U.S. Foundations - The Mystery of Foundations
Posted by Dahna Goldstein on Mon, Jun 14, 2010 @ 11:00 AM
I was a guest lecturer the other night for a social entrepreneurship class at the University of the District of Columbia. Along with Hilary Cherner of Arabella Philanthropic Advisors, I talked about the role of foundations in the U.S., and about running a social enterprise dedicated to serving the needs of foundations and nonprofits.
Hilary started by asking the students, all of whom are interested in social entrepreneurship, many of whom are mid-career, if they knew what a foundation was. Only a few hands went up. I was a bit surprised, but I shouldn’t have been.
Foundations play a significant role in the U.S. According to the Foundation Center’s latest research, there are over 75,000 grantmaking foundations in the U.S., and they collectively awarded almost $43 billion in grants in 2009.
But the average American doesn’t really know what a foundation is or what it does. NPR listeners hear about foundations underwriting their favorite public radio programs, and many Americans have heard something about the Gates Foundation, and perhaps about Ford and some of the other big foundations.
Even among the most engaged American citizens, those who hold leadership, committee, or board-level positions with community organizations, more than half could not name a foundation when asked, according to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive for the Packard Foundation’s Philanthropy Awareness Initiative. Sixty percent of those polled considered themselves relatively uninformed about foundations, and only a handful (11%) could provide a specific example of the impact of a foundation on an issue they cared about.
The report about the survey, Philanthropy’s Awareness Deficit, quotes Joel Fleischman, author of The Foundation: A Great American Secret, citing a report conducted in 2003 by the Council on Foundations showing that only 11% of the general public could name a foundation. While the most engaged Americans clearly fared better, this does not bode well for the overall perception of foundations and what they do.
Not surprisingly, those who had direct experience with foundations (for example, if an organization with which they were involved received foundation grant funding) had both more knowledge of and more favorable views towards foundations.
These findings and others point to an ongoing need for greater transparency in the foundation world. The engaged Americans who knew of foundations and their impact knew more about community foundations than private foundations. Perhaps increased knowledge of foundations at large would increase involvement in and donations to community foundations in the short term, and to private foundations and philanthropy in general in the longer term.