Public Administration Commons^™

Lindblom County: Philanthropic Insufficiency, Amateurism And Paternalism, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

In this fictionalized case study, a group of friends from graduate school compose a community elite with responsibility for human services decision-making in rural Lindblom County. They must deal with issues of insufficient resources, amateurism among other community officials, and challenges posed by opposing and emergent groups of aspiring community leaders. Discussion questions and questions of strategy and calculation are posed for further examination of the issues raised.

Sustainable Development Goals: Exploring A Foundation’S Contribution Through Text Analysis, Filippo Candela, Marco Demarie, Paolo Mulassano

The Foundation Review

Compagnia di San Paolo, an Italian grantmaking foundation, conducted a text analysis using a set of keywords extracted from grantees’ project descriptions to measure how successfully its work aligned with the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and to identify interrelationships among the goals themselves.

This article describes the foundation’s research methods and shares the results of its analysis, which found significant contributions to the goals in a number of areas funded by the Compagnia and less alignment in others. The analysis is particularly noteworthy in its identification of an unintentional pattern of convergence between the foundation’s activities and the …

Black Women Nonprofit Executives’ Use Of Sustainable Funding Strategies In Marginalized Communities, Asakuia Ayoka Wiles-Abel

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Lack of funding resources, inadequate staffing, poor capacity building, and difficulties in attracting individual donors are problems for small Black-led nonprofit organizations. Black women lead a majority of nonprofits in low socioeconomic and under resourced neighborhoods and have deep connections with and cultural awareness of community needs. However, little is known about how Black women leaders of nonprofits employ effective strategies to overcome funding and staff capacity challenges. The purpose of this study, which had resource dependency theory as its foundation, was to examine Black women nonprofit executives’ perceptions of obstacles in securing organizational funding and strategies for overcoming them. …

Making Health Equity Real: Implementing A Commitment To Engage The Community Through Fellowships, Saphira M. Baker, Mark D. Constantine

The Foundation Review

Between 2016 and 2019, Richmond Memorial Health Foundation jumpstarted its transformation from a health legacy foundation committed to increasing access to health care to one promoting regional health equity through a racial and ethnic lens. A central component of this new focus was the trustees’ decision to invite community members to inform and advance the health equity strategy through two distinct community fellowship programs — the Equity + Health Fellowships. These programs ultimately provided the foundation with a new language, benchmarks, and structure for welcoming broader community engagement.

This article highlights the outcomes of both programs, how the experience with …

Growth Of Community-Based Giving Days In The United States: The Landscape And Effects, Catherine Humphries Brown, Abhishek Bhati

The Foundation Review

Over the past decade, local and regional community foundations across the United States have adopted “giving days” as a means to build awareness, bolster community pride, and raise money for local nonprofit organizations. Despite the increasing prevalence of giving days, little scholarly research has empirically examined this phenomenon and its impact, particularly at the local and regional levels.

To address these gaps, this article shares the findings of a study that examined similarities and differences across communities’ giving days and sought to evaluate the extent to which those days led to more giving at the community level.

While the study …

Leveraging Effective Consulting To Advance Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion In Philanthropy, Stephanie Clohesy, Jara Dean-Coffey, Lisa Mcgill

The Foundation Review

In 2018, the National Network of Consultants to Grantmakers launched an initiative to sharpen the impact of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work in grantmaking by increasing the capacity of consultants and grantmakers engaged in these efforts. Network researchers used a systematic protocol to interview consultant members about their most effective partnerships with grantmakers. Case studies drawn from those interviews yielded valuable lessons for advancing DEI in philanthropy.

In sharing some of these lessons, this article advises consultants to be prepared to help grantmakers define or refine the meaning of DEI and understand where equity fits into their values and …

Publicness And The Identity Of Public Foundations, Alexandra Williamson, Belinda Luke

The Foundation Review

This article investigates understandings of publicness in the context of public foundations in Australia by examining how perceptions of publicness inform and influence the practice and conduct of those grantmaking foundations. As part of a broader study on perceptions of accountability and identity in Australian foundations, the article provides empirical evidence from interviews with managers and trustees from a diverse group of public foundations suggesting that understandings and applications of two dimensions of publicness were significant: donations, or public money; and grantmaking, or public benefit. Further elements of publicness were expressed around foundations’ visibility and the transparency of their operations. …

Strengthening Support For Grantees: Four Lessons For Foundations, Anna J. Bettis, Susan Pepin

The Foundation Review

As society becomes more interconnected, the problems nonprofits are tasked with addressing require systems work. It is imperative for funders to adapt not only to the challenges faced by the organizations they fund, but also to the dynamic social systems within which they aim to effect change. This requires new approaches that are responsive to community needs and address the known challenges in grantor-grantee relationships.

