Message From The President

The Foundation Story - A Journey of Discovery

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By Charles R. Halpern
President, Nathan Cummings Foundation

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I have long been an admirer of the work of Andy Goldsworthy, the British artist featured on the cover of this report. His work involves sensitive and precise manipulations of natural materials. He rearranges stones, leaves, ice chips--in this case, pushes stalks into a lake bottom. The sculpture of knotweed stalks is completed by its own reflection, creating an intricate web that appears to hang in the air above the water. The Goldsworthy image reveals itself in layers, helping us see more clearly.

His work reminds us that human intervention can enhance the beauty of the natural world. It draws attention to the magnificence of the creation and of man's role as a part of the natural order. It emphasizes the transitory character of our interventions. We perceive another image: a waterscape without the wooden sculpture, which will be destroyed by the next heavy rain or strong wind, floating off to the edges of the lake. We can intervene in the natural world in ways that still preserve it as an unspoiled legacy for future generations.

This image makes a particularly timely cover for the Foundation at a moment when the idea of environmental protection and stewardship of the natural world for future generations is under attack. Congress threatens to roll back years of legislative protections of clean air and water. At the same time, it threatens federal support for the arts. The Goldsworthy image reminds us of the precious natural legacy and the role of the arts in our understanding and engaging that legacy.

The interrelationship of the arts with the Foundation's goals are also illustrated by the photo- graphs, which appear starting on page 33, by the French photographer Frédéric Brenner. His eloquent images speak of the stirrings of new directions in Jewish spirituality, and the possibilities of community which transcend individual differences. At a time when the importance of art is being questioned, these images too show us the ways that art can increase understanding and let us see more clearly.

This report covers the Nathan Cummings Foundation's fifth grantmaking year, a time of transition and challenge in an ongoing journey of discovery and creation. For five years, informed by a commitment to fairness, diversity, and community, the Foundation has tried to see the human predicament clearly through programs in the arts, environment, health, and Jewish life. We have sought to discover new approaches to solving urgent social problems, to create new institutions, and to assure their absorption into the mainstream. We have encouraged many creative people whose innovative ideas enrich our society.

During 1994, as our programs grew and evolved, the Foundation's staff, board, and advisors reviewed what we had learned and achieved. Out of the re-view came new program guidelines that refine the Foundation's priorities and set new directions and strategies for meeting the challenges of the future. As a result, 1994 can be seen as a year of transition; the grants listed on the pages of this report represent the priorities of the past five years while the new guidelines point the way toward the next five years.

Working Collaboratively with Grantees

In seeking new approaches to persistent problems, we have learned the value of working collaboratively with a wide range of grantees. Their particular expertise and our view of the larger situation often combine to produce a new perspective that can lead to progress. For example, when we started awarding grants, there were few environmental organizations focusing on transportation. In a separate but related field, we found Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy analyst who had made his reputation advising governments and private firms, including showing electric utilities how to generate electricity more efficiently. We awarded him a grant to apply his creativity to the car, and he repaid us with plans for a 150-300 miles per gallon "hypercar."

A nonpolluting car, of course, is not the whole solution to our most important environmental problem. As Dick Mark, our new environment director, writes elsewhere on these pages, we must "reinvent transportation," establishing policies and systems that encourage the use of mass transit, instead of single-occupant automobiles.

The task is daunting yet not impossible. We must persuade an industry, government, and society hooked on powerful gas guzzlers to cut back on their dependency by developing and switching to alternative modes of transportation. We must make the public understand the connection between car pollution and health problems, such as the inner city epidemic of asthma and other respiratory illnesses. To promote our views on solving the problem, the Foundation helped create the Surface Transportation Policy Project, a coalition of organizations dedicated to rethinking the nation's transportation policies.

These developments in transportation are partly a result of our deep engagement with the environmental movement. We try to have similarly collaborative, mutually educational relationships with all of our grantees. Our Jewish life program typifies this kind of partnership. Through Rachel Cowan, its director, the Foundation has become a leading force in the movement to strengthen and explore Jewish spirituality and to reach people outside the traditional mainstream of Judaism, such as intermarried couples, women disaffected by the religion's historical paternalism, and Jews who have found meaning in other spiritual traditions. Opening paths for these searching Jews to return to the heart of the Jewish community is a mitzvah, a good deed, that benefits everyone. The spiritual dimension is one of the threads that binds our programs together.

Exploring Connections Among Our Programs

As we explored approaches to Jewish renewal, we recognized the importance of offering comfort and community in times of illness, death, and bereavement. In an experience common to the Foundation, Rachel Cowan and Andrea Kydd, the director of our health program, shared their expertise to address this issue. Rachel was concerned with the spiritual dimensions of serious illness. Andrea concentrated on the mind/body connection in healing. Their collaboration produced an interprogram initiative and another new organization, the Jewish Healing Center. The center's support groups for seriously ill people create a sense of balance and well-being through modern therapeutic practices and Jewish rituals.

