White Courtesy Telephone

Avoid Frankenthinking, Expert Suggests

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In Mary Shelley’s beloved novel, Dr. Frankenstein was a visionary member of the scientific community of his day, who, sensing the terrible nature of his work, isolated himself from the world to conduct his experiments.  He was a god-like figure, a “modern Prometheus” breathing new life into inanimate flesh.

Imagine how a well-meaning member of the nonprofit or foundation world might have rewritten Shelley’s tale.  Perhaps, from this perspective, Dr. Frankenstein’s approach to creating human life was too top-down.  This is what ultimately led his townsmen to take up their torches and pichforks to hunt down and kill his monster.

Suppose instead that Dr. Frankenstein had invited each villager to dig up his or her favorite body part in the churchyard and bring that to a community visioning process.  The creature, when finally stitched together, might have sported five arms and two heads and been unable to breathe for lack of a trachea, but it would have been their monster.

Unfortunately, research indicates that group brainstorming processes that involve simply eliciting and accepting the contributions of multiple participants, without examining these contributions critically, rarely outperform processes that incorporate a robust measure of respectful disagreement and debate. 

“Never, ever brainstorm,” cautioned Jonah Lehrer, the keynote speaker at a recent Grantmakers for Effective Organizations conference in Seattle.

And yet brainstorming, “consensus-building” processes are endemic to our field.  Every potentially bone-headed thing we’ve ever said is reverently recorded on a piece of flipchart paper now hanging in some facilitator’s office.  Being overly cautious not to offend our colleagues, we self-edit our “yes, buts” into “yes, ands,” as if by doing so we can bleach out the stain of our disagreement.

That is how we in the foundation world take what might be an extraordinary tale, a great advance in human knowledge, and turn it through groupthink into lifeless quiltwork.  These processes account for the myriad incoherent mission statements we encounter in our work, which are not so much mission statements as overwrought landscape paintings attempting to capture every inconsequential detail of some alien terrain.  What might have been simple statements of purpose are often yes-anded into meaningless word salad.

Inclusiveness is an important value in nonprofit work, I get that. Yet I often find that a regard for including all points of view in these processes does more to make us feel good than to improve our work.  We celebrate our consensus not fully understanding what the cost is to the communities we serve.

Philanthropy lacks the respectful, yet bracing, debate that is so much a part of the culture of the business world and of academia.  It would take a deliberate and sustained effort to shift our culture, but doing so might at least help us avoid compounding the sin of ineffectiveness with the sin of incoherence.

Steve Jobs, The Meaning of a Nonprofit, and The Moral Imagination

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I.

I remember my sense of anticipation some 18 years ago when I landed my first foundation job. None of my friends or colleagues had any inkling what happened inside these black boxes that consistently swallowed our proposals and issued polite rejections.

I had heard that foundations were about social change, that they were about marshaling private capital for the public good. I was excited by the idea of working with colleagues who had the time to think deeply about our community’s greatest challenges, who were not constantly passing the hat to pay the light bill.

My first day on the job, I met former activists who knew what it was like to grow up black and poor; I admired the view from my 28th story window of the city I loved. On my second day, I chided myself for my overly romantic idealizations of foundation work. Of course sexism, careerism, and other isms could exist here as elsewhere. But still, foundations were anointed institutions, set apart to serve as the conscience of the community. On my third day I was wondering what I had gotten myself into.

If my idealizations were so far off the mark, what then was a foundation supposed to be about?

One reader of a recent post commented thoughtfully about the purpose and identity of community foundations:

… [S]hould philanthropy uphold or challenge the status quo? I've always seen the role and purpose of [community foundations] as being one of brokerage between the two positions. We stand of necessity with a foot in both camps, and it is our specific function to interpret each side to the other and make them intelligible. A [community foundation] that plants itself squarely on one side or the other will betray its mission.  …  We serve mutually incompatible constituencies—proponents of social change vs upholders of the status quo. All over the world, I suspect, people in [community foundations] are deliberately muddying waters in order to satisfy both at once. It’s what we’re good at, and if we leaned too far in either direction we’d stop being [community foundations] and become something else.

