The Insider's Guide to Grantmaking: How Foundations Find, Fund, and Manage Effective Programs

The Prototypical Private Foundations: Carnegie and Rockefeller

The general-purpose charitable foundation—which supports projects in fields as diverse as health care, social services, religion, education, arts and culture, and the environment—is the general standard of organization at the dawn of the twenty-first century. This style of organization, however, was not invented until the early part of the twentieth century, and the prototypical foundation exemplars were established, ironically enough, by two of the nineteenth century's robber barons.

Andrew Carnegie: The Steward

Andrew Carnegie was the avatar of the self-made man: starting in 1848 as a bobbin boy in a textile mill at a salary of $1.20 per week, fifty-three years later he sold the ...