Following is fictional satire written by a prominent philanthropy leader. The Chronicle has verified that the author is an expert about the subjects discussed in this short story. We hope this piece will stimulate a conversation about how the foundation world works, and urge you to jump into the discussion in the comments section below.
Wilson woke with a start when the BlackBerry in his shirt pocket started to buzz repeatedly.
The plane was still several thousand feet above the runway, but he’d stopped turning his phone off in flight after a colleague in Washington had assured him the signal from a cellphone couldn’t possibly bring down a plane.
He must have been asleep for some time, because the salad and glass of wine that had been on his tray earlier were gone and his reading stack had slipped to the floor.
He hoped no one had noticed the buzzing and vibrating phone in his pocket as he slipped on his shoes and stuffed the reports and articles he’d brought to read into the blue-and-white Aspen Institute tote that he’d been given at this past summer’s Ideas Festival.
As the plane descended toward the runway and the flight attendant handed him his sport coat, he thought about the three days ahead of him in San Francisco, at a national conference that would bring together over 1,000 foundation executives, nonprofit leaders, scholars, public intellectuals, and government officials to talk about how to lower the poverty rate in America.
The topic he had committed his career to working on was just in the news, but for all the wrong reasons.
Despite the fact that foundations like the one he ran had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on fighting poverty, a recent Census Bureau report showed that the median household income hadn’t changed since the 1980s and the poverty rate still sat at 15 percent. Even worse, the bureau said, a greater share of the poor is in deep poverty than has been the case for years.
Wilson was the CEO of a large foundation in Duluth, Minn. Duluth was a thriving city at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Its deep-water port shipped iron ore from the nearby Iron Range and coal and grain in mass quantities. At its height, Duluth rivaled New York City in gross tonnage handled and far outstripped Chicago. For a brief time, Duluth was even home to more millionaires per capita than any other city in the world.
One of those millionaires created the foundation that Wilson now directed, and having seen both the growth and the decline of Duluth, this early philanthropist committed his foundation to the task of alleviating poverty. Wise stewards of his financial commitment turned several million dollars in the early 1900s into a foundation with a corpus in the hundreds of millions of dollars today.
Wilson didn’t actually live in Duluth, though. How could he?
The population of the once-vibrant city, filled with old manor homes and Victorian mansions, was down to 85,000.
Winters were a mix of blizzards and Canadian cold fronts that made the clear air so frighteningly frigid that you wondered how in the world a city was built there in the first place. Summers were hot and muggy, and the joke about the size of the mosquitoes in Minnesota wasn’t so funny once they started raising welts on your arms and the back of your neck.
He had a nice efficiency apartment there, just a block from the foundation offices, where he had an appropriately large CEO’s office and an assistant outside his door. He tried to visit there at least twice a month to keep things on track.
His home was in Washington (thus the BlackBerry), where his wife was a tenured professor in the foreign-service school at Georgetown University, with a specialty of studying democratic movements in the Baltic states.
They had a traditional row house on R Street in Georgetown, north of the madness of M Street and very near Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks Gardens, where they were members and could take evening strolls when Washington’s oppressive summer heat began to dissipate. As part of the arrangement with his board, his foundation now had a small office near Dupont Circle, which he shared with a couple of staff members who dealt with the federal government. He had an additional assistant in Washington so he could maximize his productivity when he wasn’t on the road or in Duluth.
As the plane taxied to the gate, he quickly scrolled through the 27 new e-mails he’d received. He noted that he had 10 new voice messages and a slew of tweets and Facebook postings to check, but he was looking for something specific in his e-mail and quickly found it.
One of the ways he tried to make his travel a little more bearable was by checking out new restaurants in each city he visited. So he was happy to see that his assistant had made a reservation for eight at Alibi the next evening. He’d read several terrific reviews on Yelp and was eager to check it out.
The big formal dinners at these huge conferences always seemed to feature bad hotel food served cold, too many awards with weepy acceptance speeches, and a video speech from someone too important to actually attend, so he had no problem skipping out to try a new restaurant and do some foundation-supported networking over a good meal with good wine.
His normal plan was to put together an interesting group of six or eight dinner companions on the fly.
One of his senior program officers was also attending the meeting in San Francisco and Wilson had told him he could fill two slots, which gave Wilson the opportunity to invite four people the next day as he ran into to them in the hallways, in line at the hotel’s in-house Starbucks, or at the hotel bar.
In truth, he didn’t end up attending many sessions at these meetings. He’d heard most of the presentations before, and being a foundation president, he always had a few dozen people chasing him for a cup of coffee or a drink, in the hope that they would be invited to partner with his foundation on some work. So it would be easy enough to put together an interesting dinner group along the way.