So beautifully expressed. I immediately begin to wonder about the apparent cold-bloodedness of our hypothetical translator. Was he supposed to have no feelings one way or the other about what he was asked to interpret, and if so, why did he bother? Did he interpret ultimately for the sake of a paycheck or for the sake of justice? And did it matter?

It’s not only community foundations that struggle to keep one foot in two camps, to broker between the lived experience of poverty, say, and the privileged world of trustees.  Small and large private foundations struggle with this as well, as does every nonprofit intent on survival.  Can an organization interpret the world to everything and everyone except itself?

Perhaps a community foundation ceases to be a community foundation not when it sides with justice, but when it fails to understand what living in community requires of us.  Perhaps any foundation or charity betrays its purpose, its identity, when corporate thinking completely replaces moral imagination.

II.

I expect many observers of the nonprofit field have grown tired of arguments that pit values like efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability against more liberal values like adaptability, empathy, and justice. Organizations that embody the latter need a nonprofit chiropractor to straighten their spines, the argument goes; their stiff-necked corporatist cousins need to work on their flexibility. Those who make these arguments typically come to the triumphant conclusion that we need both kinds of thinking in our field.

Some go further and remind us that the distinction between nonprofit and for-profit, while still relevant to the Internal Revenue Service, has lost its meaning for a new generation of social entrepreneurs who have learned to think outside the IRS’s checkboxes. They argue that there’s a growing sector agnosticism in our field, and that it’s only a matter of time before the distinction between nonprofit and for-profit goes the way of the 8-track tape. They point to the jobs made possible by for-profit companies, to the services they provide and the products they create, and they ask, “Is this not also a kind of social value?”

In our headlong rush to let everything be everything, to embrace blended corporations and the like, it’s important to call to mind some values that cannot be so easily “blended.” Consider one of the stories currently in circulation about Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple.

The Philanthropy Conference in 2502

Plus ça change.

Twenty-Five Theses ...

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... about foundations, with apologies to Martin Luther: 

1. The foundation world is filled with many people of good will who desire through their work to advance the common good. Many have in fact succeeded. 
2. Taken together, however, the collective actions of foundations have failed to address, in any significant way, some of the most basic injustices in our society. After decades of work, foundations have failed to alter the basic condition of the poor in the United States. The gap between the rich and poor has widened in recent years. Individuals can work hard all their lives, manage their finances prudently, and still fail to have income security in their retirement. Racism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry still affect the destinies of whole communities of people. Millions of people lack access to quality health care.  Urban public schools do not provide a world class education to our children.  Because of lax lobbying and campaign finance laws, politicians and elections are routinely bought and sold. Our economic prosperity is still tied to the ongoing degradation of our environment.
3. With few exceptions, if we were to examine the histories of some of the great social advances in our country—the winning of women’s suffrage, the ending of Jim Crow—we’d see that foundations had played a minor role at best. In spite of the resources, independence, and power available to them, the effect of foundations on the common good has been embarrassingly marginal. The claim that organized philanthropy is more effective than simple charity needs to be challenged and may be, as some have claimed, largely a fiction.
4. Some liberal foundations have made strides in asserting and supporting the rights of individuals in marginalized communities, but they have been almost completely silent on the subject of our responsibilities as citizens.  We see this asymmetry in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  One has to read through to Article 29, the second-to-last article of the Declaration, to discover that we have duties to the community “in which alone the free and full development of [our personalities] is possible.”  Twenty-eight articles detailing our rights.  One article alluding to unspecified responsibilities.
5. Foundations and their staffs often lack a sense of urgency about the challenges facing marginalized communities.
6. Unlike academic disciplines, foundation work lacks a tradition of vigorous debate and self-criticism. Because of this, our most bone-headed beliefs and practices go unchallenged. This is one of the great failings of our field.
7. Just as the unexamined life is not worth living, the unexamined profession is not worth pursuing.  But most of us who work at foundations—especially those of us who lead foundations—fail to ask the most fundamental questions about our work: What does human flourishing look like? What is my vision of the Good? What’s our responsibility to one another in a complex, industrial society? How much suffering at "the bottom" should a community tolerate if the overall statistics look pretty good? What is the role of a foundation in society? etc.
8. The positive aspects of foundation culture are significant. These include an immense pool of talent, a commitment to those who are least well off, a respect for the work of nonprofit leaders, and a desire to make a positive difference in the world. There have been and there continue to be many "great souls" in the world of organized philanthropy.
9. The negative aspects of foundation culture are also significant and tend to go largely unaddressed. These negative aspects include the following:

   Foundations are generally averse to collaboration, even though collaboration is essential for making progress on difficult issues such as poverty, universal access to quality health care, etc. There are a number of reasons for this aversion, including the desire to claim bragging rights for this or that piece of work. In the United States, this one failing perhaps above all others has had enormous negative repercussions for people in low-income communities.

