Foundations Should Listen to Charities

When I became head of the New York Foundation in 1978, the board urged me to figure out how to spend $1-million a year on a special project. Largely out of ignorance and uncertainty, I set out to get advice. I asked all the board members how they would spend a million dollars. I asked staff members at other foundations. I asked leaders of nonprofit organizations. I asked schoolteachers, lawyers who help the poor, doctors, City Council members.

No one really had a good answer.

It’s not surprising to me now: One of the things I have learned is that money doesn’t often solve problems. People solve problems. Money sometimes helps people. As a reminder of this point, we used to have a cartoon on the wall at the foundation that showed a man drowning off the end of a pier. On the pier, another man is shouting, “I can’t swim! Would $10 help?”

Keeping that in mind is important. It is an inoculation against the arrogance that is like an endemic disease in philanthropy and keeps grant makers from talking about what they have supported rather than what they have done. It’s common in philanthropy to hear people say, “Oh, yes, we started that organization.” We did not. We gave money to the people who started it.

Foundations need to learn from their grant recipients, but doing so does not mean using them as instruments for our own education — trying out something, for example, and then deciding it didn’t work so nobody else can get funds for something like that. It means learning to listen.They are not the instruments: We are. It is their work, not ours.

Listening to grant recipients requires getting out of the office, and is just as important for board members as for foundation employees. I have never learned one fraction as much at professional conferences as I have learned in the streets of our cities. Meeting people on their turf is a major statement by a foundation. It says you are not afraid, it says you are available for a direct relationship, it signals genuine interest in the grant seeker’s work.

Hiring the right people to do this kind of grant making is essential. They must not start with the assumption that their own experience and opinions are going to be a blessing to the grant seeker. They need to be trained to ask the right kinds of questions, to listen carefully, to draw people out so that they make their best case. They need to be advocates for programs they have visited, even if they think they would do things differently.

This kind of interaction is not the norm. Far too much of philanthropy is concerned with distancing itself as far as possible from personal interaction, under the misleading banner of impartiality.

I joined the world of philanthropy when the young turks and reformers were concerned that it was the plaything of wealthy individuals who gave capriciously and with no accountability. We decried the lack of clear guidelines and the virtually segregated character of foundation boards. We campaigned for more accessibility, more diversity, more-open application processes, and more transparency about how decisions were made. Much has changed from those days, and much is for the good.

But with the accumulated experience of 25 years, some of the field has now gone too far in our flight from Victorian charity. At the heart of the desire to purge grant making of personal bias is a confusion between personal relationships and personal whims.

We can see this in the struggles of new program officers to understand and accept what appears to them to be a capricious way to make grant decisions.

Most serious people coming into the grant-making field today seem to want to avoid personal bias at all cost. They devise ratings tables, criteria, screens, guidelines — all to protect themselves from the profoundly uncomfortable fact that they are making decisions that affect other people’s work and lives. Ever more specific criteria, they believe, will make things fairer.

Philanthropy is not a science. It cannot pretend to develop rating scales and systems that will be “fair.” It will never be fair. You have limited staff time and limited grant dollars, and you have to ration them somehow.

Just because philanthropy can’t be fair, that doesn’t mean it has a right to be arrogant.

When I became a foundation executive, grant seekers complained about foundations that refused to make their office addresses public; made offhand comments to grant seekers like “We’re not interested in health-care reform any more;” demanded three, four, or five revisions of a proposal, only to decline it; and sent rejection letters with statements like “You should be seeking public support for this work.”

Many foundations were so arrogant they regularly gave jobs and board positions to friends and family. Foundation professional meetings were often closed to people actually doing the work; they were seen as “grant seekers,” and were ipso facto undesirable and threatening.

Unfortunately, plenty of the old arrogance persists.

Philanthropy remains a largely unexamined field. There is little open discourse about its members. Very rarely do any of us within the field criticize another foundation in public, and then only when it is one whose good will you are never likely to have or need.

Still less do we talk about individuals.

Bad behavior to grantees is legendary: Foundation staff members lose proposals, lead people on, don’t return phone calls, don’t answer their mail; they are imperious, rude, officious; they meddle where they don’t belong. Some people are scandalously overpaid. There are people who do not work hard. We hear the stories and sigh.

But there is also a new type of arrogance displayed by people who consider themselves professionals, who act as though they believe their knowledge and experience give them the right to treat other people like instruments, or just treat them badly. It is not the old gouty robber baron saying, “It’s my money and I can do what I like with it.” It’s a newer breed — people proud of their dispassionate overview of the field, their lack of personal bias.

One might have expected things to be different because today’s foundation executives are far more diverse than they were a generation ago, but even so, when there are meetings of large foundations about some crisis, the room can sometimes be filled with white people and most of them men at that.

Worse, and more damning for the field, when the meetings evolve into some kind of working group where daily work has to be done, they morph into an all-female group. Admittedly, this is better than when the embryonic group that was to become the New York Regional Association of Grantmakers held its meetings in a club where women had to go up a back staircase. But that’s a low standard.

People who work for foundations hold privileged jobs.

Most foundation staff members don’t have to raise their own salaries every year. Most can safely assume that the rent will be paid and that they will receive health and retirement benefits. That certainty alone sets us apart from a significant portion of the human population, and much too far apart from our grantees, who all too often can’t give their staff members more than a bare-bones salary.

As we labor to eliminate the gap between our having money and nonprofit organizations not having it, an important task for grant makers is to take the information and experience we gain of other people’s lives and represent it, passionately and indignantly, in places where it is not always invited.

The Quaker concepts of “bearing witness” and of speaking truth to power should be a part of our obligation in foundation work.

It is a common lament among foundation professionals that we feel depersonalized when we realize how many people see us only as bearers of money. We should not make the same mistake.

It is wrong to limit our view of ourselves only to money we control. Money may be our most visible asset, but it is not all that a foundation can bring to bear. Foundations have much more than money, even small foundations. They have facilities, employees, board members, a collective memory, experience, opinions, and access to many places of influence. Help, advice, connections to other valuable networks, advice on approaching other grant makers — these are all assets that we develop as we work in the field.

We need to pay more attention to how we allocate ourselves, our time, our passions, our values. Foundation people are invited to lots of interesting forums: They can be sure that the voices of people not invited are nevertheless represented there.

Our individual voices, on behalf of the people we support, are seriously underused resources. Our work takes us into situations where we can make a personal difference.

Humility does not come naturally to me, but my work as a foundation executive has given me such humility as I have. I have learned to keep my thoughts to myself in order to hear the thoughts of people who work much harder than I ever have, who risk much more than I have ever risked, who face lives far harder than mine, who, if you listen, will share their lives and their dreams in the most open and courageous way.

Madeline Lee retired last year as president of the New York Foundation. This article is adapted from

Listening at the Grassroots: Reflections on 25 Years of Grantmaking in the World’s Greatest City, an essay that was released by the foundation in February.