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The following is an excerpt from the Creative Family Grantmaking: The Story of the Durfee Foundation by Deanne Stone.
Fewer Meetings Requires Better Preparation In the summer of 1992, the board held a two-day planning meeting to re-evaluate the foundation’s long-range grantmaking objectives and to examine its grantmaking practices. The board had been meeting four times a year, which made it difficult for Mike, then living on the east coast, and Carrie in northern California, to attend all the meetings. The trustees voted to reduce the meetings to three times a year and to combine the summer meeting with their biennial board retreat. Fewer meetings, however, would mean fuller agendas. To ensure time to cover all the items of business, the trustees agreed to complete as much work as possible in committees and to handle small items of business in conference calls. It was further agreed that agenda items would have to be submitted at least 10 days in advance of the meetings. That would require trustees to be well organized and the foundation to streamline mailings sent to trustees. "We used to bring piles of loose papers with us to the meetings," says Carrie. "Invariably someone would be missing a paper and we’d have to interrupt the discussion to xerox copies. Now, 10 days before a board meeting, each trustee receives in the mail a notebook containing all the paperwork we need for our meeting divided into sections. It’s easy to read because all the documents and reports are organized and everything is in one place." In reviewing its grantmaking practices, Carrie recommended that the discretionary fund Stan established in the 1960s for his children’s personal gifts be discontinued. By giving money to organizations in their own communities, she argued, trustees were acting as individuals rather than as a collective board. Furthermore, making grants to organizations, as all the trustees were doing, was problematic given the foundation’s guidelines to support individuals. Finally, by abandoning discretionary grants, the family could sidestep conflicts that might arise from political differences among the trustees. "By keeping our focus on funding individuals," says Carrie, "we could focus on what we agreed on and avoid areas where there might be disagreements." In the past, trustees had given grants to organizations with which they were associated, most often as board members. Although such grants are perfectly legal and left to the discretion of trustees, Carrie thought it wise to go on record with the reminder that the board "scrupulously avoid any gifts that might have the appearance of self-dealing or of conflicts of interest and be sensitive to not making what might be called vanity or ego grants." Because the Durfee Foundation programs initiated by trustees were unusually labor intensive, Robbie recommended that the foundation compensate them for their time. In 1992, the board voted to pay trustees a modest annual fee and, in the case of family members who live out of town, reimbursement for travel expenses. "I know that many foundations choose not to pay fees to trustees, and I respect that" says Carrie, "but from the perspective of a younger family member who joined the board while I was in graduate school, it helped a lot. Being on the board is wonderful, but it’s a significant time commitment." Leadership of the Third Generation After serving on the board for more than 25 years, Judy, Russell, and Dennis were ready to turn over the leadership to the next generation. Dennis, who had taken an active role in the foundation and served as president of the board for 10 years, retired from the board in 1989. Remarried and the father of young children, he wanted to turn his attention to his family. Russell, then in his sixth year as board president, had also wearied of board responsibilities. Although Judy had been either vice-president or secretary during most of her years on the board, she had no interest in becoming president of the board. With the second generation scaling back their participation, the board looked to the third generation to take a leadership role. Carrie stepped forward and was unanimously elected as the new board president. This opportunity came at a perfect time for Carrie who was pregnant with her first child and working more than full-time as a lawyer, a hectic schedule she did not want to maintain. In the spring of 1993, Carrie replaced Russell as board president, a position now considered a part-time job. She works half time from her home office in Berkeley and travels to Los Angeles frequently to attend meetings and conduct site visits. "I was very excited about being president," says Carrie. "The foundation’s assets had grown to the point where we were capable of doing much more than we had in the past. I saw this as a terrific opportunity to shape and give identity to the foundation at a critical time. I wanted to get more involved in the day-to-day operations of the foundation and plan for its future. The idea of being able to devote more attention to the foundation was very appealing." At the top of her agenda was the expansion of Durfee Foundation programs. The second- generation trustees had developed programs stemming from their interests, and now the third- generation trustees had a chance to do the same. Mike, a physicist, started the Student Challenge Awards to stimulate high school students’ interest in science. When Mike was a teenager, his grandfather, knowing of his interest in science, arranged for him to go to the Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech to watch the first probe land on Mars. Mike never forgot the thrill of being in the control room with the scientists and seeing the first images of the landing. That experience inspired him to establish a program to provide similar experiences for other teenagers. Each summer the Student Challenge Awards program sends 70 to 80 talented students who excel in the arts and humanities to work at a scientific research station for two to three weeks under the direction of the project’s principal investigator. After graduating from law school, Carrie won a fellowship from Georgetown University’s Women’s Law and Public Policy program to work on drafting civil rights legislation at the National Women’s Law Center in Washington, DC. A few years later, Congress was debating how much to cut funds for the National Endowment for the Arts. As a recipient of an award herself, Carrie was aware that the experience she gained from her fellowship program would give her entree into the competitive field of public interest law. Compared to law graduates, art students had little funding available to them. As a step toward correcting that discrepancy and bringing art to nonprofit settings usually devoid of art, Carrie created the California Institute of the Arts/Durfee Residencies to provide funding for art students to create new works in community settings. Besides acting as the lead trustee on the Durfee Residencies, Carrie also oversees three other programs, the American/Chinese Adventure Capital Program, the Durfee Sabbatical Program, and the Durfee Community Fund. (Each program is described in Part II.) More Fine-tuning of Grantmaking Philosophy With almost a decade of experience running programs the trustees themselves created, the board once again set aside time at their 1995 retreat to re-evaluate their grantmaking. Their experiences working closely with grantees and nonprofit organizations reconfirmed their support of the foundation’s grantmaking principles. It also alerted them to problems they had not anticipated. As a result, they reworked their guidelines:
© 2003 National Center for Family Philanthropy. All Rights Reserved.
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