Dialogues on Civic Philanthropy: The Discussion Series

Between March 2005 and June 2006, researchers, program officers, foundation and non-profit leaders, trustees, donors, grantees, and interested citizens around the country participated in six focused conversations about questions both basic and urgent in philanthropy. The more than one dozen commissioned essays and six transcripts from those conversations can be accessed as follows:

By Topic

By Author

By Host, Location, and Date

About the Series

The “Dialogues on Civic Philanthropy” was a series of six dialogues facilitated by Amy Kass and conducted among people of all shades of the political and philanthropic spectrum, each held in a different part of the country. Invited participants include researchers, program officers, foundation and non-profit leaders, trustees, donors, grantees, and interested citizens. Participants met together in focused conversations about questions both basic and urgent in philanthropy. Three or four commissioned short essays (750-1000 words), responsive to each topic, were distributed ahead of time to all the participants and used to start discussion, the model for which was discussion among peers, rather than experts talking to amateurs.

The overall purpose of the symposia was to promote and help sustain more civil and thoughtful discourse about the fundamental questions and issues facing the philanthropic sector today, and to point a way toward a more responsible, responsive, and civic-spirited philanthropy.

The conversations were organized and facilitated by Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Amy Kass and made possible through the generous support of Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, the Council on Foundations, the Pettus-Crowe Foundation, the Association of Small Foundations, the Conference of Southwest Foundations, the Achelis & Bodman Foundations, the Georgia Humanities Council, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

History of the Series

Over the course of 2004 and into 2005, with generous support from Lilly Endowment and in connection with its Project on Civic Reflection, Amy Kass facilitated discussions based on the readings in her collection The Perfect Gift: The Philanthropic Imagination in Poetry and Prose (Indiana University Press, 2002), with people from the philanthropic community—donors, foundation leaders, nonprofit leaders, multigenerational families of wealth, and trustees—about the meaning of giving in general. “Dialogues on Civic Philanthropy” initially took its shape from those discussions, but sought to focus explicitly on questions that people in the field are in fact wrestling with, and to be directly informed by encounters with the wide range of contemporary opinions among philanthropists and scholars of philanthropy.

In December 2004, an ad hoc advisory board gave further shape to the project, with support from the Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal (Hudson Institute) and assistance from Council on Foundations, the Pettus-Crowe Foundation, the Association of Small Foundations, the Conference of Southwest Foundations, the Achelis & Bodman Foundations, the Georgia Humanities Council, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.