Foundations’ Self-Improvement Efforts Strike a Hollow Tone

To the Editor:

It’s certainly inspiring to read that foundations are making an effort to improve the quality of their grant making. It’s even more inspiring to read that efforts like the Ford Foundation’s GrantCraft and Foundation in a Box from the Association of Small Foundations are helping funders be self-critical about their approaches (“Grooming Better Grant Makers,” June 13).

But read on, and it’s impossible to avoid noticing that these initiatives are not about thinking critically at all but about teaching newcomers who might ask inconvenient questions to toe the traditional philanthropic line.

Anyone who’s been used to exercising generosity based on a best estimate of how much she or he can possibly give will indeed be mystified to enter the world of foundations, where giving more than 5 percent of available resources is considered reckless. People who might imagine that touching the corpus is the whole point of charity — that they had refrained from doing so before precisely so they’d be able to do so now, for others’ sake — must indeed be re-educated. And those who’ve thought it was enough to assure themselves of an operating charity’s bona fides before giving it a gift and getting out of its way must be shown how to hedge the gift instead with challenges and difficulties and restrictions, how to build hoops for charities to jump through. As Rodgers and Hammerstein sagely observed about the development of race prejudice, “You’ve got to be carefully taught.”

As the published excerpt of a GrantCraft conversation with a foundation official makes clear, the thing new grant makers must be taught is arrogance — though it’s not something I would have thought was in short supply in the philanthropic community. The official complains that she or he had to help a charity because, “Essentially, they had used $60,000 of project money for core support.”

A truly self-critical project might ask whether that had anything to do with philanthropies’ unwillingness to give charities the money they need to turn on their lights and give their workers health insurance. A project genuinely dedicated to systemic change might raise the question whether charities’ chronic state of not-enough really makes for the best service to people who likewise don’t have enough. But by “self-critical,” GrantCraft apparently means “finger-pointing,” for instead of considering how — and when — program grants might be superior to operating grants, the grant maker dismisses these difficulties by saying, “The issue was cash flow.”

In fact, of course, “the issue” is poverty. Cash flow is merely a symptom, and precisely the one philanthropy exists to ameliorate.

So how did this model grant maker proceed? First, she or he hired some consultants. I have nothing against consultants, having been one myself, but I can’t help asking whether the charity would have been better off with less advice and more money. Further, I can’t help asking whether the advice the charity secured was worth the money diverted to its production. If the issues were really as simple as the grant maker reports — “They began exploring how they could generate revenue from some of their work, and how they would fund the work that doesn’t generate fees” — they hardly require the attention of McKinsey. A few hours of the grant maker’s own precious time would probably have been sufficient, at least for diagnosis.

Then again, the grant maker’s insights (or lack thereof) suggest that the charity was better off without his or her attention. “They . . . were not saying ‘No’ often enough,” she or he reports, without considering that a charity’s task is to handle those to whom everyone else says ‘No,’ or even that their saying ‘No’ to a project will deprive them of the ancillary dollars that project might generate — essential dollars, given that philanthropies won’t give them direct operating support.

More chilling still is the grant maker’s account of what the charity did right. “They’re seeing that conferences, for example, could actually provide income. They also clarified that there was some service work that would never make money but was important.” Now, there’s a revolutionary concept: that charities do some work — some, mind you — that matters even though it doesn’t make money! It answers a question doubtless foremost in the minds of all new philanthropists: why there’s a nonprofit sector to begin with. It’s always seemed like such a waste of time, when the free market does such a terrific job of feeding and housing and educating and providing medical care for everyone.

Probably these efforts to educate new philanthropists are an inevitable backlash to the venture philanthropy craze, which took the legitimate need for accountability and inflated it to absurd demands for immediate solutions to intractable problems. Listen to enough self-satisfied nouveaux riches congratulating themselves on applying inappropriate business principles to charities, and one naturally wants to respond by trumpeting the field’s own principles and emphasizing its special nature, particularly its determination to persist long after others have given up. But reactionary self-congratulation is hardly the answer to the arrogance of newcomers, especially when any honest practitioner has to admit that she or he is faced with way more questions than answers.

Probably every operating nonprofit could stand to improve its operations. Most nonprofit executives, like most grant makers, come to their work with expertise in substance — teaching or rehabilitation or ballet — instead of business process. But philanthropies don’t contribute to this necessary improvement among their grantees by packaging nonsense and labeling it hard analysis.

At a pivotal moment in the movie Blazing Saddles, a group of politicians faces a crisis. Gov. Mel Brooks handles the situation by issuing a flurry of pointless orders, explaining to his colleagues, “Gentlemen! We’ve got to do something to justify our phony-baloney jobs!” I’d be laughing harder if, through self-deception masquerading as self-criticism, organized philanthropy didn’t seem so determined to turn Brooks’s comic dystopia into a way of life.

Kelly Kleiman
Chicago