Highlights from Atlanta 2001

MS. MARCIA SHARP: This is Candor and Cooperation II, which is called II because we did a session like this last year.

My name is Marcia Sharp and I'm going to try to keep the conversation moving, but this is a conversation among all of us, and that's why you are all seated where you are.

We do mean it to be candid about the relationship, the complicated relationship, between grantseekers and grantmakers. A small anecdote about just how candid is last year, when we were getting ready for this, Joel Orash from Kellogg, who was one of the panelists, looked at the set-up and said, "Hmm, I think we all have to worry about whether we're having a bad hair day at the back."

[Laughter]

MS. SHARP: Anyway, in an important way, this whole question about the relationship between grantseekers and grantmakers, between foundations, in other words, and their nonprofit action partners, is a continuing conversation. It's one that is important to visit and revisit, and to keep having, in a sense, in the field.

Now people also say that it's a conversation, or someone reminded me of this once, that it's important to have but it seldom rises to distinction, by which I think they meant that so often these conversations bring up "the usual suspects," and I want to do that for just a minute so we don't have to spend the rest of our day on the usual suspects.

That grantmakers are arrogant. That they don't return their phone calls. It brings up the debate about the operating in project support. On the other side, people will say the day you become a program officer is the last day you get any honest feedback in your life, even whether it's gravy on your tie, let alone your approach to social change. Or grantmakers, you know, don't tell us when something changes.

There's probably some basis for all those stereotypes. We'd really like in this conversation to push beyond that and try to surface in this session some ideas for how we can improve this incredibly important relationship in social change.

We also hope that we might challenge some of the immutables. It'll never be any different because there's an inherent power imbalance. Maybe there isn't an inherent continuing power balance.

Just a little word of introduction before I set up the starting panelists here.

Even before September 11, even before it was very clear there was going to be a recession, even before we knew we don't have a secure America, even before we paid the kind of attention that we're now paying to cultural divides and cultural gaps, and what they mean in our life in the world. Even before all of you who are on the not-for-profit grantseeking side of the equation in this room were legitimately concerned about where money is now suddenly going, and how some of the activities that you know are extraordinarily important, will need to be supported. Even before we knew all that, there were some real reasons, and we touched on a good bit of this last year in our conversation.

Some real reasons to think differently or to want to think differently about the relationship between grantmakers and grantseekers, and I want to tick off a couple of those.

Clearly, the ecosystem, if you will, of philanthropy and public problem solving is changing. There are many, many new players on the philanthropic scene. You all know this. The venture philanthropists, the e-funds, the individuals of great wealth. There are new life forms in the philanthropic pond, that five years ago we didn't know about—giving circles, other ways of connecting financial resources to problems and needs.

Those changes in the ecosystem are, you might say, diminishing the foundation market share of support in the not-for-profit sector, the traditional foundation market share. I think they are calling upon foundations, and foundations are asking themselves to think harder about how they put all their assets, financial and non-financial, their knowledge assets, their expertise, their leadership, their vision, into play. I think they are causing foundations to ask different questions about how they can work together, not just in collaborative grant funds but is there a way to think about philanthropy? The foundations and the nonprofits is, in some cases, is some kind of unified system for delivering social services and social change.

It's certainly these changes in the ecosystem are causing nonprofits to explore and find other funding mechanisms. There is, as you all again know, a whole new emphasis on knowledge and knowledge assets. Where does knowledge come from? Is it created in communities by people who are doing the grant work? What part of the knowledge bundle do foundations have and what part do the nonprofits have? How do you build it? How do you share it? How do you apply it?

All of that is potentially of great change to the relationship between grantmakers and grantseekers, and that is one of the topics that we did end up looking quite a bit at last year in this conversation, is will the balance in the relationship between philanthropy and grantees change because of these new ideas about knowledge?

I think we're all finding that the systems and the structures that we use for social change are becoming far more complex, so there are cross-sectoral approaches involving nonprofits and the business sector, and government, more and more in all your work.

There are strategic alliances that are put together and then taken apart when the work is done, and nonprofits, as you know, are developing profitmaking subsidiaries, profitmaking organizations are entering into what we used to think of as the nonprofit marketplace. People are moving in and out of foundation and public sector and business sector jobs.

All of this is changing the experience that is probably needed in different venues in foundations, in grantseeking organizations elsewhere in the sector for public problem solving.

So as I said, even before what we now know to be true about our world, there were real reasons to ask some wonderful hard questions about this relationship between foundations and nonprofits.

How can we construct relationships across this divide—it sometimes is a divide—between nonprofits and foundations, that really draw on all the talents, and all of the assets, and all the knowledge of all the players?

How can we create relationships in this room, and by metaphor, more broadly in the sector, that build the will and the trust that we need to change and grow together, to adapt to changing environments together?

How do we draw on all the new ideas, the old ideas, the new technologies, the new players, the old players, in the words of this conference, to ensure that every voice is heard?

Now we even have a larger imperative, I think, to think differently. John Morgridge made a really interesting comment in the CEO session yesterday. He was talking about what he called an inflection point as a stimulus for change, and he said an inflection point is something that disassembles your prior sense of configurations and relationships and allows you to make new ones, and there are a jillion things we can and must say about September 11th, but it probably is an inflection point in thinking about some of the relationships in the nonprofit sector.

We want in this session to involve you all, that's why you're seated where you are, in a conversation about some of these issues, in thinking about new strategies that will make the relationships between grantmakers and grantseekers even more productive.

Your colleagues that have bravely agreed to sit up here, exposing their backs, and get this conversation started, offer us some wonderful perspectives, and Elan Garonzik, who is nearest to me, is a program officer at the Mott Foundation. Mott, as I think you know, from reputation and the wonderful opening address in this meeting, is a foundation that takes its mission to support philanthropy and civil society very seriously. Elan works on capacity building and strengthening issues all across the nonprofit sector. So this discussion is home territory for him.

Gayle Williams is the executive director of the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation in North Carolina. Babcock has committed itself and its resources to work that is very strongly focused on racism and poverty, and how foundations engage on the ground with communities on those issues, and they have really transformed themselves and their staff and the board to do this work on the ground. So another hugely important perspective in thinking differently about relationships.

Mike Tenbusch is over here, is a co-founder and the CEO of an organization called Think Detroit, which is a relatively young high-growth nonprofit, uses technology and sports to develop character in young people.

Darell Hammond is the co-founder and CEO of KaBOOM!, another relatively new, very high-growth nonprofit that builds playgrounds all around the country. Both Mike and Darell are of an age and of an outlook where they have put wonderful organizations together, relying on not just foundations, but other kinds of resources and other kinds of expertise, and therefore have that additional perspective.

