Community Foundation

2007, 11 Pages. Americans for the Arts, One East 53rd Street, Second Floor, NY, NY 10022, (212) 223-2787, www.americansforthearts.org

2007, 11 pages. The Funder's Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities, 1500 San Remo Avenue, Suite 249, Coral Gables, FL 33146, (305) 667-6350, www.fundersnetwork.org

2008, 141 pages. Council on Foundations, 2121 Crystal Drive, Suite 700, Arlington, VA 22202 (703) 879-0600, www.cof.org

This robust report features a series of essays on aspects of rural philanthropy from a diverse range of perspectives. The conclusion, by Sherece Y. West, alone is worth the price of admission. The report concludes with a summary of funding recommendations from the Council on Foundations Conference on Philanthropy and Rural America: A 21st Century Agenda, held in August 2007 in Montana.

Working at a busy foundation involves a lot of reading and listening to smart people who are working hard to improve the world we live in. One thing comes across loud and clear: how little value added is being contemporaneously realized from the definitional leaps of our unsustainably complex verbiage.

In other words, it's time for us nonprofit people to learn to MAKE IT PLAIN.

When funders move into indigenous communities they tread a very fine line. On one side of the line they have a duty to undertake sufficient investigation to ensure that they properly understand a funding request and their own role in relation to it. On the other side, obtaining the information may conflict with the ability to acknowledge and give appropriate respect to the applicant's indigenous culture and its bounds.

My first horse was like New Mexico.

On summer grass under an arch of the cottonwoods, no creature could have been more beautiful, at least to my eye. He was a big rangy bay with a white blaze, and he animated the afternoons just by lazing into view. He was an ordinary country gelding, but his long-limbed grace and equine pride conjured a kind of magic. At a hundred yards, when he lifted his head, I could feel his kingly disdain. He was all horse, not an ounce of Flicka, and he could fly over the hills. Not to coin a phrase, but I was enchanted.

2007, 90 pages, 79 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003, (212) 620-4230, www.foundationcenter.org

Download pdf: www.foundationcenter.org

2006, 66 pages. Haigh-Scatena Foundation, P.O. Box 4399, Davis, CA 95617, 530-758-5327

This book by Ronald W. Clement, who has worked as both a grantmaker and grant seeker, details ways in which grantmakers can foster social change. Clement uses his forty years of experience in the field of social change to elucidate the obstacles that funders face

2006, 90 pages, Grantmakers for Education, 720 S.W. Washington St., Suite 605, Portland, OR 97205, 503-595-2100, www.edfunders.org

Download pdf: www.educationdonor.org