Philanthropy Roundtable
17 General Operating versus Program Support
Lynn Thoman:
Good morning, everybody, and thank you for
coming to our panel.
Today we’re going to be talking about
general operating support versus restricted or program support.
Can everybody hear me?
Voices:
Yes.
Lynn Thoman:
Perfect.
Okay.
So, imagine that you’re an entrepreneur and
you’re starting a chain of restaurants, let’s say burger
restaurants, and you’re looking for funding, and you meet a
potential funder and he or she is very enthusiastic, and then he
says, “Well, I’ll support your cheeseburgers but not your
hamburgers.
sodas.
And I’ll support your juice drinks but not your
And I’ll give you funding for two years and you have to
spend X percent in year one, Y percent in year two.
And I love
your idea of opening another restaurant in Salt Lake City but
I’ll only fund you if you open it in this part of Salt Lake City
and not in that part of Salt Lake City.”
So, that’s what we’re
going to be talking about today which is general operating
support versus restricted or program funding.
And in fact, of the largest 1,000 foundations, 85 percent
of the funding goes to restricted or program support and only 15
percent into general operating support.
today, three foundation leaders.
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We have a great panel
I’m Lynn Thoman.
I’m going to be the moderator today.
I’m
an adjunct professor at Columbia University School of
International and Public Affairs.
I also co-chair a foundation
and serve on a variety of non-profit boards including Harvard
Medical School.
I’m going to ask each of our panelists to
introduce themselves.
Peter, would you like to go first?
Peter F. Bird Jr.:
Sure.
Happy to start.
I’m Pete Bird
and I am the president of the Frist Foundation in Nashville,
Tennessee.
Of the three foundations represented up here, we’re
the smallest.
But for a number of years, we’ve had a corpus
between about $100 million and $200 million volatile [sounds
like] and we’re right at about $300 million right now, and we
have a staff of two-and-a-half -- me, the office manager, and a
half-time bookkeeper.
And we have been around about 30 years
and we started out as part of Hospital Corporation of America as
a corporate foundation but there was an ownership change in the
mid ‘90s and we became an independent foundation.
And then
there was a sea change a few years later and we changed boards
and family members came on, family members of the founding
family, and so, five out of eight of our board members are
Frists and hence the Frist Foundation.
And we make about $10
million worth of grants a year, going to bump up soon because
our asset base has bumped up.
And a lot of what we do is based
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on strong personal relationships with non-profits in our
community, we are focused solely on Nashville.
Lynn Thoman:
Okay.
Peter F. Bird Jr.:
Wendy?
Lynn Thoman:
Wendy.
Wendy Garen:
I’m Wendy Garen, and I’m with the Ralph M.
Parsons Foundation in Los Angeles.
different.
We’re the same but
You’ve probably all heard the, “If you’ve seen one
foundation, you’ve seen one foundation.”
overlapping sets.
I think we’re sort of
Ralph Parsons was a civil engineer and he
built a worldwide engineering and construction firm.
Cities in
Saudi Arabia, Alaska, an oil pipeline, hardened missile silos.
When he was alive, his entire focus was on building the company.
After his death in the early ‘70s, there was an estate plan and
there was a distribution, and the foundation received what is
inelegantly called the residue of his personal estate.
The
residue was somewhere valued at $20 million to $40 million, not
a small amount but not enormous.
Over time those assets from
the ‘70s -- because it was the perfect time to have an
inheritance, our assets have grown to about $430 million, and we
distributed about that same amount of money.
Donn Weinberg:
Wendy Garen:
I want your investment manager.
We didn’t hit it out of the park but we
didn’t ever make any really serious errors.
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So, it’s pretty
gratifying.
It is a perpetual motion machine potentially at the
five percent payout.
We never paid the two percent excise tax,
so what that means is we always stretch a little bit more on our
grant-making.
We’re no longer affiliated to the company.
This
is a way for Ralph Parsons as an individual to be remembered in
perpetuity.
There were no family members, and so we evolved
very quickly into the independent stage.
The first story is a
little different because it usually works the opposite
direction.