So they've agreed to get us started, and before we get started, I would just like to find out, I should have done this at the beginning, who's in the room, in the sense of who here is a grantseeker, or grantseeking nonprofit.

[Show of hands]

MS. SHARP: Okay. And who represents—stand, please—the funders?

[Laughter]

MS. SHARP: Okay, guys. I'm just being, probably foolishly, amusing here. We wrote in the description for this that this was not about "us and them," but this was about, in the worlds of the lunch plenary we're about to go to, moving forward in a changed world, and I would like to add that it's about moving forward together.

So now that we've demonstrated the "us and the them," let's forget it and let's talk about how this works.

Just as a way to get started, I asked our panelists if they would think about, in advance, an example, a story, so we could get concrete here, an example that they thought illustrated the way the relationship between foundations and nonprofits ought to work, and one that illustrated the way it shouldn't work.

Darell, let's start with you and put them both out.

MR. HAMMOND: Thanks. It's good to be here. You know, it struck home to me yesterday, when I heard somebody who is the executive director of a foundation speak, and as soon as the workshop, you know, was over, somebody ran up to the front and said I met with you two years ago and at that time you were just a regional organization, and are you considering, now, to be a national organization, and here's my card, and if you are, I want to meet with you.

I think that that's endemic, from a nonprofit perspective, you know, what are some of the challenges? You know, from KaBOOM!'s perspective, 98 percent of our income comes from corporations, and mainly, not even corporate foundations, the human resource department, the advertising department, or the marketing department, and in looking at that, one of the successes that we've seen is that—it is what Peter Goldberg described three years ago as one of his challenges when he took on the Independent Sector, chairmanship of the board three years ago—a relationship, and the relationship is not just papers, voice-mails, e-mails. It's a process, and the relationship is getting to know the person who might be making, getting to know the persons and where they fit within the organization, and how the decision making process is structured and made, and sometime the program officers have so much work to do just to get through a grant document.

I didn't understand that six years ago when we started KaBOOM!, and that's why we were unsuccessful, because we sent, like everybody was advising us to do, papers to the good folks over here, and e-mails and voice-mails, and got frustrated at why there was no return.

Now when I've gone through corporations that understood the relationship and the win-win, and how to craft both the message and the strategy, we've been more successful.

So my challenge is, years ago, we did what everybody told us to do, which was write a case statement, tell people what your need is, tell people that play is an absolute, fundamental right, not just a luxury, and they'll do good things for you.

My success is now we can go back to foundations, and ironically, foundations are coming to KaBOOM!, foundations are coming to us and saying we understand your case, we understand how you work, and let's work something together.

One foundation in California came to us, they came to us, we didn't solicit them, we didn't read in the Chronicle of Philanthropy that they were giving out grants and what they were funding. They came to us and said we're interested in an initiative with you, and three months later, $2 million check acme in the mail.

MS. SHARP: Sounds like a good story. What's a bad? You want to do one?

MR. HAMMOND: From our vantage point, I think—and I'll just speak from my personal experience. From our vantage point, we were advised, unduly wrong, in the beginning, about the process, and, you know, Billy Shore jumped into this conversation a couple years ago, and said that it's a paperless process, and nobody knew how to translate that to foundations. They knew how to translate it to corporations, because with a corporation, same as a foundation, they have both current, what they're doing, but things that they're looking at to do, and to understand what they're looking at to do, you can't make assumptions because it's not on paper yet.

With foundations, I've now learned that's the same thing. They're changing strategies to meet their missions and it's not on paper yet, and if you just assume that what is on paper—and years ago, when we got started, we were so frustrated, we were so angry, we were so bitter, that—and we were so boisterous about it, saying that foundations were, you know, ungrateful, and all these other things, and that, indeed, still may be the case, but not in my experience.

MS. SHARP: Gayle, what would you throw out as examples of the way this works, when it works out, something that didn't work optimally, or is not the way you'd like to do business?

MS. WILLIAMS: Okay. I'm going to take the example of what seems to be working, from some of our current work at the Babcock Foundation. In 1995, we started a program to fund nonprofits in the Southeast to do their own organizational development. In the seven years hence, we've worked with about 150 nonprofits in the Southeast, everything from big regional organizations like the Southern Regional Council down to little grassroots groups of one staff person and a very active volunteer board, to help them become more effective and sustainable, over the long term, by working on their internal structures and relationships.

Along the way, we have created a learning network that has involved hundreds of people through these last seven years, and that learning network has been co-created by foundation staff, some consultants, and the organizations participating in the program.

I think a couple of key elements in that co-created learning network have been, one, at the beginning of each grant we negotiate outcome, organizational development outcomes for that grant, and they are mutually-agreed upon goals between the foundation and the organization, and then throughout the three-to-four year relationship those outcomes and their achievement is renegotiated because it always takes longer to put new fiscal management systems in place than you ever thought it was going to.

There are more bumps in the road and doing a constituent-based strategic plan than you ever imagined. The executive director quits, the chairman of the board has a baby, you know, life happens, and so we have learned—

MS. SHARP: Take that home, that's a lesson—life happens.

MS. WILLIAMS: Life happens. So both the organizations that we have worked with and the foundation have learned how to get better at setting realistic organizational development goals in different kinds of nonprofits at different stages of their development.

That has been an important learning that's helped us all do our work better.

MS. SHARP: Great.

MS. WILLIAMS: The second key element in that co-created learning network is an annual gathering of organizations around the Southeast who are working on their own organizational development, and next week, we've got about 150, 200 people coming to this annual gathering, that's now been going on for six years. The agenda is created and the learning is led by the organizations themselves, and so it is very much a peer learning situation, and we have found, over the years, that the topics that the representatives of the organizations pick to focus on for their learning together are exactly the topics that the foundation staff and board needs to know more about also. So we've become co-learners and co-creators of learning.

MS. SHARP: But might not have known to pick?

MS. WILLIAMS: Of course not. Of course not.

MS. SHARP: What's another one?

MS. WILLIAMS: I'm going to go back to when I was a grantseeker. Before I came into philanthropy, I worked in a national nonprofit that was doing pioneering work in an emerging field, and we never could get any funding from this particular foundation, which instead of funding us, took our ideas over a period of a few years, kind of made them their own ideas, funded other organizations to do more research and advocacy, and never gave us any credit for the pioneering work we were doing in the field.

So I think that is an example of when the relationship does not work.

