George Soros

For a foundation, eliminating a charitable program can be equally as difficult — if not more so — as

establishing one more. It must wean beneficiaries off its dole, while making sure the strides it has made with the philanthropic effort continue after it has left the scene.

George Soros, the billionaire financier, says he has always believed in the value of having beginnings and endings in his philanthropic work, and he says he has urged his philanthropy, the Open Society Institute, in New York, to make the transition from one program to the next as smooth and open a process for grant recipients as possible.

“I started telling my network of foundations that I take greater pride in ending programs than in starting new ones because it’s much harder,” he says.

Now Mr. Soros’s strategy of making a big financial investment, then stepping aside, faces two major tests:

• Open Society has just announced that it is phasing out its spending in Baltimore for a comprehensive effort to test theories of urban renewal. The organization has donated $50-million since 1998 to support treatment for drug addicts, job training, efforts to improve the city’s public schools, and numerous other projects to revitalize the city, which has one of the highest poverty rates in the United States. As part of the transition, Mr. Soros has proposed giving an additional $10-million to the project — but only if local leaders can raise $20-million over the next five years to match it.
• The last of a combined $200-million in grants by the Open Society Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation are now being awarded for issues related to death and dying in America. Many observers credit the foundations with changing the way doctors and nurses care for dying patients, including educating them about the need for pain management and emotional, as well as medical, support. But finding new sources of funds for a topic many people prefer not to think about is so far proving challenging.

The outcomes of these efforts are being closely watched as grant makers debate the best way to use limited philanthropic dollars to tackle ambitious projects.

For its part, the Open Society Institute has tried to prepare its grant recipients by informing them of its plans to end programs years in advance of the last grant, says Gara LaMarche, director of the foundation’s U.S. programs. It has also tried to line up other donors to help carry on the work after the Open Society Institute moves to other causes.

“Whenever a large funder changes by reducing or eliminating a program, we recognize that has an impact,” he says. “There’s too much in this world where people do it sharply and without sufficient notice and wreak a lot of havoc.”

Yet Mr. Soros’s success in recruiting other donors remains to be seen.

Some foundation observers praise Mr. Soros’s matching-gift strategy in Baltimore, calling it a novel use of an old philanthropic tool.

“It’s a very honorable and responsible thing to do,” says Joel L. Fleishman, a professor of public policy at Duke University, in Durham, N.C., and former president of the Atlantic Philanthropies, in New York. “It would be easy just to walk away.”

Aside from the additional dollars from Mr. Soros, Mr. Fleishman praises Open Society for informing its grantees of its decisions to end programs. Most foundations, he says, keep their beneficiaries in the dark about such moves: “Foundations don’t like to be transparent.”

Yet while the information is appreciated, grant recipients still feel the sting of lost dollars.

In Baltimore, “people are lamenting its departure,” says Peter V. Berns, chief executive of the Maryland Association of Nonprofit Organizations, an Open Society grantee.

Mr. LaMarche of Open Society is sympathetic to such views, but says foundations need to be able to respond to the country’s needs as they see them. “All we can hope for is that they understand the larger context in which we are operating,” he says. For example, Mr. LaMarche says the foundation has increased its focus on civil liberties in response to what it sees as a growing infringement on personal freedom in the United States. “Funders have to be free to change their emphases over time; that’s part of the dynamism of philanthropy.”

According to Mr. Soros, while ending a program is difficult, he is proud of being able to know when a charitable effort has lived past its prime. Without endings, he says, a program “may lose its energy and vitality.”