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https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/4b345fea448124512de5508425e13a46.pdf
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Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
Johnson Center for Philanthropy
Grand Valley State University
Oral History Interview with Donna VanIwaarden, September 23, 2011
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 Donna VanIwaarden, September 23, 2011, conducted by Dr.
James Smither of the History Department at GVSU, and recorded at GVSU in Grand Rapids,
Mich. 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 Donna VanIwaarden, September 23, 2011. "Michigan
Philanthropy Oral History Project", Johnson Center Philanthropy Archives of the Special
Collection & University Archives, Grand Valley State University Libraries.
James Smither (JS): [This is] an oral history being conducted for the Johnson Center for
Philanthropy at Grand Valley State University. We’re talking today with Dr. Donna
VanIwaarden who was Director of the Johnson Center between 2001 and 2005. The interviewer
is James Smither of the History Department at Grand Valley State.
Donna can you start us off with some basic background on yourself. To begin with, where and
when were you born?
Donna VanIwaarden (DVI): October 3rd, 1946 in Okmulgee, Oklahoma.
(JS): Now did you grow up in Oklahoma or moved somewhere else?
(DVI): I did, I grew up in Tulsa.
(JS): And what did your family do for a living then?
(DVI): My dad was an accountant and my mother was a homemaker. I had three little sisters. So,
I was the oldest, the overachiever.
(JS): What kind of education did you have?
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�(DVI): I graduated from Will Rogers high school in Tulsa, and I moved to Minnesota, and when
my son was in the first grade I started college at the University of Minnesota. I got a Bachelor’s
in Sociology. I kept right on going; I got a Master at Public Health Administration, and kept on
going and I got a Ph.D. in Health Services Research, Policy and Administration.
(JS): In what year did you get the doctorate?
(DVI): Eighty nine.
(JS): You had been working though before that, right? (Donna nods). You had different
professional positions. Let’s kind of go back, sort of, undergraduate college experience, why did
you go to Minnesota?
(DVI): Well, I got married and I moved to Minnesota and I’d always wanted to go to college,
always thought I would, but somehow life has a way of changing things. So, I started when my
son started first grade, and I went part time.
(JS): Now how old were you when you started college?
(DVI): Probably 25, 26 [note – actually, I was 28].
(JS): And then how did you pick your major?
(DVI): I think just because I really enjoyed sociology I loved studying people and the way
groups work and all that. So, I just fell into it just because I loved it, didn’t have any ulterior
motive or reason. I just took a lot of classes. I think the first class I took was the Psychology of
Women. That was just the first class at Community College, so I finished two years at
Community College and then I went to University of Minnesota.
00:02:42
(JS): If I may ask it, you were doing this in the early 70’s?
(DVI): That’s right.
(JS): Which would have been a very interesting time to be doing sociology, with women and so
forth; did you have at the time views about the women’s movement that was going on, or the
ERA and things like that?
(DVI): I did, I was right at the cusp of traditional values and feminist values as anybody my age
probably experienced that tension between those two; because I wanted to grow up and get
married and have a family, but I also wanted to grow up and get educated and have a career. So it
was always that balance I think that a lot of woman my age would say they had that same issue
of always the balance, and the tension between the two desires.
(JS): Alright. Now, how long did it take you to get that first four year degree?
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�(DVI): Probably six years. I started with one class and just loved it. Before you knew it I was
going, my son would leave for school and so would I. So anything between 9 and 3, and I usually
did my homework between 12 and 3 in the morning after everybody had gone bed, it was quiet
and I could study.
(JS): Was there a particular course or whatever that kind of captured your imagination or gave
you ideas about where you wanted to go from there or was it more of an overall experience?
(DVI): I think it was the overall experience. I always was interested in health and when I was
young I thought I wanted to be a doctor. My dad always discouraged anything related to
hospitals because he didn’t like hospitals. So, when I was a volunteer Candy Striper at 15 or 14
whatever it was, he could not understand why I wanted to spend my time in a hospital. But I
loved it. And then when I was a young adult I was a Pink Lady on the weekends and I really
loved that. So, anything related to health. So I took some sociology of medicine courses which I
just thoroughly enjoyed. So I think that moved me in that direction. I can’t think of any specific
course that captured my imagination but I just kind of moved in that direction.
(JS): Now was Sociology of Medicine a field that was just kind of growing or developing at that
point?
(DVI): I think it was.
(JS): So you sort of get in there as they are figuring out what it’s all about.
(DVI): Learning some of the theories that made absolute perfect sense to me and just thoroughly
enjoyed the study of medicine, the study of the professions, how it all developed. I loved all that.
00:05:20
(JS): Now once you completed the four year degree, did you directly move toward graduate
school or was there a gap in between?
