What we call results are beginnings
by Robert F. Long, Ph.D.

 Building Bridges Initiative
2000 Learning Community Meeting

Washington, DC
October 21, 2000

It is with a mixed sense of joy and sorrow that I address you today, the last day of our final networking conference for the Building Bridges Initiative.  I am sorry to see the last year approaching and joyful to witness the success you are all achieving.  I wanted to take a few minutes today to celebrate your accomplishments and to congratulate you for your success in responding to the wide range of management and leadership needs of the Third Sector.  The strong bridge we have built is represented by the network and its many connecting strategies that link communities of interest and geography to the development of knowledge and educational programs.  From Buenos Aires to Indianapolis and Puebla to Phoenix and Albany to Portland and so on and on, you have all built relationships that will stand the test of time. 

However, to paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill, this is not the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

We are also here to contemplate the next steps to be taken in continuing efforts to encourage the two-way flow of learning and teaching that is a focus of the Building Bridges Initiative.

I’m reminded that the goal of the Initiative was, quite simply, to change higher education.  It is a daunting challenge to strengthen the management skills of students, volunteers, and staff in nonprofit organizations by linking community organizations and institutions of higher education.  The legendary monolithic nature of academe is well known.  Today, through your efforts, however, the proverbial “ivory tower” is leaning in the direction of the community.  Nonprofit management education programs around the country have been expanded, made more accessible and sustained by creating partnerships between higher education and those working in the field.  Each Building Bridges project is making its own distinctive contribution to this essential partnership between practice and knowledge. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation has been pleased to be a part of these efforts. On balance, I think that the ledger will show that our investment has been handled quite well. With your indulgence, I want to take the opportunity today to place our activities in some perspective, and to establish a context for where we are and where we need to go.

In 1930, breakfast cereal pioneer W.K. Kellogg established his foundation with one primary goal in mind:  “to help people help themselves.”  From modest beginnings, with programs that served the health and education needs of youth in southcentral Michigan, the Foundation has grown to achieve international prominence.  Today, it ranks among the world’s largest private foundations.

Over the years, the Foundation’s programming has evolved to meet changing societal needs.  Many of its initiatives are centered on young people.  Its focus, however, has always been on organizations in the community through which lives are improved at the local level.  This happens in many ways, but certainly includes education, which Mr. Kellogg believed “offers the greatest opportunity for really improving one generation over another.”

Over the past ten years, total Kellogg Foundation payments of all types have totaled over two billion dollars.  As someone once said, a billion here, a billion there—pretty soon you’re talking real money.  As large as $2 billion seems, it is put in perspective quickly when one realizes that the Foundation’s annual giving is not enough to support even one year’s operating costs of an average sized college or university.

The established Foundation programming areas include Health; Food Systems and Rural Development; Youth and Education; and Philanthropy and Volunteerism.  Of primary interest to this audience, Philanthropy and Volunteerism was organized as a program area in the late 1980s, and grantmaking was developed into a long-term strategy to improve the capacity of nonprofit leaders.

In 1986, the late Pete Ellis began Kellogg Foundation grantmaking to support the development of education programs focused on the leadership and management challenges of the nonprofit sector.  After an initial period dedicated to helping build dynamic, multidisciplinary curricula and delivery systems, in November 1996 the Foundation Board approved support for the next stage of programming through the Building Bridges Initiative.  The stated purpose of the initiative was to extend the reach, access, and sustainability of nonprofit management education programs around the country.

To place our investment in nonprofit management education in the proper perspective, however, I should note that Philanthropy and Volunteerism is the smallest of the four Kellogg Foundation programming areas, with approximately $190 million in grants over the past ten years.  Of that amount, just under $85 million went to grants involving nonprofit management education.

At the Foundation, we are aware of the perception that Building Bridges grants benefit only universities, to the exclusion of nonprofit organizations.  While it is true that most of the Bridges grants were made to universities, the purpose of all the grants was to improve education for the benefit of the field, not to build more ivory towers.  Additionally, an analysis of the Foundation’s giving in this area over the past ten years shows that the lion’s share of the money didn’t go directly to institutions of higher education.  Instead, a significant percentage of the monies went to infrastructure organizations, community-based support centers, research and student development.  The majority of our grants have been in the field, where the nonprofit leader is found.  The Building Bridges investment has enabled the expansion of academic access for leaders, and has deepened the impact of educational programs on management practice.

The Initiative wasn’t formed to fund universities or do basic research; it had a very specific purpose—that to promote a “give and take” between educational programs and practitioners, where the needs of the field were addressed.

