At their best, perpetual foundations, especially the large and midsized ones, are institutions that embody enduring, time-tested values that are worth preserving for future generations. Of course such foundations evolve steadily, but that evolution consists of applying their respective donors’ instructions to the changing circumstances of society. The same passion that animated General Johnson’s desire to improve US health and health care is as strong and focused today as it was when the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation began functioning in 1972. The same passion that moved John D. Rockefeller Sr. to aim to stamp out yellow fever 100 years ago showed itself when his philanthropic successors at The Rockefeller Foundation plunged into financing the planning of New Orleans’s urgent response to Hurricane Katrina.
Like the great research universities, the great foundations have a similar social function of collecting, testing, and refining the knowledge relevant to their respective missions, preserving and enhancing the utility of that knowledge, and passing it along to future generations. If we were to cease creating such perpetual foundations, a vital link in the chain of knowledge in the service of society would be broken apart. Perpetual foundations operate in ways and fill critical needs that no other institutions are able to do. That is because, unlike universities, they are endowed with uncommitted financial resources that can be deployed any time as they see fit. They are unencumbered with the same sort of long-term commitments (extensive physical plant; significant staff or faculty commitments; financial aid or other public programs that hospitals, universities, or public charities have committed to) that constrain their directional changes. This flexibility—which leaves them exposed to the risk (real or imagined) of unaccountability, donor neglect, or even whimsy—is what also enables them to adapt to current needs in a way that no other public charity or government agency is capable of doing. To use the investment terminology, they are not constrained from opportunistic approaches to making big differences.
If American wealth-holders cease creating new perpetual foundations, they will deprive our society of the constant flow of support that in the past has left a century-long legacy of pioneering impact of immense benefit to society. America desperately needs the constancy of such social capital finance institutions to ensure the continuing regeneration of our country. As I have observed earlier in this book, perpetual foundations have been the primary route of first resort for talented Americans wishing to launch new civic-sector organizations in virtually every field of civic-sector endeavor, and I will not again list here the wide range of fields in which perpetual foundations have seeded new organizations. In this chapter, however, I wish to suggest a few areas of activity in America that are not likely to be focused on by spend-down foundations or “giving while living” donors, which therefore could benefit greatly from support by existing and new perpetual foundations. The following seem to me to be some fields in which perpetual foundations, if they continue to be created, could be of crucial help in tackling significant existing problems of today that otherwise seem likely not to be adequately attended to.
All but a few of the following are countercyclical initiatives aimed at correcting or diminishing the individual, social, or cultural effects produced by the now hyperactive malfunctioning and ever-more-widely reaching of our free market economy that prizes eyeballs more than vision, that (like sugar consumption) gives a momentary high followed by depressing lows, and that provides no genuine, healthy nutrients. The few that don’t fall within that category are recurring conditions affecting society that donors of years past found attractive but that recent donors have tended to neglect. None of these initiatives is likely to find support among donors or foundations that are spending down in pursuit of high-profile, large topical problems and big public bangs for their bucks. These are not the sorts of causes that offer a hope of achieving some sudden breakthrough and garnering massive press attention. Donors who care about preserving healthy traditional values should be attracted to all of these as offering possible candidates for perpetual foundations. Each of the following threats is a continuing challenge to the kind of society that most thinking individuals would like to live in, and none of them is likely to be solved in the space of anyone’s lifetime.
Everybody needs a doctor at some time or other; as our population ages, more people will need to see doctors more frequently. One of today’s neglected issues in the field of health and medicine is the by-product of America’s system of managed care, which insistently rations doctors’ time available for talking to patients. This urgent problem was powerfully called to my attention by Dr. Linda Celeste Robb-Nicholson, a primary care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, who was the founding editor of the Harvard Women’s Health Watch. In an era when doctors now routinely spend only 15 minutes in examining each of their patients, she says that it is of supreme importance that medical students be trained to devote adequate time to listening to their patients, so that when they become practicing physicians they will do such listening with special attentiveness. Donors and foundations that care about the quality of health care delivery should focus their advocacy and experiment-devising initiatives on ways to enrich the training of physicians so as to foster more effective communication between patients and their physicians.
The combination of insistently growing secularism, hand in hand with the distraction of 24/7 media and a great deal of salacious, seductive entertainment trash, is steadily undermining the individual and social norms that grew out of the teachings of most religions as well as secular humanism and moral philosophy—norms that constitute the foundations of most civilized societies. As the authority of organized religions has grown weaker, the effects of religion’s waning influence on human behavior dramatically show themselves in various forms of destructive individual and social behavior. Many think that religion itself should be strengthened. Many others think that secular substitutes—moral philosophy, character education, ethics, psychology, humanitarianism, humanism, to name but a few—should be somehow strengthened in order to compensate for religion’s decline. Perhaps many remedies should be tried. There is a great need for experimentation in new ways of establishing and strengthening social norms of civilized behavior. Perpetual foundations that long have had programs focused on religion in American life include The Pew Charitable Trusts1 and the Lilly Endowment,2 but the need for other philanthropic dollars to deal with this problem has never been greater.
