Duke Sanford School of Public Policy

For the past two years, the Center has been documenting the process of spend-down at two major foundations. Joel Fleishman has been following events at AVI CHAI and Tony Proscio those at The Atlantic Philanthropies.

The Foundation Center’s 2009 report Perpetuity or Limited Lifespan found that, of the 1,074 family foundations responding to a survey of the 20,000 top foundations, approximately 12 percent plan to spend down while another 25 percent are undecided. If those number hold roughly true for all of the approximately 70,000 family foundations in the United States, we’re talking about there being potentially more than 8,000 foundations that have positively decided to spend down.

Even under normal circumstances, it can be tricky for foundations to change a grantmaking strategy once it’s launched (hence all the learned writing on “mid-course correction” and “exit strategies,” which has provided a generation of consulting fees for people like me). Yet strategic changes become even harder when a foundation’s life expectancy comes down to single digits. At that point, the time for making adjustments is short, and the risk of a rushed or haphazard course-correction rises steeply. It becomes all too easy, in the course of trying to renovate a program in its final years, to discover that you’ve accidentally dismembered it.

For the past three years, I have been chronicling the ongoing process of spend-down at AVI CHAI, a foundation located in Jerusalem and New York with programs in Israel, North America, and the former Soviet Union. The third annual report, titled "Shifting the Spend-Down into High Gear: A Foundation Begins Implementing Its Strategy," is now available.

This is Part III of a speech delivered by Gara LaMarche before participants at the second annual Conference on Scaling Impact, hosted by the Social Impact Exchange. You can read Part I here and Part II here. A PDF of the full speech is available here.

This is Part II of a speech delivered by Gara LaMarche before participants at the second annual Conference on Scaling Impact, hosted by the Social Impact Exchange. You can read Part I here.

On June 15, 2011, Gara LaMarche, President and CEO of the Atlantic Philanthropies, delivered a speech before the participants of the second annual Conference on Scaling Impact, hosted by the Social Impact Exchange in New York City. Over the next three days, the Intrepid Philanthropist will run the text of Gara's speech. Here is Part I.

"Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." —Samuel Johnson, as reported by James Boswell in Life of Johnson.

With the publication of the second annual report on spend-down at the AVI CHAI Foundation, Tony Proscio and I have had the opportunity to reflect on some of the lessons that we, as well as the trustees and staff at AVI CHAI, have learned over the first two years of the project.

It has never been easy to explain the practice of philanthropy to the uninitiated. Confusing philanthropy with charity, many people tend to wonder what can be so hard about giving money away.

Elizabeth McCormack, Deputy Chairman of the Atlantic Philanthropies and Senior Advisor on Charitable Giving, Rockefeller Family & Associates, spoke before the