By Charles R. Halpern President

The decade of the 1990s has witnessed rapid and continuing change. A global economy has become a reality, creating new opportunities and new challenges. The aggregation of wealth and economic power in the hands of a small number of Americans has accelerated while the poorest 20 percent of the population has sunk deeper into hopeless poverty, with little prospect for effective connection with the new global economy. Many in the middle class are facing increasing economic pressures and growing insecurity about the future for themselves and their children.

Great concentrations of wealth have created new opportunities for philanthropy as well. Ted Turner, through the Turner Foundation, has shown how a person of wealth, working with family members, skilled professionals, and soundly rooted local organizations can have an effective voice at the local level on critical issues from water quality protection to teen pregnancy. The United Nations Foundation shows how the same conjunction of forces can be brought to bear on problems of global concern. Turner's challenge to other people of wealth to devote their resources to philanthropy suggests a bright possibility for the activities of philanthropy.

At the same time, we in philanthropy have an obligation to review our own practices and challenge ourselves and our grantees to provide better service to our communities and to the global community. After nearly a decade of grantmaking, the Nathan Cummings Foundation is now reviewing its programs and thinking about what our future grantmaking activities should look like. This process, drawing on trustees and family members and the Foundation's professional staff, is proceeding, as a collaboration, throughout the year.

We are also taking this occasion to look more deeply at the core values that motivate the Foundation. Our commitment to community empowerment, for example, is reflected in our arts program. Arts instruction in the public schools continues to disappear. How can we support and stabilize community arts organizations so that young people are schooled in the arts, creating career possibilities for themselves and enriching their communities? And how can we help bring arts back into the schools?

Support for advocacy has the potential of helping hundreds of thousands at a time rather than one or two people.

The spiritual foundations of life, often lost under an avalanche of commercialism and economic competition, call out for renewal. Given the religious heritage of our founder, the Foundation focuses its efforts on strengthening spirituality in the Jewish community, but we also look for deeper spiritual roots in our environment and health programs. All the major religions teach that humans have an obligation to preserve the natural order, a shared insight that can help ground the environmental movement for the new century. In our health program, we are exploring the spiritual dimensions of dying. An increasing number of people, deeply dissatisfied with the mechanistic impersonality of a strictly biomedical approach to the dying process, look for richer opportunities and experiences at that critical time of life-for the dying person, her family, and her community.

During the past year, our attention to philanthropy and nonprofit organizations has continued to grow. We are anxious to work with other foundations and nonprofits to clarify and reaffirm the values of the nonprofit sector. Increasingly, many nonprofit organizations are facing vigorous competition from for-profit organizations. How can nonprofits compete effectively without sacrificing the values that make the sector distinctive? Nonprofits must be concerned with equity, with assuring an equitable distribution of services so that no segment of society is left behind. Nonprofits must be concerned with democratic participation so that institutions function in a way that gives ordinary people an opportunity to affect the decisions that impact their lives. And nonprofits must be concerned with service to specific communities. If, for example, they are providing health services in a deprived neighborhood, they cannot simply close down when it suits them, leaving a community unserved. These constraints put nonprofits at a competitive disadvantage; at the same time, they are the very reasons that justify the existence of nonprofits, as well as their favorable tax status. Obviously nonprofits need to be viable financially in order to stay in business, and we want to assure that the new competition stimulates improved performance. But we must not allow competitive pressures to undermine the basic mission of nonprofits or their commitment to the public good.

The Nonprofit Sector and Government
In this time of reassessment, the role of the nonprofit sector must also be considered in relation to government and the for-profit sector. Blanket criticism of the competence of government, and the federal government in particular, is wrongheaded and counterproductive. Government is the democratic foundation for public participation. We must not be deluded into thinking that private institutions, whether for-profit or nonprofit, can take the place of government.

It is a time for rethinking the relationships of the diverse sectors that shape our society, and to claim for the nonprofit sector the important role appropriate to its participatory character, flexibility, and concern for the public welfare. In this context, we need to ask: What is good and responsible philanthropy? Some people and groups have proposed a narrow view, wherein the only good philanthropy is local volunteer relief work to meet the immediate needs of poor people. If philanthropy only does relief work, no matter how important, then we are throwing out the crucial nonprofit activities engaged in by universities, arts institutes, hospitals, and citizen advocacy groups. Such a view does not even allow for efforts to confront the root causes of poverty. Only relief is allowed, only a helping hand in a moment of crisis. Without efforts to understand and rectify the connections between poverty and discrimination in housing, education, and employment, for example, the helping hand will remain extended to the poor indefinitely, crisis after crisis. Is this good philanthropy? Is this truly serving the public good beyond today and tomorrow? Is this narrow vision worthy of the traditionally high aspirations and generosity of Americans?

