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Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
Johnson Center Philanthropy Archives
Johnson Center for Philanthropy
Grand Valley State University
Oral History Interview with Kathryn A. Agard, Ed.D., April 6, 2010
The Council of Michigan Foundations, Johnson Center for Philanthropy at Grand Valley
State University (GVSU), and GVSU Libraries’ Special Collections & University
Archives Present:
An oral history interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010. Conducted by Dr. James
Smither of the History Department at GVSU. Recorded at the Johnson Center for
Philanthropy at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This
interview is part of a series in the Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
documenting the history of philanthropy in Michigan.
Preferred citation: Researchers wishing to cite this collection should use the following
credit line: Oral history interview with Kathryn A. Agard, April 6, 2010. "Michigan
Philanthropy Oral History Project", Johnson Center Philanthropy Archives of the Special
Collection & University Archives, Grand Valley State University Libraries.
James Smither (JS): Today’s conversation is with Kathy Agard who is Executive
Director of the Dorothy Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership at
Grand Valley State University. This oral history interview is being conducted for the
Johnson Center as part of an ongoing series and the interviewer is James Smither of the
History Department at Grand Valley State University.
Alright, Kathy, can you start by giving us just a little bit of background on yourself? To
begin with, where and when were you born?
00:00:25
Kathy Agard (KA): Sure, I was born, do I have to tell the date [laughter], in 1949 in
Muskegon, Michigan. And my parents are there. We have lived there their whole lives.
JS: Alright. And what did your family do for a living?
KA: My dad worked in the shop. He worked at Camel White and Cannon as a tool filer
and fitter. He had been a farm boy and had won a chicken scholarship, judging
scholarship, to Michigan State University but he was from a big family of thirteen and
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1
�after his freshman year they didn’t have money for him to be able to finish school, so he
came back home, went to work, helped the other kids go through school and then stayed
there the rest of his life.
JS: Alright, and how many kids were in your family?
00:01:07
KA: Well in my family, there’s only two. I have an older brother and myself and then in
his family there were thirteen and in my mother’s family there were seven. So they both
came from big families.
JS: But they downsized a little. And what kind of schooling did you have?
KA: I went to, I was in the third graduating class from Mona Shores High School, which
was a brand-new suburban high school that had just been built and it was the typical
suburban high school I would say. We had a lot of advantages. One of the things that was
fun about being in the third class was that there were lots of opportunities because
everything was brand new. So we were setting the theme song, we were setting all of the
colors, we were setting the mascot, we had all of that fun of setting up a brand new high
school.
JS: And when you were going through high school, was it your expectation that you were
going to go on to college?
00:01:57
KA: Oh absolutely. Because of my dad’s experience, I never was, and I’m sure this story
is very common, was one of those kids who never had the choice whether to go or not. It
was where I was going to go or not. And then I had an unusual high school experience
that probably helped to shape some of my own background, in that Mona Shores had a
very unusual high school debate team. So I started debating when I was in the ninth grade
and there were seventy-five kids on our debate team. And I debated all during high
school ending up on a national championship team as a senior. And because of that, was
able to get a scholarship to go to the college of my choice. My parents were really high
on me going to community college for two years because of the money. So once I could
prove that I could pay to go somewhere else, I was able to do that, which was nice.
JS: And where did you want to go?
00:02:47
KA: I went to Albion College which is a small liberal arts Methodist college just down
the road from Grand Rapids in Albion, Michigan. And I went there because it had
beautiful gas lamps and because they gave me the money to be able to debate and had a
national championship team at the time.
JS: Alright and then what did you study while you were there?
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
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�KA: I started out, I was going to be a high school debate coach because that’s what I
knew. And about halfway through my schooling, about as a junior, I took my first
political science course and I fell in love with political science. My dad had been very
active politically on the local level. Part of the advantage of working at the shop was he
was done at 2 o’clock in the afternoon and then he would start his real life. And so he was
a volunteer fireman and my mother was the person who called the volunteer firemen
before 9-1-1 existed and my brother was a volunteer fireman and my dad had been a
founder of the city of Norton Shores, had been involved in a lot of political campaigns
and so I ended up really falling in love with American political theory, had a great
professor, took every course I possibly could get from him and my original intention was
then to teach political science at, which would be civics at the high school level, and
coach debate. And then when I graduated I found out that the combination in high school
that you have to have as a teacher is English and debate not the civics and debate, so I
never was able to find a high school teaching job.
JS: At that point, was there not yet an expectation; you went through teacher certification
process and extra certification or things like that?
00:04:25
KA: I went through…I was certified to teach at high school but I think I probably got
frankly bad counseling. And because I had such a passion for political science, or I
wasn’t listening, you know, I stayed on that track rather than picking up the English
major.
JS: So you were technically qualified to teach. The catch was that you didn’t have the
right combination of fields to do what they wanted to hire. Now, what year did you finish
college?
KA: It would have been ’71.
JS: Okay, well things are getting kind of interesting in the American political scene by
then too. Antiwar protests going on, and a lot of other things going on at the same time. I
mean did you get caught up in that yourself?
00:05:04
KA: Some. I considered it a very hard time to have been in college partly because I didn’t
want to be involved politically. I wanted to learn. I thought, you know, I was so set to go
to college and I had this vision of it being a place that would be safe and that I could go
deep into a topic. I actually probably had an unusual experience. I suppose everyone in
the sixties had an unusual experience, in that I wanted it to go away because I wanted to
study and I was a serious student. Of course the University of Michigan was just down
the road and a lot of that would fall over onto Albion or we would go back when there
were protests. And there was a lot of protesting on campus. My graduation was very
politicized. We had no senior year book because no one wanted to do it at the time.
