Family Foundation

2007, 11 Pages. Americans for the Arts, One East 53rd Street, Second Floor, NY, NY 10022, (212) 223-2787, www.americansforthearts.org

2007, 11 pages. The Funder's Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities, 1500 San Remo Avenue, Suite 249, Coral Gables, FL 33146, (305) 667-6350, www.fundersnetwork.org

2008, 141 pages. Council on Foundations, 2121 Crystal Drive, Suite 700, Arlington, VA 22202 (703) 879-0600, www.cof.org

This robust report features a series of essays on aspects of rural philanthropy from a diverse range of perspectives. The conclusion, by Sherece Y. West, alone is worth the price of admission. The report concludes with a summary of funding recommendations from the Council on Foundations Conference on Philanthropy and Rural America: A 21st Century Agenda, held in August 2007 in Montana.

Working at a busy foundation involves a lot of reading and listening to smart people who are working hard to improve the world we live in. One thing comes across loud and clear: how little value added is being contemporaneously realized from the definitional leaps of our unsustainably complex verbiage.

In other words, it's time for us nonprofit people to learn to MAKE IT PLAIN.

2007, 48 Pages. FSG Social Impact Advisors, 20 Park Plaza, Suite 320, Boston, MA 02116, (617) 357-4000, www.fsg-impact.org
PDF online: www.fsg-impact.org

Arts and education grantmakers at an historic gathering in Santa Fe in October of 2007 agreed on the need to forge a new vision for public education in the United States and to collectively explore how the arts can help shape and realize that vision.

Convened by Grantmakers in the Arts and Grantmakers for Education, more than 100 foundation representatives met formally for the first time under the aegis of their two affinity organizations to debate and discuss the role of the arts in education.

2007, 73 pages. The Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, 5 Bennett Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138, (617) 496-5675, www.ksghauser.harvard.edu

According to some, "the word twain has its origin in the Old English twegen, meaning two. The phrase never the twain shall meet was used by Rudyard Kipling, in his Barrack-room ballads, 1892: 'Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.'" Kipling uses a colonial lens to bemoan the lack of commonality and accord between the British and the indigenous East Indian. Until my recent trip to New Mexico I often felt that same lack of accord between arts funders and education funders.

2007, 86 pages. The Center for Arts Education, 14 Penn Plaza, 225 West 34th Street, NY, NY 10122, www.cae-nyc.org