New Foundation Leaders Come From Fields Afar

Many of the nation’s biggest foundations are being run by new leaders.

At least 15 of the 146 big foundations surveyed by The Chronicle appointed new chief executives last year — many of whom have never before held full-time jobs as grant makers.

They come from academe, government, the news media, health care, and many other fields.

And some of them expect big changes in the world of philanthropy, especially with so many new chief executives taking over.

“You have quite a few new voices in a field that is in transition — and a world that is in great transition,” says Paula DiPerna, who took over as head of the Joyce Foundation, in Chicago, in July. “There is a lot of potential, and having a bunch of new people coming from fields other than philanthropy is probably good for perspective.”

While several foundation leaders say they are currently conducting reviews of their foundations’ programs and are not ready to announce major changes, some offer a glimpse of how their perspectives may influence their funds.

Ms. DiPerna, former vice president for international affairs and a filmmaker for the Cousteau Society, says the insights she gained from traveling the world in that job will help her in her new post.

“There’s almost no field where having an international perspective isn’t necessary,” she says. “Everything in life is about the ability to see the horizon and implement your vision at a reachable level.”

For example, she says, the Joyce Foundation’s environmental grant-making efforts have focused on, among other things, water quality, soil, and farming practices in the Midwest. Such issues, she says, can be affected by international agricultural policies. “World trade subsidies and tariffs, for example, are extremely important for farmers in the U.S., not to mention agreements around genetically modified organisms,” Ms. DiPerna says. “With water quality, there are issues with respect to Canada and the Great Lakes and the utilization of water that will affect farmers in the Midwest.”

She adds, “For us to be effective in Iowa or Illinois, our grantees need to know what the international decisions are.”

Chicago’s biggest private foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, also has a new president. Jonathan Fanton, former president of New York’s New School, says that he was drawn to the job by the causes that MacArthur already supports and that he has no immediate plans to change the fund’s focus. His major move thus far has been to expand the foundation’s grant making to cover more countries in Africa than in the past.

“Foundations build up expertise in areas where they’ve been working, and they also have responsibilities to continue and follow through on work that they’ve begun,” says Mr. Fanton, who took over in September. “I don’t feel the need as an incoming president to make abrupt changes.”

While global issues are attracting the attention of the new heads of Joyce and MacArthur, Rip Rapson, who took over the McKnight Foundation, in Minneapolis, says he plans to institute a regional grant-making program that will look at problems affecting older suburbs populated largely by lower- and middle-class people.

A former president of the University of Minnesota, Mr. Rapson says he is especially worried about what he sees as the “polarization of grant making.” Some foundations are becoming more global in scope, he says, while others are becoming much more focused on regional issues with an eye for creating new economic development. Mr. Rapson says he worries that grant makers are ignoring what he calls “the middle” — the suburbs in the middle of a region, rather than the outskirts where the new factories and new high-technology areas are springing up.

While Mr. Rapson brings the skills of a political leader, another new foundation head is looking to business as he plans for the future.

Paul Brest, who took over last month as head of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, in Menlo Park, Calif., is undertaking a lengthy planning process to figure out how Hewlett can be effective as it grows. Last year the fund expanded by more than 41 percent, to $2.7-billion — due to a rise in Hewlett-Packard stock prices and donated shares from Mr. Hewlett.

Mr. Brest, former head of Stanford University’s law school, says that it is too early to speculate on what programs the foundation may take on but that one of the issues he wants to explore is what philanthropies and charities can learn from the business world.

“We can learn from the practices of venture capitalists investing in start-ups, from ‘value investing’ in more mature companies, and from organizations’ making internal investments in research and development,” Mr. Brest says. “As business investments seek economic returns, philanthropic investments seek social returns — the societal benefits that our programs seek to achieve.”