Foundation management

1998, 178 pages, Independent Sector/Jossey-Bass Publishers, 350 Sansome Street, San Francisco, California 94104, 415-433-1740

Management Consultants for the Arts, Inc., 132 East Putnam Avenue, Cos-Cob, Connecticut 06807, 203-661-3003

October 1996, 30 pages, The Aspen Institute, Nonprofit Sector Research Fund, 1333 New Hampshire Avenue, NW, Suite 1070, Washington, D.C. 20036, 202-736-5800.

The Cleveland Foundation, founded in 1914, is the nation's oldest community foundation. In 1998, the Foundation's assets totaled $1.5 billion and it made grants totaling $47 million.

Kudos to Retiring Board Members
The fall 1998 conference in Chicago will signal the end of GIA board service for a remarkable group of leaders. Each one of the six individuals leaving the board, along with Ben Cameron who departed mid-year, has given magnificently of themselves in building GIA into a much richer and more participatory provider of services to its membership.

As they return to regular membership in GIA, these individuals leave a board far more responsive to its members, supported by a wonderfully facilitative staff, and serving many more arts grantmakers.

The full text of this article is not yet available on this site. Below is a brief excerpt.

Is it possible for money to be a conduit for love? The word philanthropy carries the meaning "love of humanity." Modern philanthropy brings together two seemingly irreconcilable concepts: love and money. But if we read through all the annual reports of all the foundations for the last ten years, I'd wager we would be hard-pressed to find the word "love" mentioned more than ten times.

Entrepreneurship is a concept that receives considerably favorable attention in the nonprofit press. Whether referring to mission-related income ventures, non-traditional partnerships, or a redefinition of organizational culture, the word "entrepreneur" has an undeniably positive, even buoyant, connotation in today's nonprofit parlance.

A rather widely shared belief within the foundation community holds that philanthropic resources cannot, will not, and perhaps even should not, be expected to keep up with the growing and changing resource needs of the not-for-profit arts industry. This belief has generated lively discussion among arts grantmakers about the future role of foundations in supporting a healthy nonprofit arts sector in this country.

Foundation grantmakers are investors. The endowment that sustains a grantmaking program demands the same concentrated, strategic thinking that developing a focus for a giving program entails. The challenge addressed in this essay is to bring together these two basic functions — investing and grantmaking. The context for doing so is socially responsible investing. My purpose is to take an expanded definition of socially responsible investing and see if it has a meaningful role to play in arts philanthropy.