A Charity Watchdog Takes a New Role: Grant Making

Trent Stamp boarded a plane one frosty New Jersey day and disembarked in Los Angeles to find most

people wearing shorts. The extreme weather change mirrors Mr. Stamp’s job shift from outspoken head of the nonprofit watchdog group Charity Navigator, in Mahwah, N.J., to executive director of the low-key Eisner Foundation, in Beverly Hills, Calif.

The philanthropists John and Marion Dugan hired Mr. Stamp to start Charity Navigator in 2001. He built it from a business plan on his kitchen counter to an organization with a dozen employees whose evaluations of 5,200 charities nationwide drew five million visitors to the group’s Web site last year.

Mr. Stamp, 37, left his highly visible role there — he appeared regularly on national television shows to give his opinions on charity abuses, among other topics — to run a family foundation with a relatively narrow focus: education causes in Los Angeles.

Established in 1996 by Michael D. Eisner, the former chief executive of the Walt Disney Company who now runs Tornante, an investment company in Beverly Hills, the foundation had $146-million in assets according to its most recent informational tax return and gives about $7-million annually. In 2003, Forbes magazine estimated Mr. Eisner’s net worth at $630-million.

Previously, the foundation was run by a part-time director. Mr. Stamp’s arrival signals its interest in becoming a larger player among philanthropies, says Jane D. Eisner, Mr. Eisner’s wife, who serves as the foundation’s president.

“We would like to review our focus and our mission and dig deeper,” she says.

The family also plans to eventually add to the foundation’s assets, but Mrs. Eisner declined to provide details.

While Mr. Stamp says he wasn’t looking to leave Charity Navigator, he admits tiring of the attacks he received from nonprofit leaders as he sought to help donors choose the most effective nonprofit group to support.

“It was seven years of getting up and going to war with people who didn’t think we needed more transparency and accountability in the nonprofit sector,” he says. “I wanted to try something more conciliatory, that was more about building something, more about reaching out and having connections with people at other organizations.”

The foundation’s primary cause and the Eisner family captured his interest as well. Mr. Stamp, who has two young children, once taught special education at a middle school in Henderson, N.C., through Teach for America. He says he admires Mr. Eisner’s professional career and the community activism of Mrs. Eisner, who currently serves as board president of the California Community Foundation, in Los Angeles.

For their part, the Eisners liked Mr. Stamp’s entrepreneurial experience at Charity Navigator, his educational background, and the fact that he’s a native Californian, says Mrs. Eisner. Mr. Stamp grew up in the Bay Area.

In his new position, Mr. Stamp will earn $225,000, which is nearly a quarter of Charity Navigator’s annual budget.

The two groups seem nothing alike on the surface, yet Mr. Stamp says they have much in common: “You have a powerful businessman looking to make the world a better place and it’s your job to implement their vision.”

In addition, the Eisner Foundation is seeking to update its Web site, collaborate with other groups, raise its profile, and become a model in how well a philanthropy can be run — all approaches that Mr. Stamp undertook at Charity Navigator, or at least encouraged charities to take.

While Mr. Stamp says he’ll miss having a forum to spotlight good and bad practices in the nonprofit world — he gave up the well-received blog, Trent Stamp’s Take, that he wrote while at Charity Navigator — he won’t miss chasing down dollars.

“When you are talking about funding a group of analysts who pore through tax forms, it’s an unsexy sell and a lot of funders have backed away from it,” he says. “If I don’t have to fund raise anytime soon, that’s fine by me.”

In an interview, Mr. Stamp discussed the challenges ahead at Charity Navigator and his new job.

If you were still at Charity Navigator, what would your priorities be?

Expand qualitatively and quantitatively. They need to evaluate more charities and figure out a way to get better at measuring how effective organizations work. For example, Charity Navigator can tell you how many sandwiches the food bank serves, but not how good they taste or what their nutritional value is. But to do that, it’s going to take charity cooperation, a massive influx of funding, and a donor public that demands that type of information, which currently they are not doing.

What is your advice for your successor?

Have a thick skin. People are going to dislike you. I was excited to get up in the morning and expose people I thought were flouting nonprofit regulations and refusing to play by any sort of rules even though they had tax-exempt status. If I had to take some heat personally, that was a price worth paying.

What is your mandate from the Eisner family in running their foundation?

They want to expand their funding priorities. Historically, they have been focused on kids in Southern California. An area Michael is especially interested in is aging. They want to look at people who are vulnerable, either starting life or at its end, still in and around Los Angeles. They would also like to make this the most transparent family foundation in the nation, where people can look at it as a model for good behavior. We are going to make everything public on the Web site: all grantees, the application process, board-meeting minutes, how and why we make our decisions, so that people can see how and why things happen and you can see we are totally above board. We need to move past this era of secrecy in the nonprofit world.

What do you hope this approach will accomplish?

Donors who may not have the opportunity to ask charities detailed questions about their work can look at the Web site and say, I admire the Eisner Foundation’s decision-making process, obviously they have vetted charities and done a good job. After that, maybe those donors would be more likely to give to the same types of organizations. It’s a way to take a family foundation and almost make it more like a community foundation, without the fees.

How involved will you be in deciding where the money goes?

At the end of the day, all funding decisions will still need to be finalized by the Eisners. It’s their name on the door. But they didn’t bring me 3,000 miles to be the bookkeeper.

Hopefully we will work together to make sure the money goes as far as it possibly can.

Will you speak out about abuses you might find among foundations?

My focus is 100 percent on this particular foundation. I didn’t come here to transform the foundation world, I am just trying to run this foundation appropriately.

How do you see spending your time the first few months on the job?

Anytime I am in the office is probably bad. I need to go out and talk to the charities we have historically funded and, more importantly, look for partners, people who can help us achieve long-term goals. If you are looking for me, I will be in my car.