| Notes |
With Gardner, the Corporation entered the era of strategic philanthropy — the planned, organized, deliberately constructed means to attain stated ends. It no longer sufficed to support a socially desirable project; rather, the knowledge must produce concrete results and be communicated to the public, the media, and decision makers with the intention of fostering policy debate. A central objective was to develop programs that might be implemented and scaled up by larger organizations, especially government. The turn toward “institutional transfer” was partly in response to the relatively diminished power of the Corporation’s resources, making it necessary to achieve “leverage” and “multiplier effects” if it was to have any impact at all. The Corporation saw itself more as a trend-setter in the world of philanthropy, often supporting research or providing seed money for ideas while others financed the more costly operations. As an example, the Corporation advanced the ideas leading to creation of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, later adopted by the federal government. Declaring that a foundation’s most precious asset was its sense of direction, Gardner gathered a competent professional staff of generalists whom he called his “cabinet of strategy,” regarding it as a resource for the Corporation as important as its endowment. |