Our distribution is about $20 million a year.
the grant-making has evolved.
1978.
Over time,
We started our grant-making in
I came to the foundation in 1986.
In the very beginning
years, about half of the grant-making was higher ed related and
the rest was really human services locally.
And with a locally
driven board, that really evolved over time.
And while we still do higher ed grant-making, the bulk of
the grant-making half of it is human services grant-making in
Los Angeles -- all the grant-making now today is in Los Angeles
County.
So, it’s place based but it’s a pretty big place.
Because of that, we really have a very high degree of
relationship with our grantees.
We think it’s very important to
be in the field, meeting grantees at their sites so that we can
really be involved in authentic dialogue.
The grant-making
focuses on human services, healthcare which is community clinics
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and emergency room, civic and cultural grant-making, which can
be helping museums to build a new wing, Disney Hall, and a lot
of it is arts education and then higher ed.
We’re not going to
talk about the kinds of grant-making because we’re holding that
for the conversation.
Oh, and we have nine staff.
about 250 grants a year.
Donn Weinberg:
We make
They’re all site visited.
Hi, everyone.
I’m Donn Weinberg, executive
vice president and trustee of the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg
Foundation.
We have two offices, one in Owings Mills, Maryland,
a suburb of Baltimore, and the other one in Honolulu, Hawaii.
The Hawaii office exists -- it always did exist, but it existed
because of the amount of real estate that we have in the state
of Hawaii.
That office primarily has people to manage the real
estate but there is one person there who handles grants.
Our
Owings Mills, I’ll call it Baltimore office, is mostly involved
with grants and non-Hawaiian real estate, and also our chief
investment officer and so forth is out at our Baltimore office.
Our mission is to make grants to charities that help people
on the lower end of the economic spectrum, below the median, and
we do that in a number of subject matter areas: the elderly -always attach the word “poor” at everything -- the poor elderly,
workforce development, people with disabilities, kids and
families, basic human needs, health, hunger, homelessness, and
general community support.
Some of these subject matter areas
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we do everywhere and some we do almost entirely in our hometowns
which are state of the Maryland, Northeast Pennsylvania near the
Scranton area, and Hawaii.
We make grants internationally too.
We have probably 25
percent of our grant-making is principally in Israel, former
Soviet Union, in that case mostly poor Jews because the
foundation is considered to be in some sense a Jewish
foundation.
In terms of our grant-making, our charter requires
that we give at least 25 percent of our grants to Jewish poor,
25 percent to non-Jewish poor, and as I like to joke, the other
50 percent, to the atheist poor.
But the way it turns out is it
ends up being about 50/50 between Jews and non-Jews.
And so, we
have about 45 people altogether in our foundation, about 17 in
the Hawaii office, the rest in the Baltimore office.
We have
about seven program directors that assist the trustees with
investigating grants and making recommendations.
very active.
Trustees are
We have our grant meetings now every other week.
Until recently, we were doing it every week where we have a
packet of grant recommendations as well as letters of inquiry to
determine whether or not to investigate further.
And just very quickly, we have our regular grant program.
We also have a grant program called the Maryland Small Grants
Program which applies also in Northeast Pennsylvania, and that’s
for grants that are grant requests where the request is for
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$50,000 or less per year for up to two years which can be
repeated when appropriate.
And we also have an employee-giving
program which very quickly is for all those employees, both in
Hawaii and in Maryland who are not ordinarily making grant
recommendations or not trustees, we have an annual program in
which all of our employees from the receptionist to various
clerical people make a grant recommendation which we invariably
approve of $20,000 for non-profit organizations, and in the case
of our Baltimore employees in Maryland, in Hawaii for Hawaii,
and it’s a terrific program.
So, that’s a good summary to start
with.
Lynn Thoman:
Okay.
Could we start by defining what do we
mean by general operating support?
Wendy Garen:
Well, you know, I’d like to start by saying
the Parsons Foundation has always been a responsive foundation.
What I mean by that is we don’t have RFP’s or initiatives.
We’re really trying to be listening closely to the non-profits
in the community there on the frontlines and letting them
articulate what they see as their needs, and then figuring out
where the Venn Diagram fit is.