   Foundations are notoriously risk averse. The psychology of this phenomenon was brilliantly explored by Joel Orosz in his book Effective Foundation Management: 14 Challenges of Philanthropic Leadership—And How to Outfox Them.

   Foundations and their staffs are subject to the same forces that beguile us all: consumerism, careerism, a lack of media literacy, etc.

   Foundations frequently fall prey to the Cult of the New.

   Foundations sometimes succumb to the Cult of Personality—a strong leader who makes his or her pet peeves, prejudices, fears, aversions, moods, etc. the measure of all things.

10. Because those of us who work at foundations are largely unaware of the history of our field, we frequently reinvent the wheel. We pay far too little heed to what has already been attempted, and to whether and why it has succeeded or failed. This in spite of the fact that there are resources available to help us overcome our professional amnesia. 
11. There is a clear difference between bad, good, and inspired grantmaking.  The distinction between bad, good, and inspired grantmaking can be taught (but rarely is).
12. Foundations generally do not know how to relate to the people and communities they aim to serve.  This relationship tends to range from command and control to benign neglect.
13. Evaluation is our friend, not our enemy. Unfortunately, it’s often used as a blunt weapon against grantees. Worries about evaluation have become the math anxiety of philanthropy.
14. The language foundations use to describe their work is frequently tortured and moribund. More often than not, foundations fail to communicate effectively the good they’ve able to accomplish.
15. There will typically be more problems (and solutions) around the table, than there are on the table.
16. There can be no significant social change without systemic change.
17. At the same time, we must be careful to avoid the Systems Heresy: the idea that fair institutional structures and a fair enforcement of laws will inevitably produce fair outcomes.
18. We must also be careful to avoid the Gadgets Heresy: the idea that new tools—new social media sites, B corporations, more "efficient markets," etc.—will save us from ourselves. Our greatest progress will come not from chasing the latest Shiny New Object, but from attending to the field’s moral and intellectual failings.
19. The social entrepreneurship movement is important and worthy of support. At the same time, we need to acknowledge that there is important work a civilized people must do that will forever require subsidy either through public tax dollars or private donations. If it really were possible for a business-minded individual to turn a profit by providing health care to the penniless, it would have happened long ago. The not-for-profit status of organizations that provide services to the indigent reflects not a failure of entrepreneurial imagination or will, but rather a sober assessment of what people value enough to pay for freely.
20. We will forever knock our heads against some of our society’s most intractable problems and make little progress addressing them as long as we ignore their social justice dimensions. It’s absurd to believe that we can effectively address the challenges faced by low-income communities, for example, by ignoring the effects of race and class or by side-stepping issues of power and privilege.
21. Teach a man to fish, certainly. But also ask why so few people in this man’s community can afford to own a fishing pole; why the county incinerator is being sited in his neighborhood, befouling his pond rather than that of his wealthier townsmen; and why he’s being taught to fish when he’s more likely to earn a living wage as an accountant or an engineer.
22. Most foundation work is transactional rather than transformational.  To borrow a phase from Nietzsche, its very meanness cries to heaven.
23. Philanthropy is and should be primarily a moral rather than a technocratic tradition. This doesn’t absolve foundation professionals from using all the knowledge and resources available to them to make their grantmaking better along every possible dimension—spiritual, technical, and otherwise.
24. There is currently a great battle on for the soul of philanthropy.  We oppose "technocrats" to "social justice grantmakers," "liberals" to "conservatives."  But these are skirmishes on the edge of a larger battle about the role each of us will play in either contributing to or subtracting from the common good.  What will future generations say about us, about our engagement as citizens, our stewardship of the planet, our ability to defend the common good against the ravages of narrow interests?  I believe my own ears would burn with shame.  We’ve left future generations one hell of a mess.
25. Insert your own 25th thesis here (or in the comments below).

