July 23, 2009 | Read Time: 1 minute
NEW BOOKS
Wit and Wisdom
by Mark D. Constantine
To produce this volume, Mark D. Constantine, a consultant and senior fellow at the Jessie Ball duPont Fund, talked with nine prominent leaders about how their personal background influences their work, the challenges facing grant makers, the advice they would pass on to the next generation of philanthropists, and how organized philanthropy can achieve equity in the United States.
The conversations are candid. Jack E. Murrah, the recently retired president of the Lyndhurst Foundation, in Chattanooga, Tenn., discusses his battles with depression and says that being a gay man from a working-class family put him at odds with the local community and the foundation.
He also shares his frustrations with the way philanthropic institutions draw boundaries between poor and affluent people. He himself led a successful project that drew real-estate developers and middle-class people to poor neighborhoods, thereby raising property values. Mr. Murrah believes that poverty cannot be alleviated without including affluent people as part of the solution.
“If philanthropy’s focused on the poor,” he says, “and thinks it can’t work with people who aren’t poor, it’s not using all the available tools.”
Other people who are interviewed include James Joseph, former president of the Council on Foundations; Linetta Gilbert, a senior program officer at the Ford Foundation; and Karl Stauber, former president of the Northwest Area Foundation. An essay by Emmett D. Carson, president of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation concludes the book, which is available free for download at http://www.epip.org/wit.php.
Publisher: Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy, 10 East 34th Street, 10th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10016; (212) 584-8249; http://www.epip.org.