The dysfunction of democratic governments around the world, and the polarization of politics especially in the United States, will demand a great deal of work to understand how to overcome polarization with collaboration. Solutions can come about only by identifying, recruiting, and supporting leaders who resist the steady hardening of differences among us and instead seek respectful, civilized consensus on how to solve society’s most urgent problems collaboratively. That can be done only through the facilitation of leaders whom we know well enough to trust and who appeal to our better angels rather than our ever-present and ever-more-insistent internal devils nourished by today’s secular culture. Our democracy has an absolutely desperate need for such leaders, for men and women of all ethnic, gender, racial, and religious backgrounds who are animated by ethical and moral norms that guide their behavior in all things. As noted previously, a group of perpetual foundations under the leadership of the Hewlett Foundation has formed a multimillion-dollar collaborative effort called The Madison Initiative to strive for a better understanding of the reasons for the extreme political polarization in America and also to experiment with practical ways of diminishing such polarization.3
This problem is so pervasive that there is plenty of room for other foundations to seek to remedy it. Its origins and seemingly ever-greater severity are likely the result of the increasingly large amount of dollars being poured by wealthy individuals, cash-rich corporations and their related foundations, and nonprofit organizations into narrowly based radical-right positions that demand adherence to the “one true way” and resistance to any compromise or negotiation with those who disagree with them.4
For many Americans, democracy has increasingly come to mean raw and unbridled self-expression and self-serving of all kinds with few or no social restraints, whether by words or by guns or knives. Schools and colleges have gradually abdicated any responsibility for teaching their students self-discipline and for trying to enable their students to discriminate between better and worse behaviors. The uncouth language and uncivilized behavior rampant in popular culture have legitimated the use and spread of what were formerly regarded as four-letter obscenities disdained by civilized peoples. What to do to stem this cheapening of culture—and indeed of human life itself—is a subject that only a perpetual foundation is likely to explore. The long-run perspective and a devotion to long-lived values are particular virtues of long-lived institutions.
“It is difficult to get the news from poems,” William Carlos Williams wrote in his 1955 poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” “yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” Likewise, philanthropy has often had more of a taste for responding to the events of the day than for tending to the deeper stirrings of the mind and spirit expressed in poetry. Yet institutions devoted to promoting human well-being could scarcely do better than to help supply the “lack of what is found there.”
There were countless audible gasps in November 2002 when Ruth Lilly pledged $100 million to Poetry magazine, which was thereby transformed into the Poetry Foundation. By the time the pledge was paid the following year, it had grown substantially, closer to $200 million according to some estimates. That munificent gift was but one in a sequence of gifts she made to support Poetry magazine and The Poetry Foundation starting in 1996. Many perpetual foundations continuously support literature and the arts but only a few spend-down foundations do so. Judging from the social problem-solving preferences expressed by “giving while living” donors, one would be very surprised to see them supporting poetry and/or the arts—though one could make a strong case for their doing so.
A similar case can be made for the performing arts. It is rare that time-limited donors pursue these more timeless endeavors, though some perpetual foundations do take an ongoing interest in them. While the Ford Foundation, for example, no longer has a separate Arts and Humanities Program, which it did have in the 1960s and 1970s, it continues to support arts institutions through its new program on Creativity and Free Expression. The Ford Foundation was among the first foundations to make grants to classical and modern dance companies in the United States.5 Moreover, it made one of the foundation sector’s all-time historic grants for the arts in its 1965 gift of $85 million to American symphony orchestras. The purpose of that grant, which was part of a matching campaign, was to raise over $160 million to improve the salaries and extend the seasons of the recipient orchestras’ musicians.6
Furthermore, many other perpetual foundations support important performing arts institutions that benefit the communities that they serve. For example, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Program on the Performing Arts supports institutions in the San Francisco Bay Area. As is the case with virtually all of the Hewlett Foundation’s grantmaking programs, the foundation traces its commitment to the performing arts directly to the support given by its founders William and Flora Hewlett during their lifetimes.7 Also in the Bay Area, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation likewise makes grants to visual and performing arts organizations in the five nearby California counties that it defines as its local grantmaking area, as well as in Pueblo, Colorado, where its founder David Packard was born.8 Other perpetual foundations that support arts and culture are the Surdna Foundation9 and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.10 There are many others, too.
As in many other fields, perpetual foundations’ missions include grantmaking that is countercyclical to any given period of time. Sustaining and furthering the values of the fine arts is therefore a mission especially appropriate to foundations with unlimited lives. If no new perpetual foundations are created, where will the funds come from to ensure a thriving arts culture in America?