            The Foundation has been doing this type of work for a long time, and we’ve learned a lot about the characteristics of bridges between the community and higher education.  For example, our work with the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land Grant Universities (a panel made up of 24 state university presidents and chancellors) has given us a better sense of what it means to be an engaged institution.  An engaged institution in higher education sees its present and future as linked to the well-being of the community.  It promotes open communication, structures its curriculum accordingly, and understands that institutional and community learning is a reciprocal relationship.  By the same token, a community (or field of practice) engaged with higher education is one that utilizes its resources in a variety of partnerships based on mutual respect and that shares resources across institutional boundaries.  Engagement is a two-way process, and it requires both sides to behave differently to achieve their mutual outcomes.

Through the Building Bridges Initiative, I believe that we have been extremely successful in becoming “engaged” with higher education.  Your projects have contributed to greater understanding of the role that practice plays in the development of educational programs and of the role that education plays in developing a field of practice.  You have successfully built bridges.  By improving practice and by changing higher education, the relevance and utility of this initiative is being demonstrated beyond question.  Its effects are perhaps most dramatically demonstrated by the steady growth in the number of colleges and universities which offer academic programs in Nonprofit Management.  In 1990, researchers at Seton Hall University reported a total of only 17 universities offering a graduate concentration and the American Humanics network of undergraduate programs reported 13 affiliates.  Last year, a new survey found 179 colleges and universities with a variety of Nonprofit Management education programs, and American Humanics had grown to 75 affiliates.

Significant Organizations, Dates, and Events in the Development of

Nonprofit Management Education

·        (1935)  First professional fundraising association (American Association of Fundraising Companies)

·        (1948)  American Humanics is founded

·        (1975)  Nonprofit Management Association is established (MSO)

·        (1977)  Yale University establishes a Program on Nonprofit Organizations

·        (1979)  New School of Social Research starts a Masters Professional Studies in Fundraising Management

·         (1980)  INDEPENDENT SECTOR founded

·         (1983)  University of San Francisco begins a Masters in Public Administration with a concentration in Nonprofit organization management

·         (1985)  Union Institute of Experimenting Colleges and Universities starts a non-residential doctoral program in Philanthropy & Leadership

·        (1986)  First University of San Francisco conference on “Educating Managers of Nonprofit Organizations

·        (1988)  Case Western University starts a Nonprofit Management certificate

·        (1989)  Case Western University starts a Masters of Nonprofit Management

·        (1990)  Seton Hall study finds only 17 universities offer a graduate concentration in NPM

·        (1990)  First major grants in the field by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation

·        (1991)  Association for Voluntary Action Scholars (AVAS) becomes Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Associations (ARNOVA); Journal of Voluntary Action Research becomes the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly

·        (1996)  Kellogg Foundation begins field research in Nonprofit organization education needs

·        (1997)  Building Bridges Initiative announced

·        (1999)  Mirabella & Renz survey finds 179 colleges and universities with a variety of NPM education programs.

·        (2000)  American Humanics announces its 75^th campus affiliate.

The timeline above shows significant dates and events in the development of nonprofit management education.  From the creation of the first professional fundraising association in 1935, to the membership and programmatic milestones reached in recent years, the timeline shows a long and steady march towards an educational atmosphere conducive to a more diverse and effective cadre of Third Sector leaders.  In 1948 American Humanics was founded.  The Nonprofit Management Association was established in 1975, and in 1977, Yale University established the Program on Nonprofit Organizations.  The Independent Sector was founded in 1980.  In 1985, the University of San Francisco began its Masters of Nonprofit Administration.  These milestones, along with the creation of masters and doctoral level programs at a variety of institutions, all demonstrate a growing attention to the needs of nonprofit leaders in a changing world.

            At the Kellogg Foundation, we like to believe that our participation in the process was a timely one.  In 1986, the Kellogg Foundation was represented at the first University of San Francisco conference on “Educating Managers of Nonprofit Organizations,” and began scanning in this field.  Four years later, our first major grants, which included Academic Centers of Excellence in a wide variety of settings, were announced.  Examples of this type of investment include our support of programs at the University of San Francisco, Case Western Reserve University and Indiana University.

Finally, then, in 1996, the Kellogg Foundation began formal field research on nonprofit organization educational needs, and in 1997, the Building Bridges Initiative was launched as a strategic response to the changing operating environment facing nonprofit leaders.  The initiative has been broadened and enriched with the intentional linkages through partnerships in Latin America and the United States.  In addition, a number of strategic investments have been made since then in the broader movement, including support:

• For new membership programs and services at ARNOVA,

• For a Latin American research network through the International Society for   Third Sector Research,

• For minority student graduate scholarship with the Nonprofit Academic Centers Council,

• For applied research through the Aspen’s Nonprofit Sector Research Fund, among others. 