One of the great fallacies of modern medicine is the notion that you can treat symptoms and not the whole person. From the beginning, the health program supported programs dealing with the ability of the mind to promote well-being and help heal the body. The other priority of the health program was a concern with the radical disparities in our system of health care, particularly the country's tendency to ignore the health needs of poor people. The two priorities are closely interwoven, for the more medicine focuses on expensive high-tech treatments of specific diseases the less it is capable of providing cost-effective preventive care that benefits the poor. During the past five years, the Foundation supported a range of programs designed to give mothers and small children access to proper nutrition, school lunches, and free health clinics.

In the field of mind/body healing, we have supported the pioneering work of a number of doctors and researchers. David Spiegel, for example, leads supportive psychotherapy groups for women with metastasized breast cancer. first-year medical students should attend one of these groups to learn at an early stage that a center of healing is the mind. Women who attended Spiegel's groups not only suffered less pain but lived longer. One woman who participated described their experience as "learning courage from each other."

Using the insights gained in such programs, we supported a program to take the mind/body connection a step further with an experiment by Jon Kabat-Zinn showing that his group meditation techniques worked just as well with Spanish-speaking inner city women as they did with middle class white women. As with our other programs, we also sought a vehicle for propagating these new approaches to health and well-being. With the MacArthur Foundation, we set up the Center for the Advancement of Health in Washington, DC. Our goal was to mainstream mind/body medicine through its inclusion in the federal policy process in terms of research designs and funding and the practices of managed care programs.

Embarking on New Directions

After reviewing the Foundation's programs over the first five years, the Board of Trustees, in 1994, decided to embark on several new projects. Some of the projects involve exploration of new substantive areas while others involve new ways of relating to our grantees. (Our new program guidelines appear in full starting on page 8.)

Health. In the health program, we will try to understand the problems of death and dying, looking for new ways to promote a more humane approach to dying people and their caregivers. We want to help cure American medicine of its pathologic obsession with keeping people alive at all emotional and financial costs, and restore the end of life to its historic human dimensions for the sake of the individual, the family, and the community. We will also focus on the other end of the life cycle--approaches to the birth process that empower parents and promote healthy infants. We will support programs that increase the competence, confidence, and skills of low-income parents, which in turn will improve the health and quality of life of their children. In this sense, a feeling of control over one's life is just as important as vaccinations.

Environment. In the environment program, we will explore new campus-based programs in an attempt to motivate young people to become active participants in solving environmental problems. We will also encourage an exploration of values to create a deeper commitment to the protection of the earth.

Interprogram. In the past, we have made grants under our interprogram category to provide support for groups whose work extended across two or more of our program areas--for example, groups working on environment and health, or arts and Jewish life. For the future, we have decided to shift our interprogram focus to two areas of particular concern: democratic values and contemplative practice.

Democratic Values. The democratic values we want to support and promote are the values that inform the work of the Foundation: a sense of community, strength through diversity, the well-being of future generations, fairness, and economic justice. These concerns cut across all of our specific program areas. The democratic values initiative is designed to strengthen the American commitment to these values. It also will try to understand the circumstances that have led many Americans to question these values and espouse solutions that are incompatible with them.

Contemplative Practice. Our grants in the past have supported contemplative practice in contexts where we believed that new insights on our current complex situation were likely to emerge only from a deeper reflection on our problems and potential solutions. We will try to understand and promote such practice.

The Foundation's engagement with contemplative practice started in our health program where we supported programs using meditation effectively to deal with pain management and serious coronary disease. In the Jewish life program, we created the Center for Jewish Meditation, which is reintroducing Judaism's rich traditions of meditation into the Jewish community; and in the environment program, we have supported organizations that teach meditation to deepen the insights of environmental activists and protect them from burnout.

Arts. The arts are central to a flourishing democracy. They can be a significant vehicle for communication and education, promoting understanding across cultures, and building bridges between groups. Under our new guidelines, we will assist community-based arts education programs that offer support to at-risk youth, and strengthen culturally specific and community-based arts organizations.

Responding to the New Political and Economic Climate

Globalization of the economy and political shifts at the federal and state level have made the burdens of non-profit organizations much more difficult. We want to help organizations evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their programs, and learn to adapt to a situation in which they face an increased demand for their services while their budgets are being cut back.

Technical Assistance. One of the ways to achieve this goal is to rethink organizational structures. We have discovered that many people with brilliant and creative ideas can be helped to develop their skills at building and managing organizations. We are exploring waysto provide technical assistance to help such people build stable organizations and promote their ideas toa wider public.

Communications. Another way is to develop more effective communications skills and strategies for ourselves and our grantees. Our foundation is at the center of a large flow of information. We are exploring ways to organize that information and make it more widely available. We also want to help our grantees improve their capacity to communicate with other groups.

The overall mission of the foundation remains unchanged. However, we recognize that changed circumstances call for new responses. We have tried to shift our focus responsibly--taking into account our obligations to organizations that have relied on us in the past--and at the same time to look for new ways to meet the profound challenges that confront us today. being cut back.