(DVI): There wasn’t a gap. I was very fortunate that at the time I wanted to and I really don’t
remember how I actually got into public health actually now that I think about it, but there was a
stipend that was available and so I applied. I got the stipend, it worked well I loved
administration, and the management part as well. It was a very exciting time to be in public
health. My university was right down the street from the state health department and one of my
teachers of epidemiology was Michael Osterholm who was the one who was so involved in toxic
shock syndrome back in the 80’s, I think it was. And then I remember a lecture he gave and he
said, “there’s something unusual that we’re seeing right now.” I think it was Karposi Syndrome
and he said “something is up.” Well it was a precursor to HIV and understanding that that was
happening. But he was on the forefront of that and it was so exciting to be there, and have a part
and just learning about these epidemiology things that were coming in. It was an exciting time to
be in public health.
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�(JS): And then how long did it take you to do the Masters?
(DVI): Probably three or four years. I don’t remember the exact date now that you’re asking me.
I didn’t look at that.
(JS): Were you going full time or was there work mixed in with that?
(DVI): I was going part time and still managing my family, and so I did it part time.
(JS): Right, that still worked.
(DVI): It still worked. And part of what I was doing is I began to manage or coordinate the prelicensure program for nursing home administrators. In the 70s there was a federal law passed that
nursing home administrators had to be licensed. And so Minnesota was really on the forefront of
that in developing curriculum and I had the honor of being the coordinator of that pre-licensure
program. So we had a wonderful program of adult students who are actually working in the field
and they’d come in and get their coursework and I coordinated that while I was working on my
Masters, and then continued it for my Ph.D. So I did that for a long time.
(JS): Now you’ve taken these people, who were, they’d been running nursing homes or
whatever, they’d been doing this stuff, what kind of attitude did they bring in with them? Did
you get to meet any of them or talk to them a little bit about this?
(DVI): Oh, all the time, yes. Some of them thought it was just totally a waste of time, they’d
been doing this for years and their experience was good enough. Others were great. They really
wanted to learn. They were so glad that they had the opportunity to expand their knowledge.
(JS): Did you have the sense that the experiences that they brought with them maybe ultimately
helped to shape the program at all or help things get done?
(DVI): Absolutely. That’s true I think anytime you’re teaching adult students, they shape the
course as much as you do as a teacher and that’s what makes it so exciting. I love teaching adult
students.
00:08:48
(JS): Alright. Now, once you completed the Master’s degree what did you do next?
(DVI): I went right into the Ph.D. program, working with the very same people at the University
of Minnesota. So it really was just a continuation of something that I was enjoying.
(JS): Now, how does a Ph.D. program physically work? How much is actual course work now?
How do you do dissertation research? There are kind of straight academic fields, like history
where you go and read a bunch of books or documents and then go write something. What did
you have to do for the doctorate?
(DVI): Well, I did have to take a lot of courses. I had to take a lot of statistics courses, research
methodology as well as some management courses because it was a broad Ph.D. with health
services research, policy, and administration. So I had courses in all of those areas, including
sociology that was a big part of that program as well. Policy was a big part and research and
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�statistics. I had a lot of coursework to do. When the coursework was done I had the oral exam
over all those areas and then I presented my thesis proposal, and then I worked on that for a long
time.
(JS): What was the thesis topic?
(DVI): The thesis topic was The Impact of Prepaid Healthcare on Utilization and I can’t
remember the exact title at the moment.
(JS): One of those good social science…
(DVI): (laughter), Utilization and Function in Nursing Home Patients. What happened was in
Minnesota in the 80s it was a hotbed for prepaid health care which you would think of now as
HMOs, but back then, that was very new and Minnesota was really a pioneer in the whole
concept of prepaid health. I had the perfect opportunity because Minnesota was randomly
selecting Medicaid nursing home residents to go into prepaid health plans. So I was able to
compare 400 people who were in the prepaid health plan to 400 people who were left in the
regular fee for service system and determine if that had an effect on their utilization of health
services or on their functional status at the end of the year. That was exciting research to do.
(JS): So, were you tracking a group of individual patients then who agreed to be part of it or how
did that work?
(DVI): Well what we did was actually records review. So after they had been put into the health
plans, I was able to hire two nurses who would go back and extract data from the health record
for a year. So we would walk into a nursing home where we had already randomly selected the
files that we were going to study. And there would be a huge stack of files that they would go
through and extract the data.
00:11:47
(JS): Now did the people whose files were being looked at, did they have to sign consent forms
or was this an earlier era where we didn’t worry about that?
(DVI): It was an earlier era. I’m trying to think exactly how that went. Because it was for
research purposes we were allowed to look at their medical record under very strict guidelines.
And because it was funded by Medicaid, we had access to those records for research purposes.
So we never actually talked to the residents, it was just their records. And there were very strict
guidelines about who could be in the room with the medical record and they had to be locked,
and I had to keep all my data under lock and key as well, it had to be destroyed when I was done,
all those kinds of things. I had no identifying data on my data collection forms. Everybody was
assigned a number. It’s not the same as it was back then but it still was very stringent in terms of
confidentiality.
(JS): So what did you find? Did it make a difference to be in a prepaid plan or not?
(DVI): It made a difference, yes, in the utilization of physical therapy and occupational therapy,
and some doctor visits. What we could not determine was did it make a difference in their
functional status. I interviewed a lot of nursing home administrators and nurses, it was their
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�anecdotal evidence that said there was some difference in the functioning but the instruments we
used were not capable of finding a difference. So the bottom line is it saved the county a ton of
money and there seemed to be no detrimental effect on the residents, which was what they were
hoping to find.