So, really, from the very
beginning although we didn’t call it general operating, we were
making unrestricted grants.
But not all of it because the
grantees know they can come to us for their needs, so they might
come for capital, to build a building or renovate their property
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or to purchase equipment, those are clearly restrictive
purposes.
For our conversation today, we’re considering all of
that capital money, I think, to be program.
Lynn Thoman:
Restricted?
Wendy Garen:
Restricted.
We’ve always thought of programs
as expendable dollars as somewhat different than the hard
dollars of building buildings and the like, but again, for this
purpose.
And then unrestricted support which we become much
more comfortable calling unrestricted operating support,
particularly after 2008 when we saw really that cataclysmic
three months of our own assets plummeting by 30 percent and then
what that did to that same circumstance of really meltdown
crisis in the community and our grant-making changed pretty
significantly after the Great Depression.
Lynn Thoman:
Okay.
So, I’d like to poll the audience with
a couple of questions on general operating versus restricted
support.
You should all be holding clickers.
Okay.
So, what
percentage of your foundation grants are for general operating
support?
Everybody’s clicked?
Okay.
percent general operating support.
share are one to 24 percent.
So, five percent are 100
It looks like the lion’s
I’m going to ask the same
questions by the way at the end of the panel.
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And now the flip question, what percentage of your grants
are for program or restricted support?
We’re good?
Okay.
So,
it looks like people primarily give restricted support.
Wendy Garen:
So, you’re in the right room for this
conversation.
Lynn Thoman:
Exactly.
So, here is the key slide, are you
considering increasing or decreasing your general operating
support?
And we’re going to ask the same question at the end of
the panel, see if people have changed their minds.
No change.
Okay.
Are we good?
We’ll see how we do.
These are our three panelists -- Wendy, Donn, Peter.
I’d like to ask you all questions.
general operating support?
Donn Weinberg:
So,
Do your foundations provide
And why or why not?
Well, I’ll be happy to go first.
We do.
And I would say there’s one thing that took me a little by
surprise in terms of our definition of what we consider to be
restricted.
I understand it but I just want to say from the
Weinberg Foundation’s way of doing things internally, we’re a $2
billion foundation so we make grants of $100 million a year on
average.
We’re required by our charter to give half of our
grant money for capital grants.
So, when we ask ourselves the
question of general operating versus program, we’re looking at
the other 50 percent.
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Now, I can tell you that our stats are that according to
our data, which is not perfect but it’s good enough for our
discussion, 60 percent of our non-capital grants are general
operating or relatively unrestricted, and I say relatively -sometimes completely, sometimes pretty much so -- which means
overall that’s 30 percent if you follow base ten math.
So, of
all of our grants, about 30 percent are general operating.
We
make general operating grants and we make program grants, but
let me tell you why I think that there’s a great deal of
misunderstanding in this area of program grants.
There’s an organization out there, National Committee for
Responsive Philanthropy that has been pushing for foundations to
give more in unrestricted, general operating support.
This
isn’t about that organization but I think that it’s that
conversation that’s going on that has stimulated this sort of a
meeting.
And the reason I think it’s somewhat of an artificial
distinction is consider the program grant, you know, somebody
comes to you and says, “We run 10 programs.
operating grant.”
We’d like a general
And you look at your own guidelines and you
say, “Well, you know what, because of limited money or because
of our interest, we would like to support Program A but not the
others.
So, show me the budget for Program A.”
Well, Program A
truly takes up 10 percent of the general operating budget, then
the overhead should be reflected in the program grant.
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So, we
have to define our terms here because the argument is
organizations that are seeking our support need help for their
overhead.
Well, if they show you a proper program budget for,
let’s say, Program A which is one-tenth of their overall general
operating budget, then it should include 10 percent of the
overhead.
issue?
And if that’s the case, my question is, what’s the
You see what I’m saying?
Now, if someone, the rare donor, will say in terms of, “I
want to make a program grant, and I see your program budget
showing 10 percent of your overhead, I’m not going to pay that.