MS. SHARP: It almost becomes abusive. Thank you.

Elan, what would you throw into this?

MR. GARONZIK: Well, you know, the idea of kind of the good grant and the bad grant. When I was thinking about this, after our phone call a couple of weeks ago, the Mott Foundation works in the international community foundation development throughout Western Europe, South Africa, Central and Eastern Europe, Canada, Mexico, and elsewhere in the world, and there was a need in the field for emerging community foundations to come into America, interact with their peers, and for the emerging community foundations to meet each other and do some peer to peer exchange and some sharing of experience. We were at a point where we knew we had a kind of critical mass of organizations that needed to do this kind of visit, and it was all around the Council on Foundations. There was a focus on the Council on Foundations fall community foundation conference, that this year took place in Vancouver. So there was a partnership in the planning between Mott and the Council on Foundations, and the Council of Michigan Foundations, to host a group of around 15 emerging community foundations on site visits around America, then going to that meeting, and another thirty who got travel scholarships to go to the conference and to attend it.

When I look back—and it was thought of as a successful endeavor in the last couple of weeks for the community foundations. A lot of them came up to me and said thank you, thank you, thank you, and I said, well, don't thank me, thank Bill White, or thank the council.

I mean, it was an area where we had some ideas and we identified a need. It was a great partnership between the three primary organizations in the concept and the planning. There was an enormous amount of communication back and forth via e-mail. 

I remember a conference call. I was driving down to my home, doing it on the car, everybody was worrying whether I was going—there was a lot of communication, there was a lot of trust on who would be selected for the fellows, what would be selected for the right site visits.

So I think of those words of communication, trust, partnership. Very little paper, I should say. There was a lot of information flying back and forth to get the right group of people to this meeting. The bad experience, when you asked us to kind of think about that, I had several, and then I thought the one that for the Mott Foundation, just rings in my mind, is when we pour—for this room, this will sound a little strange—far too much money into one organization, and do them, in some cases, a disservice.

I'm not saying this is a frequent experience in the Mott Foundation, but where they do not diversify their funding base as strongly as they could, become just a little too dependent on one grantmaker.

MS. SHARP: Great. Thank you.

Mike, and then we're going to go out to everybody else here. 

A couple things that, for you, are illustrative of the relationship when it works really well, and something that didn't work so well.

MR. TENBUSCH: I have an ideal grantseeking process. I had pushed paper for the first three years—the first three years, real hard, we were in like the mini grant cycle, we couldn't break out of it, 25 here, 5 thousand there. In December of '99, we received our largest grant to date of $40,000. Well, during the months leading up to that, a woman came into our office every month and a half or so, and each time she'd bring gifts, one time some hand-made mittens, another time some donuts, and each time she would just ask us about our family, she'd ask us about what we do, and she was quite vague about who she was. She never really explained it that well, other than that she was thinking about taking a job at a new division of GM which was called EGM, the Electronic Division of GM.

Before we knew it, about four or five months had gone by, we'd seen her every six weeks or so, and she calls my partner, Dan, he's the co-founder of Think Detroit with me. She said what are you doing this Thursday at 5:00 o'clock. He said I'm going out of town, I have to go to California on a business trip. She said cancel your plane reservations, we need a three-year $3 million proposal, three pages, in our office tomorrow morning.

So Dan gets a hold of me at home. I mean, he has to drive to my home to get me because we didn't have cell phones at this point. We put the proposal in. A few months later we get the $3 million. But the next week, they bought us cell phones, so that we could have cell phones.

[Laughter]

MR. TENBUSCH: Which I realized with $3 million, they also have expectations on frequent communication.

[Laughter]

MR. TENBUSCH: I mean, we literally have meals together, probably once every week or two weeks. As a matter of fact, today, at 2:00, they'll be announcing this huge initiative, a website which will shift the rights to patents and all of the proceeds will go to Think Detroit. This could be a multi-million dollars, you know, gain for us. It could be some long-term funding for us.

So that's ideal for us, obviously. I would say as an example of what I think doesn't work well with foundations is, after a year, we went back that organization that had given us $40,000, I bumped into somebody, and I said, oh, you know, that really worked out well, what we do with the 40,000, we have a lot of new ideas, we'd like to meet with you, let's have breakfast or lunch soon so we can talk about what we can do together. I mean, I'm approaching this in terms of a partnership, and she just looked at me and said, oh, no, there's no way we could eat together, there's a rule against that in our foundation. We can't do that.

[Laughter]

MS. SHARP: Thank you. Short examples, and one foundation doth not the sector make. But nevertheless, there are some threads in here. Long term, win-win relationships. Co-learning between the foundations and the communities. Less paper. More meals. More cell phones.

[Laughter]

MS. SHARP: That's the beginning of a story. Sound right? What's missing? I'd like to get—I want to ask from those of you in the audience, put some more things on to this list of what is it that characterizes the relationship between a foundation and its nonprofit partners when it works the best?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: A few years ago, five years ago, I was asked by Jimmy Carter to put together a television campaign for an international U.N. conference but there wasn't any money involved. But he said he would help, and the way he helped was he went to Ted Turner and asked Ted Turner if he would give us free advertising time, and Ted said sure, I've got plenty of it.

We took that to two of the largest national foundations, and the process of just getting to them, it took a while. In the meantime, I talked to a very small foundation out in California. They gave me $5000, which was just enough to pay for a pilot and some airplane tickets, and we took that to the two national foundations.

We said, well, Jimmy Carter would like to do this and Ted Turner would like to do this, and all you have to do to get your name on it is to give us some money. That led to a half a million dollars without about, oh, six weeks, two Emmy nominations, an Emmy, and four Tellys, and they were delighted to go to those Emmy ceremonies. So that's a good relationship.

MS. SHARP: Thank you. Who else wants to put something into this equation? Jane.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Another example of a good one. A foundation in North Carolina was getting ready to change its priorities and had been working for many years with a number of organizations in North Carolina, and rather than just come out with exciting priorities and publish those, and drop the organizations, that foundation sat down with every organization and talked about what would be a good transition, knowing that the funding was going to go away for most of those organizations, and it recognized the importance for the nonprofits of planning ahead, and even though most were not overly dependent in terms of, you know, a large proportion of their budget, it was an important part, and it generally had been general operating support.

So it was, I think, a number of the nonprofits called them "goodbye kiss" grants, that they gave as sort of a transition away. But they didn't just dictate either how those were going to be done. They talked with each organization about a plan for transitioning out, and they varied, by organization, but it was really mutually respectful.