Everyone was too involved in things. And I suppose from that point of history the most
memorable time for me was that one of my jobs, I had several on campus, was to be the
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
3
�telephone operator in our dorm which was a co-ed dorm, and the day of the first lottery I
was working the telephone and watching the guys come up from the basement and tear
up, and I actually tear up even thinking about it now, tearing up their all of their
acceptances to medical school and to law school and to graduate school and having their
moms call in tears saying, you know, “I’m really sorry you were born on this day because
you were number one or number two for the draft.” I’ll never forget it. Those experiences
go deep, I guess.
JS: The draft itself is something that is now an unfamiliar experience to anyone not at
least in their 40s, to have much clue of even what that was about.
00:06:44
KA: Yeah, that someone could come and say you have to go and that was the time.
JS: And so of course, college students, in a lot of cases had deferments, or at least that
was the principal. But…
KA: These were the seniors.
JS: So they were graduating. So they were, Uncle Sam could now catch up with them at
that point. So you finished college. How long did you spend trying to find a teaching job?
KA: Really my whole senior year, so just about a year. Then, I actually had fallen in love,
which does, a woman’s job description ought to have a parallel line that says, you know,
“fell in love, got married, husband decided to move, had a kid, had a child, had the next
child, decided to move somewhere else…” because there’s this parallel structure going
on in life. My husband was in the Air Force. He had been called up for the draft, had
gone in for medical deferment, found out that his medical condition could in fact be fixed
which was a big surprise the day before he was on his way to Detroit. So he ran and
signed up right away for the Air Force and was a translator. He spent two years in
Monterey, California in the language school and then a couple of years in Turkey as a
Russian translator in the security service. So the timing was such that when I graduated,
he was on the, just getting done with his tour and so we were planning on getting
married. My first job really was hanging out at Albion as an admissions counselor and
basically, I was hanging out to get married. It was an interesting job. I didn’t know what
else I was going to do. I couldn’t find a teaching job and so this seemed like a fun thing
to do. I went and talked to high school students about going to college.
JS: Alright so you do that for a year and then what?
00:08:31
KA: Well, we decided, he decided to use his G.I. Bill to go back to school. So he went to
Hope College. We were married. We were there for his last two years and again I was
basically just looking for a job and I was hired that summer as a social worker for a
woman who had just had a pregnancy leave. I, of course, knew nothing about social work
but I was hired as a social work replacement for the regional center for people with
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
4
�disabilities, to help to, this is when Michigan was de-institutionalizing a lot of people and
so my job was to make the connection from the institution back to the home community
when mental health agencies were first being set up, and to begin to look at what kind of
supports could be given to populations as they were returning home. So I did that for the
summer and then when my husband went to Hope, as it turned out Ottawa County’s
Mental Health was just getting organized and they hired me because I had a relationship
with the institution that was sending people to their community. So while I was there, I
developed their Life Consultation Center which is meant to be a lifelong support system
for families when there’s a child with disabilities. I worked with the hospitals setting up
those connections. I did a lot of getting volunteers involved in mentoring and support for
families, and working with older families who never expected that their loved one would
be coming home again. If you can imagine at the age of seventy, when you’ve put a child
in an institution at birth to suddenly have that child be coming home to live with you was
really quite traumatic for families and so we were doing a lot of support for them
JS: What kind of instruction or guidance or direction did you get while you were doing
this?
00:10:23
KA: [laughter] None. It’s my favorite kind of a job actually, which is make it up as you
go along. I think I was well served by Albion in terms of having a general education so I
knew how to learn and I knew how to teach myself. And so I would just go talk to people
and I would go read things. I would go to conferences and basically just picked it up as I
went along.
JS: So maybe, even that initial counseling experience, or just going and talking to people
and meeting people you don’t know, sort of ties in with that.
KA: It does. Yeah, I think it does. I would say most of my life, and this is probably, I feel
fairly fearless about those kinds of things. That given some time I can figure it out, and so
it wasn’t scary. It was just a matter of trying to get in there and figure it out and do the
best I could with it.
JS: Do you think that if you were today starting out with that kind of thing, in the world,
society and government and things the way they are, could you do the same thing as
easily? Could you just walk in and create programs?
00:11:26
KA: Well, probably not because the regulatory environment is much - right then was one
of those moments in history where no one knew what should happen, and the surface
reasons for deinstitutionalizing people were about great values: about that it’s better to be
treated closer to home, it’s better to mainstream people with disabilities so that they have
a more normal life circumstance. The reality was that the real reasons were dollars, and
promises were made that money would follow the patients and that never happened. And
so, at that point, it was a bit of a mess in terms of nobody really knew how to make it
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
5
�happen. So there’s an opportunity in that then to create what you think ought to happen. I
had that chance to do that.
JS: Alright. Now, how long did you stay with that work?
00:12:17
KA: I was there two years, the same two years my husband was in school and then we
had our first child, my son, and moved back to Muskegon. And I was then, worked for
Muskegon Community Mental Health, doing the same job now for Muskegon County. So
I worked for mental health there for about two years and then had my daughter, had a
second child. And then we were trying to figure out what to do with our lives, and my
husband said “Well, why don’t I go back, since I have this great Russian language
background, why don’t I go back and get a Ph.D. in Russian language and be a business
translator?” So this sounded like a good plan. So we sold the house, packed up the kids
and went to the University of Michigan, lived in married housing. My son started
kindergarten there and again I was looking for a job. Oh, I missed a step. I missed a step.
I’ll go back.
JS: That’s alright.
00:13:07
KA: When we were in Muskegon, for about three years, I had worked as the, I was home
with the kids a little while, about 2 years, and while I was home, I decided to go back and
get a Master’s degree because I was not happy being home just with the kids. So I went
back at night and got a Master’s degree in Public Administration because it was the
closest thing to what I thought I was interested in which is this community organizing,
world changing, you know, point of view. And so I went back to get the Master’s degree
and while I was home one of my friends called and said well there’s an opening as the
Director of Planned Parenthood in Muskegon so I took a job as a half time director of the
Planned Parenthood affiliate there and then finished up my Master’s degree and then we
decided that we would move. So when we moved to Ann Arbor, they had an opening in
the regional office of Planned Parenthood Federation of America doing multi-state
technical assistance for the nonprofit organizations. So I had a great background in terms
of professional development. They did a good job with things like risk management, and
human resource development, and board development and all of the things it takes to run
a nonprofit. And then I was in a training position at that point, and I think that’s when I
really became fascinated with how nonprofit organizations operate, and became very
interested in the organizational theory underneath them.
