American Foundations: An Investigative History [Paperback]

Mark Dowie (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0262541416 | ISBN-13: 978-0262541411 | Publication Date: September 9, 2002

In American Foundations, Mark Dowie argues that organized philanthropy is on the verge of an evolutionary shift that will transform America's nearly 50,000 foundations from covert arbiters of knowledge and culture to overt mediators of public policy and aggressive creators of new orthodoxy. He questions the wisdom of placing so much power at the disposal of nondemocratic institutions.As American wealth expands, old foundations such as Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Pew, and MacArthur have grown exponentially, while newer trusts such as Mott, Johnson, Packard, Kellogg, Hughes, Annenberg, Hewlett, Duke, and Gates have surpassed them. Foundation assets now total close to $400 billion. Though this is a tiny sum compared to corporate and government treasuries, and foundation grants still total less than 10 percent of contributions made by individuals, foundations have power and influence far beyond their wealth. Their influence derives from the conditional nature of their grant making, their power from its leverage.Unlike previous historians of philanthropy who have focused primarily on the grant maker, Dowie examines foundations from the public's perspective. He focuses on eight key areas in which foundations operate: education, science, health, environment, food, energy, art, and human services. He also looks at their imagination, or lack thereof, and at the strained relationship between American foundations and American democracy.Dowie believes that foundations deserve to exist and that they can assume an increasingly vital role in American society, but only if they transform themselves from private to essentially public institutions. The reforms he proposes to make foundations more responsive to pressing social problems and more accountable to the public will almost certainly start an important national debate.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Investigative journalist Dowie--author, most recently, of Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (1996)--turns his attention to organized philanthropy, a world at once highly visible and widely misunderstood. Dowie draws on academic literature, foundation archives, and more than 200 interviews with foundation officers, critics, and grant recipients in assessing the recent history of foundations and projecting the changes they face. In the face of crisis, Dowie suggests, organized philanthropy has been "slow to see problems coming, slow to respond, and quick to justify every decision." Dowie applies a public perspective, analyzing how effectively foundations have contributed to public education, science, health care, the environment, the arts and humanities, and civil society. Government devolution is likely to make foundations even more powerful in the twenty-first century; Dowie urges that they need to adopt democratic reforms (like citizen trustees, grantee advisory boards, and strong social agendas) to justify their increased influence. The author's proposals may seem utopian, but his studies of specific foundations and their programs are fascinating. Mary Carroll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"As usual for the award-winning Dowie, this book is right on time." Jim Dulzo Metrotimes (Detroit)

"His studies of specific foundations and their programs are fascinating." Mary Carroll Booklist

"This book is a thorough review of the world of American philanthropy." Colin Greer Whole Earth

"This is an important work. Mark Dowie is offering a critique of philanthropy that is long overdue. This book I hope will spark debate within philanthropy and outside as well, and perhaps empower those whose feelings are reflected here to speak out without fear. Foundation staffs and boards should read it. It will be on the reading lists of the plethora of fundraising schools that are springing up all over the country. It should also be used in classes on civil society and contemporary America."--Steven Viederman, former President, Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation

"Mark Dowie, America's foremost investigative reporter, skewers the 'philanthocracy'--liberal as well as conservative--with masterful precision and care. If you have money, or you would just like to have money, consider this book assigned reading."--Barbara Ehrenreich, author of *Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America*

"American Foundations is a major and remarkable work. Dowie's specific judgments will be widely debated. His fiercely independent assessment of organized philanthropy is a wholesome challenge to the soporific and captive trade literature."--Michael Lerner, President, CommonwealPlease note: "Jenifer" is spelled with ONLY ONE "n" in this case.

"In Life Support, Michael McCally and his colleagues provide a superb and authoritative road map for the emerging environmental health movement. The issues dealt with are the most pressing issues of our time. We need true scientists to provide direction, and McCally has assembled their best and most authoritative judgments here."--Michael Lerner, President, CommonwealPlease note: The spelling of the word "judgments" has been changed.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 360 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (September 9, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262541416
• ISBN-13: 978-0262541411
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #488,290 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Foundations in Cross Examination, December 19, 2001

By 

Robert O. Bothwell (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: American Foundations: An Investigative History (Hardcover)

(Foundations&Phil\Dowie-amazon Book Review) Dec. 19, 2001

There are over 50,000 foundations in the U.S. today. With $448 billion in assets (1999), foundations are an unbelievably huge philanthropic industry compared to almost 40 years ago, when the federal government launched its War on Poverty. Foundations' assets then were well under $30 billion.