MS. SHARP: That's a wonderful example. Can you just say, kind of one more sentence, what was the outcome? I mean was the foundation respected for doing that? What was the "buzz on the street," so to speak?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: The "buzz on the street" was the first group that had their meeting with this foundation, everybody else called to say, What did they really do? You know, how fast did they drop you? How bad is it? Actually, a couple were in our office meeting, and they'd already met, so as they walked out we were saying, What'd they do? What'd they do? But the "buzz" was that this was very unusual, the way they did it, and that it was really a model for respecting the relationship and giving even the departure the same level of thought that the coming together of the two partners had had.

MS. SHARP: Over here.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Our board chair, and a person who turned out to be a program officer for a major foundation happened to take an airplane trip to Ireland, and strike up a very, very spontaneous conversation. As a result of that conversation, we've enjoyed a 20-year relationship with this foundation, where they have funded us more than $15 million, and it was very, very gratifying to hear the president of that foundation thank us for helping them think through some very important and innovative ideas.

MS. SHARP: Let's go over here.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, I don't have the outcome of the story yet but I think it's a great beginning, and I'm sure we are all anxious to find out the end result. But our president was speaking on a panel and was heard by the president of a very large foundation in the Midwest, and we were invited to come and put in a proposal, and when we did, we were told it wasn't big enough. That we weren't thinking big enough, we needed to think bigger, both in the amount of money and the bigger picture.

So we're waiting with our fingers crossed, and a lot of other things crossed, to see what happens with that. But I think if you're lucky, if you have a CEO or president or board chair that gets out there, that you can put out there, and that is effective when they're out there, and they're heard, I think that's a really good way of getting foundations to come to you.

MS. SHARP: Thank you. One more over here.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi. I'm Richard Wyzanski with the Student Conservation Association. I have two comments. One was your question about what other characteristics, and from my own personal experience as a grantseeker, I think that over a period of at least a decade, I learned that the art of grantseeking is to understand partnerships and relationships with funders, and to make sure that in one's own consciousness, there is not an inimical relationship, that the playing field is level between the grantseeker and the funder.

An example of a good story for our organization was we had a very active program running in the Bay area, and funders in the Bay area, several years ago, and they still are this way, were very rigorous about quantification and measurable outcomes. So I was hearing from the funders that I was visiting, you've got a great program but you've got to do some documentation. You've got to show us numbers, and results, and outcomes. I went back to our management team and said if we're going to continue receiving funding, we've got to do something about evaluation within our own organization. So to make a long story short, we decided that we would do something about evaluation.

We found another foundation to fund a major evaluation of this national program and, in essence, that evaluation has helped us to come up with feedback loops and measurements that have vastly improved the program.

So it was taking the cue from the foundations, which led to program improvement.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Marcia, looking at the makeup of the room, from funders to nonprofits, I think that Elan and Gayle would probably advocate for quitting while we're ahead, because we all love each other here.

[Laughter]

MS. SHARP: Funders are calling up and saying I want to give you $3 million, I want to give you more than you asked for. We're meeting people on airplanes and it's turning into money.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Quit while we're ahead.

MS. SHARP: Yeah; let's go home! But probably there is—and I don't want to turn this into a gripe session, but I do think we need to get to what are the hard parts before we get to some solutions, and it looks to me like I have a couple hard parts in the front row here.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay. We're done with success stories here. I'm just teasing.

Mary Day with National Campfire USA, and my question is one primarily for our two grantmakers, but others who have experiences that would illuminate this. I think, because we are all so serious about building relationships, and take that to heart, when the program officers change at a foundation, and a relationship has been extended for a number of months, and it's been very good, and it's in that early stage of getting to know one another, help us with some ideas for what we can do in inquiring, appropriately, when that change is shared with us and we don't know quite what to do next, and then from your perspective, when program officers do change, how do you manage that within your own infrastructure? 

Because you, too, are just as sensitive to those relationships, I'm sure, with the organizations.

MS. SHARP: Can we make a little list here of things to address, rather than having them do it right now? So one is program officer transition.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi. My name's Kim Smith-Colefield from the Boston area. I'm CEO of an organization that's fairly large, and has multiple funding sources. We've had a couple of funders or foundations that have been in the wings or in relationships with the organization for a while, not necessarily having given money, but have a good rapport with the organization, and the organization is going through changes.

I have just come on board, a year now, and it's been an effort for the senior staff to continue to work with funders, to have them understand that life happens, and that there's no, not necessarily negativity attached to the changes, and that we still manage to have wonderful programs.

I say all this to say that what do you suggest in terms of communicating to funders, to those who you've had a great relationship with, that were not dying, were not, you know, all of a sudden collapsing, and no good anymore, and therefore you disinvest? But, really, we need to work together, and I say this, actually, to the staff as well, internally. We need to all maintain our investment and believe that these changes are not necessarily for the bad.

MS. SHARP: That's the flip side of Jane's point, I think, is when the disinvestment is perceived that way and becomes really disruptive. Let's get a couple of others. We'll go here and then back there.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm in higher education, I'm from Union College in Schenectady, New York, and I'm the grants officer. I really deal with foundations that fund higher education. Many of the larger foundations that fund higher education are those that do not accept proposals. You have to be invited to submit a proposal, and that's fine because we, generally speaking, because we, you know, go meet with the program officer, blah, blah, blah.

However, there are really too many, in my opinion, foundations, where the program officer basically says, or the executive director basically says I have very little clout with my board. It's really the board that makes the decisions, and therefore, go back to your college and figure out what kind of connections you have to people on my board, because that's the only way, really, your proposal is going to get a serious hearing. 

I find that very difficult, because as it happens, our board doesn't have enough connections. So my question is how can we educate some of these foundations to, you know, wrest some of the power from their board with respect to making decisions on proposals?

MS. SHARP: A great issue; a difficult issue. Okay. Here, and then we're going to go, one more back there.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have a question that I'm not sure has an answer but I've been trying to find out for six years now. If you look at all these success stories that we heard before, one thing they have in common is that many of them seem to be accidental. Somebody meets on a flight, somebody walks in, et cetera.

If you look at most of the sectors in this country, anything from publishing, fashion, sports, education, all these sectors seem to have developed very good funnels for finding talent, scouting for good ideas.

In fact many of these sectors live in constant fear that they'll miss the next good idea. You know, nobody wants to miss the next great pitcher, the next great novel, the next great technological idea. So if you write a great novel, if you're a great pitcher, if you've a great student, and you're persistent, there's a very good chance you'll make it into school, get your novel published, et cetera.

