The Cost of Caution: Advocacy, Public Policy, and America's Foundations
Kathy Postel Kretman, PhD, director of the Georgetown University Center for Public & Nonprofit Leadership, shares comments on the 2005 Issues Forum.
"In choosing the topic for the Center’s 2005 Issue Forum – "The Cost of Caution: Advocacy, Public Policy and America’s Foundations" – we sought to create a venue in which to explore the challenges posed by a changing era for philanthropy. One of the foremost contemporary students of philanthropy, Robert L. Payton, brings perspective to this changing era as he writes about four fundamental supports of American life1, supports that stand almost as legs supporting a stool:
• Self help, or our ability to take care of and serve ourselves;
• Mutual aid, meaning our webs of family, religious institutions, associations, and friendships that help sustain us;
• Government assistance, that is, provision by the state of goods (and services) that will not be provided by self-help or mutual aid, such as safety and defense, foreign policy, roads and transit, and, to a degree, care of the poor and marginalized;
• Voluntary service, meaning philanthropy, nonprofits and what we have come to think of as the independent sector.
Much of the cultural and political angst in America today is the result of shifting weight, strength and power among these four legs and, consequently, the rebalancing that must occur between them. In such a time of change, philanthropy may seek to influence this rebalancing, or take a more passive role and respond to the influences of others. Which is the appropriate role for philanthropy and, if the appropriate role is a proactive one, how might philanthropic agents, particularly foundations, which hold the bulk of philanthropy’s assets, best fulfill that role?"
Read the 2005 Issues Forum transcript below.
