The Foundation Quotes

“foundations have an overriding obligation to the public to perform their duties according to the highest standards of effectiveness and stewardship. That obligation arises especially from the tax deductibility of gifts to create foundations and the tax exempt status granted to foundation assets and income once they are established. As a result of these benefits, United States taxpayers annually benefit United States foundations with foregone taxes in excess of twenty billion dollars. For that reason alone, foundations must somehow be made accountable, preferably by means of voluntary action, but, failing that, through legally mandated regulation or through voluntary action. Many foundations”
― Joel L. Fleishman, The Foundation: A Great American Secret; How Private Wealth is Changing the World

“Today’s most vociferous critics come from every position on the political spectrum. The right decries what it regards as the deliberate disregard by (liberal) foundation trustees and program staff of the intent of (conservative) donors, while the left opposes the long-term growth of foundation assets as an unhealthy concentration of wealth and power. Warren Buffett’s historic gift to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has ratcheted up the concerns about the scale of foundation assets, although, despite the amazingly misleading press reporting of his gift as one to be added to the assets of the Gates Foundation, the Buffett gift is to be entirely spent within a year of the receipt of its installments, and indeed is contingent on the Gates Foundation’s also spending a minimum of 5 percent of its own asset value.”
― Joel L. Fleishman, The Foundation: A Great American Secret; How Private Wealth is Changing the World

“By contrast, a number of strong arguments can be made in support of the perpetual foundation. First, and perhaps most persuasive, is society’s continuing need for well-designed, carefully instructed foundations with perpetual life. In a democratic society in which priorities are established and implementing policies are chosen by transient majorities seeking to rectify intransigent, large, complex problems, perpetual foundations can be countercyclical forces of great value to policy-making and problem-solving. It is only a perpetual foundation with an unlimited lifespan that can take the longer view necessary to understand and deal with the dynamics of significant, persisting social problems through extensive research and/or demonstrations over time.”
― Joel L. Fleishman, The Foundation: A Great American Secret; How Private Wealth is Changing the World

“Perhaps the outlook of the social entrepreneurs is best captured in the words of the great city planner and architect Daniel Burnham: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will themselves not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die.”
― Joel L. Fleishman, The Foundation: A Great American Secret; How Private Wealth is Changing the World

“Foundation managers need to keep the message of O.P.M. in mind in more than one way. Of course, the money they spend is other people’s money because it came originally from one or more donors. But it is also other people’s money to the extent that taxpayers shoulder part of the cost of the foregone revenue from the capital and income earned on that capital through the tax breaks that foundations enjoy. For this reason, the taxpayers, too, have an interest in how wisely and well foundation money is spent. Thus, the general public has a real, tangible, even proprietary interest in a foundation’s deployment of its assets and in all of the ways it makes its decisions.”
― Joel L. Fleishman, The Foundation: A Great American Secret; How Private Wealth is Changing the World

“However, in 2004 there were only some seven hundred community foundations in the United States and almost three thousand corporate foundations, so the overwhelming number of the approximately 68,000 American foundations are independent foundations that are effectively unaccountable to any outside force.)”
― Joel L. Fleishman, The Foundation: A Great American Secret; How Private Wealth is Changing the World

“One of the most infuriating traits of some philanthropoids is their practice of dragging out grantmaking decisions beyond any reasonable time frame, while failing to offer any clear signals about the real likelihood of approval. When the proposal has been solicited by the foundation in the first place—which is usually the case nowadays—this behavior is even more reprehensible.”
― Joel L. Fleishman, The Foundation: A Great American Secret; How Private Wealth is Changing the World

“Foundations are dandy things, but the truth is few institutions are as complacent and potentially unaccountable to the real world as private foundations. When I was a public official, my dealings with philanthropy often left me with the question—who do they think they are?”
― Joel L. Fleishman, The Foundation: A Great American Secret; How Private Wealth is Changing the World

“The United Nations and the U.S. government were also deeply involved. But early on, they had little success transferring “production technology from the industrialized temperate zones to the tropics and sub tropics.” This is why, according to Borlaug, the cooperative Mexican government–Rockefeller Foundation model “ultimately proved to be superior” to “public sector foreign technical assistance programs.... ”114 By the time the Green Revolution really took off, these national and supranational bodies had recognized the success of the foundation-pioneered model and supported it, as demonstrated by USAID’s commitment of funds to the international centers.115 The Green Revolution would not have been possible without earlier scientific breakthroughs. Dr. Borlaug estimates that fully 40 percent of the world’s current population would not be alive today were it not for the Haber-Bosch ammonia-synthesizing process.116 The spread of Mexican dwarf wheat and IR8 rice (and their continually improving offspring) would have been impossible without such breakthroughs in fertilizer technology. But that is the nature of progress. Scientific achievement is not diminished by its debt to the work of previous generations. It has been argued that the Green Revolution produced negative side effects commensurate with its benefits. Critics point out that, in some parts of the world, the greatest benefits of new seed varieties and agricultural technologies have flowed more to well-off rather than poor farmers. They also claim that the irrigation needs of high-yield agriculture drain local water resources. And fertilizer use, essential if high-yield crops are to reach their full potential, can lead to runoff that pollutes streams and rivers. Observers have also worried that, by enabling the developing world to feed more and more of its people, the Green Revolution has been a disincentive for them to get serious about population control. But population growth historically levels out in developed nations, and it is impossible to make the leap from developing to developed without an adequate supply of food.”
― Joel L. Fleishman, The Foundation: A Great American Secret; How Private Wealth is Changing the World

“Explosive population growth in much of Asia was making it less and less plausible that nations like India, Pakistan, and the Philippines would ever be able to feed themselves. In Famine—1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive? William and Paul Paddock argued that a Time of Famines would soon lay waste the developing world. “The famines are inevitable,” they warned. And “riding alongside [them] will surely be riots and other civil tensions which the central government[s] will be too weak to control.” The Paddocks derided the naïve hope that “something [would] turn up” to forestall this doom.102 And the Paddocks were not alone in their assessment. Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, for example, argued that Famine—1975! “may be remembered as one of the most important books of our age.” The Rockefeller Foundation shared these men’s sense of urgency. But, rather than advocate a triage system (as the Paddocks did), in which the worst-off nations would be denied assistance and left to their Darwinian fate, the foundation looked for new ways to attack the problem. The foundation had first extended its agriculture programs to India in 1956, at the request of the Indian national government. In the ensuing years, Rockefeller partnered with USAID and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Together, they “helped establish five state agriculture universities in India. ” 103 These universities collaborated with their American counterparts on research and training. As it had in Mexico, the foundation thereby contributed to the development, in India, of a community of homegrown agriculturalists with access to the most advanced technologies in the world.”
― Joel L. Fleishman, The Foundation: A Great American Secret; How Private Wealth is Changing the World