I’m not going to include that in what I consider.”
the complaint is.
That’s what
The complaint is when the donor is saying,
“Uh-uh, I’m only going to pay --,” but it’s crazy.
If any of
you are doing that, I don’t mean you’re crazy, but what I mean
is that how does one truly separate in this scenario the onetenth of the overhead from the program budget?
you can really do that in a meaningful way.
I don’t think
You know, if the
overhead includes a certain degree of oversight by the executive
director or it includes the accountants in doing the audit have
to audit that program among other things, I don’t see how you
could truly separate it.
So, I think that there is confusion
out there I think along with this organization, NCRP, but
there’s confusion out there as to what we talk about, what we
mean when we say a program support, a grant on a program budget.
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Wendy Garen:
You know, following along that line, not only
are we as a field often very restrictive about how the money
might be spent.
I have a colleague in Los Angeles who runs a
foundation, and if they give a vehicle for transportation to a
non-profit, they absolutely will not consider the driver, the
insurance, the gas and, you know, where is that suppose to come
from?
So, it’s on our end sometimes, we’re very, very narrow.
But it’s also sometimes on the end of the unsophisticated
grantee who is trying -- is not really in touch with their true
costs, what will it cost to really deliver the fully loaded
program outcomes to get impact?
that’s what we want.
Because at the end of the day,
We want to see excellence executed.
And it’s not just us, the funders, that don’t really see
the full cost, but we have grantees that are not -- they’re
giving us lean budgets because it’s what they think we want.
And what we saw after 2008 was a field of non-profits that are
undercapitalized.
And I’m hopeful that some of you in the room
are business people, that you run your own businesses and that
you know you need cash reserves and working capital to run a
good business.
And the non-profit finance fund has looked at
non-profits nationally and discovered that 75 percent of them
have less than 90 days of reserves, and more shockingly, 22
percent have a month of reserves.
So, what we see is a field of
non-profits that we invest in that are really fragile.
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They are
anxious.
It’s difficult for them to have adaptive capacity to
innovate, to respond to increased demand, to respond to changes
in the environment, because they’re worried about payroll.
They’re scrambling to stay open.
And I think it’s in that
context of very fragile partners that unrestricted support
becomes way more important.
really unrestricted.
When I say unrestricted, I mean
We’ve begun making grants sometimes on a
matching basis to help build reserves.
Lynn Thoman:
So, Wendy, when you say unrestricted, what it
means to you is that the organization can use it for anything?
They can pay their own salaries, they could build up their
capital, or they could use it to experiment to try something new
as opposed to a proven program, they could use it for anything?
Wendy Garen:
Clara Miller who used to run the Nonprofit
Finance Fund has a saying, “Risk minus cash equals crisis,” and
it’s pretty simple and it makes sense I think to all of us.
We
know great non-profits need long-term reserves and working
capital, direct program expenses, and administration and
operating support.
And obviously we know that government is not
paying what it should to deliver outcomes on government
programs, so, the squeeze is from every direction.
I just want to give you one quote from Jim Collins, the
Good to Great guy.
heard.
I think he sums it up in the best way I’ve
He said, “Restricted giving missed a fundamental point,
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to make the greatest impact on society requires first and
foremost a great organization, not a great single program.”
Lynn Thoman:
Okay.
Peter F. Bird Jr.:
Peter.
Our foundation makes about $10 million
of grants a year and about 55 percent of that is general
operating support.
But that’s a little misleading because $5
million or half of our grant budget goes to support a single
thing.
It’s a visual arts center in Downtown Nashville.
a huge budget and we started it.
It has
That brings up why, why would
we want to make general operating support grants, which we
consider unrestricted grants can be used for anything, we trust
them.
That’s what that says.
One is we started it and we in
the 30 years we’ve been operating as a foundation have started a
lot of things in Nashville.
When we started, we were the only staff foundation in
Nashville and we surveyed the landscape and saw a lot of things
that were missing.
We were missing a community foundation and
we were missing a volunteer center, and we were missing some
kind of management consulting organization for non-profits and
we started all those things.
is our belief, you own it.