(JS): Alright and how long did it take you to finish that?
(DVI): Probably two or three years because they had to be in for a year in order for us to even
access the records. So, once the data collection was done, then we had to enter the data, you
know that was back in the days before SPSS got so easy to use, and I actually was able to hire
some people to help enter the data, and I had a research person who was able to actually print out
the report. This was before you could print your own on your PC and so I would say, I need this
test and this test and this test, and then I would go in a day or two in his office, and he would
hand me this big print outs, you know, big paper stacks. After that it didn’t take so long, writing
it up was pretty easy. It’s all the other parts that took so long to get done.
(JS): Alright. Now once you had the degree, did you have an idea what you wanted to do with it?
00:14:49
(DVI): I wanted to teach. I did. And I got a teaching job at the University of North Carolina in
Asheville. Remember I told you that I started college when my son started first grade. So I took a
teaching job in North Carolina about the time he was in college. And he said mom, we’re doing
this backwards. I am supposed to go off to college not you (because he stayed in Minnesota to go
to college and I went to North Carolina.) So I taught in the Management Department and I taught
healthcare management to undergrads for three years.
(JS): So what was that experience like?
(DVI): You know it was really quite amazing. I remember two specific things that were quite
striking. One is the first management test that I gave my students, I got it back and almost
everybody flunked my test. And I was just aghast. I thought I’d been teaching this and I had been
trying so hard to teach this material and they’ve all flunked it. What’s going on? So I called my
mentor back at the University of Minnesota and I said, I just flunked all my students, what’s
going on, what am I doing wrong? And he roared with laughter. I said, you know what Ken, this
is not funny. And he said, “Oh, it is.” He said, “Every new teacher does this because you’re
coming fresh out of a Ph.D. program and you’re on a different level from your students so your
tests are really hard and it’s not unusual for this to happen.” And I said I wish you told me this
before.
(JS): Had you had any kind of exposure to undergraduate teaching other than being in a
graduate…
(DVI): No, it had all been graduate.
(JS): That has a lot to do with it. There are fields where if you’re a teaching assistant or a lab
assistant and you were working with undergrads as a graduate student then you see how it works.
But you were geared in all these professional programs and doing that for so long and with the
adult learners on top of it when you were dealing with it in a lot of cases. Very different.
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�(DVI): Then I had one other interesting experience as a first year teacher. I got involved right
away with some research that my colleagues were doing on hearing loss in the work place and I
was really excited to be a part of this new project and we were looking at the statistical tests we
were going to use, and I said well you can’t use that and they said, “ Well, why? Of course we
can.” And I said, no you can’t. So I called my statistics mentor at the University of Minnesota
and I said Vern, you always told us that we could not use this test in this instance and he roared
with laughter. I said you know what, this is not funny. What’s going on here? And he said, “Well
you’re right. I did tell you that you couldn’t use it in this case. But social scientists do it all the
time.” And I’m like, why didn’t you tell me this, that there were exceptions in how it could be
used? But he was such a purist that he didn’t want us to use it that way. So, there were some
interesting learning experiences in that first year.
00:18:07
(JS): Now how long did you stay there?
(DVI): I stayed there for three years and I just had my contract renewed when I decided that I
was probably going to look for something else because I was about to remarry and move to
Michigan.
(JS): When you went to North Carolina was there any amount of culture shock from going there
from Minnesota or was it relatively easy place to adapt to otherwise?
(DVI): No it was intense culture shock. Probably because I was used to being in a big city living
in the Twin Cities and before that I lived in Tulsa which was a big city and Asheville was pretty
small compared to them. And I used to say, “I miss the traffic.” You know it was just such a
slower pace of life, a different, it was beautiful, I liked the people. It just seemed small compared
to being in a metropolitan area.
(JS): Was there much of a cultural difference in terms of just the attitudes that students brought
with them in the classes, I mean, you’re dealing with various kinds of social issues and so forth,
and you come from a place where there would had been probably a fairly strong feminist
perspective in a lot of things and so forth, go in to mountain North Carolina, did you notice much
of a difference there?
(DVI): I did, but remember I grew up in Tulsa. So, I had exposure to both worlds so that part
wasn’t such a shock to me. I wasn’t surprised. I did teach a course in women and business where
I was trying to get women to think a little broader about their own careers. So, I had a chance to
do some of that as well, kind of mentoring young women. That was exciting. I enjoyed that. At
the same time you have to respect their values and not tread on those too harshly.
(JS): Right. So, you found some reasonable balance to make the course work?
(DVI): (Nodding) Exactly.
(JS): Alright. You decide then for reasons of your own that you were looking to move on, so
where did you go then from North Carolina?
