charge, from the Duke University Web site.
Calling attention to the talented leaders who shepherded initiatives through to completion and to the fortuitous match between the nature of the problem to be tackled and the judgment, experience, and discipline of the individuals who took on those tasks, Fleishman and his graduate students present a dozen synopses of foundation successes, starting with the 1906 Flexner report funded by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which led to significant reform of medical education in the United States, and continuing with an initiative from nearly every decade of the twentieth century, including Julius Rosenwald's efforts to build schools for rural African Americans in the 1920s; Gunnar Myrdal's seminal, Carnegie-funded study of race in America in the 1930s; the Rockefeller Foundation's support for the work of Dr. Norman Borlaug and his Green Revolution colleagues in the 1960s; and George Soros and the Open Society Institute's support for democratization and civil society in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1980s.
However, it is his assessment of foundation failures — and some are, by Fleishman's own admission, a matter of opinion — that sets The Foundation apart from many earlier books on the subject. Critics of foundations might argue he doesn't go far enough, but Fleishman does not shy away from drawing attention to foundations' shortcomings, confident in his belief that a fair, unbiased examination of foundations will demonstrate that they have indeed provided significant social benefit to Americans. "At the same time," he writes, "I am convinced that the foundation sector as a whole, as great as its social contribution is now and has been for most of its history, seriously underperforms its potential." The challenge, he adds, is "to ensure that foundations can raise the level of their performance by reducing their insulation from beneficial external influences while retaining the independence they need."
One of the ingredients of publishing success is timing, and Fleishman's has been impeccable. While he was conducting the interviews for the book in 2003 and 2004, Warren Buffett was beginning to think about giving a significant portion of his vast fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, already the world's largest. Of course, that gift, when announced in the summer of 2006 — along with the blizzard of media attention that followed in its wake — helped build an audience for the book beyond what Fleishman and his publisher could have expected when he began the project.
The result does not disappoint. The Foundation is sweeping in its scope, balanced in its presentation, and deeply informed by a lifetime of study and observation. Readers who only recently have become interested in the subject of philanthropy are likely to be surprised by what foundations have accomplished in the century or so since Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller created the template for the modern foundation, while more seasoned practitioners will be pleased to see foundations accorded the respect and serious treatment they deserve.
Few books on philanthropy merit the accolade "instant classic," but The Foundation by Joel Fleishman has all the ingredients to be considered just that — especially by those whose work and lives are directly affected by foundations. And as Fleishman, a professor of law and public policy at Duke University, makes clear, that means most of us.
Indeed, readers unfamiliar with the many roles foundations play in society will quickly learn how versatile foundations can be, whether driving a brand-new initiative, partnering with others, or serving as a catalyst by scattering seed funding among promising projects in the hope that one or two will take root and produce lasting change.
Throughout the early chapters of the book, Fleishman explores themes of effectiveness and efficiency. To be effective and efficient, he writes, foundations need to employ decision-making processes and progress-checking systems that increase the impact of their funding. To be strategic in deploying their resources, they should focus on problems that are ripe for solution while retaining flexibility in how they respond to unexpected opportunities. But regardless of where a foundation decides to focus its efforts, success should always be the goal. And to be successful, an initiative should provide major benefits to the public, expand knowledge in a particular area or field, catalyze social change, take an initiative to scale, and/or help a grantee find a new path to greater effectiveness.
Unfortunately, Fleishman argues, many foundations behave as if they don't care about success — behavior, he notes, that is at cross purposes with the social-benefit mission used to justify foundations' existence as tax-exempt entities in the first place. He bases his observation on the reluctance of many foundations to share information about how they decide which goals to shoot for and the strategies they use to achieve them, as well as on the lack of public — and, often, private — analyses of those initiatives, whether successful or not. "Those foundations that are truly interested in using their resources in ways that will have the greatest positive impact on the world around them," says Fleishman, "should study the stories of the most successful and effective foundation initiatives. They provide models for the future success stories that others in the foundation world should aspire to write."
To buttress his argument, the middle section of The Foundation offers a dozen case studies of high-impact initiatives — selected from the one hundred prepared for a companion volume that is available, free of charge, from the Duke University Web site.
Calling attention to the talented leaders who shepherded initiatives through to completion and to the fortuitous match between the nature of the problem to be tackled and the judgment, experience, and discipline of the individuals who took on those tasks, Fleishman and his graduate students present a dozen synopses of foundation successes, starting with the 1906 Flexner report funded by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which led to significant reform of medical education in the United States, and continuing with an initiative from nearly every decade of the twentieth century, including Julius Rosenwald's efforts to build schools for rural African Americans in the 1920s; Gunnar Myrdal's seminal, Carnegie-funded study of race in America in the 1930s; the Rockefeller Foundation's support for the work of Dr. Norman Borlaug and his Green Revolution colleagues in the 1960s; and George Soros and the Open Society Institute's support for democratization and civil society in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1980s.
However, it is his assessment of foundation failures — and some are, by Fleishman's own admission, a matter of opinion — that sets The Foundation apart from many earlier books on the subject. Critics of foundations might argue he doesn't go far enough, but Fleishman does not shy away from drawing attention to foundations' shortcomings, confident in his belief that a fair, unbiased examination of foundations will demonstrate that they have indeed provided significant social benefit to Americans. "At the same time," he writes, "I am convinced that the foundation sector as a whole, as great as its social contribution is now and has been for most of its history, seriously underperforms its potential." The challenge, he adds, is "to ensure that foundations can raise the level of their performance by reducing their insulation from beneficial external influences while retaining the independence they need."
One of the ingredients of publishing success is timing, and Fleishman's has been impeccable. While he was conducting the interviews for the book in 2003 and 2004, Warren Buffett was beginning to think about giving a significant portion of his vast fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, already the world's largest. Of course, that gift, when announced in the summer of 2006 — along with the blizzard of media attention that followed in its wake — helped build an audience for the book beyond what Fleishman and his publisher could have expected when he began the project.
The result does not disappoint. The Foundation is sweeping in its scope, balanced in its presentation, and deeply informed by a lifetime of study and observation. Readers who only recently have become interested in the subject of philanthropy are likely to be surprised by what foundations have accomplished in the century or so since Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller created the template for the modern foundation, while more seasoned practitioners will be pleased to see foundations accorded the respect and serious treatment they deserve.
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