In the foundation world, I guess, and I was trying to think about this again for a long time, the one thing all of these people have in common is that they make money out of their ideas. In the foundation world, there seems to be a missing element of greed. Basically, there's no— program officers don't get rich by finding a great idea. So what's the incentive to go out into the world, find those great ideas, compete for them, and have a systematic way—and make sure that the people—you know, in the venture capital industry in California, the people who open the mail are literally Stanford MBAs. All of them. They're the first person who sees your letter and decides to throw it away or not.

I'm not sure that the people in every foundation who open the mail are the smartest people at the foundation, and so how do we get to a situation where there's an eagerness to find a great idea, and the great ideas don't get lost in frustration until you fly to Ireland and meet someone, and suddenly you get funding.

MS. SHARP: A good point. The incentive for finding and moving with ideas.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm Lorraine Zamora. I'm VP for Resource Development at the American Foundation for the Blind. Probably among my most poising experiences has been developing corporate relationships. I think my CEO would agree with me. He's in this room. I hope he agrees with me. He seems to have a lot of fun when it works. This is not you, I know, but I'm finding that it still happens much too often for me, and that is, most of the successes we have had has come as a result of knowing a higher-level person at the corporate foundation or private foundation.

Without a key contact to a very high-level person, we don't have the success that I would like. We make calls and try to get appointments, and, frankly, they're not answered, and after making three or four phone calls, we then write a letter saying we've called three or four times, we haven't heard anything, what should we do? You know, please reach us.

The letters aren't answered either. Now it's not all the time but it happens often enough that I'm really concerned about it, and want to get our mission across to a lot of the prospects that don't know about us yet.

So I keep feeling I'm doing something wrong because this shouldn't be happening, and I'd appreciate hearing whatever you have to say to help.

MS. SHARP: Great; thank you. It's a really interesting list of issues here. I'm going to go back to the lucky victims in the middle of the room for a minute. Program officers change and the relationships are disrupted. An organization moves through a funding cycle and is disinvested and allowed to feel bad about it.

The connection between the program officers and the board is tough for lots of people to manage, including the program officers, sometimes.

This whole question of incentives within foundations and the culture that recognizes and supports innovation. This issue of relationships.

You all mentioned it as a positive end. It's really important to have enduring relationships, and build relationships across, but there is a flip side, which our last speaker just brought up. To what extent is it who you know, and is it a game therefore of people who know each other? Particularly Elan and Gayle, and then we'll ask some other funders, what are your thoughts about this?

MS. WILLIAMS: I was intrigued with questions about the board and board staff and grantseeker relationships, and I agree with your identification of a problem—I think it was yours—but I disagree with the solution that you propose, of resting more decision-making power about grants from the board to the staff.

I think that's not a good solution. I would argue that a more helpful solution for the entire sector is to have who is on the foundation boards look very different than the way most foundation boards look right now, and if the people who are on the foundation boards look more like the rest of the country, and the people in the organizations and communities that we're funding, then that changes how we think about what we're doing inside the foundation and how we do it.

It also changes who you have relationships with, because I know at the Babcock Foundation, we've got, you know, a couple of people on our board who may fly to Ireland once in a lifetime. We have other people who go every year. You know, we have a couple people on our board who may go once in a lifetime, and so they're not going to be out there meeting people who are flying to Ireland, but they're working in the black belt of Alabama, and they're going to meet people who are doing community work in the black belt of Alabama, and that's who they bring to the foundation.

So by diversifying boards or foundations, and keeping the relationships about decision making, you know, even, kind of distributed between the strong staff and the strong board, with diverse staff, diverse board, then have tentacles out in lots of different places and deeply into communities with people who are not going to get on airplanes and fly to Ireland.

MS. SHARP: Elan.

MR. GARONZIK: I want to say something that Gayle said during our conference call a couple of days ago, and you said during that call, and I've thought about it a lot since, is that grantseekers would be advised to appreciate the fact that we're an organization just like everything else is an organization. I've thought about that a lot since you mentioned that. That we have bosses, we've got boards, we've got people we're responsible to, we've got payout requirements, and I use that as a response to touch a number of the questions that were raised over the last five minutes because that's a response to the question about program officer transition, especially when you're coming into a large foundation like Mott or Ford. Your first month is, a lot of it is orientation before you even sit down to a piece of paper.

Who are our board members? Who's the family members? What family members are on the board? Who are they married to? So that when you hear the name—oh, yes! It's like working in a large law firm or working in—and I use it also for your question of when an organization has aspirations and goals, and our goal is not profit-oriented, but our goal is a service towards the program areas that the board has approved, then the objectives that the board has approved and Ford, like Rockefeller, does not send grants to the trustees, directly. The Ford Foundation has the president designated as the person who can make the grants. So Susan Beresford, in fact, awards the grants, will go to the trustees, again, for sort of program direction, and in some cases, for very large initiatives or particularly large endowment grants.

So in the experience of Ford, I would say it really is at the program level staff, whether it's a program officer or a director of the unit, where much of the decision making is made in that regard. But having said that, the point I would underscore is, going back to Gayle's point about the importance of the diversity of boards, Ford is unusual in this regard. 

Most boards at foundations do in fact have a great deal to say about grantmaking and I think the concern about who is on the board is a very serious one, and important for the field. The additional point would be that, again, it's a very, very complex and diverse field. I think the biggest mistake that I made, as well, and I've done a lot more fundraising than grantmaking, and, actually, a lot more unsuccessful fundraising raising than successful, was that I saw the field as being monolithic, and it's certainly not.

MS. SHARP: Ben.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm Ben Shute. I'm a program officer, among other things, at the Rockefeller Bros. Fund, but I will 'fess up, I'm also a trustee of the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund. I also worked in operating nonprofits for 20 years before I came to the RBF.

I'm not sure that the discussion about board and program staff is exactly the right discussion. I still, after 40 years in the nonprofit and foundation world, haven't figured out where the power really lies. When I was in an operating nonprofit, I was convinced it was at the board. I've now been on the board of a number of nonprofits. I don't feel terribly powerful. The RBF sends most grants to our board for approval.

I could probably count on the fingers of both hands, the number of those that were turned down by the board in the past 20 years. So to say that the board has all the power is clearly not entirely true. I think the notion of who manages the information that gets to the board suggests that program officers are more powerful than they say they are, maybe even than they think they are.

It's much easier to say to a prospective grantee, "Gee, our board has decided we're not gonna be in that field," rather than to say, "Hey, that's a crazy idea."