And when you start something, this
And you can try to involve the rest
of the community, you need to reach out to the rest of the
community, you need to get them excited about it, but you can’t
just launch a ship and three years later duck your head down and
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run away.
Our board felt very strongly that if we started
something, we had a permanent responsibility to help sustain it.
And the good news is on some of those things where we were 100
percent 20 years ago, we’re now five percent.
So, because
others have bought in but we haven’t abandoned ship either.
The other reason why a general operating support goes to
the nature of the organizations, sometimes the impact of what an
organization does is so broad that it’s really difficult to kind
of unbundle and say we want Program A and not Program B, C, D,
E.
It’s all one program.
Or you take an organization --
there’s one organization in Nashville, it’s called Nextlink.
It’s been around for 100 years.
And it will give somebody false
teeth if their teeth dropped out and broke and that’s keeping
them from eating and going to work.
So, it’s weird little stuff
and you can’t make a false tooth grant.
unrestricted support to Nextlink.
So, we give
We give unrestricted support
to the United Way, and there about 20 other organizations that
get unrestricted support from us because either we started it or
their mission is so broad that it’s hard to unbundle.
Lynn Thoman:
Donn, under what circumstances do you give
general unrestricted grants?
Donn Weinberg:
answer.
You know, it’s a facts and circumstances
For example, -- and I’d like to illustrate because
otherwise it’s just all abstract.
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If we get a grant request, a
letter of inquiry from a homeless services organization, they
have one program, they’re providing housing and some other
services.
It’s not that they’ve broken it up into different
programs.
That sort of scenario, the facts and circumstances
speak toward the general operating grant.
Now that would include the following scenario just so -you’ll encounter these too.
Somebody writes to us and they’d
say, “You know, we’d like to add on two new staff people to do
this and that.”
But we won’t make a grant for those staff
people as such.
The way we conceptualize it is they want to
increase their general operating budget that will accommodate
these two new staff people, because we certainly don’t want to
be on the line in case they end up it doesn’t work out.
not the employer.
So, we’ll say okay.
We’re
So, really, you’re
looking at an increased general operating budget, and if we like
everything else, which is a whole different topic in terms of
financial strength and outcomes and so forth, then in that type
of scenario we’re more likely to make a general operating grant.
Now, if we get a grant request from the Jewish Federation
of New York, they often will ask for a particular program in
which case it’s easy, they’re asking for a program and so forth.
Where it gets interesting is when you get a request for a
general operating grant from an organization that has let’s say
the same scenario, 10 programs, it could be three programs or
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two, and you’re now looking at what you’re interested in based
upon what you and your trustees and your staff have decided as
relevant, and you say, “You know, only one of those programs
really is a fit for us.”
I think that’s a completely legitimate
and proper and smart thing to do in that type of scenario, in
which case you’ll support that program, including a portion of
the overhead in most cases.
And again, that’s all with the assumption that you’ve
looked at the organization as a whole, you feel that its
overhead is appropriate, you’re looking at page two of the Form
990, something I look at very quickly, and saying, “Okay.
So,
100 percent of the budget, 70 percent is for program, assuming
that that’s an accurate allocation -- if it’s not, it’s a
different story -- and 30 percent includes management in general
and fundraising.”
So, okay.
Out of that program budget, 70
percent of that program budget is going to include some of that
overhead because there’s going to be fundraising for that and
administration for that.
we have no hesitation.
So, it all depends on the facts.
But
In other words, we don’t have a sort of
prejudice from the start against general operating grants.
We
just take it as it comes in and decide what’s the most
appropriate type of grant for this case, for this scenario.
Peter F. Bird Jr.:
Donn, you’ve made a good point a couple
of times about a program that has appropriate overhead added
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into it is an appropriate grant, so in essence you’re helping to
support the overhead.
What we found over time -- and we will
typically deal with 200 different organizations every year -- a
lot of those organizations just simply don’t know how to account
for their overhead properly, and so, in those cases particularly
the smaller organizations, we will throw in extra money and we’d
say, “You haven’t accounted for any overhead here,” you haven’t
accounted for the driver or the insurance that Wendy was talking
about, and we’ll just take that initiative to do that knowing
that we may be guessing wrong in that amount of overhead.
