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| Best Practices: Philanthropy |
Sum of the Parts
Eileen Gunn
10/01/2004
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Five years ago, the staff at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJ) in
Princeton, N.J., began to see a growing number of grant requests for programs
designed to increase access to dental care in rural and inner-city communities,
especially among the elderly and uninsured families.
“There were few dentists
willing or trained to serve these populations,” says Judith Stavisky, senior
program officer at the foundation. She began looking into ways that RWJ might
address the problem. “Ninety-five percent of the folks I talked to said, ‘You
won’t make a dent until you change who goes to dental school,’” she recalls.
Stavisky’s research found that only 10 percent of the people who graduate from
dental school are African-American or Hispanic and, as might be expected, few
come from those communities where dental care is scarce.
 The foundation came
up with an idea for an ambitious program aimed at encouraging dental schools to
recruit more diverse applicants and to help them with tuition, as well as adding
courses in public health awareness to dental school curriculums and by working
community-based stints into student residencies. It was a hefty agenda to take
on single-handedly, so when Stavisky heard through the grapevine that the W.K.
Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek, Mich., had been looking into ways to fund
dental scholarships for low-income and minority students, she called it to see
if the two well-heeled foundations might work together.
“We’re big, but the
issues we’re tackling in health care are bigger,” says Paul Tarini, a spokesman
at RWJ, which has assets of $8 billion. “Getting enough effort focused on a
problem to really make change happen is tough and beyond our resources.”
Instead, the foundation is aiming at what Stavisky terms “cataclysmic” changes
in dental school education, in collaboration with the $5.7 billion Kellogg
Foundation and the California Endowment, which turned out to have a similar
statewide program in mind.
TOP VIEW
When we want to tackle monumental problems, collaborating with other foundations
can maximize our philanthropic muscle. Those who have tried such arrangements
caution, however, that it takes time to find the right group chemistry—and participants should check their egos at the door. |
Whether our foundation has an endowment in the
billions or is of a more modest size, we all may encounter programs we would
like to pursue, but which are beyond our resources. Even Bill and Melinda Gates
sometimes collaborate in their foundation ventures, as do the Michael and Susan
Dell Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard
Foundation.
The main reason foundation leaders decide to collaborate is that
they wish to tackle colossal issues such as ending homelessness in a major
metropolitan area, making health care available to all Americans or stopping the
spread of AIDS in underdeveloped countries. These are problems that require a
commitment of time, as well as money—time to lobby Congress or oversee
construction of homes and clinics. “People now want to achieve these
philanthropic goals in their lifetimes,” notes Robert Mahaffey, vice president
of the National Center for Family Philanthropy in Washington. While benefactors
have traditionally established perpetual family foundations, more of them today
are spending down their assets themselves in order to accomplish more in less
time. Add a collaborative program, Mahaffey advises, and that “is the best way
to maximize your ability to effect change.”
It Takes a Network
Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic, a Minneapolis
medical device company, and his wife, Penny, were able to lengthen their $30
million family foundation’s philanthropic reach by working with others of like
mind. Penny’s bout with breast cancer in the mid-1990s left the couple convinced
that the U.S. health care system is long on technological advances but short on
the sort of one-on-one care that factors in total mental and physical
well-being. Riled up, they agreed to use the George Family Foundation’s
resources to promote the latter.
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