[Laughter]

AUDIENCE MEMBER: All I'm saying is I'm not sure, trying to figure out where the power is, and diversify that locus is really getting at the heard of how do I get a grant for my organization, or how do I, as a program officer with a limited amount of time. You know, people ask me how I'm doing and I say I'm overworked and overpaid, which is probably true. But there is only so much time. I worry about the emphasis on relationships, because, you know, I understand it, and I understand that fundraising is about relationships, and I understand that grantmaking is, at some level, about relationships. But I worry about the emphasis on personal relationships. Who do you know? I mean, I suppose you could say send your director of Development to Ireland once a week, and maybe on long plane trips things will happen.

MS. WILLIAMS: Yes. I'm going to suggest that I think you're "right on" about it's kind of a, not a productive, kind of either/or about board or staff within foundations, because what Joanne said is true. At the two foundations where I work, the staff has a fair amount of control over the information that flows to the board, but I have found it more productive, at least the way we work at the Babcock Foundation, to work on a strong board, strong staff model, and everybody acknowledges that, that's what the board wants and that's what they have set up, and that's the way we work.

I think the deeper issue is who is making the decisions in that collective group of board and staff in foundations, and is it a diverse group of people, representative of the constituency that you're attempting to work with? So I think the diversity issue is more a productive issue for us all to tackle in our institutions than the board stuff.

MS. SHARP: Diversity, and I assume by that you mean diversity of outlook, of experience, of philosophy, of age.

MS. WILLIAMS: Yes. Across the board.

MS. SHARP: Lots of comments wanting to be made. We haven't done much here. Let's go way back over here. Bridget, where are you with your mike?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I want to comment on power of disequilibrium. I think one of the issues is the professionalization in the nonprofit sector, and the comment that was made about the prince kissing Cinderella. That there needs to be more of a collegiality and a peer relationship amongst the nonprofit sector instead of kind of the "golden rule" folks. Those who have the gold make the rules. So I think that there's a real challenge, both for nonprofits who are grantseekers and foundations who are grantmakers, and their staff and boards and leadership to see the opportunities for the impact of the investment, and the kind of change that can be made, instead of this kind of beggar mentality that many of us feel like we've been put in on occasion. I don't know if that resonates with anybody or not.

But I want to compliment the Babcock Foundation for really trying to be strategic in their grantmaking and by bringing in representatives of different types of nonprofit organizations that are interested in working with them in the region, to think strategically about what are the pieces, how do they fit together, how should funding be done, so that there really is more of a peer relationship than just this is a strategic priority of the foundation and we're going to push it on to the community.

I think that's a cultural shift and a mindset, that I think that we need to foster and develop as we raise the credibility of nonprofits as peers with foundations.

MS. SHARP: That's a great comment. Mike, when we were talking on the phone—a follow-on point here—you talked about the kind of relationship that you had with your corporate funder in terms of the peer feeling of it and the complementarity between your objectives and theirs. You might just say a word on that in response to that last point.

MR. TENBUSCH: I'm not sure exactly where you want me to go with that, Marcia, to tell you the truth.

MS. SHARP: Well, I don't want to make it confusing. The notion that early in your time, you found with—and I don't think it's necessarily because it was a corporate funder, but a funder that really approached the growth of the organization with you as something that you were both working on, and was willing to be there and deal with organizational challenges along the way, and not, as you say, the sort of arm's length, "We've got the money and you figure out how to do it" kind of approach.

MR. TENBUSCH: Yes. I think that one of the things that really going on here is that mutual respect, and I think it really starts from the leaders of the foundations. When you talk about the difference between the board and the program staff, I think both of those end up being a reflection of the chief executive officer and his or her three or four key people around it, and we just happened to be in a good situation with that company, where they had an awesome president of that small group.

So as we talk about this, it just really is striking me that the foundations that we work really well with are led by people of just the utmost integrity of ideas about diversity of thought, experience, those types of things.

So I don't know how you change that other than just hoping, praying that good people are running these organizations and are hiring, not only hiring good program staff but they end up choosing board members when they have a choice, it's not a family foundation, for example, that exude those same values that they share.

MR. HAMMOND: I think Joel Orash said last year, he said one of the concerns out of this fishbowl conversation at this conference was that everybody's looking for the one strategy that works, and if we all walk away from here thinking that the staff is unempowered, the board makes all the decisions, and we start sending proposals directly to them, and then they go put it on [inaudible] desk, and stuff like that, who knows what's going to happen? But what we can't assume is that that is the one strategy to pursue. We've got to look at the breadth and then we've got to look at the depth, and that what we have to become on the nonprofit side is a little bit more sophisticated.

Hey, a lot of people have written about KaBOOM!'s success and some people think it's luck. Who cares? You know, I would argue that it was a little bit a luck, it was a lot of intentional, it was a lot of strategy, and, sure, I met our board chair coming back from a plane. He happened to be the chief operating officer of a company, but what's happened after the fact of we made that connection, where the relationship stands, and it's what happens when people make relationships here.

It's what happens when people make relationships—hey, we'll take credit, the Packard Foundation. Did they just call us out of the clear blue? No. Three years ago, we sent them a news article, to four program officers, with no proposals.

Just all of a sudden, we wanted them to hear that we were going to San Francisco, having an office out there, building community. No proposal. It was just a news article.

So was that luck? Sure. You could view it as luck. Was it strategy/ I view it as very intentional.

MS. SHARP: We don't have a whole lot of time left, and there's a lot we wanted to do, and there won't be enough time to do it all, and that's probably one hallmark of a good conversation. But I want to ask, and again, I'll throw it first to the panel, but then everybody.

I mean, is this an important conversation? And I don't mean just is it a good conversation to have. But is there reason to believe that changes in patterns need to occur and that they can? What happens, that we keep gathering here?

MS. WILLIAMS: Well, I think it is important. I was here last year, and in just a year's time, the one thing that stands out for me is the strategic discussions that you talk about, Darell, with funders, between funders and organizations, and the better that we get at doing that, and the more give and take, which means furthering understanding of the differences in structures and people, and priorities, the better we will make good decisions for social change.

So I think it is an important discussion, provided we walk away understanding the multiplicity of strategies that are involved.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think the pattern is changing, is that the grantseekers are becoming more professional, and the power imbalance you talked about I think is beginning to equalize. In the example I gave earlier of my success, the reason we were successful with the Ford Foundation is because we brought in significant assets.

We brought in television time. We brought in the technical capability. We brought in the audience research. So it was a partnership. It wasn't begging. I see more and more nonprofit organizations coming to foundations with significant assets and saying this is the agenda that we both want to move, we know how to move it, rather than, Would you please help us out.

