Mutually assured survival: library fund-raising strategies in a changing economy

Library Trends, Summer, 2003 by Lisa Browar, Samuel A. Streit

CHANGES IN THE PHILANTHROPIC ENVIRONMENT

For development officers and others involved in fund-raising and portfolio management for cultural and educational institutions, the severity of these economic repercussions has been compounded by recent shifts in the funding priorities of corporate, foundation, and private philanthropists away from higher education and cultural initiatives. Educational and cultural institutions dependent upon financial support from philanthropic agencies have been left scrambling to reformulate not only fund-raising priorities but also strategies that heretofore yielded lucrative results from individual and corporate donors.

Higher education, particularly the liberal arts, has been disproportionately affected by this new economic reality. The Chronicle of Higher Education notes,

   During the downturn, some budget items, predictably, have received
   the lion's share of attention: faculty salaries, tuition rates, and
   construction spending. But the budget items that support
   intellectual life are much smaller and much more vulnerable, so many
   academics believe they will not be able to bounce back when the
   economy recovers. (Smallwood, 2002, pp. Al0-13)

As the principal support of intellectual life on most university campuses, academic libraries fall into this category. The fear of never regaining lost financial ground is palpable. Penn State English professor Michael Berube notes, "Imagine that flush times return in 2006. I can't believe any state legislator will be saying, 'OK, now let's pour money back into the library.' That's not going to happen" (Smallwood, 2002, pp. A10-13).

Compounding the decelerating pace of philanthropic giving is the geopolitical instability that has unfolded in the months since September 11th, capturing the attention of many philanthropic organizations. More than a few organizations have opted to focus their diminished financial resources on issues pertaining to nation-building and world health crises, assigning a lower priority to their largesse on behalf of education and culture. Simply put, at this particular juncture, corporate and foundation philanthropists have less money to give away largely due to an economic recession. The bulk of philanthropic resources available for distribution are subsidizing humanitarian relief. For many philanthropic organizations, the problems of historic and cultural preservation pale in comparison to the gut-wrenching needs of starving children, land mine victims, the Third World AIDS pandemic, and human rights abuses.

Acknowledgment by grant makers that the problems faced by higher education are not as compelling as they once were is a serious blow to fund-raising in the educational and cultural venues. Elementary and secondary education, early-childhood education, early-childhood development, and health and medical programs are competing successfully with higher education for foundation funding, as evidenced by the Atlantic Philanthropies' announcement in early 2002 that it was abandoning its higher education programs, which had accounted for 60 percent of its grants. Atlantic announced that it would shift the focus of its philanthropy to issues of disadvantaged children, aging, and biomedical research and public health. Atlantic's president, John R. Healy, said of his foundation's new philosophy, "We expect to reduce our investment in higher education and generally in nonprofit sector research in the U.S." (Pulley, 2002c, p. A28).