How Foundations Work: What Grantseekers Need to Know About the Many Faces of Foundations

Preface

Judges. Editors. Citizens. Activists. Entrepreneurs. Partners. These roles, or faces as I call them, are six metaphorical identities of foundations and they represent a new way to understand foundations' complex and often contradictory nature. As I develop the metaphors in this book, I suggest that foundations have unique values, languages, rituals, customs, and behaviors: a personality, in other words, that distinguishes them from other types of organizations. In more than a thousand books, studies, and articles on foundations that I have examined, none takes a metaphorical approach to analyzing them. The idea that organizations have personalities has been called culture or saga, a collective understanding by the members of organizations ...