But
if we really want the grant to work, we’ve got to understand
that as a grant-maker.
Donn Weinberg:
Lynn Thoman:
See, in that scenario, if I might just -What are the [cross-talking] -- okay.
Donn Weinberg:
In that scenario, the way we’d see this
kind of situation with the van and then all these other things,
we’d say, “Okay.
You’re seeking a capital grant for the van,
and we have a limit we can only go 30 percent of any total
capital cost,” so they have to come to us with at least 50
percent of it raised already.
And now you’re talking about
you’d like either a program grant or an operating grant for your
operations.
Now, again, we don’t do particular positions but we
would look at the operations and the cost of the driver and
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these other things, gasoline, as part of their operating budget
or part of a particular program budget.
Lynn Thoman:
So, when you look at overhead it’s really
interesting to me that there’s a focus in the foundation world
on overhead and the correct amount of overhead and there’re some
disagreement.
Some people believe it’s 20 percent.
believe it’s 30 percent.
be limited.
Some people
But most people believe that it should
And it’s really interesting to me because in the
business world, there’s no focus on overhead.
When somebody’s
purchasing a product, if you’re going to buy a car, if you’re
going to buy a GM car or a Rolls-Royce, nobody’s going to say,
“I’m going to buy the Rolls-Royce because it’s got lower
overhead.”
And actually Rolls-Royce I think had lower overhead
than GM’s Saturn which has since defuncted.
So, it’s a really
interesting question.
Wendy Garen:
[Cross-talking] do we buy stock in iPad or do
we buy stock in Apple?
When we’re making grants to an
organization in a general support way, we’re really looking at
the overall context of the organization and not the narrow
program.
And so really, we have -- and the word “trust” has not
come up yet.
And in this crowd, it’s probably very appropriate
to say, “Trust but verify.”
You know, we don’t want to be
foolish or blind but we do want to be in genuine dialogue.
And
it is much easier to make unrestricted grants to organizations
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if you know them thoroughly, if you’ve really reviewed their
financials, if you’ve met their leadership, if you’ve seen them
on their turf.
And so, -- and many of us also talk about sort
of the power imbalance between funders and grantees.
And I
think it goes a long way to level the playing field when we are
willing to invest in an unrestricted way.
Peter F. Bird Jr.:
Wendy, you’ve mentioned an interesting
word “trust,” and it’s fascinating to me -- we do an RFP every
year, technology grants.
We invite every single Nashville non-
profit to ask us for technology money.
on any individual technology grant.
We put a cap of $10,000
We end up making about 100
grants a year, they average about $5,000.
But what it does, the
dynamic is it not only helps individual agencies with technology
needs but it also gives us a doorway into an organization to see
who they are, how they operate, and can they be trusted.
Trust
somebody with a $4,000 grant and look at them six months or a
year later and say, “What’s going on here?”
I found that that
incremental kind of building of trust, “We’ll give you a grant,
see how you deal with it, and we’ll give you a bigger grant next
time and maybe a big capital grant next time, maybe an emergency
grant if you’re running out of money.”
Those kinds of
relationships build over time and it’s hard to trust an
organization with a big operating grant if you haven’t trusted
them with a little grant.
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Lynn Thoman:
grants?
Do you give multiyear general operating
And how does the time period compare to program grants?
Wendy Garen:
We do.
We do both.
We’ve escalated the
amount on multiyear grants that we make both for internal
efficiency reasons frankly; if they’re just going to come back
in 12 months, it’s simpler for both ends if we think we’re
increasing our capacity and their capacity but also for
stability reasons.
Typically they’re not more than two years
but it is helping to stabilize the sector.
We generally do not
commit any more than about 30 percent of the next year’s budget
in that way.
management.
That’s the tricky part, is that internal
But that said, if you’re paying attention, it
works.
Donn Weinberg:
We do multiyear grants also.
Before the
downturn, it wasn’t uncommon to see three- to five-year grants.