Hegemony By Proxy

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A recent publication by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, titled Do Nothing About Me Without Me, raises some vexing questions about the proper division of labor between foundations and the communities they aim to serve.

It’s not unusual for a foundation initiative to be “resident-led” up to the moment when the funder—rather than the residents—decide that facilitators, trainers, or other professionals are required for some aspect of the job.  At this point a “grassroots” project begins to lose its “bottom-up” character.

Along these same lines, when funders go about the business of identifying “indigenous leadership” in a neighborhood, they’ll often search for people who share their values and behave accordingly.  On several occasions I’ve seen resident leaders develop some very strong ideas of their own and begin to lose favor with the grantmakers who “empowered” them in the first place.  We might call this “funder hegemony by proxy.”

We seldom discuss these dimensions of stakeholder engagement, but should.  As grantmakers or donors we can’t have it both ways.  We cannot, in my view, claim bragging rights for supporting a community’s right to self-determination while we continue to call the shots and stack the jury.  If good sense requires the latter, then we need to own up to it and press the case against those for whom resident judgments and values and experiences are the measure of all things.

This Just In ...

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This is an excerpt of a memo from John Anger, White Courtesy Telephone’s Director of Inevitable Conclusions, to Albert Ruesga, Managing Editor:

1. I checked on a statement you made during our most recent White Courtesy Telephone conference call. You said that the pharaohs of ancient Egypt have no equivalent in contemporary philanthropy.

This is technically correct. You foundation CEOs no longer believe you are gods. You only act as if you do.

2. During our call, [Sally Wilde, White Courtesy Telephone staff writer,] referred to this passage from a recent op ed by William Schambra discussing the NCRP Philanthropy at its Best report:

And in a world where everyone speaks in hushed tones for fear of offending the panjandrums of philanthropy, it is unafraid to call even the largest foundations to account, naming names if necessary.

I polled 349 colleagues. While 82 percent responded positively to the word "panjandrum" only 4 percent knew what the word meant, sort of.

3. [Dixie Moline, White Courtesy Telephone staff writer,] quoted this passage from the May 1909 Scientific American:

Much excitement has been created by Prof. Pickering’s proposal to build a system of mirrors, by means of which light can be rhythmically flashed to Mars. According to Prof. Pickering, a system of reflecting surfaces of adequate area could be constructed at a cost of $10,000,000. … If an answering signal should be received, it would be safe to say that the event would transcend in interest and importance the most stirring occurrence in the history of the earth, and would inaugurate a new era in the progress of the human race.

On our conference call you asked if we would have funded Professor Pickering’s project.

My answer is yes, and here’s how I figured it: Professor Pickering’s thesis is that there might be intelligent life on Mars that would see our signal and respond.

Let the probability that this thesis is true equal one in a billion or 0.000000001.

What is the value of showing the thesis to be true, according to the author? He writes, "the event would transcend in interest and importance the most stirring occurrence in the history of the earth, and would inaugurate a new era in the progress of the human race." I estimate the value of this at $7 trillion, about ten times the size of Obama’s stimulus package.

If we fund Professor Pickering’s project, the expected return = benefit minus cost = ( 0.000000001 x $7 trillion ) minus $246,477,592* =  negative $246,470,592. We’d be $246 million in the hole.

If we don’t fund the project, the expected return is roughly zero.

Even though logic tells me it would be foolish to fund Professor Pickering’s project, I think that whole mirror thing would still be cool as shit.

_____

* $10,000,000 in 1909 dollars adjusted for inflation.

Beige Philanthropy in the Crosshairs

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Think of them as two armies battling against overwhelming indifference—and frequently against one another—for the soul of philanthropy.

One camp is arrayed under such banners as “metrics” and “evaluation,” and has a distinctly business school cast.  The other champions a style of philanthropy concerned with social justice, and seeks to expose the root causes of our social ills.

These are caricatures, but they’re not entirely without foundation, so indulge me for a moment longer.