JS: Let’s plug in a couple more pieces here. Where did you get your Master’s degree
from?
KA: Oh, Western Michigan University because it was the closest campus available at the
time.
JS: And did you have to commute down to Kalamazoo to take the courses?
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
6
�KA: About half and half. I had half here and I had half at Western that I would commute
down. I was one of those people who left work at 5 o’clock got to school at 7 o’clock,
tried to stay awake until 9:30 and then drove home and got home at 11:30.
00:15:04
JS: Alright, and Planned Parenthood, at that point in time, we’re kind of getting at early
to mid 70s here?
KA: Yes.
JS: Was their principal activity largely promoting knowledge and education of birth
control or were they involved in abortion issues at that point?
KA: I was right at the transition. It was primarily related to birth control and my real
interest going in was around zero population growth. I was very concerned about, having
read the books about, you know, what I would say are environmentalists by ilk and we
were very concerned about how many children can this world actually support. And so I
went in it from that point of view and about half way through, I ended up spending about
ten years in Planned Parenthood, about halfway through was when Faye Wattleton came
in as president, and there was much more of an emphasis on abortion rights. But of
course the abortion, the Roe v. Wade happened in ’72 so it was a year after I graduated
from college, and really, it was sort of amid the midstream, that the idea of protecting
abortion rights actually started to take hold. So I was in Planned Parenthood as a Director
in Philadelphia, moving forward a little bit, during the Reagan years and we literally had
a GAO auditor who had an office right next to mine who would sit and watch all of our
books and everything that we did. We got to know him so well we would like hold
birthday parties for his kids [laughter] because he was there all the time. We decided it
would be better to include him than not to include him.
00:16:35
JS: Alright, so let’s kind of follow your itinerary a little bit. You’ve gone out; you’ve
been at the University of Michigan. How long were you in Ann Arbor?
KA: We were in Ann Arbor about a year and a half. My husband, as he went through it,
he was expecting to learn to be a translator, to deepen is knowledge in terms of
translation. The University of Michigan teaches the history of Russian in English and so
it was not the program that he thought he was going to get. And so he said to me “You
know, I don’t know what I’m going to do. Why don’t you go ahead and do what you
want to do and I’ll figure it out.” And so we, I then went as the Associate Director of
Planned Parenthood in Philadelphia which is a multi-county… there were fourteen birth
control clinics for example. It was a big organization. And then he came along and he
stayed home and then took some photography classes, and tried to figure out what he
wanted to do with his life. So he was the stay at home dad and I was the working mom at
a time when that was not, it was new. It was the leading edge I would say of that kind of
lifestyle.
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
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�JS: Alright, then how long did you spend in Philadelphia?
00:17:44
KA: I think it was about four years and I really became tired a) of always being on the
front lines because it was a top-ten media market. Always being on the top, the front lines
on the abortion issue because it’s not my favorite issue to be advocating. And we also
decided that we wanted our children to be raised in the Midwest. There’s a different style
from the East coast than the Midwest, and we wanted our kids to be around their
grandparents and their cousins. And so we actually made one of those choices where we
stood in the kitchen one day and said let’s go home, and sold the house, no jobs, came
back, just shipped the kids and everybody came back home. So I was literally looking for
a job. And a hospital there, a local hospital, had had a number of years where they had
had fairly bad publicity, and because I had had so much PR experience in Philadelphia,
they hired me on as a public relations director. Again, I knew nothing about public
relations. I remember bringing in the, one of our guys who was working on our
brochures. One afternoon I said, “Okay, now I need to know everything you can tell me
about print media and I have about an hour and a half.” [laughter] And, you know, only
later did I realize what an outrageous question that was. But you know I did the job as
public relations and then I was promoted there to be vice president of planning, so I did
their planning and their marketing and handled the volunteers, and was their lobbyist for
about six years at Hackley Hospital in Muskegon. And while I was there, they had this
great benefit that they paid for higher education. So I was going to go back and get a
second Masters in health administration when my advisor at Western said why don’t you
get the Doctorate in public administration that we have. So I started in the D.P.A.
program, and that was held in Lansing and I did that for two years and decided I didn’t
like it because it was mainly about state government. And at this point in my life, I knew
what I wanted to learn, and I didn’t know where I could get it. I wanted a place like the
Johnson Center and it didn’t exist. So I went back and I took six months off and then I
went into the Ed school at Western because it had the most electives of any of the
doctoral programs. And I was able to, I sat through the higher-ed finance courses that you
have to, but then I was able to pick and choose from the university what courses I wanted
to take. I really knew what I wanted to learn so I was able to piece together really my
own doctorate.
00:20:16
JS: So you were kind of in a program geared towards people who were superintendents
and things like that, and to what degree did you sort of fit in or not with the people who
were in your classes?
KA: Not at all. In fact my dissertation took me about ten years. And the reason was that I
was educating my committee all the time because they were not in that discipline, in fact
no one was in that discipline. And I was trying to say to them, you know there is this
whole field called nonprofit, and so I had two educators and a political scientist on my
committee that I’m not sure, I think the only reason that I actually got my dissertation
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
8
�was that my chairman wanted to retire, and he finally one day said to me “We need to
wrap this up.” And I thought this sounds like a good thing. Let’s wrap this up.
JS: What kind of schedule did you have while you were doing that because you’re having
to juggle dissertation, work and everything else?