Being in the enviable position of funder, Wilson didn’t actually do the work of poverty alleviation or crunch the data or spend time in impoverished communities. He didn’t even evaluate proposals that came to him and decide which ones to support, since his foundation had stopped accepting proposals two years ago.
As a proponent of what is called strategic philanthropy, the foundation he directed supported organizations he had previous relationships with, individuals whose work he was familiar with, and, most important, those who agreed with his perspective.
He considered himself and his foundation full partners in the work it supported and was unapologetic about his demands for metrics and deliverables, his desire to dictate which consultants and advisers would be involved in the work, and his insistence that the foundation get extensive public credit for the work it financed. These days he didn’t really consider himself as much a funder, or even a person who ran a foundation, as an activist with an agenda, a checkbook, and a great deal of autonomy.
The concept of autonomy was key to what brought him to and kept him in the field of philanthropy and what helped him justify the grueling schedule he had to keep. He had started out his career with an undergraduate degree in political science from Brown and then a master’s degree and Ph.D. in sociology from Yale.
Early on, the mix of his interest in politics and sociology led him to focus his writing and research on poverty, and he had been recruited to come to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville to teach and pursue his work.
With increasing frequency, he was invited to present his papers and findings at the myriad of conferences and meetings around the country. His work was supported more and more not by the taxpayers of Virginia but by foundations that were doing work in the poverty-alleviation field.
As his network grew, his reputation grew with it, until a headhunter had contacted him four years ago and asked if he’d be willing to consider heading a medium-size foundation in Minnesota that would focus on the issue in which he was now a national expert.
On one hand, he loved his work on the UVA campus and thrived on his interaction with students and faculty alike. But the level of oversight and interference in his work was growing increasingly frustrating.
Every article he wrote for a peer-reviewed journal had to be debated ad nauseam by chippy tenured professors protecting their theories and legacies. Every time he wanted to open a new course of inquiry in his research, he had to defend his ideas to the other professors in his department, many of whom he considered to be inferior thinkers. The students who took his classes rated his teaching methods every semester, and those ratings were then irritatingly published for the world to see.
One of the things the headhunter had highlighted, and one of the main reasons he decided to accept the overture, was that when you ran a foundation, there were few, if any, constraints to your work.
She had told Wilson that the foundation’s board was a mix of third-generation family members and very successful friends of the family, and they had in the past shown a great deal of deference to the chief executive.
The legal requirements to give away at least 5 percent of the foundation’s assets each year were easy enough to meet, and since most of the projects were basically co-designed by the foundation itself, it wasn’t as if the foundation had to risk its own capital on wild theories or unproven players. So he would be in a position to support work that he had helped conceive, work with those he had developed relationships with during his career, set his own schedule, and do all of this behind the veil of “private philanthropy.”
When he considered how different this life would be from the world of academe, and the fact that the salary and benefits and perks were several times what he was currently making in Charlottesville, the decision became even easier.
The snag came when the foundation flew him to Duluth to meet the staff and see the offices. It was a lovely little town but not a place he could imagine living and certainly not the kind of place where he could even suggest to his wife that they relocate. They were already splitting their time between their house in Washington and their town home just off the campus in Charlottesville. He knew that a move to Duluth would be a nonstarter.
He raised the issue with the Isaacson, Miller recruiter he had been working with and was surprised to find out that she was ready with an answer.
It turned out he had not been the foundation’s first choice for the position, and several strong candidates had dropped out of the running over the issue of location. So the recruiter said the foundation would be willing to open a small office in Washington to make his life easier. The expense would count as part of the legally required payout, which simply reduced the amount of grant making required. The foundation’s search committee asked that he make a real effort to visit Duluth on a regular basis, and he agreed. With that, the deal was struck.
So he spent an immense amount of time in the air, traveling to meetings and conferences and elite gatherings of fellow strategic thinkers, bouncing between Duluth and Washington, with regular stops in Aspen, Cambridge, New York City, and San Francisco. He recently had seen the same set of people at three meetings in the same week in three cities. It was, as they joked, a group of people who liked to meet.
This kind of extensive, exhaustive travel had never been much fun, but regular upgrades to first class and stays in upscale hotels and resorts helped make it more bearable.
His flights were always in business or first class, even though his foundation paid only full-fare coach, because a member of his board, a publishing executive from New York, had kindly arranged for United Airlines to add him to its “Global Services” membership. That membership brought with it an outstanding suite of perks and benefits, including upgrades and even the ability to call United from traffic on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to hold the plane at LaGuardia until he arrived. So he couldn’t remember the last time he’d flown coach or not been met by a town car or stayed at a hotel that wasn’t lovely.