This article offers a new perspective on the role of private foundations and four key lessons for strengthening funder support. These learnings build upon existing research and were gleaned from a qualitative analysis of data …

Below The Waterline: Developing A Transformational Learning Collaborative For Foundation Program Officers, Annie Martinie, Jaime Love, Michael Kelly, Kirsten Dueck, Sarah Strunk

The Foundation Review

Learning from fellow grantmakers is imperative in today’s ever-changing world. In late 2016, four health legacy foundations partnered to launch the Health Legacy Collaborative Learning Circle, creating an opportunity to understand not just the participating foundations’ visible investments and programs, but also the underlying behaviors, structures, and mindsets that ultimately explain why certain results were or were not achieved.

This article describes the yearlong process of creating the collaborative, and presents a new learning framework — based on the iceberg metaphor — that can be used to create learning environments that test and expand assumptions about promising approaches to common …

Exploring, Examining, And Explaining How Participatory Governance Adds Value To Saudi Foundations’ Philanthropic Strategy, Afnan E. Koshak

Dissertations

Foundations’ flexibility, given their independence from fundraising imperatives, competition forces, and accountability pressures, enables them to invest in long-term, high-risk, multi-level experiments to deal with the increasingly complex societal problems. This flexibility, coupled with the growing role philanthropy plays in promoting social welfare across the world, is arguably what makes studies that focus on foundations’ philanthropic approaches of utmost importance.

There is a mounting interest among scholars in the governance of foundations, the systems and processes concerned with ensuring the overall strategic direction of organizations. Influenced by agency and stewardship theories, an increasing number of studies address such topics as …

Evaluators As Conduits And Supports For Foundation Learning, Clare Nolan, Meg Long, Debra Joy Perez

The Foundation Review

Evaluators play a critical role in supporting philanthropic learning, programming, and strategy, but evaluation and learning in philanthropy is often limited in ways that impede deeper resonance and impact.

Most philanthropic evaluation is focused on the needs of individual foundations, knowledge sharing with the broader field is limited, and foundations struggle to integrate evaluation and learning as a management tool. This article makes the case that evaluators and funders can do more to build the collective capacity of evaluators working in philanthropy in order to enhance their contributions to community change.

This article also examines the ways that evaluation in …

Cricket Island Foundation: A Case Study Of A Small Foundation’S Impact Assessment, Anna Pond, Seema Shah, Elizabeth Sak

The Foundation Review

In 2015, the Cricket Island Foundation conducted a multimethod assessment of its grantmaking portfolio to examine its impact and inform future decision-making and strategy. The foundation, which supports youth-led social change using a cohort-based model, focuses on emerging and medium-sized organizations and provides capacity-building supports to help organizations achieve greater organizational sustainability.

The assessment focused on two of the foundation's three cohorts and found positive trends in five key areas of desired impact: organizational capacity, youth leadership, nonprofit executive leadership, grantee collaboration and learning, and funder policy and practice. The assessment also identified areas for improvement to strengthen future impact, …

Family Foundation Development In China: Two Case Studies, Shuang Lu, Chien-Chung Huang

The Foundation Review

Amid the accumulation of private wealth in China, family foundations have begun to emerge in recent decades. Little research, however, has explored this nascent phenomenon. This article examines the development of two Chinese family foundations — the Lao Niu Foundation and the Lu Jiaxiang Foundation — using document analyses and semi-structured interviews with foundation leaders.

While detailed data on program effectiveness and efficiency is lacking because of underdeveloped methods of evaluation, it is evident that both foundations have generated positive impacts on social development despite an overall lack of support for the foundation sector from Chinese government policy.

The case …

Community Foundation-Led Giving Days: Understanding Donor Satisfaction And Philanthropic Patterns, Benjamin S. Bingle

The Foundation Review

This article examines Give Local America 2016, a giving day beset by a technology failure that created challenges for donors and community foundations throughout the United States, and explores the experiences of donors as giving day participants.

Philanthropic giving days have gained popularity as opportunities for community foundations to engage new donors, create excitement about organized philanthropy, and democratize charitable giving. This article, examining survey data collected after a giving day led by a community foundation in northern Illinois, provides unique insight into donor satisfaction levels, opinions, and giving patterns.

Data suggest that giving days are not crowding out donations …

Philanthropy: Evidence In Favor Of A Profession, Heather L. Carpenter

The Foundation Review

Philanthropic employees have been cautious in implying that they are pursuing a career in philanthropy. Karl Stauber (2010) presented an argument in support of such caution: that philanthropy failed to meet all seven standards posited by Burton J. Bledstein, that when met, define a profession.

This article presents a literature review and findings from a survey of 500 members of the Council on Foundations that offer evidence for the counterargument that philanthropic work requires specialized education and training to master a set of core competencies.

While this article does not argue for or against the question, determining whether philanthropy as …

Looking In The Mirror: Equity In Practice For Philanthropy, Ashlee Young, Jaime Love, Nancy Csuti, Christopher J. King

The Foundation Review

Philanthropy still needs to be reminded that there is no such thing as a post-racial America, and that systemic racism continues to underlie the problems foundation funding attempts to address. While many foundations have found it challenging to address equity in their grantmaking, they have found that process far more comfortable than addressing equity within their own organizations.

