June 3, 1999 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Philanthropy and the Nonprofit Sector in a Changing America
Edited by Charles T. Clotfelter and Thomas Ehrlich
This book contains 23 essays from participants in an April 1998 conference in Los Angeles that scrutinized new developments affecting non-profit organizations. The conference was organized by the American Assembly, a non-profit group affiliated with Columbia University, and the Indiana Center on Philanthropy, and was financed by 16 foundations.
Mr. Clotfelter, a professor of economics and law at Duke University, and Mr. Ehrlich, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, write that philanthropy is no end in itself, but a means to an end.
“It is sometimes tempting to think that what we are doing in this realm is so important that it should somehow be supported for its own sake,” they write. “But institutions are just instruments, and cannot be better than the purposes they serve.”
Contributors include Warren F. Ilchman, director of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, and Dwight F. Burlingame, associate executive director of the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy, who write of the importance of increased accountability from officers and trustees of non-profit groups — if only because looking to government for regulation would be “fruitless.”
Emmett D. Carson, president of the Minneapolis Foundation, predicts charities will claim a greater role in advancing social justice.
And Robert L. Payton of the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy writes a personal essay on the experiences that shaped his definition of philanthropy, and concludes that charitable giving is a loosely knit custom in danger of unraveling.
The book concludes with an essay by its editors, in which they advance a “new covenant” that stresses cooperation with for-profit ventures, advocacy work, mergers, and increased attention to social-service charities.
Publisher: Indiana University Press, 601 North Morton Street, Bloomington, Ind. 47404-3797; (812) 855-8054 or (800) 842-6796; fax (812) 855-7931; e-mail iuporder@indiana.edu; World-Wide Web http://www.indiana.edu/~iupress; 560 pages; $35; I.S.B.N. 0-253-33521-3.
