Vice President & Executive Director's Letter

As Charles Dickens might have said about 2008, “it was the best of times; it was the worst of times”. We began the year with great excitement, bringing on terrific new staff in all areas of the Foundation, launching a new approach to grantmaking, and planning for a board retreat that would help chart new strategies for the increased giving we were anticipating for 2009 and beyond.

Needless to say, we also ended the year with great excitement, but of a different kind, as endowments and institutions fell, respected colleagues slashed their grantmaking or, like the Picower and JEHT Foundations, prepared to close their doors entirely, and as tremendous gains that had been made in so many areas were jeopardized in government budget cutting. Our long-anticipated retreat, deferred until the latter part of the year, became a session in which we reviewed program goals and identified areas to emphasize as grantmaking dollars shrank.

After years of growth, our endowment fell from $288 million at the end of 2007 to $202 million at the end of 2008. However, after careful review, our Trustees chose to maintain giving for 2008 at the level set at the beginning of the year, well beyond our required 5 percent, and to sustain that level at approximately $12 million for 2009 in spite of the downturn. While this did not, and does not, leave much room for new programs and grantees, it has allowed us to continue support for grantees whose work is closely aligned with the Foundation’s goals, and whose results merit continued investment.

Developing a way to assess those results was an essential theme for 2008 as we launched our new resultsbased approach to grantmaking, developed with help from the Rensselaerville Institute. Workshops for our grantees, attended by at least 300 people, representing over 160 organizations, introduced the approach and the Foundation’s new application and reporting formats. The feedback was very positive, with one grantseeker citing Rensselaerville’s “ability to cut through the mystifying language that surrounds evaluations and to articulate a clear and compelling picture of what constitutes successful measurement of change for both the program and its participants".

As the economy declined during the year, and all funding sources had to become more selective, the phrase that we heard most often in meeting with our colleagues was “high-performing organizations”. We hope that one important consequence of these technical assistance workshops will be an improvement in the attendees’ ability to define, measure, and communicate to their stakeholders exactly why they are “high performing” and therefore worthy of support.

The economic downturn’s continuing impact on us, our colleagues, our grantees, and the communities we all serve is the major issue facing us all now. We are assessing the financial strength of potential grantees carefully, we are trying to provide funding that best meets the needs of the organizations we support, and we are working with colleague funders to collaborate on best approaches to helping our shared grantees. In a January 2009 article by members of the nonprofit consulting group Bridgespan, the authors talk about identifying results, understanding the organizational and financial costs of achieving those results, and building the organizations needed to deliver those results. Critical in any environment, these issues become even more important in a time of diminishing resources; they apply to the Foundation as well as to its grantees. They will be front and center as we move forward. With thanks to all of you,