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�(DVI): I came to West Michigan. I met my husband, John, at a teaching conference in Ohio and
he said well, you know, he would move to my area, and I said well I had been there only three
years, let me look at your area. It’s the same you know lots of academics have this issue of where
are you going to be once you get together. And he was teaching at Hope College. And it just
happened that at that time I was looking, Grand Valley was also recruiting someone to teach in
their Healthcare Administration Program, in the School of Public Administration. They had
started a new emphasis area. So, it was just like, you know, everything in the universe was just
set for things to work out.
00:20:57
(JS): Now, did you start as an adjunct or full time?
(DVI): Full time.
(JS): Now what was it like in the first year at Grand Valley, what kind of adjustments did you
make or how easy or hard was it?
(DVI): I worked really hard. Partly because now I’m teaching graduate classes instead of
undergrad, and my students are very, very sharp, very experienced in healthcare in this area. So,
I was learning a new area and teaching grad students so, I was spending a lot of time studying
myself and because everything was a new prep because I had never taught any of these courses
before to grad students so I spent a lot of time in prep.
(JS): Did you encounter graduate students who acted like they knew more than you did?
(DVI): Well, in some cases I felt like they did, but no basically no. I have to say that the grad
students I encountered were absolutely fabulous.
(JS): So they weren’t trying to tell you how to do your job or..?
(DVI): No. You know, I think the thing that I, as I reflect on teaching grad students who were
working in the field, I felt like what I was doing was giving them a framework for some of the
things that they already were practicing. It’s kind of like you have this closet where you’ve got
this pile of clothes, it’s just kind of in a lump and I’m giving them the hangers to hang them up
and organize it and kind of be aware of what they are doing and how do it better.
(JS): Is there a kind of general profile for the type of person who would come into those classes
by way of you know age, experience level, job, gender, wherever?
(DVI): No. I think it was pretty balanced in terms of gender and age probably mid to late thirties.
I had a number of nurses who were getting into management and so they were coming in to take
my financial management class. I always took it as a real challenge because I wanted to make
everybody really understand it well, so they could go out and do a really good job. And so, I
loved having them in the class and hearing experiences they were having out in the field was
just, is really refreshing and really exciting to teach when you know that what you’re doing is
being applied the next day in the real world and that’s fun.
(JS): Did they come back and then tell about what happened?
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�(DVI): (nods) I remember one really wonderful vivacious nurse, maybe she wasn’t a nurse but
she worked in the hospital, and she came back after a few classes and she said, “You know they
think I’m really smart now.” Because I had shown her some way to do a budget and there’s some
financial things that were new to her. And she thought that she sounded so much smarter and
they really caught on that she knew what she was doing. That was fun.
(JS): Now what year did you get to Grand Valley?
(DVI): Fall of 93.
(JS): Alright. And then how long did you stay in that position that you came into?
(DVI): Well in some sense, until I retired because I stayed on the faculty of the School of Public
and Nonprofit Administration even when I became the Director. So, I was assistant professor and
then associate professor, and then I took the job at the Johnson Center.
00:24:41
(JS): Okay. What kind of sort of research or scholarship expectations did they have of you? What
were you supposed to do besides teach?
(DVI): One of the interesting things that happened in my interview at Grand Valley was a
question that was posed to me by Margaret Sellers Walker, it was Margaret Sellers at the time,
she said, “So what kind of work do you do in a community?” So that was really an interesting
question that I’d never been asked in academics before. What do you do in a community? So that
really let me know right away that that was important in the School of Public and Nonprofit
Administration, and I think important at Grand Valley, to be involved in the community and
actually apply what you were learning or what you were teaching and make a difference in the
community as well as with your students. So, I think there were expectations then to do
community service as well as the university service, and the academic part of it. So, my
academics was, or my writing and scholarship really was very much practical, applied kind of
research that I really enjoyed doing.
(JS): So what sort of things did you do that would reach out into the community?
(DVI): Like I served on a lot of boards, that was a lot of fun, and got involved in some
community groups where they would want someone to come in and do a lecture or make a
presentation on a particular management topic for example in nonprofit leadership areas. At the
time when I was on the faculty, there was the Direction Center which had been started by Grand
Valley and the Grand Rapids Foundation and United Way I think. And so, I would do some
research with them and their clients as well as teaching and seminars and things like that for their
clients.
(JS): Did you do a lot by way of grant applications and that sort of thing?
(DVI): No. That was not part of it right at that particular time. Later that would become more
important but not in my first few years of teaching.
00:27:00
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�(JS): Okay, now at what point did you become aware that we have this thing called the Johnson
Center that had started out for studying philanthropy?
(DVI): Well, the Center for Philanthropy was actually started I think by people involved with the
School of Public Administration. So when I came in 93 it had already been started. Tom Jeavons
was there, and his office was right there in the same building that mine was. He was at all the
faculty meetings. So, I knew that coming in that there was the Johnson Center, at that time was
Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership. So we all worked together on the curriculum
and on faculty issues and so on.
(JS): Now how do you wind up making a switch from being sort of regular faculty member to
someone who will eventually take over the Center for Philanthropy?