Mark Dowie, author of American Foundations: An Investigative History (MIT Press, 2001), does not blanche in analyzing this industry, despite its diversity and differences in grant making and style of operating. Dowie sets an ambitious agenda. He reviews foundation funding of education, science, health, environment, food, energy, art, civil society, democracy and imagination! He is an accomplished writer with16 journalist awards and five books to his credit.
Perhaps consumer activist and Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader suggests best why this book should be read by those involved with the foundation world either as a staff member, trustee, grantseeker or academician. Dowie, says Nader, "is a scholar and a muckraker," who analyzes "foundations' past achievements and failures and then critically [takes] the institutions to task for directing their grants so often away from ?root causes.' Dowie shakes up the complacency, myopia, and insulation of [the] giant foundations by naming names and places."

Dowie clearly raises the most important questions about foundations' performance, and offers thoughtful, usually balanced answers that certainly pull no punches. As the longtime director of a national watchdog nonprofit organization charged with monitoring and redirecting foundations' grantmaking toward the disadvantaged and disenfranchised in the USA, I believe this study is both highly readable and extremely informative.

Education receives the largest share of foundation grants. Dowie observes that "Foundation trustees...seem to favor the spawning of an elite intellectual force over the principle of equal educational opportunity...The great preponderance of educational grants...have found their way to institutions of higher education where scientists and other experts are educated." Recently, however, more foundation money has been poured into reform of primary and secondary education, especially inner city schools. This money was stimulated by Walter Annenberg's $500 million challenge grant in 1993. Dowie applauds this trend. Nevertheless, he raises the question: Can such money ever change the entrenched public education monopoly to enable it to do significantly better educating poor and poorly prepared students? Maybe the foundations should "also be funding community organizations that demand more of public schools..."

"American foundations' second largest area of grantmaking is health." Dowie concludes that "foundations' enthusiasm for high-tech diagnostic systems, pharmacology, and the disease model of medicine has not only inhibited the development of preventative and holistic approaches but has also retarded public health and fostered the evolution of an essentially unjust health care system...Until quite recently the public health effects of environmental pollution have been virtually ignored by the large foundations."

More generally, beyond specific subject areas, Dowie identifies proactive philanthropy for criticism: "...when proactive philanthropy is pursued without the participation of the people most affected by it" serious problems result.

The 50-year Green Revolution is often touted as one of the foundation world's greatest achievements. Dowie acknowledges its success in significantly raising food production per acre in the developing world. But he goes on to challenge its social, economic and environmental consequences for the peasant-farmers and the urban poor. Unfettered scientific experimentalism in increasing crop yields, supported by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, with little heed to culture, economics and sustainability, meant the rich got richer and the poor poorer, with 800 million people still hungry in the world.

The Energy Foundation was created in 1991 by the Pew Charitable Trusts, MacArthur and the Rockefeller Foundations "to assist the nation's transition to a sustainable energy future by promoting energy efficiency and renewable energy." This was a major proactive foundation initiative to do what the environmental movement was not perceived to be doing. Dowie records the positive accomplishments of the Energy Foundation, but worries that "concentrating so much leverage in one funding body could create serious power problems, as well as an orthodoxy, that, if misguided, would be difficult to challenge." And, in the end, he identifies how the Energy Foundation gave its largest grants to environmental legal organizations which were "agents of capitulation...deferring to free market arguments," while "throwing mere crumbs to energy visionaries, renewable activists, and consumer advocates."

Dowie's investigation into American foundations is not all negative. The author identifies several individual philanthropists as possible harbingers of "a new and imaginative era of philanthropy." In fact, the author seems mesmerized by the big money and big ideas of these individuals.

He singles out Irene Diamond, Ted Turner, Walter Annenberg and George Soros as "venturesome" philanthropists -- because they "imagined, respectively, worlds without AIDS, without strife, without ignorance, and without tyrants, then made massive and immediate financial efforts to make those worlds real"

The author acknowledges that it is an uphill battle for these individuals to be creators of "a new and imaginative era of philanthropy." He observes, "If historical precedent were to hold, foundations would [take] courses [that] would be safe and uncontroversial."