00:21:04
KA: Yes, It was a lot. I mean not only was I working full time at the hospital but then two
days a week I was driving to Lansing for classes during the early part of this, and then
when I left the hospital, I had finished my coursework at Western, and was ready to start
my dissertation work, and I decided that I was tired of hospital work. And I actually had
an interview here to come in as a faculty member in the Communications school. In the
morning I had that interview and I met with the Dean at noon, and then at 1 o’clock I met
with this woman named Dorothy Johnson. And I asked Dottie, I talked to Dottie. One of
my friends said that before you take the job at Grand Valley you have to talk to Dottie
cause she has a job that should be interesting. So I met Dottie and she said to me, why
don’t, I have this job its doing organizational development work for community
foundations. I didn’t know what a community foundation was, but she said, “And it will
only be three years. You’ll learn about foundations which will be interesting and then you
can go teach at Grand Valley.” So I said okay, I’ll do that. And that was a twenty year
span that I spent at the Council of Michigan Foundations. So while I left the hospital I
went to the Council of Michigan Foundations and then while I was there was when I did
my dissertation work.
JS: Alright. Explain a little bit, what is the Council of Michigan Foundations.
00:22:25
KA: Yes, the Council of Michigan Foundations is a membership association of the
foundations in the state of Michigan that make grants. So you might, for example, have a
school foundation that raises money for a school, they would not be members of the
Council of Michigan Foundations. So it’s Kellogg, Kresge, Mott, all of the community
foundations, corporate grant makers like Steelcase, and what they have in common is
their role as grant makers. And it was founded in ’69 following the ’69 Tax Act. Because,
at that point, Congress had put a lot of restrictions on foundations, and the foundations
came together to act politically to begin to roll back some of those restrictions that had
been placed on them.
JS: What kinds of restrictions had been placed on them?
00:23:09
KA: Well, it was interesting. Partly it goes back further to the 60s, in that the Ford
Foundation had been using its money to register voters in the south, and the Congress did
not like the fact that all of these black folks who hadn’t ever been able to vote, suddenly
were able to vote, knew where to vote, knew that they had the right to vote. And so
Congress got upset with Ford about that. And then they also got upset with Ford because
they had put majority ownership of the company into the foundation so that it couldn’t be
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
9
�touched by anybody else coming in wanting to buy the foundation, I’m sorry, buy the
company. So they called in Ford and the Ford president, at the time, said to them, “Who
are you? You have no right to control us. We were here before you were. The nonprofit
sector existed before government did in this country.” And we both argue over the
Mayflower Compact, whether it was government [laughter], whether it was a nonprofit
association and Congress said, here’s who we are. So they put a whole bunch of
restrictions. One of the restrictions was, for example, they required a payout that if you’re
having a private foundation that gets tax advantage, you have to give some of the money
away. You just can’t sit on it. They put restrictions on the amount of money that can be
spent on your own overhead or on travel, on what they call self-dealing, so you can’t hire
your own children at exorbitant salaries. And there were, in fact, abuses at the time. So
the regulations weren’t unwarranted, and the field, the mature part of the field like the
Council of Michigan Foundations, when they responded, basically said some of this we
like, some of it we think went too far. Let’s roll back what we think went too far. And
some of that was taxation that they thought would erode the value of the asset over time.
And so what they did instead was they rolled back some of the requirement for payout
and then they gave, private foundations gave some of the money to the IRS to help
support regulating the industry. So the Council of Michigan Foundations started out very
small and ended up, and still is the largest association of its kind in the country, and is a
national leader.
JS: Alright, and now what range of things did you do for them?
00:25:30
KA: I had a little project that was going to be three years and it was funded by the
Kellogg Foundation, and it was to encourage the foundations to engage young people
under the age of 21 as grant makers. This was really the beginning of youth
empowerment and the healthy youth, where instead of always looking at young people as
problems or always looking for distress in young people, the Kellogg Foundation’s
philosophy was, you know, young people are very strong, very healthy, very smart. Let’s
use that energy now. Let’s not wait for them as potential leaders. Let’s use it currently.
And so the community foundations, and at the time there were about thirteen of them in
Michigan, got together through the Council of Michigan Foundations and asked the
Kellogg Foundation for a grant to build youth advisory committees, and also to help them
build their assets. At the same time, there was new research coming out of Boston
College, that talked about the largest inter-generational transfer of wealth in the history of
mankind which is the fact of course that the United States had the only major industrial
economy in the world post WWII for lots of years. So there’s a generation that had a
tremendous amount of wealth, and still is in the process of transferring that over to their
children who are now in their fifties and sixties. I mean the children are getting up there.
But that, there was a lot of conversation in the field about, Muskegon is a good example,
about how at one point in time, Muskegon had more millionaires than anywhere else in
the country, post the cutting of all the white pine, and that money totally dissipated. And
it would, we think how could we go from being one of the most wealthy places in the
world, to having almost nothing in a couple three generations. So the community
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
10
�foundations were talking how do we capture some portion of this intergenerational
transfer of wealth, and keep it working in our communities forever?
So Kellogg gave this grant. We tested this theory that young people would be good grant
makers, and what we found out was that they were fabulous grant makers, and we went
back to Kellogg and said we think we now have a model. What if we do this in a big
way? And the proposal that we gave to Kellogg was they should invest sixty million
dollars over five years as challenges to Michigan’s communities, and we promised that
we would cover the state of Michigan with community foundation service, and that every
community foundation would have a youth advisory committee that would have real
power over money, not just advisory power, and that they, we would bring each
organization up to a minimum level of organizational viability. So for the next six years
that was my job. I would drive into little towns in Michigan and I would say, have you
ever heard of a community foundation? Let me tell you about it. I have a million dollars
in Kellogg challenge for you if you can raise two million dollars, and one of your
commitments has to be that forever there will be an advisory committee of young people.
