Curing Career Frustration

Jon Funabiki loved his work as a program officer in the Ford Foundation’s media, arts, and culture

unit. In 11 years there, the onetime newspaper reporter made grants that helped train the next generation of Asian-American journalists — a cause dear to his heart.

But as much as he enjoyed his job, he couldn’t stay. The people applying for his grants were the ones doing the real work, he ultimately decided. They were out on the front lines of social change, and he missed being out there with them.

“I had this feeling I would get too used to giving away money,” says Mr. Funabiki, now a journalism professor and researcher at San Francisco State University. “It is a very powerful job. You could start to believe all the good things people say about how smart you are, how funny you are. I didn’t want that to happen to me.”

He personifies what some experts are calling a nagging problem at the core of the work of grant making. As coveted as the relatively few program-officer jobs are, researchers say the people occupying them often feel isolated, conflicted, even unfulfilled. Some, like Mr. Funabiki, ultimately leave. Others stay, but the isolation leaves them at risk of losing their professional bearings, a situation that some foundation veterans say can affect grant making negatively.

The problem has been receiving increasing attention in recent years, leading to calls for more training for grant makers and other ways to give people who work at foundations a more cohesive sense of professional identity. For example, the Council on Foundations, in Arlington, Va., and the Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers, in Washington, have joined forces to begin offering a new course to entry-level foundation employees to help them learn the ropes.

Unexpected Struggles

Some of the new focus on the travails of grant makers can be traced to the 2006 book Taking Philanthropy Seriously: Beyond Noble Intentions to Responsible Giving, a collection of essays edited by William Damon and Susan Verducci. In it, two researchers tackle the question of why so many grant makers struggle with a job that seems, at least on the surface, to be idyllic.

“It can be an uncomfortable experience for some people, especially in the larger national foundations,” says Laura Horn, a former researcher at Harvard University’s GoodWork Project and now a doctoral student at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, in Boston, who conducted a study of grant makers with Howard Gardner, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

“We didn’t go looking for this,” she says. The problem, she notes, “was something that was brought up by the people that we interviewed.”

The interviews were part of the GoodWork Project, a long-term research study aimed at identifying and understanding exemplary efforts and projects in an array of fields. GoodWork interviewed nearly 200 people for its study of philanthropy, including board members, program officers, donors, and grantees.

As Ms. Horn reread the transcripts, she noticed an irony.

These were people working in well-heeled institutions, performing noble work for the greater social good. They earned better salaries than most others in the nonprofit world and could do their work without the pressures of raising money.

And yet, many of them seemed conflicted. They felt isolated from the grass-roots activists whose work they finance, from the wealthy founders and board members who employ them, and even from one another inside the highly stratified departments of some foundations.

Identity Crisis

The GoodWork research turned up a real problem — one that foundations need to focus on, says Ms. Horn.

“The risk is in identifying with the money, the power, with the people kissing up to you who want the money,” she says. “The real challenge for the field is how to protect against that.”

Ms. Horn says the foundation employees she interviewed — and whose identities she still protects — expressed little loyalty to grant making as a profession. They saw themselves as just passing through on a break from or on their way to their “real” vocational calling.

They were hired not because they had spent a career preparing to become grant makers, but because, as researchers or members of academe, they happened to have a specific expertise that a foundation needed for a grant-making program area. And these interviewees, Ms. Horn notes, are typical of foundation employees over all.

“Anyone can become a professional grant maker overnight,” she says.

Since they come from different backgrounds, grant makers lack sufficient opportunities to develop a sense of shared professional identity. Thus, Mr. Gardner says, they exhibited the feelings of isolation that cropped up in GoodWork’s interviews.

As the philanthropic landscape grows increasingly complex, some experts wonder if grant making should become a more unified profession, with a detailed training and certification system. Such an approach, some say, would reduce the sense of isolation among grant makers and better define their professional standards and goals.

The calls for increased professionalization are rooted in the realities of a growing field. New foundations are emerging, buoyed in part by the wealth generated by technology companies. The number of grant makers jumped from 40,000 to 71,000 from 1995 to 2005, the last year for which data are available, according to the Foundation Center, in New York.

Some experts say the program officers who work for those organizations need more standardized training. But foundations are independent organizations, Mr. Gardner notes, and have no economic incentive or governmental mandate pushing them to collaborate in such an endeavor.

“Each wants to go its own way and get its own glory,” he observes. “But if there were three to six major prototypes” for grant-making officers, he adds, “and members of each prototype adhered to its norms, the situation would be much better.”

A New Course

Steve Gunderson, president of the Council on Foundations, says program officers do struggle with a sense of isolation. He believes part of the answer lies in giving program officers more training, especially the kind of peer-to-peer educational opportunities commonly offered to board members and executives.

Such training needs to be not only in subject or content areas, but also in grant-making processes.

“The last thing we want to do is go to our boss and say, ‘Look, I just don’t know how to deal with this.’ But maybe you’d feel more comfortable going to a colleague,” he says.

The Council on Foundations recently conducted a comprehensive survey of educational offerings available to grant makers, Mr. Gunderson says.

The results, presented to the council’s board in March, showed four times as many training programs are available to new grant makers as to experienced ones.

The council conducted the survey as part of an effort to find the gaps in education for program officers. More needs to be done, Mr. Gunderson says, to highlight best practices in grant making and share that knowledge among senior program officers. Senior grant makers need to be more engaged with foundation boards of directors, with executive directors, and with the finances of their organizations.

Still, none of that diminishes the importance of entry-level training, especially since so many program officers arrive without formal training in making grants.