The lesson we learned from the downturn was to reduce that
period of time.
So, now it would be typically we’ll make a one-
year grant, a two-year grant, once in a blue moon a three-year
grant.
But here is the way that sort of works in terms of
looking for patterns: The new organization to us -- and it’s not
a big, well-known organization -- generally, we’ll test it with
a one-year grant.
It’s an organization that’s better known to
us or has a reputation that makes us feel more comfortable,
we’re more comfortable doing a two-year grant, once in a blue
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moon again, a three-year grant.
Either way it could be general
operating or a program, of course as I’m sure we all have, we
have reporting requirements annually -Wendy Garen:
Donn Weinberg:
at a time.
So, it’s not all paid at once?
Oh, no, no.
In other words, it’s one year
And we have a provision in our contracts which is
not uncommon as we discussed ahead of time that if we’re in a
multiyear grant, if we’re at any point dissatisfied after the
first year, we reserve the right to cancel the grant or modify
it in some way.
We’ve even done poison pill, the so-called
poison pill provisions where if the key to our making the grant
was the executive director, being the executive director so
outstanding in some cases, which has its own dangers, which you
know you’ve all thought about too I’m sure, that we reserve the
right also to re-review everything.
So, yeah, we make these
multiyear grants probably more frequently than not particularly
with organizations that again that are known quantities.
Lynn Thoman:
Does your [cross-talking] -- go ahead.
Peter F. Bird Jr.:
I want to mention on multiyear grants,
we do make multiyear grants, they’re rare, and it’s probably not
more than one out of 20 of our grants is multiyear.
And if we
make a multiyear grant for two years, three years, the most
fascinating conversation that you as grant-makers would
appreciate focuses on year four, the year the grant goes away.
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And that’s -- and we are very clear with an organization if we
want out or want the opportunity to leave, we also want to talk
about sustainability.
And so, that’s an interesting
conversation when you talk multiyear.
Lynn Thoman:
So, if you all were starting a new
foundation, no restrictions, no trustees, no restrictions at
all, what kind of giving would you do, general operating
unrestricted or restricted?
Donn Weinberg:
I would do it all depending on facts and
circumstances.
Wendy Garen:
For me, it’s yes.
It’s so contextual that
what you want to do is I think not be kneejerk and be overly
bureaucratic but instead look deeply for impact if they all
matter.
Lynn Thoman:
Okay.
Let’s conclude with a poll, the same
question that we had asked in the beginning.
So, now that we’ve
been talking about general operating versus restricted grant,
are you considering increasing, decreasing, no change, or
uncertain?
Donn Weinberg:
Lynn Thoman:
Everybody clicked?
Increasing.
Did we change your minds?
Exactly, did we change your mind at all?
Okay.
And let’s look at the comparison.
Huge.
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Wendy Garen:
And you know, for those of you who are not
trustees or board members and are staff, I think there’s often
kind of a fear that the board won’t like it.
But what I have
found is honest conversations can lead to surprising outcomes,
and over 28 years I’ve been repeatedly surprised by my board
that when we get down to it, we’re actually in agreement.
So, I
think what I’d say to those who are not the financial decisionmakers, don’t think they’re going to -- they won’t necessarily
resist this understanding that we need strong organizations and
not just narrow investments to get our impacts.
Your board may
be much more willing to go partway down this road than you
think.
Lynn Thoman:
I think so.
And the other point I think that
we have talked about is what we’re really looking for is impact.
It’s not narrow funding for this or for that or a restriction on
overhead.
What everybody I think is really looking for is the
impact that they want to achieve.
And whether that’s more
achievable through general operating support or through a
restricted grant, I think it’s up to the particular foundation
to determine, but bottom line whichever one gets more impact I
think is better.
And I think the numbers are actually quite
stunning, that the number of people now considering increasing
their general operating support has doubled is huge.
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Wendy Garen:
So, we’re really glad you came.
you so much for spending the time with us.
Donn Weinberg:
Wendy Garen:
Thank you.
Thank you.
[End of file]
[End of transcript]
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And thank