We fail to appreciate how closely united these two camps are in their rejection of philanthropy as usual—“beige philanthropy,” as I like to call it.  Most striking, perhaps, is their primary point of contact: a shared concern for effectiveness.

Here’s how it works: Those in the Metrics camp argue that few foundations make any real attempt to hold themselves accountable.  Without measuring the effectiveness of their grantmaking, they’re unable to track progress against stated goals (if they exist).  Even if these grantmakers are able to see with their own eyes the good they help produce, it’s not clear that this good significantly outweighs the cost of producing it.  Accountable to nobody but themselves, they end up shortchanging the communities they aim to serve.

Those in the Social Justice camp come to exactly the same conclusion but via a different path.  They argue that most of the giving done by mainstream foundations is based on an incomplete or flawed analysis of what it takes to achieve goals like ending poverty or ensuring that all children thrive.  These foundations content themselves with triaging society’s victims, never wondering about the causes of their victimhood, and suspecting, perhaps, that they might themselves be implicated in the crime.

It’s an easy matter to strawman mainstream philanthropy, to claim that it’s grown soft on flattery and self-congratulation.  It’s a far better strategy, in my view, for those in the Metrics and Social Justice camps to make their arguments incontrovertible—to give their speculations the heft of widely shared conviction.  There’s also a lot they can learn from one another.

The Foundation Board in 60,000 B.C.

White Courtesy Telephone reader Tidy Sum set the Way Back Machine to 60,000 B.C. to visit the Upland Neanderthal Fund’s board meeting.  Here’s his report ...

It was not much different than what you see now only it smelled real stinky and I had to eat a rat.

They spent a lot of time talking about the high and lows of their hunting. (Lots of posturing from the men on this subject.)

They funded an evaluation of their arts initiative—some cave thing. Nobody really cared about it but old Grogg.  He’s 24 and will die soon so they did not argue.

They funded a nice community program celebrating bipedalism and morphological diversity.

They funded a small stone tool-making program for youth after the stern objections of one trustee who wanted better data on spear effectiveness.

One member, Oog from Dear Clan, raised the big extinction issue in reference to news about Cro-Magnons and humans but this discussion was squelched because someone wanted to talk about the new CavePoint mapping antler that would track their donations.

I guess some things never change.

Foundation Boards Should Demand Failure, Expert Claims

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Joel Orosz, founder of the The Grantmaking School,* the first university-based training program for grantmaking professionals, has come out with an extraordinary new book titled, Effective Foundation Management: 14 Challenges of Philanthropic Leadership—And How to Outfox Them. What makes it extraordinary is the willingness of Dr. Orosz to speak with candor about the challenges, both ethical and practical, of working in a profession that “lacks a salutary external discipline.”  Even those who don’t work in philanthropy will benefit from his honest portrayals of foundation CEOs and program officers struggling against flattery and other forces to do good and meaningful work.

I found what Dr. Orosz wrote on the subject of foundation risk-taking especially revealing.  If foundations have the freedom to try pretty much anything to address society’s problems, he asserts, “if they are indeed boldly exercising [their freedom] to correct the failures of the market, the government, and the fundraisers, it would be virtually impossible to open a newspaper without reading of a groundbreaking social experiment fueled by their funding.”  Unfortunately, the newspapers are more likely to be filled with stories of foundation scandals than of foundations successes.

It’s true that a good scandal sells newspapers, and foundations as a class are not very good at communicating their good work.  But according to Dr. Orosz, there’s a hidden, perhaps more important, reason for the inability of many foundations to move the needle on some of our most pressing social problems.  That reason is embarrassment.  According to Orosz:

Since foundations are undisciplined by the market, electorate, or funders, their only impetus for improvement comes from their (generally) self-perpetuating board of trustees. If you are a foundation leader, your imperative thus is a simple one: keep the board happy, and you will keep your job. So, what makes a board happy? The answer is easy: pride-inducing success. What makes a board unhappy? The answer is equally easy: embarrassing failure. What does this mean for the CEO? As a practical matter, the answer to this question is also very simple: since any kind of success is preferable to any kind of failure, since embarrassing the board members is to be avoided at all costs, it is critically important that every project be a success. What is the best way to ensure that every project will be a success? The key to perpetual success is to keep every project uncomplicated and modest in its ambition. Thus, inexorably, in order to keep their boards happy, in order to assure that embarrassment never darkens the trustees’ doorsteps, CEOs tend to seek the cautious and incremental success. Paradoxically, the societal organization given the most freedom to act hobbles itself; it is as if a superb French chef, capable of creating any gastronomic delight, insisted on making nothing except the blandest of oatmeal.