I hope I'm not fooling myself on that, but I think I'm seeing that developing.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think it would be nice—I think we've talked a lot about this issue for the last, you know, quite a number of years. It would be nice to see a little more experimentation, I think, with new practice, with foundations and grantmakers and grantseekers trying some different things, see what works.

The one bit of new activity I think in the last few years is more and more foundations surveying their grantees, which is great.

MS. SHARP: Serving meaning?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Surveying. You know, asking for feedback from their grantees, you know, in anonymous ways, and, you know, I think that's an interesting development. I don't know, the verdict may still be out on that, but, you know, why not more foundations experimenting with ombudsmen, having somebody who grantees could call in an anonymous way.

But, you know, let's try some different things. Let's maybe go beyond the just "talk stage" here and get a menu of options that we could try as a field, to move the conversation forward.

MS. SHARP: I asked our panelists to think, before this meeting, about one plausible idea for making things different and one radical idea for making things different. Let's throw those out on the table now, sort of a follow-up to Elan's point. Why don't we surface some things. Then we can discuss whether we want to try them.

Elan, why don't we start with you.

MR. GARONZIK: A plausible thing and a theme throughout the conversation today is the different models of philanthropy that are out there and how do you document them and make them transparent to the grantseeking public, the difference between approaching a Mott Foundation to a smaller family foundation, the difference to approaching a foundation. How do you find that out when a lot of the decision making power resides with program staff, or when it goes to the board?

I just offer that as an idea. I know we're kind of preoccupied inside the Mott Foundation because we use several different models of community foundations now, evolving, and feel that there's a need to make that transparent, back to the field.

MS. SHARP: Who should do that? We've got 55,000 foundations and lots of different categories. Who should make the different models clearer?

MR. GARONZIK: Well, likely, it's going to be—I'm looking at Judy, over here—but likely, it's going to be some kind of collaboration between the foundation center, and the council and the regs. It calls for more than just, you know, the classic four types of foundations that the IRS determines. It's coming out with a different type of taxonomy, of how grantmakers—would be the types, of kind of models, or operating methods of grantmakers.

MS. SHARP: Thank you. A show of hands here. For those of you who are grantseekers, how many of you feel you don't have enough information about these types, about the foundations you want to approach? Is that the issue?

[Show of hands]

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Information about them that's not on the web.

MS. SHARP: More than you have. We'll just leave it at that. Okay.

Michael, your idea.

MR. TENBUSCH: My idea would be, regionally, to get roundtables together every two months, breakfasts, centered around the idea of evaluations. I feel like there's been this ten-year pressure on evaluate, evaluate, evaluate, and I'm now asking grantmakers all the time, tell me what's working, what's not working, help us build—not build better programs—help us build a better city, help us improve conditions. I feel like there's all of this expertise out there from years and years of evaluation, that we could certainly benefit from in the way we serve people, but go in, mandatory, lock the doors, half hour before, half hour after, no one leaves, because that's when you can just do that small-time networking that can lead to big-time ideas.

MS. SHARP: Darell.

MR. HAMMOND: I would agree that we've been talking about this for a long time and I think we know what some of the trends are around people's attitudes. I think fundamentally I agree with what Elan said. We've got to fundamentally either shift behaviors or get off this conversation and stop griping with each other, and I think some strategies to do that is to—we are an industry where we copy each other, much like the corporate sector does, and we emulate best practices.

So let's do find the pilots that do work out there. My server board I guess would have been a third-party mediator or counseling. When couples are in trouble with their marriage they go to counseling, and maybe instead of looking at it when there's a problem, you should look at it up-front, to help set up the relationship where a third party can help negotiate between the grantmaker and the grantwanter, to determine—and it's a quid quo pro instead of just "I'm giving you the grant, this is what you gotta do."

MS. SHARP: Gayle.

MS. WILLIAMS: Well, I think this is a plausible idea but it's one that we have tried and not done a good job of at the Babcock Foundation. I think for both foundations and nonprofits to get better at stating outcomes and benchmarks, because our experience is that neither one of us are good at that in the kind of work that we fund, which is primarily social justice work, and the outcomes are very tough to define.

The benchmarks are tough, and we all need to have some points of mutual accountability in this relationship, that we both agree to, and we've tried to help to develop that capacity within the foundation and with grantees, and we've done a very bad job of it because it's so darn hard.

But I am convinced that when nonprofits are better at entering into the discussion with foundations, with a firm sense of what they're going to hold themselves accountable for achieving, then that helps a lot to equalize the power imbalance, right there.

I think the power imbalance is somewhat about money but it's also about a lot of things in addition to money, and one of the things that might help that imbalance is for nonprofits to come to foundations saying this is what our vision is, this is what we hold ourselves accountable for achieving, and we can negotiate with you from that standpoint. We're not going to negotiate with you from your standpoint. We're going to negotiate from our standpoint.

MS. SHARP: Great. Are there a couple of other ideas that are different from what has been talked about, that anybody would like to put on the table here?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Just a couple of thoughts, and as I begin to celebrate my 30th year of grantseeking next year. So this is just things that have bubbled up over the years, I need to get off my chest, I guess. I think the thing that we could do, those of us who have been around a little longer, is begin to think of ourselves more in a brokering role. That there is a role to be played there, those of us who have been at the game for a long time, both from the foundation side and from the nonprofit side.

Not mentoring, not training or anything else, but simply brokering between the grantseekers and the grantmakers. I think there's a role there.

I also think this is all about organizational culture. If we haven't learned anything else from our experience with the Babcock Foundation over the last five or six years, it is essentially organizational culture issues, and I really don't know how we change that from a nonprofit side, except to say this is my radical solution.

You know, there were foundations—there seem to be less foundations today that are open to these types of discussions than there were, say, ten or fifteen years ago. You know, I know foundations, and I won't call any names, where you could go in the door to have discussions, ten or fifteen years ago, and you can't even get a live person on a phone today.

Those are issues that trouble me. I think the only solution is for us to quit responding to RFPs and don't send them any doggone proposals!

[Laughter]

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Because their reply is to give away money and if you quit responding to their RFPs, then their organizational culture will have to change. So thank you.

[Laughter]

MS. SHARP: We've got time for one or two more and then I want to ask you all a really important last question. So we're going to go here and then here.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi. My name is Serena Wilcox. I'm with the Mossi Heritage Preservation Foundation. I'm an emerging leader. As a grantseeker, this is one suggestion that I think would help if the grantmakers may take into consideration, is when grantseekers apply for grants, I know a lot of times, when you review the grants you think, okay, are they really going to do this?