(DVI): I had gotten some grants through the Center for Philanthropy in order to do some research
for some nonprofits. I had worked with a long term care facility in Muskegon to do a project and
it was funded by a small grant from the center, and a few other projects that I had done where I
had gotten a grant. And then, I started working on some projects that Spectrum was doing on
healthy communities and it really pulled that whole health interest I had and the community
interest I had; it really put them together because you look at healthy communities and you look
at it broadly, not just their physical health, but the whole health of the community, the education,
the poverty, and all the issues that go into making a great place to live. And that really pulled me
in the direction of nonprofits and philanthropy. So, it wasn’t as big a leap as it might sound given
the background that I just told you about. I had the privilege of being invited to a meeting that
Don Lubbers, the President of the university, he had invited a number of faculty people to come
and hear Fred Keller talk about a new initiative that they were working on in the community, and
I think it was Fred, and Diana Sieger, and some others in the community, who were working on
some really visionary thinking on how to improve the community and they wanted to get the
university involved and so President Lubbers called this meeting. And I remember Fred talking
about what they were doing and it was so exciting just to think about using the resources of a
university to really make a difference in a community and to really measure the changes that
were going on in the community. And out of that I came up with the idea of a community
research institute (laughs), and I’m still a faculty member with no money to do anything. And I
got my first grant from the Center for Philanthropy and that freed me up to work on this concept
of a Community Research Institute. So, I had gotten grants from the center as a faculty member
to pursue some of my own interests in this whole area of community improvement. In fact, I had
met some faculty at the Water Resources Institute who had shown me the maps they were doing
with GIS, Geographical Information System. And I was so excited about that and I thought we
should be doing that with nonprofits. We can track where poverty is, we can use it to look at
epidemiology, I mean there’s so many applications for that. So, I applied for a grant to buy a GIS
system from the center and I bought it and I had absolutely no idea how to operate it or what to
do with it. But that’s just telling you how I got involved in this whole issue of nonprofits and
how that led to the Johnson Center for me.
(JS): Ok. Now, you are doing this kind of work but at some point you actually go into
administration. So how does that get started and how does that play out?
00:31:21
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�(DVI): Well, I’m kind of going back and forth in time as I tell you these things as they come to
my mind. The director of the School of Public and Nonprofit Administration had retired, and
during that year that they were doing a search I was the co-director of the School of Public and
Nonprofit Administration along with Mike Mast, and I found out I loved it. I loved academic
administration, it was so much fun. I really thoroughly enjoyed it. And so we conducted the
search and we hired a really good person. So, that worked really well. I did not apply for that job,
that’s not the job I wanted, but I really enjoyed the year that I did the administration. And
actually the Dean of Social Sciences at the time, Jonathan White, asked me, probably fall
semester of 2000, if I would consider being assistant dean, and I gave that a lot of thought and I
said yes that I would do that. But before I could do anything deanly, the opening at the Johnson
Center occurred and so they started talking to me about that. And that really was where my
passion was to be honest. So Jonathan was very supportive in my saying, oh, never mind about
the dean thing, I think I am going to take this new direction and take the job at the Johnson
Center. And by this time it was the Johnson Center.
(JS): Now, at this point did you know Dottie Johnson herself pretty well or does that come later?
(DVI): I did not know her well. I knew who she was of course and I knew her reputation and had
met her, but I did not know her well enough to say that that was the reason for taking the job.
(JS): Now, you come into the job that started that in 2001 then was that your official take up?
(DVI): I think about January.
(JS): Where would you say the center was in terms of its evolution or development at the point
when you came into it?
00:33:43
(DVI): You know Tom Jeavons as the first director had done a great job of establishing a really
good curriculum along with the faculty. He also established a national reputation with his own
scholarship. So, he was a really good director in terms of getting it off the ground and he also
introduced it well to the university itself and got faculty interested in service learning even just
kind of understanding that whole concept and the idea that we could have a grant to do some
work. And then the next director, Dott Freeman, really pushed that even farther. And both of
them by the way were on the faculty in the School of Public and Nonprofit Administration and
were excellent teachers and their classes were very popular and so on. So they did great at that
and were wonderful colleagues. Dott really pushed the service learning and helped faculty see
how they could use grants to enhance their own scholarship and service. And, she worked in the
community. She started to do some research on the community I think one of the first projects
that I thought was really exciting was the impact of the nonprofit sector on the economy in our
area. I think it was a billion dollar impact and it was really terrific to see that kind of scholarship
beginning to come out of the center. So, when I took over we had an assistant, Pat Nanzer, and a
couple of grad students. That was it, in terms of staffing.
(JS): What did you see as your sort of first priority when you came in? Was it just to keep the
place running or did you have an idea of some direction you wanted to go?
11
�(DVI): Keep the place running? No. I was just so excited to have the opportunity to move things
along. I think the first thing I wanted to do was to really make the Johnson Center visible, both at
the university and in the community and nationwide. I just felt like we had a great opportunity to
do all three things. So, I really started looking at visibility what we were doing in each of those
three areas that we could do better and do more of and really increase our visibility. So one of the
first things we tackled was really, Pat and I looking at what were we doing and how could we get
a better, some publicity, some visibility. So we did a brochure. We never had a brochure before
that was like this. So we did a brochure that really looked at all the things we did within the
university, in the community, and we had some really interesting ideas about what we could do
nationally as well.