This trip was different, however. The poverty-alleviation conference was being held at the massive JW Marriott on Post Street, which hosted these large-scale meetings. Knowing that he wouldn’t want to stay there with the masses, his assistant had booked him nearby at the more upscale Westin St. Francis on Union Square.
She knew it would be an easy two-block walk to the Marriott, it would give him some space to breathe away from the crowds at the conference, and since he was trying to build hotel points for a planned vacation to Bali, it helped that it was a Starwood property.
As he took the escalator down the stairs to the arrival level at the airport, he saw a young man holding a sign with his name on it, handed off his rolling bag and briefcase, held on to the tote, and slipped into the back seat of the town car to begin the journey into the city.
At that moment, he realized how tired he was. He had been in Chicago for the previous two days, and so it was already late in the evening on his internal clock. And the pace of phone calls, conference calls, and document reviews didn’t go away when he was on the road. He had to take care of all of that during his many flights or at night in his hotel room after the events of the evening had been completed.
He knew not to complain, though. Every time he talked about how hard it was to run a foundation and how hard it was to give away money responsibly, people either smirked or sneered, even friends and family. People just didn’t understand how difficult his job was.
As his town car sped north on Highway 101, he switched on the reading light and pulled the conference agenda out of his bag. It looked to be the same general collection of young data geeks, earnest on-the-ground problem solvers, professors reading their most recent papers, big thinkers who were also book writers (and thus book promoters), and people with the word “former” in front of their titles.
He noted the usual sprinkling of African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American, and Native-American speakers and the usual dominance of male speakers over female speakers and chuckled at the complete lack of a conservative voice anywhere on the agenda.
This was a topic of ongoing frustration for some, but the answer was always that the conference committee had looked for a conservative voice and not been able to find one.
The truth was that the one conservative who would be an acceptable speaker had her schedule set well over a year in advance and so she was very hard to get. Apparently finding a Republican for a panel at these conferences was like finding an African-American for a panel in Duluth: You knew they were out there somewhere, but you had no idea how to find them. Some things never changed.
His car pulled into the portico of the St. Francis, and as his bags were being taken inside and he signed for the car, he realized the changes that had taken place in this part of downtown San Francisco.
Union Square was a far-less- seedy place than it had once been, with an art fair and food festival dominating a space that was once claimed by the city’s drug-addled homeless. (For a moment, he put on his professional hat and wondered where the homeless had gone.)
He also lamented that the St. Francis, once one of his favorite hotels, had become far less grand and far more “touristy.” In his tasseled loafers, crisp khakis, and blue blazer, he suddenly felt out of place in a lobby now dominated by tank tops and flip-flops. He made a mental note to talk to his Washington assistant about this before his next trip to the city. There were plenty of nicer hotels in San Francisco.
The priority check-in line moved quickly, and he handed the bellman a $20 bill to take his bags upstairs so he could head straight over to the Marriott for the opening reception of the conference.
As he walked to the front of the big hotel, he paused for a moment to take in the chaotic tableau unfolding inside. Some people had just arrived and were still standing around and chatting with colleagues with their luggage by their side. Hugs and handshakes and air kisses filled the lobby as people saw each for the first time in several days and laughed about being at the next big coming- together of great thinkers.
At the bar, the older hands had staked out the tables on the outer edge of the space, and most had low, heavy-bottomed glasses in front of them as they caught up with their friends and colleagues of long standing.
The bar itself was filled with a tangle of the younger professionals in the field, drinking bottles of Rolling Rock and glasses of chardonnay. All decked out in their best conference outfits, the men wore sharp suits, new haircuts, and polished shoes, and the women wore professionally short skirts and professionally high heels, all flirting as much as networking, looking for their next dates as much as their next jobs. Wilson could hear the roar of conversation from the other side of the big glass windows.
As he surveyed the scene, he saw dozens of people he knew, including some he’d been with just the day before in Chicago. He also caught the attention of a young woman who was a junior program officer at a Boston foundation and was entertaining a group of older gentlemen with some kind of funny story. She was wearing very high heels and his favorite blue dress. She gave him a quick smile through the glass, to let him know that she’d seen him too, and quickly went back to telling her story. They were on the same conference circuit, and he knew he’d be seeing her later. He quickly noted a few people he wanted to seek out for a conversation and a few people he would need to work hard to avoid.
It was time to dive in. He had agendas to pursue and partnerships to develop and was ready for a glass of good Bordeaux. So, like a contestant about to enter the field of play, he took a deep breath, shook his shoulders, straightened his collar, and stepped inside. This, he thought, is going to be a rough few days.