And Kellogg’s million dollars would go into that fund that the young people would
advise on the giving, so that young people would be giving away fifty or sixty thousand
dollars a year of interest earnings on that endowment, and then the money that was raised
locally, the two million to match it would be unrestricted or very broadly restricted, so
the community could make decisions about urgent needs.
00:29:02
JS: Now, when you’re saying young people, what age range are we talking about?
KA: Under the age of twenty-one. Most of them were high-schoolers, and most of the
community foundations made the decision to try to build community capital in that
generation by having young people from various schools. And we used to have a phrase
that would say leave your letter jacket at the door because when you come into the room
you need to be looking at the whole community not just your own high school, and would
engage young people then from every high school in the community. And then Kellogg
really encouraged us, and smartly so, to encourage young people and bring them in, draw
in young people who were not the normal kids that you might put on that kind of
committee, particularly if you were concerned about handing them fifty thousand dollars
a year. So we would go after the kids who might be leaders but are leading in the wrong
way...kids smashing mailboxes. You know, they haven’t murdered anybody but they
were headed the wrong direction. And we have fabulous stories of young people that this
experience helped to turn around, because it was the first time adults had ever given them
real authority and real responsibility to make decisions. And what we found was that the
youth committees were incredibly honest outside of the normal politics of the
community. So they didn’t care who you were that was asking for money and then they
would ask hard questions. Can’t you get this copying done somewhere else? Why are you
spending $5.50 on postage when you could hand deliver it cheaper? Really, I have great
stories of one sheriff that, the Grand Haven Community Foundation is right next door to
the Council of Michigan Foundations, so one day we were coming in, all of us, and the
local sheriff was standing in the hallway, shuffling papers and looking nervous and we
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
11
�said well, we know, hi. How are you? What are you doing? I have this proposal to make
to the youth committee and I’m really afraid they’re not going to fund it. They’re going
to ask me hard questions. And they did. I mean, they were really terrific. And that still is
going on. That is a forever commitment on the part of the Community Foundations.
00:31:15
JS: Is that something you find across Michigan in a lot of different communities?
KA: Oh yes. We met our goals. Every community is now covered by a community
foundation. Almost all of them have a youth advisory committee, and almost all of them
are doing well. They have had a professional staff. They’ve begun to grow and they’ve
begun to capture some of this inter-generational transfer of wealth.
JS: And the youth committees themselves. Are they still kind of made up of the same
kind of people or have they gotten more conventional over time?
KA: Well, you know, I don’t know. I haven’t watched them lately. But my guess is that
those who, not every committee ended up doing unconventional kids, but those who did
have stayed that way. One of them, for example, held their meeting at Juvenile Justice
Hall up at Traverse City because the chair of the committee had been picked up for grand
theft auto. [laughter] So a really nice car that he thought he’d like to take for a spin and
ended up having his committee there. But many of them, of the kids have ended up, who
would not have normally gone on to school, or even those who had other career paths,
have changed their career path because of this experience of being able to give away
money.
JS: Alright. So that’s kind of the first thing that you go and develop for the Michigan
Foundations and what does that grow into or lead in to?
00:32:34
KA: Well, it led a lot of, it led into a lot of different things and one of them that it led into
was that, we became–we do a summer camp for the young people because we were,
actually we weren’t, but a lot of the community foundation board members, who as you
can imagine are the bankers and the lawyers and the more conservative people in the
community, were concerned about turning a million dollars over to a group of seventeen
year olds. And so we would have a summer camp every summer for the young people
and begin to talk with them about grantmaking, about evaluating budgets, you know,
what kind of questions to ask. And at this summer camp what we began to realize is that
they didn’t have the background or the depth of background, they didn’t have a language,
they didn’t have a way to think about the nonprofit sector.
And on a parallel course to this project was the development of the IU Center on
Philanthropy at Indiana University which was really the first big academic center that
began to consciously build a field of study. So they had a historian looking at the history
of philanthropy, they have an economist looking at the economics; they have a
geographer looking at the spread. I mean they really took all of the major academic
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
12
�disciplines and said, okay let’s put our focus and really begin to build a field of
knowledge. So that was happening at the same time, and as we were working with the
young people we thought we ought to be teaching them all of this great material that’s
being created, and the Johnson Center started, sort of, in the middle of all of this. And so
we looked at whether we could infuse into the curriculum of the K-12 school, the
teaching of philanthropic principals. That was my next project for the Council of
Michigan Foundations.
I had gotten tired of doing workshops and seminars on Saturdays and evenings which was
when the Community Foundation boards are available, and so really my passion has been
around these ideas, so we created this project called Learning to Give. And it was taking
the content, the graduate level at this point, content on philanthropy and looking at where
the connections were kindergarten through 12th grade, and knowing that the teachers have
way too much to teach K-12 than they possibly have time to do. That we couldn’t add
another course called Philanthropy, and actually we thought that probably wasn’t the
smartest way to do it because philanthropy is woven throughout our culture. So we took a
look at everything that’s taught and said, how can we begin to infuse philanthropic
messages? And so we started with the social studies because they are our most natural
home. So we started with history and geography and civics and began to look at every
place that’s taught. And we would, again I went to teachers and said I don’t know
anything about your lives in the classroom. You’re the experts on that but we have this
content. We think it’s really important because our thesis, at the time, was that having
knowledge about the sector, also would have an impact on student behavior, because
people would begin to think of themselves as philanthropists, students would. We had a
group of thirty-five teachers from various ages and various kinds of schools who helped
to shape the curriculum and we built a whole standards and benchmarks and learning
outcomes for philanthropy K-12. And then off of that we built a set of classroom lessons,
lesson plans, and because of Kellogg’s support they were always, they are currently still
all available for free to teachers on the website and they’ve all been recently coded to
every set of state standards. So a teacher, a third grade teacher, I want to teach about the
Underground Railroad, I can go online and find a lesson plan that talks about the
Underground Railroad because it’s required by my state, and on the M.E.A.P. test, but
this lesson plan talks about the fact that they were all volunteers, and who were the
abolitionists and how did they organize themselves, and why do they think they have a
right to confront government, and who were the Underground Railroad conductors, and
what was this role as volunteers that they held? So we tried to take this theory of
philanthropy in every single thing that was taught. The next big area we picked up was
English, because there’s a lot of philanthropy in the normal books that are taught in all
the way through the K-12 curriculum. And then we did a high school level text book that
has been out there. I don’t know how many copies they’ve sold but it’s available and
available online and that project is still continuing.