The Council on Foundations is collaborating with the Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers to create a new course for entry-level employees.

It takes roughly 20 hours to complete and the materials are offered free to regional associations or other groups that want to stage training sessions. The course teaches new grant makers the history of philanthropy in America and gives a broad overview of philanthropy’s role in society.

“A lot of people come into the field without knowing anything about philanthropy,” says Mary O’Neill, director of programs and education for the forum. “This curriculum is designed to address that. It begins, really, at the beginning.”

Still, Mr. Gunderson says, more needs to be done for senior program officers. Putting more emphasis on sharing knowledge of transferable skills among grant makers would help ease their sense of isolation, he says. But he cautions that organizations shouldn’t move too aggressively toward the kind of professionalism that would require licensing exams and a “one size fits all” approach to the work.

“That’s a bridge too far,” he says. “As foundations, we address problems in very different ways. None of them are right. None of them are wrong. They’re just different.”

‘A Perfectly Dreadful Idea’

Others take a harder line of criticism against the move toward increasing grant makers’ professionalism. They question whether greater professionalization would create a cadre of grant makers highly skilled in the mechanics of giving out money but so walled off inside foundations that they have little knowledge of the real-world challenges facing grantees.

Among those naysayers is William Schambra, director of the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, a think tank in Washington. Once a program officer himself with the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, in Milwaukee, he believes foundations that limit program officers’ service time have the right idea. The constantly rotating cast of outside experts keeps their grant making connected to fresh ideas from the grass roots.

If more professionalization means less of that, Mr. Schambra says, foundations will suffer for it. “I think it’s a perfectly dreadful idea,” he says. “If it’s at all possible for foundations to become more remote from reality, that would be a sure way to advance that project.”

Joel Fleishman, author of The Foundation: A Great American Secret — How Private Wealth Is Changing the World, believes a more widely shared sense of best practices and professional ethics would help program officers feel more like part of a coherent field of endeavor. But, he adds, “it’s very difficult to create a profession when there is no gatekeeper, no entry point, no licensing apparatus. I’m sure that’s not possible. And I’m sure that’s not desirable.”

William Getty, president of the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation, in Pittsburgh, calls the move toward professionalism a “mixed blessing.”

Benedum makes grants in education, health, human services, and economic development in West Virginia and rural Pennsylvania. Mr. Getty says that the best ideas for dealing with those issues likely will come from grass-roots activists, not from program officers. He worries that heightened professionalism could mean more arrogance.

“The effectiveness of foundations can be affected if they become too prescriptive about what grantees should be doing,” he says. “The fact that someone has a Ph.D. in grant making is probably not going to make them more humble.”

Strained Relationships

To be sure, perceptions of grant making as a lonely field aren’t driving job candidates away from program-officer positions. Such jobs always attract waves of applicants, says Larry Slesinger, a recruiter in Washington who works for nonprofit clients. After all, he asks, who wouldn’t rather give money away than raise it?

But Mr. Slesinger, who served as a program officer in the mid-1980s, with the Markle Foundation, in New York, remembers how hard it was to develop natural relationships with people, especially grant seekers.

“The job is not as satisfying as people might think it is,” he says. “The loneliness part comes from the fact that people aren’t going to be honest with you. They aren’t necessarily going to tell you if they think your organization has done something wrong. People are very reluctant to criticize an organization they might ask for money later.”

Mr. Funabiki says the most knowledgeable grant seekers he dealt with tended to understand the sensitivities of the program officer’s position. Still, what they ultimately needed was money, and he held the vault keys.

“You could start off talking about a baseball game or your family, but in the end it winds up in a request for money,” he says. “It makes for an odd relationship.”

Susan Herr, a former senior program officer and director at the Chicago Community Trust, remembers such tensions well. Now the founder of Philanthromedia.org, a Web site focused on donor education, she recalls spending a lot of her time as a program officer trying to correct what she calls “the dysfunctional relationship” between grant seekers and foundations.

The power imbalance, along with the routine ego issues and professional ambitions at any organization, seduces some program officers into the arrogant belief that their insight matters as much, if not more, than the work their grants underwrite, she says.

Says Ms. Herr: “Somebody who’s been giving away money for 20 years is changed, and not necessarily in ways that advance the work.”

Program officers sometimes also feel ambivalent, even uncomfortable, about working in what Ms. Horn calls “the reflected glow” of great wealth. Generally not rich themselves, program officers struggle to bridge the social divide that separates them from their foundation’s founders and board members.

“There are very real social and class issues people bring to it,” Ms Horn says. “There is that tension.”

‘A Little Existential Angst’

Mr. Schambra, of the Hudson Institute, says he rejects this “existential lament” over giving away money.

He acknowledges that the job has its challenges. Still, he says, the program officer’s job remains relatively attractive otherwise — especially if compared with many individuals’ previous jobs.

“Now, suddenly, you’re well paid,” he said. “Every joke you tell is funny. Every question you ask is insightful. You’re handsome, you’re beautiful. A little existential angst is a small price to pay for that sort of power.”

He believes most thinkers in philanthropy disagree with him on the question of professionalization. More new books favor the idea. Colleges are expanding training programs in philanthropy, with Indiana University even offering a first-in-the-nation Ph.D. in the subject.

Mr. Funabiki, the former Ford Foundation official who is now teaching journalism, hopes no one tries to force all program officers into the same professional mold. He said foundations and program officers are — and should remain — independent.

“If every foundation did everything the same way, there’d be no need for them,” he says. “We could expect government and businesses to solve all the problems. But every foundation is different. They can take risks. They can do things nobody else can do.”