Such a vision plays to an outdated Hollywood image of charity as the preoccupation of local voluntary groups taking care of the needy. This view of philanthropy never represented the entire picture and is even less true today. Today's communities, whether urban, rural, or suburban, are more complicated than the myth of small-town America. Dealing with these complexities requires much more than voluntary local activity. It requires the combined efforts of government, business, and a vigorous nonprofit sector.

We must acknowledge gaps in our performance and develop a practice of mutual criticism aimed at improvements.

Keynotes for the Nonprofit Sector
We do not know yet what the nonprofit sector of the 21st century will look like, or what it should look like. That will emerge from a thoughtful, committed, and courageous dialogue on the part of all those concerned about the sector. Yet a few things seem clear. First, advocacy is a vital activity for the nonprofit sector. By allowing people to join together to identify public problems and press for solutions to them, nonprofit organizations help to sustain America's constitutional traditions of association, democratic participation, and free speech. This advocacy function helps to educate the public about important problems, gives voice to the voiceless, keeps policy makers informed and accountable, and improves the quality of public decisions. At a time when the right of nonprofits to speak is being challenged, foundations need to provide leadership, both by supporting the work of advocacy and by making our own voices heard on the important challenges facing society.

Second, there is a need for professionalism. To romanticize volunteer efforts is an anachronistic mistake. Nonprofits need the right mix of professionals and volunteers to make their efforts effective in modern society. Even more important, nonprofits need active community involvement in societal problem-solving, in deciding what public goods are worthy of support and in organizing those services. The relief model of charity does not move people beyond their neediness. It does not create independence or community. Support for programs stressing empowerment, self-realization, and community development does.

Third, nonprofit organizations must also be models of openness, accountability, honest self-criticism, and renewal. We must acknowledge gaps in our performance and develop a practice of mutual criticism aimed at improvements. We must remain true to our mission, encourage active involvement on the part of citizen boards, and operate in an open and democratic fashion. We must renew ourselves periodically and adapt to change to better serve the public.

Again, foundations have a tremendous opportunity to provide leadership. The stance we take will help set the tone for the rest of the nonprofit sector. There are issues needing to be addressed in the philanthropic community, issues relating to reporting and appropriate use of funds. Rather than waiting for regulation to be imposed from the outside, we should take the lead in setting high standards and calling one another to account when we don't meet them. Specifically, we should seek answers to questions such as: What should be a minimum in terms of publicizing guidelines, explaining funding processes, and reporting grants made? What are appropriate levels of compensation for key staff? Should trustees be compensated, and if so, at what level? By being willing to deal openly with such questions and to set clear standards in such areas, we ourselves raise the bar of accountability, and bid plausibly for increased public respect.

We in the nonprofit sector must speak for a broader sense of humanity that is not measured by dollars.

Ideas and Insights
Finally, good philanthropy is about creativity. It is about helping people do things differently, as befits the new and different world that is emerging with increasing rapidity. Good philanthropy means supporting thinkers and ideas that help us change the way we see and, ultimately, the way we do. It is also a matter of helping ourselves and others tap into the deep resources of spirit and aspiration that are always available to us as human beings.

It is sometimes difficult to evaluate the results that flow from a good idea. Yet the impact of a good idea is beyond measure. Such ideas help us frame issues more productively, draw different people and resources into a solution, take advantage of new technologies or use old technologies in a fresh way. Spiritual insights and experiences are likewise hard to measure, yet their effect on people and society can be truly profound. Often it is the lightning bolt of spiritual insight or the quietude of contemplation which allow people to move beyond the dilemmas in which human life so often seems encased. Our culture's tendency is increasingly to look only at measurable outcomes, yet it is in the domain of nonmaterial values that the answers to our most pressing questions are likely to be found.

Some of the most important activities of the nonprofit sector cannot be quantified or measured-the wholeness and richness of life, the joy of community, the pristine beauty of God's creation, the wonders that come alive in artistic expression, and the attention we give to the miracle of birth and the mystery of death. We in the nonprofit sector must speak for this broader sense of humanity that is not captured by numbers, that is not found in the marketplace, for as we reclaim the fullest measure of what it means to be human, we also enlarge and enrich our understanding of what it means to serve the public good.

We must remain true to our mission, encourage active involvement on the part of citizen boards, and operate in an open and democratic fashion. We must renew ourselves periodically and adapt to change to better serve the public. Again, foundations have a tremendous opportunity to provide leadership. The stance we take will help set the tone for the rest of the nonprofit sector. There are issues needing to be addressed in the philanthropic community, issues relating to reporting and appropriate use of funds. Rather than waiting for regulation to be imposed from the outside, we should take the lead in setting high standards and calling one another to account when we don't meet them. Specifically, we should seek answers to questions such as: What should be a minimum in terms of publicizing guidelines, explaining funding processes, and reporting grants made? What are appropriate levels of compensation for key staff? Should trustees be compensated, and if so, at what level? By being willing to deal openly with such questions and to set clear standards in such areas, we ourselves raise the bar of accountability, and bid plausibly for increased public respect.

[Photo credit: Artwork by Kazuaki Tanahashi]