It was Longfellow who said that “Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.” Dr. Orosz appears to claim that our ambitions in philanthropy are almost criminally modest.  If the responsibility for this faintness of heart ultimately rests with a foundation’s leadership, i.e., its board of directors, how should it modify its practices?  Should boards, for example, demand failure?  Yes, answers Dr. Orosz:

Not sloppy failure, of course, for no one wants that. Boards, however, must demand a certain level of experimental failure, for that is the price of doing business in the nonprofit sector, the cost of true innovation, the payment for clearing the kudzu of modest, incremental, “so what?” success. By demanding occasional experimental failure, boards free foundation leaders from their self-imposed play-it-safe shackles. If not every meal has to be perfect, the French chefs can abandon oatmeal and experiment with exotic new dishes.

Compare Dr. Orosz’s call for “experimental failure” with the tried and true of supporting direct services.  Where should foundations place their bets?

_____

* Pause for disclosure: I will become a member of The Grantmaking School faculty starting this fall.  Apart from a small honorarium, I will receive no compensation for my services.  Nobody at The Grantmaking School has in any way censored what I write on this blog, nor have they suggested topics for my consideration.

Image source: magnamags.com

The Maddening Calm: Talking Around Social Change

There’s an urgency in the deliberation of social activists that’s often missing from conversations among those of us who work at foundations.

Social activists breathe fire.  At their best, they’re deeply knowledgeable about the manner in which historical accident, human nature, and ideology have interacted to produce oppressor and oppressed.  There’s plenty of impassioned debate; the causes and the people they champion have an immediate presence.

The atmosphere changes when foundation folks gather to address social problems.  Often, in my experience, there’s a maddening calm.  We’re likely to replace fire by a polite and strangely apolitical bonhomie.  You’ll find many former activists among us, brimming with good ideas and good intentions, striving in our own way to make some kind of difference in the world.

But there’s been a subtle shift.

When somebody in the foundation circle puts the issue of race on the table, to take one example, it’s sometimes treated like Aunt Betty’s Mayonnaise Surprise—one of those potluck dishes everybody comments on but few dare sample.  Those of us in this circle have learned to preserve the outward calm, and we pass over in silence those subjects that would often add the greatest value to our philanthropic interventions.

I pray that I may live to see the day when these two benevolent circles—activists and philanthropoids—converge.  In the meantime, we foundation folks have a lot to learn from our more incandescent cousins.

What activists tend to do well is ask the question, How did we get to this state of affairs in the first place?  The best social activists make it a point to understand the history, the basic assumptions, the habits of mind, the structures, the policies and the laws that led to the creation of social inequalities.  They ask: What are the mechanisms by which these inequalities are sustained?  What has been the legacy of hundreds of years of slavery, colonialism, and other forms of oppression?

Asking these questions is not an idle exercise.  If we fail to ask them before we engage in any kind of philanthropic activity—and, in my view, we fail to ask them roughly 99 percent of the time—we’re simply proposing a kind of triage on society’s wounded that will do good for some, but keep intact the flow of victims.

Fear and Loathing in Philanthropy

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I am dictate these words to my assistant, Paolo (he is one on left), as special favor to good friend, Albert Rezga.  Albert asked that I write article for his blonk.  I pity him because he is foundation drone with bad haircut, but please understand that Apraxina does not blonk.  Blonking is for indiscrete people who buy clothes from catalogues and work in cubicles.

I am never forget day I first meet Albert at Tolstoy Foundation reception.  He was very sad, barely nibbling crab cake hors d’oeuvre, and, also, I must say, very dull. So earnest!  But Apraxina gets—how you say?—weak kneels when handsome man quotes Turgenev.

