Council on Foundations Begins Search for a New Chief to Serve Diverse Members

The Council on Foundations, an association of more than 1,700 grant makers, is looking for a new leader following the announcement this month that Steve Gunderson, its current chief executive, is planning to step down.

“I have concluded that this is the right time for a transition in leadership of the council and the right time for me to begin the next chapter of my professional service,” Mr. Gunderson, a former Republican congressman who began his job in 2005, said in a letter to colleagues.

The council must now find a successor who welcomes the challenge of reconciling the interests of a diverse group of grant makers—small family foundations, big private foundations, community foundations, and corporate foundations—that don’t always agree on what the group should be doing.

Emmett Carson, chief executive of Silicon Valley Community Foundation, said he told Mr. Gunderson when he was hired that his role would be akin to running the United Nations. “There are superpowers, there are petty dictators, there are rogue nation states,” Mr. Carson said. “The one thing they share in common is that all have equal standing as members.”

The new chief executive will also inherit a group weakened by the economic downturn. Revenues from dues dropped sharply because they are based on the value of members’ assets, which fell when the stock market plunged. The council was forced to trim its staff from 104 in 2006 to 65 in 2009, along with its services to members (the staff now stands at 74).

Its membership slid too, from just over 2,000 in 2007 to 1,719 today.

However, Mr. Gunderson and Carol Larson, president of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and chair of the council’s board, sent an upbeat assessment of the association’s status to its members after Mr. Gunderson’s resignation. It said the council’s assets had risen more than $400,000 in 2010, it had more than $12-million in reserves, and more than 62 new members had joined the group so far this year.

‘Crisis Management’

Mr. Gunderson has had a full plate from the start. When he was hired, the board asked him to reorganize the staff and move the council, which had traditionally focused on member services, into a leadership role on philanthropy.

Along the way, he moved the council headquarters from Washington to a cheaper, environmentally friendly building in a Northern Virginia suburb, which prompted some employees to leave. This year, he discovered that several former staff members had defrauded the council by reselling computers for personal gain.

“I feel like I’ve been doing crisis management for the last six years,” Mr. Gunderson said in an interview.

Joanne Florino, executive director of Triad Foundation, a family foundation in Ithaca, N.Y., praised Mr. Gunderson for responding to the concerns of members during the tough economic times, for example agreeing to hold a family-foundations conference every year instead of cutting back to save money.

“He also brought a passion to increasing diversity at the council,” she said, including “diversity of thought.” Mr. Gunderson ensured that conservative speakers had a place at council events, which traditionally had had a liberal bent. But some liberal critics say the council failed to show sufficient leadership during the economic meltdown, for example never urging its members to step up giving to struggling nonprofits.

Work on Capitol Hill

Mr. Gunderson worked to raise the council’s profile in Washington. He started annual “Foundations on the Hill” visits to members of Congress, for instance.

But Mr. Carson, who was president of the council’s board when it hired Mr. Gunderson and praises his handling of “an unusually tough job,” said Mr. Gunderson’s task was complicated by conflicts between members over public-policy issues.

For example, he said, some members supported a Florida law passed last year that bars government officials from requesting data about the race, gender, income level, and other characteristics of foundation trustees, workers, and grantees. Others thought it was “horrible,” he said. As a result, the council did not take a position, while the Alliance for Charitable Reform, a project of the Philanthropy Roundtable, worked to help craft the law.

Ms. Florino said that Mr. Gunderson’s successor and other foundation leaders should consider that the council’s membership drop could reflect a broader problem with “philanthropic infrastructure.”

She said a growing number of grant-makers’ associations are now vying for members. With money tight, foundations are asking hard questions about what they are getting for their dues, she said.

The council, which has set up a search committee to find a new chief executive, plans to announce an interim leader by the time of Mr. Gunderson’s departure, Ms. Larson said.

Mr. Gunderson, who also stepped up the council’s work on global philanthropy, said he is not sure what he will do next but has not ruled out staying in philanthropy. “I’m pretty open about what the next chapter will be,” he said.

Caroline Preston contributed to this article.