In years past, many large perpetual foundations frequently collaborated with federal government agencies in piloting new initiatives, often combining their funds with those of the federal and/or state government. For example, the Ford Foundation’s community development program of the 1970s became a blueprint for the Carter administration’s urban development policy. Later, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) was established by the Ford Foundation as a purely private-sector initiative but soon attracted the cooperation of several federal agencies. LISC’s initial purpose was to ascertain the creditworthiness of low-income borrowers and community organizations seeking capital from financial institutions, foundations, and government with which to buy or build homes or start businesses. With an initial $10 million from Ford and five other private funders, LISC went on to leverage about $4 billion from financial institutions, other foundations, and the federal government to finance LISC offices in more than 40 metropolitan areas across the United States. As of 2016, it has been in existence over 35 years, has leveraged about $48.5 billion in funds for community revitalization nationwide, and has continued to exert considerable influence on federal, state, and local policy toward struggling urban and rural communities. LISC is only one of many such influential organizations that were catalyzed by initial foundation grants.
The Ford Foundation’s one-time focus on forming partnerships with the federal government reflected the era’s belief that change—including turning around declining cities—must begin in Washington. Today, many funders take a more bottom-up approach. Bloomberg Philanthropies has put cities, not the federal government, at the center of its work, seeing city halls as laboratories of change. While the Gates Foundation, especially during the Obama administration, has collaborated with the US Department of Education in such initiatives as the Race to the Top school reform program, few other national foundations have the substantial record of collaborating with the federal government that the Ford Foundation had during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Since Darren Walker has become president of the Ford Foundation, that foundation has begun to resume collaborating with the federal government in a modest way, but the need for foundations to open themselves to such entrepreneurial initiatives today—with all levels of government—is greater than ever.
It was the Carnegie Corporation that financed Gunnar Myrdal’s pioneering research and searing critique of race relations in the United States, published in 1944 as An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. It quickly became an intellectual platform of the Civil Rights movement and influenced the struggle for racial equality from the grassroots all the way to the Supreme Court, which cited Myrdal’s work in its 1954 ruling against segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. Many other perpetual foundations have financed similar reports with wide-ranging consequences. Moreover, perpetual foundations have been increasingly ready to mount advocacy efforts on behalf of problems that were documented in research funded by others. The problem of global warming has enjoyed significant perpetual foundation support to document the problem and advocate action to help mitigate it. One wishes that foundations would make support available to advocate public action to remedy such problems as the vulnerability of America’s electric grid, as documented in Lights Out by Ted Koppel. Jeff Skoll’s support for widely viewed films on major problems, such as An Inconvenient Truth on global warming and Waiting for Superman on education reform, illustrate what many other foundations could do to help generate some action on the part of the public to address lingering, simmering national or state problems.
The backbone of the Internet was created by various government agencies to support the work of the defense department and scientific research. It has subsequently become the dominant frontier for commercial ventures, and in doing so has created great wealth and dramatically altered how people live, shop, and communicate. But many bridges between nodes of this still emerging network will not be supported by the market. Access to the Internet is considered to be essential for individual progress’ but affordable access to the web (within the United States and around the world) is far from guaranteed; standards of conduct and evolving norms of behavior and laws need to be derived in ways that are not entirely driven by the market. Organizations such as the World Wide Web Consortium, Creative Commons, National Information Standards Organization (NISO), and the Berkman Klein Center for the Internet & Society are working to derive solutions for the long-term infrastructure, access, data permanence, and civil society questions that the digital age cannot afford to leave only to market players to resolve.
Perpetual foundations have played an indispensable role for at least a century in seeding and nurturing countless civic-sector advocacy organizations in virtually every field, as well as in supporting an enormous number of organizations serving other important continuing social needs. Through those organizations, foundations have played perhaps the critical role in facilitating peaceful, nonviolent, major social change in the United States. Perpetual foundations are there when needed with discretionary capital to start new organizations, to help them grow and, when successful, to help them scale to optimum size. America’s perpetual foundations typically support undertakings that “giving while living” donors and foundations may not be interested in helping and ones that require more patience and more interplay with existing institutional players than many new spend-down foundations will tolerate. It is no exaggeration to think of perpetual foundations as constituting America’s social sector investment banks. You do not want to have to create such a bank when an unexpected social problem arises; you want these institutions to be in existence to be drawn upon when needed.
In many metropolitan areas, private perpetual foundations, usually family foundations, are primary collaborative partners of community foundations and, together with them, have been principal forces for civic improvement and reform in virtually every field of social policy. As we have seen, these well-established cooperative models combine the donors’ ongoing dedication to their home communities with the foundations’ ability to research, test, and refine solutions to local problems. Likewise, in many states, perpetual foundations are the bulwark of civic-sector organizations and universities.
Perpetual foundations are the primary engines of peaceful social change in America’s civic sector. They provide a continuing stream of fuel to start and nurture initiatives by public-interest-motivated individuals seeking to change society for the better. Without that fuel, America’s social engine is bound to slow down.