00:37:26
JS: Now, a text book in philanthropy or is it an English textbook that has philanthropy in
it?
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
13
�KA: It’s a textbook in philanthropy, but the chapters are in civics. So it’s philanthropy in
history—American history, philanthropy in U.S.—in world history, philanthropy in
government, philanthropy in world government, world governments, politically plural,
philanthropy in geography, and so we went—I think it’s a seven chapter book. It was
about the discipline that is required to be taught in high school, but it’s from the
philanthropic slant.
JS: You’re combining the different disciplines in the one volume?
KA: Yes. It’s one volume.
JS: Is that designed actually for student use or for teachers?
KA: We did both a student volume and then we did a teacher volume. And of course at
high school it’s a little difficult because the teachers are in their own slot; you know they
don’t teach across the disciplines. But it was cheaper to do them as one volume for each,
so there’s a teacher guide and a student textbook.
JS: Was there any way to measure the extent to which anybody is using it?
00:38:33
KA: Only on the sales and I don’t think it has sold very well. Most people are going to
the website and downloading lesson plans, and they were downloadable so that, every
classroom, they always want to make them their own, so you can download the lesson
plan into a word document and then actually manipulate it and add your own content.
JS: Are the lesson plans set up to be geared towards specific topics that are in these
different fields? You mentioned the Underground Railroad for example. You’re trying to
look for material on the Underground Railroad that you can go use in your class. You can
find this and in its design to work for them that it has the philanthropic part of it
emphasized or woven into it.
KA: There’s a search engine and you can search by academic strand or requirement. So
like the Underground Railroad, that’s how you would search, or you can search by
philanthropic topic, or you can search by grade level, or you can search by keyword. So it
has a lot of ways to be able to get at the material.
JS: Have you got then additional programs or initiatives, or kind of what after you’ve
developed this, what then did you kind of get into?
00:39:41
KA: I was there ten years. That was a long haul for me. That was ten years. And we were
ready to take it to, we were beta testing it in Michigan, with the idea that it would be a
national model, and we were looking for ways to make it national. And there are all kinds
of issues, as you can imagine, between being able to do something in depth in one state,
versus trying to go broad in multiple states, especially in K-12 education because it’s
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
14
�state by state. I had a very wonderful group of advisors, Michigan advisors. And I bet we
looked for two years about how to take it national, when a young guy came in who has
done these kinds of projects before, and he was very interested in service learning, which
would be a teaching methodology for all of this content. And he had asked if we couldn’t
partner in it. As we talked more and more with them, we decided that we would merge
Learning to Give with this project called The League. And that we would be the academic
content, and then he would have a sort of jazzy marketing. And it allows, what happens is
there’s a calendar during the year in The League, that starts with a fall cleanup and then
young people earn so many points for doing these kinds of acts of kindness and
philanthropy. And so they would learn about it in their classroom and then they would go
out and do the service learning and get points for it and then they would be set up in
leagues and there would be league play and national reporting on it. And I think maybe
this spring will be the first time in Parade Magazine they’re going to start to talk about
how The League is doing in different parts of the country. So it’s gone to that level. So
we were ready to, we merged with them; we were ready for it to go national. The
organizational role was that I would become the chief operating officer and Bill would be
the CEO and then I decided that I a) didn’t want to be a chief operating officer. That’s not
really my good skills. And that I was at a point in my life where I didn’t want to do a
national launch because it would mean not only working hard but traveling a lot
nationally. And this job was open at the Johnson Center, so every time it has been open I
would lay it face down on my desk and I would look at it and think, ooh, that’s a really
nice job. I really like that job. And this is the first time that it’s happened to be open at a
time when I could leave a project and it’s just a place where I wanted to be so I was
fortunate enough to come here.
JS: And then when was that exactly when you started?
00:42:10
KA: Four years ago in April. So I’ve just been here four years
JS: Alright. Now tell us a little bit just about the Johnson Center itself for people outside
of here. What is it designed to do? What is its function? What kind of function does it
have?
KA: Yes. We’re one of forty-four, what are called academic centers on philanthropy, that
are university-based. We’re probably the second or the third largest depending on what
you count, and we’re maybe the second or the third oldest depending on which programs
you count. Often some of the programs are a faculty member or two, who have had an
interest in philanthropy and have built their own scholarly work in that field. But once
those faculty members retire, probably that program will go away. So the Johnson Center
is different in that we’re institutional. And it really doesn’t matter who’s here. The
institution will continue because the university and the Kellogg Foundation have both
made a commitment to it. So we started when Kellogg looked at the IU Center and said
we really like what’s happening there. We’d like one of these for the state of Michigan.
And the president of the Kellogg Foundation at the time, Russ Mawby, brought together
all of the university presidents from the state of Michigan, had a meeting, and said we
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
15
�would like to fund one of these, but university, we want you to make a commitment of
money, and a real commitment that you will develop a center. And of the fourteen
universities, two put in proposals and Grand Valley’s was the strongest so it ended up at
Grand Valley. There was a $990,000 challenge grant from Kellogg matched by $900,000
from Grand Valley which launched the Center. So in our early years, the first director,
Thom Jeavons, again this was the start of service learning, he really stressed bringing
service learning to the faculty members at Grand Valley, trying to introduce this as
teaching methodology, as a pedagogy, and that they would begin to embrace it. He left
and our second director was Dott Freeman and she came out of the corporate
philanthropy side of the family, and so she was really stressing work with corporations.