To continue: Albert was concerned philanthropy’s image had been tarnished by scandals, that it lacked vigor and was often “unstrategic.”  Such big word from such little man!  But I understood because I had been to philanthropy conference.  I saw men and women with bowed heads carrying small sacks filled with papers.  Very sad.  And so much talking!  People in uncomfortable chairs, opining in cold rooms, inducing narcosis-like state in listeners.  “Alë, garázh!” I shouted, “Rasskazhí éto komú-nibúd drugómu!”*  I would rather spend afternoon with Uncle Sergei listening to description of most recent colonoscopy.

I thought I could help Albert by drawing inspiration from very dear friend, Hunter S. Thompson, Gonzoi journalist.  He started foundation** before he committed suicide (perhaps he attended same conference I did?).  But I was disappointed when I visited—how you say?—Internets.  You will look at this link, please.  I want tell Mr. Ralph Steadman that this is no tribute to Hunter S. Thompson.  What is big arm in desert?  Did it turn man with suitcase into big chicken?

_____

* “Hail, citizen [an ironic address]!  Tell it to someone who cares!” — Editors

** “A Legacy for the Godfather of Gonzo” by Michael Anft, Chronicle of Philanthropy, November 10, 2005.

The Countess Apraxina on Fashion

My good friend the Countess Apraxina believes the public image of foundations can be improved with an extreme fashion makeover.  She sent me this file tucked inside a copy of Turgenev’s Diary of a Superfluous Man ... 

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Public Relations Advice From a Russian Countess

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I met the Countess Apraxina at a reception hosted by the Tolstoi Foundation and we hit it off instantly, partly because I was born to trade bons mots with European aristocracy.  The Countess is an unusual woman.  Her parents were in their nonage when the bodies of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, after being soaked in acid and burned, were disposed of down a mineshaft.  These terrible events, recounted often by her father at the dinner table, made an indelible impression on the young Countess’s mind.  “They’re what persuaded me to go into public relations,” the Countess confided to me after her sixth Champagne Martini.

Concerned about the number of nonprofit executive directors who are burning out and leaving their jobs, I asked the Countess if, in her professional opinion, there was something we could do to make charitable work more exciting, more appealing to people inside and outside the field.  I just heard back from her today:

My Dearest Alyosha—

I have done research, and I think I can fix public image of nonprofits and foundations for little less than $40 million.  I have attached budget.  Naturally it excludes my per diem expenses.

I went to philanthropy conference.  I saw people sitting in cold rooms, half dead from narcosis, drooling into laps.  So few men!  Women everywhere, wearing beiges, blacks, and tans … It was sad, very sad.  Nonprofit conference the same, except with more young people wearing sensible shoes.  Very dull, like when Uncle Sergei assailed me with entire history of Turkic peoples.

First, I want André to do your colors.  Which reminds me, my dearest Alyosha, that our mutual friend Mark R. has shown me two photographs of you wearing the same orange shirt.  Orange doesn’t suit you, my dearest, it’s vulgar, color for children and prostitutes, not distinguished grey-beard like you.

So yes, André will do your colors because you all dress like undertakers.  And I will ask Tony Proscio to change way you speak.  Have you noticed, little zaychik, that you bore paint off walls?  “Convenings,” “learnings,” “empowerment”—what is this?  Emigré that I am, I have little trouble reading Gerard Manley Hopkins, but I can’t understand one word of what you and your colleagues say.  Such a shame!

For first publicity stunt, I think I will stage high speed car chase through lower Manhattan, with possibly some kind of brawl near Stock Exchange.  I will ask Nikolai about this.

I know you are thinking, ‘Such a brilliant woman, this Countess.  Truly there is no substitute for good breeding!’  Of course I agree with you completely.

The car chase is perfect, I think, because it will take people’s minds off your petty larcenies.  To add little spice, I thought you might encourage nonprofit colleagues to trash hotel rooms when they attend dismal conferences.  Perhaps small disagreements in boardrooms can escalate into shootouts between—what is word?—pistol-packing trustees.  And is it at all possible to have one of your program officers arrested in Las Vegas for cheating at Roulette?  Please let me know at your earliest convenience.

Your sector needs more excitement, Alyosha, more young people, more drama.  Fortunately, I believe I can work with Steve Gunderson.  Very handsome.  I think for next conference I put him in cowboy boots and gold Speedos.

Remember, these are just sketches, Alyosha, try to see big picture …