July 29, 1999 | Read Time: 5 minutes
Peter F. Drucker, the guru of corporate management, is considered by many to also be a guru of non-profit management. Yet the widely acclaimed nonagenarian has once again demonstrated how out of touch he is with philanthropy.
In an interview in the March-April issue of Philanthropy, a magazine published by the Philanthropy Roundtable, Mr. Drucker observed:
“Well, let’s be indiscreet. Name a single major foundation that has done a good job for more than five or eight years, without turning into a grant-making machine where grant requests come in and the money flows out. The Ford Foundation had this one accomplishment — the Green Revolution in India — but otherwise, all their spending has had absolutely no results. When is the last time the Carnegie Foundation [sic] made a difference? Not in my lifetime. Rockefeller made a difference — a tremendous difference — in the 1920s and 1930s, but since then what have they done?”
On what planet has Mr. Drucker been living? Were he more earthbound, he might have noted the enormous contributions made by those three major foundations, as well as others, to the arts, the environment, consumerism, community development, civil rights, opportunities for members of minority groups, women’s issues, education, health, and housing — not to mention the building of civil societies overseas and economic and community development activities to help the poor around the world.
Those contributions were made over four decades. There is absolutely no evidence that foundations can’t go beyond five to eight years before becoming routine and uncreative in their grant making.
Were it not for Mr. Drucker’s distinguished career as an analyst of and expert on corporate management, his opinions on the non-profit world could simply be discarded as just plain silly and ignorant. But they can’t. They deserve critical attention.
Mr. Drucker’s notion of philanthropy appears in large part to reflect — and is as misplaced as — the attitudes toward philanthropy that emanate from the Manhattan Institute, the Capital Research Center, and other conservative think tanks. According to that view, the major foundations performed well as long as they were sponsoring scientific and medical research, building libraries and other university facilities, underwriting established cultural and arts programs, combating diseases, and promoting education. In the 1960s, when they started focusing on new social and economic issues; the problems of poverty, race, and gender; and the need for new organizations and mechanisms to adapt our democratic society to a rapidly changing world, those foundations, according to conservative gospel, lost their way.
But while most conservatives decry the so-called activism of major foundations, they don’t say that those philanthropies haven’t made a difference. That observation is left to the less ideological and more ingenuous Mr. Drucker.
If only he had actually looked at the foundations’ record, talked to some of their staff members, and asked non-profit executives for their opinions, he might have found the following:
The Ford Foundation has had a profound impact on American society during the past 35 years. It has provided crucial support to many, if not most, of the major minority and civil-rights organizations in the country. More than any other foundation, it has been responsible for the creation and growth of the community-development movement and the non-profit financial and other organizations that sustain a large portion of that movement. The Police Foundation, one of its creations, has done much to improve policing throughout the country. Its generous support of community foundations has been one of the reasons behind the rapid growth in the number and size of community foundations nationally. Its creation of the Public Education Fund (now the Public Education Network), its support of the influential magazine Youth Today, and its establishment of the National Arts Stabilization Fund have all had impressive results.
The Carnegie Corporation can point to similar high spots in its philanthropy. Its Commission on Public Broadcasting led to the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It sponsored Gunnar Myrdal’s monumental work An American Dilemma, a book that not only shed new light on the nature of race relations in this country but also was instrumental in advancing the arguments that resulted in the historic Supreme Court decision that declared the doctrine of “separate but equal” to be unconstitutional and ended legal segregation in the American school system. With other foundations, Carnegie was responsible for helping to establish and sustain the Children’s Defense Fund and a number of other legal-defense organizations. Its promotion of quality early-childhood education, including children’s television through Sesame Street and other programs, has left its distinctive mark on the field. And it developed the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.
As for Rockefeller, we certainly shouldn’t forget the major role that that foundation played in the Green Revolution. What’s more, Rockefeller, along with Carnegie and Ford, supported anti-apartheid activities and human-rights organizations in South Africa, which Nelson Mandela and others have credited with helping the nation make a peaceful transition into a democratic, black-led, multiracial society. Other major foundations can also trumpet significant success stories that have positively affected our society.
While I and other observers of philanthropy have been — and still are — critical of many of the priorities and grant-making activities of major mainstream foundations, we have to recognize that they have helped to establish, nurture, and sustain many of the most important non-profit organizations and programs of the past four decades. Indeed, they have made a substantial difference. Mr. Drucker, I’m happy to say, is dead wrong.
Pablo Eisenberg is senior fellow at the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute and vice-chair of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. He is a regular contributor to these pages.
