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VICTOR S. NAVASKY
They are able to question the status quo, encourage experimenta–
tion and provide "seed money" for new institutions and new ideas.
Foundations do the essential job which the government by nature
cannot do. The Foundation is more than a mechanical alternative
for government action.... The Foundation is an instrument for our
citizens to transfer profit from the commercial sector and put it
directly to work as risk capital for the general betterment of
society.
Visions of a poet-port which will helicopter poets from coliseum to coli–
seum where they will give readings to hundreds of thousands of ticket–
subsidized citizens; or a black Summerhill; or a· contemporary constitu–
tional convention with delegates elected from every state; or a little mag
tucked into every fourth copy of
Time
as a pioneer experiment in piggy–
back distribution; or . .. To take a representative sample of the grants
that Irvine actually gave that year: $25,000 to the Orange County
Children's Hospital to furnish the third floor; $10,000 to the Orange
County Society for Crippled Children and Adults; $5,000 to the Orange
County Symphony Association; $5,000 to the Boys Club of South San
Francisco to help build a gym.
And yet, having carefully surveyed the performance of thirty-three
foundations with assets of $100 million or more (which collectively
account for over half of the $20 billion-plus controlled by the more than
.25,000 foundations in the country), and having found that the vast
majority of them have been either noncreative, nonproductive, sloppy,
unimaginative, unethical, arbitrary and/or misleading in their granting or
reporting and self-publicizing activities, he concludes, in a euphemism
worthy of one of those PR firms which more and more foundations
retain to write their annual reports, that "it is obvious that private
philanthropy has enormous unrealized potential." And he argues that
"this potential is so great and of such special value at this point in
American history that it would be reckless imprudence to throw it away.
The wisest course of public policy would appear to be to give them a
further chance -- for a reasonable but limited period of time -- to
begin to fulfill their possibilities."
Given Nielsen's negative findings, how to account for his optimistic
prognosis? The answer lies partly, one suspects,
in
the fact that having
worked for a foundation (Ford, which gets deservedly high marks here)
and having conducted his study under the aegis of a foundation (the
Twentieth Century Fund, not one of the top thirty-three), he perhaps
inevitably, despite honorable intentions and correct behavior on both
sides, internalized something of the foundation ethic. As a result, many
