The Foundation Administrator: A Study of Those Who Manage America's Foundations

Chapter 1. The Extent of Foundation Staffing - Absense of Staffing Policies

1 The Extent of Foundation Staffing-Absence of Staffing Policies In a country that sets such store by managerial skills in its business structure as does the United States, it is something of a paradox that extension of these skills to nonprofit enterprise has been 50 slow. Full-time, professionally trained, and properly rewarded executive leadership and adequate staffing in administrative posts have only recently been accepted in the nation's universities, colleges, hospitals, and similar institutions. Many of even these organizations continue to rely for administrative tasks on their operating or professional staffs or upon their boards of trustees or other volunteers . The American private foundation has been particularly backward. Whereas its sibling institutions may be said to have reached the Bronze Age in administrative staffing, the foundation has hardly reached the Stone Age. Indeed, among foundations, acceptance of the concept of administrative staffing is still so tentative that the total number of individuals who derive their livelihood and professional satisfactions from full-time employment in any foundation post above the clerical level is considerably less than the number of foundations. Data supplied to the study indicate that the number of such full-time employees is 1,012, of whom 840 are male and 172 female. These administrators are employed by 212 foundations. The authors are confident that the census they conducted did not overlook more than fifty full-time executive-level employees; hence, 1,062 is a generous estImate of all persons thus employed. 19 20 / The Foundation Administrator In addition to the full-time personnel, reports made to the study indicate that there are also some 349 part-time employees of foundations, other than consultants, above the clerical leveP If these are added to full-time personnel, the total comes to 1,411 individuals actually employed and compensated for devoting their energies and talents to the administrative and program activities of all American foundations. And if one adds the foundations that employ only part-time help to those that employ full-time help, the number of employing foundations rises from 212 to 345. How minuscule these numbers are becomes apparent when one compares them with the estimated total of foundations. If the previously mentioned figure of 24,000 is used as the estimated total, the staffed foundations do not exceed 1.5 percent of all foundations.2 Distribution of such staff as exists among employing foundations is, moreover, decidedly uneven. Of the 1,062 full-time administrators, approximately 25 percent are employed by a single foundation, namely, the Ford Foundation. About 15 percent serve The Rockefeller Foundation, the second largest foundation employer. Another 12 percent make up the administrative and program staffs of eleven other well-known foundations. These are the Carnegie Corporation, and the Commonwealth, Danforth, Duke, Houston, Kellogg, Kettering, R. K. Mellon, Mott, Rockefeller Brothers , and Sloan foundations or funds. Thus, these thirteen major foundations employ about half (52 percent) of all full-time personnel of executive stature serving foundations in the United States.3 With the exception of twenty-five or so part-time executives also employed by these thirteen foundations, the remaining full-time and parttime administrators, somewhat less than 60 percent of the total of 1,400, like the lonely hydrogen atoms in space, are dispersed among the remaining 332 foundations that this study has determined actually employ someone of executive stature either on a full-time or part-time basis. Astronomers and physicists have suggested that the hydrogen atoms in space are not quite so lonely as they were once deemed to be, but paid executives among these 332 foundations remain distinctly isolated. One hundred seventy-six individ1 Reports on part-time executives are not as complete as are figures on full-time executives. 2 The modest total of foundation administrators identified by the study suggests that the estimate of the recently published Peterson Commission report, namely that "... full-time professional personnel for all foundations probably does not exceed a few thousand" is too generous. The same observation might be made of that report's estimate that one-fifth of all foundations had paid staff. (See Report and Recommendations of the Commission on Foundations and Private Philanthropy, Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1970, p. 87.) 3 The actual totals at the time the study took the census were as follows: Ford, 262; Rockefeller, 160; the other eleven foundations, 127. The Extent of Foundation Staffing / 21 uals occupy the...