And then when she left one of the faculty members from our School of Public
Administration, Donna VanIwaarden, came, and Donna was the third director and really
stressed more of the scholarship and the research. At that same time, Joel Orosz, who had
been the head of the program officer for philanthropy and volunteerism at Kellogg, came
here as our distinguished professor, and really helped to launch the Center as a national
presence. Before that, we were pretty Grand Valley and pretty West Michigan focused.
And Donna, because of her ties in the community, launched one of our main services
which is the Community Research Institute.
So taking them kind of one a time, the Community Research Institute, the Grand Rapids
Community Foundation wanted to do data-based decision-making and they had to make a
choice, do we build this capacity inside our own organization or do we build it at Grand
Valley, so it’s available to everyone? And they made the choice to do it at Grand Valley.
So the Community Research Institute started doing research first for the Grand Rapids
Community Foundation, and now we do it for most of the foundations in West Michigan.
And we’re looking, it makes us a little different from the other centers on philanthropy,
because they’re looking at doing research about the sector, so their research says how
many volunteers are there, how much are people giving, what kinds of organizations are
in the sector. Our research is more research for the sector. So we’re looking at what are
the rates of child abuse, then giving that information to the nonprofit organizations, so
they can use that data to make data-based decision-makings, working with the food
pantries to find out where is hunger. And we do a lot of geo-coding and mapping, so
where does hunger exist in West Michigan? And then we work with the food pantries to
help them look at where they should be delivering services. So that’s the Community
Research Institute.
00:46:24
JS: So you have, sort of, organizations or groups or whatever, who have an idea, they
think they want to help in a particular sector or do something but they’re not sure where
exactly to put the money. This information helps them figure out how to do that.
KA: We’ll do regular program evaluations, so some of them get grants and we do the
program evaluation for them. But the more interesting work is this work, and the food
pantries is a good example. We did research about where do senior citizens live in Kent
County, who are hungry, who need food support. And then on the geo-mapping what we
overlaid were the pockets of concentration of those populations, and then we overlaid
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
16
�what are the public transportation routes, and then we overlaid where are the food
centers, so where can they get food. And immediately, you can look at the map and say,
Oh my gosh. Here’s a group of senior citizens who don’t have access to transportation
and who don’t have access to food support. And then we can take that and work with the
food pantries and they, we would then overlay where are the churches and synagogues
and religious communities, and where are the schools, the elementary and public schools.
So the pantries could begin to say, who could be our natural partner where we could
deliver service and we do that kind of work for foundations and for nonprofits all the
time. And so that’s the Community Research Institute.
When Joel came in, we really became involved in providing support and doing research
and training for foundations, for grantmaking foundations. And that again makes us very
different from our peers because most of the other academic centers don’t touch the grant
maker’s side of the family at all. We launched The Grantmaking School, which is a
national school to help grant makers learn their craft. A problem for grant makers is that
most of them when they’re hired are hired, because they have deep content knowledge.
They may be the premier water quality person in the world, and the Annenberg
Foundation can hire them. They’re hired; they know everything there is to know about
fresh water quality in rivers in the upper Midwest. So they have this deep, deep content
knowledge and suddenly their job is to look at budgets, and make decisions about how
the money ought to be given away, and how do I strategically look at six grants to make
sure that they interact with one another. In some ways, it’s a difficult job in that the
person loves the content, and often they’re making grants to people who have very good
project ideas, and they have to say no to more than, what ninety percent of them. So
they’re saying no to things that they care about to people who know are doing really good
work, and they have to say no just because there’s not enough money to go around. And
they really need help. And what is this transition from being, from having deep content
knowledge to being the person who’s giving the money away, and we do that in The
Grantmaking School. We do that all over the country, we do it in major cities, and that
part’s been going pretty well.
00:49:26
JS: How would you characterize your own job description right now? What is it that you
do here day-to-day?
KA: What do I do here? A little bit of everything. It’s a cook and bottle washer kind of
job. I raise money. I do strategic planning. I have, there are seven program directors. I
have a lot of staff supervision. I handle all of the, or most of the relationships,
relationship building, I would say both within the university and outside in the
community. Because we are not an academic center, in a sense that we don’t give the
degrees. You know, the School for Public Administration is the place that actually gives
the degrees. So I partner, we partner with them. We have a lot of graduate students
working here, and a lot of what I do is trying to keep it all headed the right way, you
know, as things pull you other directions and to be able to raise the money to be able to
support it. We’re mainly supported by outside money to a great extent.
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
17
�The other, the third thing we do is, so that we don’t loose that piece, is that we also do
training and support for nonprofit organizations. Grand Rapids had a program called the
Direction Center. It was one of the first in the country that had been designed and funded
by the area foundations to support nonprofits, and it was supposed to become selfsufficient but they never could charge enough to be able to do that. So when it failed, it
came into the Johnson Center, and we still do a lot of training on how to be a nonprofit
board member, how to be a CEO, and mainly we’re doing that for smaller, midsized
nonprofits. Spectrum Health doesn’t need our help. They go and hire whoever they want.
It’s the women’s shelter, it’s the neighborhood association, it’s the Paws for a Cause, it’s
all of the, you know, it’s Latin Americans for Progress, those kind of organizations who
are coming to us for assistance.
00:51:22
JS: Alright, now, to back up a little bit in another section. You talked about the Johnson
Center being created and so forth. When this got set up at Grand Valley who was
instrumental in terms making that happen? Was this one of these ideas that captured
President Lubbers’ imagination?
KA: Yes. It was launched from Russ Mawby, the president of the Kellogg Foundation,
whose, I would say his 30 year tenure at Kellogg would be typified by being a builder of
the infrastructure organizations to support the whole sector. That’s really how he’s
known. And so when he launched it, he made the offer to President Lubbers, who had the
right kind of entrepreneurial spirit and the vision to be able to say, I could see what this
would look like twenty years from now. We’ll be twenty years old two years from now.
