Profiles of 2 Community Foundations: a Striking Contrast

To the Editor:

Having worked with a number of community-based groups interested in generating resources to support their efforts — as well as having had a bit of experience in and around community foundations — I found your piece on the Kansas City version in the hands of president Janice C. Kreamer intriguing, but also annoying (“Kansas City Community Fund Adopts a Customer-Service Approach,” January 13).

What, I wonder, is the role of the foundation’s board in the new “service position” so largely deferential to an apparently burgeoning clutch of donors? How, in any reasonable fashion whatever, does the foundation reflect the makeup of the community as a whole, whose challenges would seem to offer the best reason for the foundation’s grant making, if not its very existence?

In relating the transformation of one donor from his initial involvement for what he called “totally selfish reasons” to an ostensibly more-enlightened stance, we learn that he is up front with a group of donors and investors in building a school for students from poor families. Isn’t this garden-variety paternalism of the worst sort? How can we visualize that the recipients of this beneficence are in any way active partners in the donor’s apparent epiphany?

What makes these questions even more pointed for me is the ironic juxtaposition of another story about the work of grassroots activists in Mexico (“Mexican Fund Aims to Make Philanthropy a Tool of the Poor as Well as the Rich,” January 13). Acknowledging that there are sharp divisions between Mexico’s haves and have-nots, with relatively few benefits from “conventional philanthropy,” the foundation’s president, Javier Vargas Mendoza, notes that “Poverty needs to be overcome with the poor as protagonists” in their economic struggle, rather than as passive recipients.

A striking dichotomy. While the denizen donors of Kansas City aggregate around an entity aggressively pitching to their self-interest, we are told that there is a worldwide citizens’ movement concentrating on support for civil society. As so well put in the article on the Mexican fund’s experience, the mere transference of money does not change the way things are. We need only look around us in this country to know as much. But not so in Kansas City, it would seem.

It would be fascinating to be the fly on the wall were Ms. Kreamer and Mr. Vargas Mendoza to sit down and compare notes.

Harvey Chess
Non-Profit Management Consultant
Westport, Calif.