As we leave the Learning Community Meeting today, the initiative is moving into its final year but he work is far from over, however.

As we begin the 21^st century, philanthropy and volunteerism and the nonprofit sector as a whole are undergoing tremendous growth in resources and in creative approaches.  Just consider some of the current developments in philanthropy.  The New York Times recently reported that Americans are donating more to charity than ever before--$175 billion in 1998 alone.  Part of this increase is due to a new wave of philanthropic givers—high tech millionaires and the so-called “new philanthropists.”  Many analysts are also looking to what has been termed the “intergenerational transfer of wealth,” which has been estimated to represent a potential of up to $25 trillion for philanthropic purposes during the next 50 years.

The number of foundations is growing.  America is currently home to more than 44,000 foundations of all kinds, and their number has more than doubled in the last 20 years.  In fact, to demonstrate how this trend has accelerated, ten percent of the total number of foundations have been created within the past two years. 

Forces such as government devolution are fundamentally affecting the way the nonprofit sector is doing business.  A number of other factors are influencing the operating environment for the nonprofit sector, including increasing competition among nonprofit organizations for funds and volunteers, a growing drive to be “more entrepreneurial” in program development, increasing complexity of laws and regulations, salary demands of workers who can earn more in the private sector; and so on.  These new ideas, challenges and new resources have great potential to transform philanthropy and volunteerism.  Simply put, philanthropy and the nonprofit sector are evolving, and its leaders and educators need to evolve with it.

What does the future hold?  Our interest in this area continues unabated.  What the Foundation will not be doing is to continue to fund the development of academic programs in the way we have been, however.  We hope that our targeted investments to date have created “currency” for programs within higher education that will continue to pay dividends on campus in the form of faculty assignments, priorities for space, operating money, products and curriculum additions, to name a few “ripple effects” from our grants.  We hope that the Building Bridges partnerships have helped create “currency” for nonprofit leaders in the form of active engagement in the development of educational programs, recognition and value for the education they receive, and improved capacities for their work. 

We believe that, as with any “construction project,” Building Bridges is an effort that calls for a capstone.  Now that its base has been firmly established with your work, we hope to encourage the creation of a higher profile and greater permanence for the linkages between practice and the academy.    We will continue our support for the broader nonprofit management education.  Whatever we do, you can trust that it will be directly informed by the field, as has always been the case.  Our Building Bridges evaluations are already influencing the planning underway for the future.

We are learning a great deal about the need for and approaches to the continuation of educational programs in this field and the broader movement of which they are a part.  We are exploring sustainability strategies for the field.  By sustainability, I mean not just funds to support the operation of programs, but sustainability in the broader sense.  Such an investment might take the form of past Kellogg Foundation efforts to support the long-term relationships between a field of practice and its educational programs.  After years of investing in the development of the field of adult and continuing education, the Foundation helped start a national awards program for leaders, invested in student scholarship, and did something it rarely does, helped support the construction of buildings.  Many of you know the Kellogg Centers for continuing education located on 18 campuses around the country.  Although we will not be supporting “bricks and mortar” efforts in this field, these types of investments illustrate the Foundation’s commitment to the issue of sustainability in one field of interest.  The possibilities are endless, as the needs for assistance are diverse.  I certainly anticipate no less of a commitment from the Foundation to this important work—only a different look.  You will be the first to know as our plans unfold.

Personally, I offer my continued readiness as a resource.  Whether money needs to be raised, or relationships built, I hope that all of you will consider me as a friend and as a partner.  We are in this field together.

Since 1986, the Foundation has placed a premium on its involvement with improving nonprofit leadership and education.  At the beginning of a new century, philanthropy and the nonprofit sector are facing a time of unprecedented change and challenge.  The world in which we operate is being redefined, and we all must adjust to meet this sectoral evolution.  As we reflect on the accomplishments of the past few years, perhaps the most useful thing to keep in mind is the importance of partnerships.  Partnerships allow us to achieve in unison what we could never achieve in isolation.

            As we exchange reflections and words of encouragement, we should take heart in the magnitude of our accomplishments over the past few years.  More importantly, though, is the admonition that much remains to be done.  Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that “what we call results are beginnings.”  Let’s make sure that our results—significant though they are—form the basis for continued beginnings in improving nonprofit management practice.  The future depends on it.

Thank you very much.