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

Conclusion

“In the long run,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, “men hit only what they aim at” ([1854] 1973). Initiative-based grantmaking allows foundations to take deliberate aim at significant targets and, through very careful application, to hit them. Initiatives are a very powerful medicine in the foundation pharmacopoeia, but like many drugs, the effective dose is uncomfortably close to the lethal dose. That is to say, initiatives are effective only when they are exhaustive, and they are exhaustive only when they are intensive, comprehensive, and expensive. Foundations should never try to undertake initiatives if they cannot spare program officers to concentrate on them; never attempt them if they cannot marshal all the elements needed ...