The Walter & Elise Haas Fund: Letter from the Executive Director

Pamela H. David
Executive Director
Walter & Elise Haas Fund

August 2004

Dear Friends:

Welcome to the Walter and Elise Haas Fund's web site. We are now just short of one year into the implementation of the Fund's strategic plan, and have already made some significant investments into our new program areas and strategies. The full list of current grantees can be accessed by going here. We will update this section several times a year.

We are tremendously gratified to find so many partners working creatively towards our shared mission of helping people feel connected to and responsible for their communities. In each of our program areas, we are finding great people and organizations doing important community building work, and are honored to be able to support these endeavors. On our web site we will soon be providing links to many of our grantees' web sites, so that those who are interested can get more detailed information. Eventually, we will be expanding our web site to share interesting discussion pieces, research, and other information we've found useful and/or thought-provoking.

In addition to announcing changes to our web site, I also hope to use these "Letters from the Executive Director" to share some of my own thoughts and observations on coming into philanthropy after more than a decade working in local government and several decades of active community involvement. Let me begin by acknowledging that, once I adjusted to the relative calm and quiet of my new offices (compared to San Francisco's City Hall), I was immediately impressed with the intelligence, thoughtfulness, commitment, and compassion of so many of my new colleagues in the philanthropic sector.

At the same time, I was taken aback by how much I realized I had to learn about philanthropy, despite a long career of working with the nonprofit community. Before I came to the Fund, I assumed there was a consistent and uniform philanthropic perspective on critical issues and solutions. I now realize that, though we have great collegial relations with other funders, jointly fund a number of initiatives, and often find ourselves supporting the same organizations, foundations' individual histories, cultures and processes make it nearly impossible to generalize. The individual, and often idiosyncratic, nature of philanthropy certainly can create a difficult maze for grantees to navigate, and can limit the collective impact of the philanthropic sector (see Lucy Bernholz' new book, Creating Philanthropic Capital Markets, for an interesting perspective). But it also can spur a variety of approaches to longstanding problems, and lead to new opportunities for social change.

One thing that has not surprised me is Congress' new focus on foundation accountability. Numerous factors, including the expansion of the philanthropic and nonprofit sector, the proliferation of governmental "sunshine" laws, and the media exposure of the abuses of a relative handful of foundations and nonprofits, have all combined to make increased governmental scrutiny nearly inevitable. The irony, of course, is that the Congressional hearings and threat of regulation are occurring in the context of ongoing reductions in federal and state funding for health, education, housing, and other basic social needs, resulting in increasing reliance on foundations and nonprofits to take the place of what used to be provided by the public sector.

Though I question the motives of some of the elected officials leading the charge against foundations and nonprofits, I am in full agreement that our sector has not held itself to sufficiently high standards of accountability and transparency. The debate now happening within and around philanthropy and the development of standards and self-policing methods occurring at national and regional associations of grantmakers are healthy developments of which I am fully supportive. I look forward, both as a leader of a private foundation, and as a Board member of Northern California Grantmakers, to putting policies and procedures in place to ensure that our collective practice of philanthropy meets the highest of ethical and legal standards.

In the interim, we are striving to make our own processes and guidelines at this Fund as clear as possible. From explaining our strategic planning process to providing detailed background and rationale for our program areas and funding strategies, we are committed to providing useful and accessible information to current and potential partners. Whether it is using our web site to update our grants list or developing user-friendly on-line application and budget forms, we are always looking for ways to move ourselves and our sector towards transparency and efficiency, keeping the particular needs of grant seekers in mind. This web site is our most important communication tool, and I hope you will let us know how well it is working and how we can make it better.

Until next time,

Pamela H. David
Executive Director