So that was a natural, a natural combination, and the university has continued to be
extremely supportive, even as Kellogg’s support has gone up and down. The university
built this new space for us, and built it to our specifications. They want it to a place where
the community comes in and interacts with the university. So we’ve been very fortunate
to have the kind of support that we do.
00:52:35
JS: Okay. What’s the relationship with the Johnson family?
KA: Oh, yes. What happened was that when Dottie Johnson retired from the Council of
Michigan Foundations, they were looking for a way to honor her at that point twenty-five
years of service. And she really had built the Council of Michigan Foundations from
nothing. She was at half time in a closet, basically when she started it. And is a well
known national leader; she started the Foundation Center, she was involved with the
Council on Foundations, was on the Corporation for National Community Service Board.
When Dottie retired, we were trying to, I was at CMF at the time, we were trying to find
a way to honor her. And the thought was that we could talk with the university, because
her family’s been involved and she’s been involved with Grand Valley, about naming the
Center after her. So the CEO at that time of the Council of Michigan Foundations, Rob
Collier, raised the money to be able to bring over all of the library resources of the
Council of Michigan Foundations, and a half a million dollar endowment for the library,
and then the name, the Center was named in her honor. And no one deserves it better. She
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
18
�really has been a great leader both for Grand Valley and for the field. Now, the materials
that came over, some of them were videotapes, original videotapes of people like Mr.
Kresge talking about his philanthropy that are irreplaceable, and those are all out at the
archives. So this tape that we’re doing is a part of a continuing effort to say, let’s capture
this rich Michigan history. Michigan is known nationally as being a very unusual state
because we’re so well, our philanthropic community is so well organized and works so
well together that we’re somewhat the envy of the rest of the country and we want to
capture some of those stories.
00:54:33
JS: Alright. And finally, I would like to ask where do you see this particular center going
after the next decade or so? What are you going to be trying to accomplish from here?
KA: I had three goals when I started. One was our own building, a twenty million
endowment, and a Ph.D. So far I have the building. (laughter) I would like to see us selfsufficient, on our own, so if we were self-sufficient with an endowment, a large
endowment, then we would be able to continue to help these smaller organizations that
have no where else to go, and I, we’re continuing to do that even though that’s the part of
our budget that struggles. And the reason is that I think that it keeps us honest. It’s very
easy to come into a very nice building and a very nice university and be taken care of,
and forget what its like to run the neighborhood association where you can’t get a copy
machine and you don’t know how you’re going to pay people for the next payroll. And so
I want us to stay rooted deeply in the community and to become a place where nonprofit
leaders can always come and always feel supported and that they’re getting the
knowledge that they need. We, in partnership with the School for Public Administration,
are just proposing a new Master’s degree in philanthropy that we’re hoping that we can
launch in the fall. And that would be a first step towards the possibility of a Ph.D. Now,
Grand Valley is not a Ph.D. granting institution, so I’ve been talking with IU about
whether we could do their Ph.D. here by extension. Or there is some conversation on
campus about an Ed.D. and if we did an Ed.D. whether there could be a major in
philanthropy and nonprofits, because where our counter part academic centers are really
focused on producing academic research and academic practitioners and faculty members
for centers on philanthropy, we are much more applied and so the Ed.D. would make
sense for us because we would be preparing, what I call reflective practitioners, people
who want to be out in the field running nonprofits but also want to do it with, within the
scope and scale of a discipline and with deep knowledge about what they’re doing, and I
can see us preparing that kind of a professional here and would like us to be on the
cutting edge of that.
00:56:53
JS: Alright. Now let’s see. Do you think that there is anything significant about what
you’ve done in your career that we’ve managed to leave out at this point?
KA: No. The kids grew up. My husband became a teacher [laughter], a sixth grade
science teacher. So yes, the life went on, but yes, I think that’s a good coverage.
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
19
�JS: Alright. Well, thank you very much then.
KA: Thank you, Jim. Good.
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
20
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/aa10b790082faa25d40504056ef5df6d.mp4
83a33cc988eafb1345a03dcdec8986fc
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project Interviews
Subject
The topic of the resource
Philanthropy and society--Personal narratives
Family foundations--Michigan
Charities--Michigan
Description
An account of the resource
The Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project (MPOHP) was initiated in 2006 as an innovative partnership between the Council of Michigan Foundations, StoryCorps, Michigan Radio and the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership at Grand Valley State University to create an oral history of Michigan philanthropy. Additional video interviews were created by the Johnson Center for Philanthropy to add to the depth and breadth of the collection.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/516">Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project (MPOHP) (JCPA-08). Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-05-02
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
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Sound
Text
Moving Image
Language
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eng
Type
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audio/mp3
application/pdf
video/mp4
Identifier
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JCPA-08
Coverage
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2006-2008
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Johnson Center for Philantrhopy
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
StoryCorps (Project)
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/516">Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project (JCPA-08)</a>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Agard, Kathryn A., video interview and transcript
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Agard, Kathryn, A.
Description
An account of the resource
Kathryn A. Agard, Executive Director of the Johnson Center for Philanthropy at Grand Valley State University, 2006-2010. She discusses her early life, education, family, and work in the Mental Health field, at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Hackley Hospital, Council of Michigan Foundations, and the Johnson Center. She discusses developing Youth Advisory Committees in Michigan Community Foundations, Learning to Give and the development of philanthropy curriculum for grades K-12. She shares the history of the Johnson Center, development of its programs and partnerships, efforts to capture Michigan’s philanthropic history and her goals as director.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Smither, James
Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership, Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Philanthropy and society
Personal narratives
Charities
Michigan
Associations, institutions, etc.
Muskegon (Mich.)
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership
Women
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
JCPA-08_AgardK
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Moving Image
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
video/mp4
application/pdf
Relation
A related resource
Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2010-04-06