This article will describe the efforts of three foundations in various stages of seeing themselves through an equity lens: the Consumer Health Foundation, The Colorado Trust, and Interact for Health. This article will discuss why these foundations are on this journey, what …

Who Benefits From Giving Circles In The U.S. And The U.K.?, Angela M. Eikenberry

The Foundation Review

Giving circles have emerged around the world as an alternative to mainstream, bureaucratic philanthropy. This article examines the types of organizations that benefit from giving circles in the U.S. and the U.K., drawing on data from interviews, surveys, observations, and documentation collected in both countries.

The findings show that giving circles tend to fund certain types of organizations — often those that are small and locally based, startups and newer organizations that are reorganizing or transitioning, those that have a business orientation, and those that can engage members or show significant impact in relation to their size.

While some populations, …

Community Philanthropy In Russian Remote Areas, Julia Khodorova, Larisa Avrorina

The Foundation Review

Russia’s “back country” — remote, nonindustrial areas that are home to almost 40 percent of the population — was largely excluded from the changes brought about by perestroika. People who live in these areas, where NGOs are almost never present, are often unaware of the resources available to address local issues. These regions require new development models that focus on fostering community engagement, and the community foundation model has proven to be the most useful and adaptable.

This article is based on the results of research conducted by CAF Russia in 2016 on the development of community foundations in remote, …

Building Vietnamese Community Philanthropy: Understanding The Experiences And Expectations Of Donors To The Lin Center For Community Development, Dana Doan

The Foundation Review

Vietnam’s steady economic growth over the past two decades interacted with existing patterns of inequity, social exclusion, and geographic disparities to widen the gap between those who can and cannot obtain quality education, a stable income, and access to quality basic services. Meanwhile, after the World Bank classified Vietnam as a lower middle-income country in 2010, several international and bilateral donors announced plans to gradually decrease their development assistance.

It was under these circumstances that Vietnam’s first community foundation, the LIN Center for Community Development, was established in Ho Chi Minh City in 2009. Its mission is to build a …

A Primer On Grant Writing For Foundation Support For First-Time Grant Writers In Academic Libraries: Challenges And Opportunities, Peter L. Kraus

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

In a majority of academic disciplines, grant writing is a skill that is often self-taught or acquired informally by trial and error. Few academic disciplines have grant writing as standard part of their curriculum at the graduate level. In the past, grant writing has received little or no emphasis in traditional library education since library science faculty themselves have a poor record of pursuing external funding. Yet, grant writing is a critical skill for new and experienced librarians. For many librarians, the prospect and challenge of writing a grant can seem daunting; however, with institutional support and the support of …

From Altruism To Investment: Venture Philanthropy And Its Impact On Shared Governance At Liberal Arts Colleges, Joshua D. Merchant

Dissertations

Competition for philanthropic dollars has escalated in recent years, particularly in higher education. A new type of charitable giving – venture philanthropy – has emerged and is impacting both educational policy and practice. Venture philanthropy involves donors using business models, championed practices of venture capitalists, and decision making procedures to drive their philanthropy and ongoing engagement with organizations they support.

Venture philanthropy has the potential to improve the financial vitality of colleges and universities. However, it also poses significant questions to the academy as more colleges and universities engage with donors who embrace its tenets. The primary research question seeks …

Book Review: Sievers, B. R. (2010). Civil Society, Philanthropy, And The Fate Of The Commons, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

The selection of civil society institutions (which the author refers to as strands) around which the volume is woven is interesting because it contains several novel elements in a novel combination: civil society is said to consist of philanthropy, the common good, rule of law, nonprofit and voluntary institutions, individual rights, free expression and tolerance. This book is important reading for political philosophers, doctoral students and theorists interested in the connection of civil society and philanthropy. Yet it has a number of weaknesses that are enumerated in the review.

Charity, Philanthropy, Public Service Or Enterprise: What Are The Big Questions Of Nonprofit Management Today?, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

This essay takes a birds-eye view of the topic of nonprofit management, looking at what I see as the big issues of nonprofit management.

Philanthropy And 9/11: How Did We Do?, David R. Jones, David A. Campbell

Public Administration Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Community Foundations In West Virginia, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

This report is part of an ongoing investigation of the support of neighborhood associations by community foundations in three states – Michigan, New Mexico and West Virginia. The findings are primarily negative: There is no evidence that the 22 community foundations of West Virginia have provided support for the development or continuation of neighborhood associations in the state.

Philanthropic Partnerships: The Theory Of The Commons, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

In Anglo-American traditions, the concept of a commons has historically been most frequently attached to shared land in joint use by a village or community. The common theory of voluntary action presents organized collective action as consisting of shared purposes, shared resources and voluntary participation resulting in an evolving sense of mutuality, and moral order, consisting of shared norms of fairness and participation.