(JS): What can you do to raise your profile nationally? Or what did you try to do to get more of
that kind of attention?
(DVI): Well, we knew what we needed was a scholar who could really make a contribution to
the national scene and we were so fortunate to be able to have Dr. Joel Orosz from the Kellogg
Foundation join us as distinguished professor, and that just kind of sealed it as far as the national
part of it was concerned, because he already had the national reputation, and great ideas, a great
colleague, and so, he could spearhead us right into that national arena just perfectly.
(JS): Does that start moving into the area of organizing conferences or publications or other
kinds of things?
00:37:35
(DVI): The other colleague I had in the beginning was Margaret Sellers Walker who absolutely
was fabulous and she was so connected in the community. She was involved in everything. She
was smart and wise and, great ideas. My husband used to call she and I the dynamic duo because
we were always strategizing on ways to make something work and to get our students involved
in projects and get involved in the community. So she and I had looked at what we could do in
the community and at about that time the Direction Center had ended. There was a real need for
some executive training in the nonprofit arena. So, we envisioned I think we called it the
executive series Nonprofit, I think we called it 201 or 101 or something, but it was the nonprofit
leadership piece for directors who wanted to get in on some of the cutting edge management
literature and really hone their executive skills. So, I was able to hire her with a grant from the
center, with funds from the center, it takes at least half of her time from the School of Public
Administration which she was on the faculty, and really focus her time on the nonprofit
leadership part. So that was our community piece and then Pat Nanzer, who was my assistant at
the time, really took over the university initiatives with the service learning and looking at other
grant requests that came in. We kind of had a threefold thing going where we had the university
initiatives where we were really looking at ways to involve faculty members in service learning
and research. And then we had our community piece with the nonprofit leadership and we
developed a number of seminars, and programs and involvements there. Then we had research,
which was CRI, by then I had been able to raise more money from the Grand Rapids Community
Foundation and get that going really well with a lot of applied research. And then we had the
national piece with Joel Orosz and there we had a grant from Kellogg for I think it was $990,000
when he came and we were able to do what we called a knowledge management initiative which
was to start the nonprofit good practice guide. These things we did after he arrived trying to
12
�figure out how are we were going to share knowledge in the field, you know good practices,
share that with the nonprofit and philanthropy sector. So, that was his initiative at the time, and
then later that moved into The Grantmaking School which was so exciting. We, under his
leadership, launched that, and that’s been I think quite successful as well.
(JS): Can you describe a little bit what The Grantmaking School does?
(DVI): Yes, we really looked at what do grantmakers, people who work for foundations whether
it’s community foundations, private foundations, what kind of information do they need to know
to be really good grantmakers and to make good decisions, to be good stewards with the money.
With all of his experience Joel knew that really well, and so we began to develop a curriculum
that we would take on the road, and we knew that we needed to get the message out to the field.
They didn’t have a lot of time to leave their offices and come to Grand Rapids of all places to
learn anything. So, we really saw right away that we needed to take it into the field so we
conducted the classes all over the country.
(JS): Now, if you are going out across the country, are there many other places that do this?
(DVI): No. At the time we did it, there wasn’t anybody doing exactly this. We really modeled it
after The Fundraising School that Indiana University was doing. And in fact, if I back up a little
bit, we had partnered with them and brought The Fundraising School to West Michigan by the
way. But anyway, we thought that’s the kind of model that we could use to develop The
Grantmaking School, so we learned a lot from their experience with The Fundraising School, and
so we started The Grantmaking School.
(JS): So, how did the road show get funded? Did that have grant money of its own?
(DVI): It was funded from the Kellogg Foundation with startup funds and then we charged for
the classes and worked towards making it self-sustaining.
(JS): Is this an ongoing thing? Is the Johnson Center still doing this?
(DVI): Yes, as far as I know.
(JS): Alright. I guess you retired in 2005, was it at the end of the year?
(DVI): Right in the middle, in the summer.
(JS): So you were in charge for about four and half years before you do that.
(DVI): (Nodding)
(JS): If you look back on that time, what would you say maybe was your most significant
accomplishment or what are you most proud of having done?
(DVI): Well certainly the Community Research Institute is a big part of that, cause that was
something that I was able to, it was like you can see the idea and you can see it through and see
the accomplishments already because I hired an intern from I think he was at Cleveland State. I
hired him to come and do the GIS. He was a student and now he is directing the CRI which is
really fun for me to see, and all the projects that we did when I look back on the kinds of things
13
�that we did. We had something like 25 grad students working, we had a number of full time
staffers, and we accomplished so much and made so many contributions I think to things that
were going on in the area. I was fortunate to be involved in the Delta Strategy which came out of
that Fred Keller, Diana Sieger thing that I told you about that wanted to get the university
involved, that was really the beginning of looking at data driven decision making for nonprofits.
