Philanthropic practice

This Field Resource Book profiles nine foundations that provide general operating support to arts organizations. The featured foundations reflect geographic and institutional diversity, as well as myriad grantmaking approaches. The chapters are the result of research and interviews with senior staff at each of the nine foundations.

Each chapter includes six sections:

"Learning and the Arts: Crossing Boundaries" was a meeting of 120 funding professionals in the arts, education, or children, youth and family programs of fifty foundations, that was organized by the Getty Trust, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. Together with a group of outstanding researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, they explored the value philanthropy can add to education and child development by integrating the arts into schools and non-school programs for children and youth.

Independent Sector and the Foundation Center have partnered in developing this research, resulting in a quantitative study of social justice funding by 1,000 of the largest private and community foundations in the U.S.

Documents the growth in number, giving, and assets of all active U.S. foundations from 1975 through 2003.

June 2005 / 100 pp.

Available online from The Foundation Center.

Provides a first look at estimates of foundation giving for 2004 and final statistics on actual giving and assets for 2003. It also presents new top 100 foundation lists.

April 2005 / 13 pp.

Available online from The Foundation Center.

Examines 2003 grantmaking patterns of a sample of more than 1,000 larger U.S. foundations, and compares current giving priorities with trends since 1990.
February 2005 / 86 pp.

Available online from The Foundation Center.

Prepared in cooperation with the Council on Foundations as an update to the 2000 International Grantmaking II study, this report examines perspectives on the post-9/11 funding climate and the current outlook for the field based on a 2004 survey of more than 60 leading U.S. international grantmakers.

Author Paul Firstenberg challenges grantmakers to proactively assist their grantee's management in maximizing the nonprofit's social impact, showing grantseekers how potential funders increasingly emphasize organizational capacity building.

Author James Joseph has traveled the world interviewing men and women who contribute to the public good. In The Charitable Impulse, he explores the varied impulses that motivate philanthropists in different cultures.

The Foundation Center, September 1989, 210 pp.

Available online from The Foundation Center.

This report provides the most comprehensive measurement to date of the size and scope of the U.S. family foundation community—the fastest growing segment of foundation philanthropy. It identifies the number of family foundations and their distribution by region and state, size, geographic focus, and decade of establishment; and includes analysis of staffing and public reporting by these funders.