On the war of political ideas and foundations, Dowie writes, "During the last twenty years of the twentieth century, it was conservatives who prevailed.., financed the Reagan revolution, and provisioned the Republican recapture of Congress. A dozen or so medium-sized, uncharacteristically patient foundations can take a good deal of credit for the rise and endurance of America's conservative revolution...More recently, following this bold twenty-five-year foray into public policy by right-wing foundations, the Left has stepped timidly into the fray with a few programs in economic and political justice. Will mainstream foundations, too, learn from the conservative foundations' triumph of leveraged influence? Or will they continue their minimal, unimaginative funding of safe and soft institutions proposing weak, incremental solutions to urgent and undeniable crises?"

"Brilliant and constructive as some of their work has been," writes Dowie, "much of it has also been fruitless, uninspired, and designed to do little more than perpetuate the economic and social systems that allow foundations to exist."

He explicitly faults foundations for not doing enough for social movements which they have aided: "With the single exception of civil rights, foundation interests in America's signature social movements ? for women's rights, peace, environment, environmental justice, students, gay liberation, and particularly labor ? [have] been parsimonious, hesitant, late, and at times counterproductive...In any case, all foundation support for social movements...remains small potatoes any way it's measured."

In summation, Dowie argues that "Those empowered to make grants should not assume that they have the wisdom to solve such serious problems simply because they control the money." As a student of philanthropy and seeker of foundation largesse for the past 30 years, I can only say, "Amen!"

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Strong on the politics of philanthropy, weak on economics..., December 30, 2003

By 

"joemikjr" (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: American Foundations: An Investigative History (Paperback)

This was an excellent book on how foundations spend their money. But as the author points out, they distribute only about 5% of their assets per year. As a reader, I wanted a more searching analysis on many interesting economic issues raised by the other 95% of foundations' money.

There is little on the tax aspects of foundations. Namely, I would be interested in reading about the policy consequences of allowing large pools of capital to aggregate in perpetuity. Readers need some statistics on the cost of this tax exemption to government revenue and, by inference, to taxpayers-at-large. The author could have collated the data from public records filed with the IRS. IRS mandates that foundations file financial disclosure forms each year (unfortunately, many fail to comply).

There are only a few pages in an appendix on foundations' impact on capital markets. Where and how they invest their endowments? Do their trustees sit on corporate boards and, if so, how does the presence of these trustees affect corporate decision-making? Are the assets held offshore? What institutions invest the assets on behalf of the trustees of the foundations? How well do the trustees perform? The answers are of considerable importance as some of the larger endowments rival in size mutual funds and pension funds.

There is little on the legal framework within which foundations are created and operate. This is a key failing. If the author were familiar with the Statute of Elizabeth, adopted by virtually every common law jurisdiction, he would understand why foundations do not contribute to political activists. Political activities - defined by the Internal Revenue Code as the funding of electoral campaigns of individuals or parties and as exercising direct influence on the legislative process - would cost foundations their charitable status. They would be subject to taxation, which would rapidly erode their capital and force them to divert resources toward fundraising. The author repeatedly criticizes the restraint of the trustees. Much of this restraint is the product of fiduciary obligations imposed upon the trustees by law.

I would like to know more about the background of trustees. Where are these people from? where are they educated/trained? What about their attitudes to American society? Why did they join a foundation as opposed to government or the private sector?

One last complaint: the book focuses primarily on a handful of older, well-known foundations (Rockefeller, Carnegie, etc.) at expense of the tens of thousands of small family foundations.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of our best journalists does it again, June 29, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: American Foundations: An Investigative History (Hardcover)

You simply cannot understand the social and political order in the United States without reading this book. Dowie is at the top of his game here, and that says a lot since he is arguably America's best left-leaning investigative journalist. Some people slow down in their 60s, but Dowie is picking up his pace. He has the wisdom and perspective and gonads to speak it like it is, picking apart the influence of wealthy foundations in helping, and mostly hurting, the cause for social, political and economic democracy and environmental sustainability. Too bad he left out an analysis of foundations and their impact on the worsening state of US media, but maybe that's the next book. This is a great follow-up to Losing Ground, his brilliant critique of the failures of US environmentalism.