Really, how can we measure the work that we’re doing, and how do we know what to work on
and if we are making a difference. And so the time was right for a capacity in the community to
be able to do that kind of measurement, and that really is what was behind CRI. How can we
provide that data out there and make it available to anyone who is on the ground trying to make a
difference in the community. So, I would say that’s one of the things I am most proud of.
00:44:44
(JS): Just to explain a little bit, can you give an example of the kind of data that would be
collected. What sort of information would you get and what would somebody do with it?
(DVI): There were a couple of different things that we looked at, one was just collecting census
data and organizing it in a way that could be used. We looked at poverty and there was a real
poverty initiative going on in the community, and there wasn’t a lot of information on what that
meant for people. So, we put out just a little one page thing that we called, In-brief: Poverty, and
it had the statistics that related to what does that mean for someone to be in poverty. So, we used
statistics that were already out there but we formulated them in a way that could be used and
make sense to people who were working in the field. We also worked with Delta Strategy and
put out a community report card that was inserted in the Grand Rapids Press. And it was a long
process of identifying indicators in the community that were important to the community, and
then it was our job to find the data and sometimes that was really hard because the community
would want to know some kind of information that absolutely was not available because nobody
was collecting it. And so part of what we did was raise the awareness that we needed to be
collecting data so that we would have it to work with. So that was one of the issues that was in
terms of data. But the other part of it is program evaluation. If you’re a nonprofit, one of the
things that you want to be able to do is to tell your story to your potential donors, let them know
that you are being effective in your work. And you can’t do that really well without data to back
up your stories of success. You really need some data, and so we really got involved in doing a
lot of program evaluation as well as collecting data, and then we did surveys. If you’re going to
tackle a particular issue in the community, you need some data to work with, what are people
thinking about it, what are they doing? So we did several years’ worth of community surveys
where we actually surveyed thousands of people in the community and asked them questions
about how they were living and what their opinions were on different things. So we just raised
the whole area of working in community and in nonprofits and using data to drive that work and
to tell a story of what’s being done. That was exciting work.
(JS): What do you think was the most challenging aspect of the job as director of the center?
(DVI): Probably trying to do all the good things that we did on a shoe string. We had good
funding, don’t get me wrong, and we had good support from the university and from the Kellogg
Foundation and from the Grand Rapids Community Foundation and others. But it still is
challenging to always find the money to do the work that you want to get done, and I had such
fabulous staff and grad students who worked harder than anybody I’ve ever seen to accomplish
14
�these things. I think that was a challenge. And working on community is always a challenge too.
You know we talk a lot about collaboration and collaboration is never easy. It’s always hard and
if you’re looking at nonprofits and community, trying to collaborate to accomplish things there
are a lot of difficulties associated with that because everybody has their own individual mission
statement, their own individual turf, and then you try to combine those together for the good of
the community, and that’s hard sometimes. It’s really hard work. It’s rewarding but there’s a lot
of hard issues in that. But it was really fun to be a part of all that was going on in the community
at that time.
(JS): Is sort of creating evaluation tools or actually using them, does that get tricky? They don’t
want to be told, they’re not doing what they said they were doing?
(DVI): Absolutely. You know we’re limited by the tools themselves and I guess you’d call it the
technology of evaluation, you can’t always measure everything you want to measure and you
have to figure out how to get a proxy for that and whether it makes sense or not. So it’s really a
challenge to design a really good evaluation and it’s a challenge to deliver the story if it’s not a
positive one to your client.
(JS): At another level it would seem to me that if you’re being successful with a lot of your
initiatives part of what would happen is you would see a lot more things that needed to get done.
So you might have accomplished a lot but you keep seeing all the rest of it. Does that happen?
(DVI): Oh yes. Margaret Sellers Walker used to say that you never finish the job. And I think
about it kind of like a conveyor belt. And you’re on this conveyor belt, and while you’re in this
scene at this particular place you do what you can, and then it keeps moving but there are more
people coming along with new and fresh ideas. And so it continues along but, the problems
change a little bit but you still have some pretty intractable social problems when you’re talking
about people. So it’s always good to get those fresh ideas coming into the scene and that’s
exciting too. You do your part while you are there and then you know that good people are going
to come along behind you and keep it going.
(JS): Now, you retire in 2005, what have you done since then? Do you feel like you’ve stopped?
00:50:43
(DVI): I guess I thought I’d have started something new again. The first year that I was retired I
think I was mentally just exhausted. I had worked really, really hard. And I decided that I would
accept no assignments, no projects, and I would read no professional literature. I know this
sounds terrible coming from an academic but I just thought I was going to focus on my health.
And so, I lost a lot of weight, which I can’t say is still gone. I walked two miles every day, I went
to the fitness center and worked out a couple of times a week, I took a yoga class, all those things
that I did not have time for.
(JS): So you were saying basically you kind of took that first year off to physically get yourself
on the right track.
(DVI): Get rejuvenated.
(JS): Then at a certain point did you feel you had to get back into things?
