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

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

Atlantic Philanthropies' shift mirrors similar transitions in other philanthropic organizations that are redirecting resources away from higher education toward other areas of the nonprofit sector. The Pew Charitable Trusts has, according to Susan A. Urahn, Pew's director of education, narrowed its focus in higher education to concentrate on issues of early education. Objecting to any characterizations of Pew's altered practices as a shift, Urahn calls it a "trimming." Gail C. Levin, executive director of the Annenberg Foundation remarked, "There was a concern that not enough was being done to strengthen public elementary and secondary education. There has been a heightened awareness of the great need in those K-12 years." Deborah J. Wilds, a program officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation said, "I think many foundations are trying to focus on the areas that they see as having the greatest needs and the greatest problems. That has tended to be, increasingly, K-12 education" (Pulley, 2002c, p. A28).

In a climate of diminished philanthropy driven by changes in focus by foundations, corporations, and individual donors, universities increasingly are strategically redirecting their fund-raising initiatives. This may mean repackaging traditional and ongoing needs in order to adjust to contemporary giving trends or, more radically, shifting institutional priorities significantly so that they will have greater appeal to external imperatives. For universities, this often means demonstrating and emphasizing the positive role they play in society at large, for example, creating links to K-12 education, national health issues, or sharing resources via the Internet. Suffering by contrast are funding initiatives that are perceived as emphasizing "thing over people" or areas of teaching and research that appeal, or seem to appeal, only to a limited number of scholars or to have no "practical" benefit. The humanities, perhaps, are at a greater disadvantage in this regard than either the sciences of the social sciences in that the humanities often are associated in the public mind with elite cultural expression, distant historical subjects, or artistic endeavors that are of less urgent consequence in hard economic times than are issues of world hunger, AIDS and cancer research, or explosive global politics.

THE NEED FOR A LONG-TERM FUND-RAISING VISION

While desperate times traditionally call for desperate measures, traditional tactics such as the wholesale cancellation of important but expensive serial titles and other similarly dramatic gestures taken to mitigate rising acquisitions costs will not by themselves stanch the bleeding that research libraries are currently experiencing. Neither will piecemeal nor opportunistic fund-raising efforts mounted in support of stand-alone projects, nor those that capitalize on the whims of individual donors. The long-term survival of research library collections, programs, and services will necessitate comprehensive strategies that include not only voluntary and involuntary belt-tightening, but also a philanthropic vision that resembles a personal investment strategy as much as it does an institutional fund-raising plan.