Overview of the Contents

The book opens with a prologue introducing you to foundations: their history, structure, and function in society, and the role of the foundation program officer. There follow chapters on setting grantmaking priorities and on grantmaking considered as a human enterprise. These chapters address such questions as these: Is grantmaking a calling or a profession? What kind of person should become a grantmaker? How can you avoid the “seven temptations” of philanthropy?

Chapters Three through Fourteen focus on your essential work as a program officer: meeting with applicants, reviewing proposals, declining proposals, conducting site visits, recommending proposals for funding, making oral presentations to the board or funding committee, managing and evaluating funded projects, increasing the impact of funded projects, and managing program initiatives. The final chapter discusses the ethics of grantmaking, and the book concludes with an epilogue considering the possible future of foundation philanthropy.

As a grantmaker, you are a steward of funds that are precious—funds that often provide the margin between progress and stagnation, between development and decay. It is incumbent upon you, and all grantmakers, to maximize the good these funds can do by enhancing your ability to effectively and ethically invest them for the common good. It is to that end that I conceived and wrote this book and now offer it to you.

JOEL J. OROSZ

Kalamazoo, Michigan
January 2000