Maybe on your website, if you would put some trends that you see, that you don't like with projects, and some trends that you see that you do like as far as reporting of project management and evaluation of the programs that you fund, would help us when we go to your website to look for information, to see, okay, this is some trends that don't work, don't do this, and these are some things that have worked for other organizations, or some things that we may want to follow suit with.

MS. SHARP: Great; thank you. Here, and then over here.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm Carol Spangler and I'm with the Enterprise Foundation, and this may be—I'm not sure if it's radical or not, but I love the idea of brokering, and I think one of the things that I've been thinking about is the foundations that we work with also have access to corporate relationships that we may not have, and it may be conflict of interest, I'm not sure, but I think it would be a wonderful opportunity for the foundations to enter in with us, to kind of expand the base of who provides support to the philanthropic sector.

It's particularly exciting to me. I was reading John Gardner's last, the last speech he gave—I don't know when it was but it was recently—and he said I look around and I realize all the people who aren't involved in this important work, all of these important works that we're doing," and he said we need to be bringing them up and bringing them with us.

It feels like that is a shared responsibility of the foundation world as well as the nonprofit world. So I challenge you to, for all of us, to work on that, on bringing more support into this world.

MS. SHARP: Hillary.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hilary Pennington, Jobs for the Future and IS board member. Two concrete things. A group of program officers should write something like book agents do, award-winning book proposal, award-winning grant proposals that makes more concrete your own theory of change, the way you write up a proposal for your board. There's an internal set of methods and logic you use that we don't understand, and it would be great to have that be accessible and more transparent to us.

Second, to try to think about the issue with asset building for, not just for low-income populations but for nonprofit organizations, and maybe there is a series of experiments that could happen, that would have some incentive fund, if an organization reduced its operating expenses, in a not traditional, like an endowment, but really starting to come to terms with this long-term issue of sustainability and helping their be ways for foundation to build up a small group of assets that would let them invest in their own capacity, innovate when they needed to, not wait to have to convince someone else to fund an idea, and I think that also gets to the issue of transitions from long-term, longstanding relationships. So two ideas.

MS. SHARP: Great; thank you.

Clearly, this has been a tip-of-the-iceberg conversation and frustrating in that sense because there is so much that should come up, and you all have been wonderful about making sure that it does.

My understanding is that IS is pretty interested in this issue, and the last thing I'd like to ask you to do—could they put it on their evaluation sheet?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Sure.

MS. SHARP: Okay. I'd like you to write on your evaluation sheet, if you could, and maybe we could take a couple ideas, and then we need to thank the panelists.

I want to know what you think—we had Candor and Cooperation I last year. We have Candor and Cooperation II today. What could this wonderful organization that represents the grantseekers and the grantmakers, and that really is a forum for the kind of issue you talked about, about drawing more resources and more people into this conversation. What could IS do to keep this conversation moving, and not just keep it repeating so we do it next year, but to really come up with what some of what Elan talked about. What are the things, who needs to be in the room for these conversation, where should they happen, and what are some things we could really work on, not just talk about?

So if you have an idea for how IS could move this, we would love to see it.

I want to ask each panelist for a 30-second parting shot, if they want to make it, and then I want to thank them. 

Darell.

MR. HAMMOND: You know, I got to tell you it's Groundhog Day. This is the same conversation, it was the same discussion, it was the same ideas as we had last year, and—

MS. SHARP: Now what does that mean—

MR. HAMMOND: If we have candor and cooperation again next year, you know, it might be the same thing. We talked about, you know, payout, we talked about the relationship, we talked about power, and balance of power, and all these, board members versus staff. If you were in the room last year, it was the same conversation. Joe Oreson and folks. I think that you're right. What IS needs to do is move it beyond. What does happen, where does the "rubber meet the road?" and start sharing those ideas and best practices, so that we could move from talk and move towards action.

MS. SHARP: Great. Okay. I'm going to let our panel talk first, and then, if we have time for a couple comments, we'll go out again. You're a newcomer to this but do you have any ideas on how—

MR. TENBUSCH: Yeah; a couple things. I don't want to be too hard on ourselves. I almost see it like—in Detroit, we have the three auto companies and then all the auto part suppliers. Kind of the same analogy. We all want to put the best car on the road. I want all foundations and nonprofits not to see the car as the program, who has the best program, but to see the car as social change, how to create the best social change, and I think that's what we should be talking about.

MS. SHARP: Great; thank you.

Elan?

MR. GARONZIK: Well, this makes me reflect on the history of the Filer Commission, and Jim is here in this audience, and I just have—and Independent Sector is actually a child of the Filer Commission, to a certain extent, and the entire commission was focusing on the role of philanthropy, public need, and in the back of my mind—I mean, I know Pablo Eisenberg has called for a new Filer Commission, and Brian O'Connell has brought that up. I just think it's something that needs to be—that issue needs to be in the public debate, particularly in view of the light of how much new philanthropy and new philanthropists there are in the country in the last five to ten years.

MS. SHARP: So you're an advocate for a large-scale conversation. Yes? No? Okay.

MR. TENBUSCH: It's not necessarily my boss's position.

[Laughter]

MS. WILLIAMS: You know, reflecting on this conversation, and I've been in philanthropy, now, for about 15 years. I hate to admit I've been in that long, but I have, and, you know, it's not a different conversation than it was 15 years ago, and I try to be both realistic and as you said, you know, totally unrealistic about implausible ideas. But I think it is partly just in the nature of the game that we're all in together, that there's going to be—and I think it's good that there is enormous diversity among nonprofits, and enormous diversity among philanthropies, and anywhere you get that amount of difference, you're going to have the kinds of issues that I heard talked about 15 years ago, that you talked about last year, this year, and we're going to be talking about it five years from now.

I don't see that as all bad. You know, I think it's a sign of health and vitality, that all foundations are not the same, that all nonprofits are not the same, and I want to celebrate the enormous creativity and energy that's in the broader nonprofit field that we're all in together, and anywhere you get that amount of creativity, commitment and passion, you're going to have people who come at life and reality in very different ways, and I think that's good.

So I wouldn't try to solve everything.

MS. SHARP: That's fabulous. Let us end with creativity and celebration, and the notion that—I'm not going to give up quite so easily, Gayle. I think, on the one hand, this is a conversation that is going to go on the same forever. On the other hand, I think there are new ideas and it is important to germinate them, and push them and try them, and come up with the best of them, and it's really important to have conversations like this where a lot of people get to talk, and thank you all for making this a terrific session.