The Insider's Guide to Grantmaking: How Foundations Find, Fund, and Manage Effective Programs

Chapter One

Making Sense of the Grantmaking Universe

All grantmaking is done in a context—in fact, in many contexts simultaneously. There is the financial context (How large is the asset base?), the social context (Is society kindly disposed toward foundations and the types of social change they promote?), and the historical context (What has the foundation accomplished in the past?). The most influential of them all, however, is the institutional context of the foundation itself. All foundations have a dominant ideology, and given the large number of foundations in the United States, these ideologies span the spectrum from the loony left to the rabid right. The ideology, in turn, does much to shape the foundation's “theory of change”: its beliefs ...