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.

Center Faculty Chair Joel Feishman, with his coauthor Tom Tierney of the Bridgespan Group, has an article in today's Fortune magazine online, titled "The New American Philanthropists: Will Their Billions Get Results?"

"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.

The Center is pleased to announce the creation of a new resource for the field, the Philanthropy Course Syllabus Database.

The Course Syllabus Database contains a collection of syllabuses for courses on philanthropy contributed by scholars from institutions nationwide, including Indiana University, the Harvard Business School, Stanford University, and Princeton University. Course titles and descriptions are fully searchable. Users can also browse by focus, keyword, institution, instructor, and year offered. The syllabuses themselves are stored as read-only PDFs behind a free registration wall.

John Abele, a cofounder the director of the medical devices company Boston Scientific as well as founder of the Argosy Foundation, came to Duke recently and met with several groups.

Video of his presentation before the Foundation Impact Research Group, in which Mr. Abele discusses the evolution of Argosy's decision-making process, FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) youth robotics competition programs, and a book he's writing about cooperation, among other topics, is available here.

About two years ago CSPCS, along with the Fuqua School's Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) and the Bridgespan Group, hosted a conference at Duke titled "Scaling Social Impact: What We Know and What We Need to Know." (Session summaries of the conference can be found here.) Out of that conference came a book edited by CASE's Paul Bloom and our own Edward Skloot, Scaling Social Impact: New Thinking (Palgrave Macmillan).

In today's Chronicle of Philanthropy, Thomas Tierney and the Center's Faculty Chair, Joel Fleishman, discuss the recent announcement that 40 very wealthy individuals and families, at the encouragement of Bill and Melinda Gates, have taken the Giving Pledge, promising to donate half their wealth to good causes.

And over at the Center for Effective Philanthropy's blog, Phil Buchanan has written a heartfelt and moving thank-you to Joel Orosz, who recently announced his retirement from Grand Valley State University.

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.