Grabbing the grant; what will catch the attention of foundations, and entice the money grantors? Step away from the status quo, say those who made the grade

University Business, July, 2004 by Chris Cumo

If it were easy to obtain money from philanthropic organizations, development officers would be putting in three-hour workweeks. Reality, of course, is otherwise. No wonder foundation relations officers lament the diminishing-returns syndrome. Annette Ketner is one of them. As senior director of Foundation Relations for the University of San Diego, her office churns out more and more proposals to reap fewer grants than it did five years ago. Ketner's plight isn't hard to understand: It was the dot-com debacle of the late '90s that hobbled foundations. They then lost 4 percent of the value of their assets in 2001, and between 10 and 12 percent in 2002, according to a Q1 2003 statement by the Foundation Center in Washington, DC.

Consider the Ford Foundation (www.fordfound.org) in New York City, which for size of grants in 2002 ranked behind only the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (www.gatesfoundation.org) in Seattle, and the Lilly Endowment (www.lillyendowment.org) in Indianapolis. The Ford Foundation reported $10.8 billion in assets in September 2001, but only $9.34 billion year-to-date later (a 14 percent drop). As a consequence, the foundation's grants fell from an aggregate of $829.1 million in fiscal year 2001, to $509.7 million in fiscal year 2002--reverberating to an even more dramatic 38.5 percent drop. In fact, overall foundation giving slipped 1.5 percent in 2002, according to the Foundation Center, and the 2003 drop may prove even greater, when the numbers are tallied.

What all of this means is that the decline in foundation giving has only sharpened the Darwinian struggle for grants among colleges and universities. Worse, higher education is only a single constellation in the galaxy of nonprofits, all of which compete for grants, emphasizes Susan King, VP of Public Affairs at the Carnegie Corporation of New York (www.carnegie.org) and Jorge Balan, senior program officer at the Ford Foundation. Data from the Foundation Center reveal that U.S. colleges and universities received 30 of the 50 largest grants from philanthropic organizations in 1998, but only 26 in 2001, the most recent year on record. And where seven of the top 10 grant recipients in 1998 were colleges and universities, only three cracked the top 10 in 2001. Key to grabbing those dollars are compelling proposals in the areas of science and technology, globalization, and diversity. That's where the money's gone in the past few years, and where it continues to go.

Finding a Niche in Scientific Research

In an economy driven by technology and science, foundations continue to bulk up programs in the sciences--especially computer science, engineering, and emerging technologies. This is a trend Alex Pang, research director at the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, CA (www.iftf.org) expects to accelerate in the next 18 to 24 months.

The Pew Charitable Trusts in Philadelphia (www.pewtrusts.com) had this future in focus when it gave the Phoebe R. Berman Bioethics Institute at Johns Hopkins University (MD) $9.9 million to establish the Genetics & Public Policy Institute. But Institute Director Kathy Hudson says the university got the grant only by filling a new niche in science. Rather than vying for dollars for research in areas already being addressed by others (including the American Society of Reproductive Medicine in Alabama, Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, and the President's Council on Bioethics in Washington, DC), the Institute went after the opinions of ordinary Americans--a somewhat novel approach in scientific research.

Says Maureen K. Byrnes, Pew's director of Policy Initiatives and Health and Human Services Program, "Through polls, focus groups, interviews, and other public engagement activities, the center is developing a body of literature on public attitudes toward reproductive genetic technologies." Research administrators showed that the grant to Johns Hopkins would enable more than an exercise in gauging public opinion. They demonstrated that the research is an attempt to peek inside the "designer" genome of the future, when perhaps, like Serena Williams, everyone will be able to rip a two-handed backhand down the line--and look good while doing it.

"Reproductive genetics encompasses a number of techniques that increasingly will enhance the ability of parents to use technology to make decisions about the genetic characteristics of their children," says Byrnes. She expects the research to frame the issues and enumerate the options that academics and policymakers debate in trying to decide how people should use reproductive technologies. Science isn't just a dispassionate search for knowledge, she points out; foundation money can make science a form of social engineering.

Build a Brave New World with Technology

This is not to say that foundations grant money to universities only if they can demonstrate that they can deliver technology and science that shapes the future--but it does help. Such an agenda led the William and FLora HewLett Foundation (www.hewlett.org) in Menlo Park, CA, to give the Massachusetts Institute of Technology $5.5 million to create OpenCourseWare, a project well known across academia, in which MIT has pledged to place all its courses online. To date, more than 500 MIT courses have made it into cyberspace. Marshall S. Smith, the Hewlett Foundation's Education Program director, was drawn to OpenCourseWare by MIT's groundbreaking promise to make its courses free to anyone anywhere. OpenCourseWare, says Smith, democratizes knowledge by using the World Wide Web as a global clearinghouse of information. Smith points to the fact that universities from Spain to China are using OpenCourseWare as a foundation for developing their own curricula. Scholars have translated MIT's courses into 10 languages. From Boston to Bangladesh, students can access OpenCourseWare in their native language.