Foundation News —Chip Edelsberg

Foundation News
—Chip Edelsberg, Executive Director

January 2011

With the onset of 2011, the Jim Joseph Foundation (JJF) begins its sixth year of operation. Directors have awarded $236 million in grants in the foundation’s initial five years. We anticipate another busy twelve month cycle, with JJF Directors meeting four times for two day meetings scheduled in March, June, October, and December.

The portfolios of JJF’s four grant making professionals (and a fifth who is employed on a consulting basis for one year) are brimming. Each professional manages somewhere between five and one dozen major grants in tandem with special project assignments. I am eager to fill the two positions for which JJF is currently conducting searches. The new Program Officer and Program Associate for Grants Management will expand the foundation’s grant making and grants management capacity commensurate with the scope of JJF’s philanthropic activity.

Personnel are obviously key to this foundation’s effectiveness. Thanks to the efforts that 45 JJF grantees made in responding to the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s (CEP) Grantee Perception Survey of JJF, we have recently received a comprehensive report from CEP on JJF’s grantees’ views of how JJF professionals are conducting themselves. The feedback will prompt us to make some changes in ways we communicate with grantees. The CEP report also motivates us to redouble our focus on strategy-based grant making.

Of course, it is not only foundation personnel who play a pivotal role in JJF’s eleemosynary work but the talent in the grantee organizations the foundation funds as well. I would not begin to single out either individuals or organizations in this column for their exceptional performance. It would be disingenuous to assert that JJF funds uniformly accomplished grantees populated by universally stellar professionals. Yet it is entirely accurate to acknowledge that the significant numbers of experienced, dedicated, highly educated professionals who expertly execute JJF funded initiatives enables JJF’s investments to result in concrete outcomes that tangibly benefit the world of Jewish education.

JJF has endeavored to develop an approach to philanthropy that incorporates rigorous assessment of what the foundation funds. There is a certain discipline to what we do and how we operate. Concurrently, we fully recognize the art in philanthropy. Much of any foundation’s success revolves around its good fortune to find talented individuals who execute faithfully on inspired ideas. As Pete Karoff notes, “American philanthropy has always been a combination of the heart and mind in the search for the best people, their organizations, and the relevant world around them.” JJF will continue its pursuit in striving to weave together the rational and artistic in its philanthropy.

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