15
�(DVI): I did. I joined the board at the Holland Zeeland Community Foundation. I live in Holland,
so I loved that. That was fun. However my husband who was already retired, it was one of my
reasons for retiring was because he’d already been retired and the timing was kind of good for
both of us to go do fun things for a while. So we decided to buy a house in Florida, so we started
wintering in Florida. So that was kind of the end to the board work. But I took up golf and line
dancing things that no one who knows me when I was here could ever belief that I was doing any
of those things. So now I play golf and I line dance and do a number of hobbies and it’s very
different.
(JS): And do you pay any attention at all to what’s going on in the philanthropy profession at any
level?
(DVI): Oh, yes. You know you can’t ignore that. It’s just a part of you once you worked in it.
And so I do. I read about it. I look at a lot of things that are going on but just not actively
involved in it anymore.
00:52:55
16
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/7831d9bd5e8cf0dd5bf83d5f6bca4dda.mp4
6f3b215d0986c283d272c512dbba527b
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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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
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/516">Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project (MPOHP) (JCPA-08). Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives</a>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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2017-05-02
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eng
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audio/mp3
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video/mp4
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JCPA-08
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2006-2008
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Johnson Center for Philantrhopy
Contributor
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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>
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Van Iwaarden, Donna, video interview and transcript
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Van Iwaarden, Donna
Description
An account of the resource
Donna Van Iwaarden, former director of the Johnson Center for Philanthropy at Grand Valley State University discusses her early life, education, family, and work at the University of North Carolina, Grand Valley State University’s School of Public and Nonprofit Administration, and the Johnson Center for Philanthropy. She discusses the development of the Community Research Institute (CRI) and The Grantmaking School. She describes her role as the director of the Johnson Center in creating nonprofit training, university initiatives, and research, and her efforts to increase the visibility of the Johnson Center in the university, in the community, and at national level.
Contributor
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Smither, James
Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership, Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Philanthropy and society
Personal narratives
Charities
Michigan
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership
Women
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JCPA-08_VanIwaardenD
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eng
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a>
Type
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Text
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Relation
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Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives
Date
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2011-08-23
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/cb053f95a1e108e1b75cb14e70a62df0.pdf
d2794b0e3c142e73d7899a88de23c05f
PDF Text
Text
Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
Johnson Center for Philanthropy
Grand Valley State University
Oral History Interview with Michael R. Payne, February 28, 2012
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 Michael R. Payne on February 28, 2012. Conducted by Dr.
James Smither of the History Department at GVSU. Recorded at GVSU, 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 Michael R. Payne, 2012. Johnson Center
Philanthropy Archives of the Special Collection & University Archives, Grand Valley
State University Libraries.
James Smither (JS): We’re doing this interview with Mike Payne, on the staff at Grand
Valley State University [retired professor, School of Public, Nonprofit and Health
Administration]. This is for the Johnson Center for the study of philanthropy and the
interviewer is James Smither of the History department from Grand Valley. Now
basically what we’re doing here is we want to, we’re gathering information on sort of the
history and origins of the Johnson Center, so, and we’re talking to various people who
were involved in it in one way or another, and before we get into that we like to fill in a
little bit of background on who we’re talking to. So, we’ll start with when and where
were you born?
Michael Payne (MP): St. Louis, Missouri, 1946, so.
(JS): And then did you grow up in that area or somewhere else?
(MP): Grew up in and around St. Louis until mid-late 60s, mid 60s, I guess.
(JS): Ok. And then what did you do at that point?
(MP): Well, those were Vietnam days, so I spent four years on active duty until 1970.
1
�(JS): Well you’ve just gotten yourself into a good deal of trouble since I run the veteran’s
history project, but we won’t worry about that now right here. So, were you in the army
or?
(MP): Air Force for those four years.
(JS): Air Force for four years, alright, and for four years then let’s see, were you an
officer or enlisted?
(MP): Enlisted. One of those many folks that didn’t carry enough credits to keep their
deferment, so, you had a choice of finding something you wanted to do or be drafted. I
found something I wanted to do so I spent four years doing electronics for the air force.
(JS): Alright. Now did that take you to Vietnam at some point or did you stay in this.
(MP): No. I worked with training pilots for the Air Force. We did all the training at home.
They went to Vietnam to work.
(JS): When did you leave the air force then?
(MP): Early discharge in I think it was January of 1970 to go back to school, so I went to
the University of Missouri in St. Louis and finished an undergraduate degree, and then
from there to Syracuse for a Ph.D. in economics.
(JS): What did you do the undergraduate degree in?
(MP): Economics.
(JS): So, it’s economics all the way through.
(MP): Yes.
(JS): In what area of economics then did you focus your research on as you were doing
dissertation work?
(MP): Started out with a fellowship to study economics of education which sort of
expanded to human resources, human capital kind of resources not personnel. And from
there, narrowed back to health care. So I studied for-profit and nonprofit hospitals as they
behaved in New York State back in late 60s.
(3:19)
(JS): Was there a central message or lesson that you took out of that?
(MP): Sure, being an econ and numbers guy, there was all kinds of theories about how
hospitals behaved, and back in those days, there was a rift between for-profit and
2
�nonprofit hospitals, one accuse the other of all sorts of things, and the way I wanted to get
at that was look at the actual expenditures; how did they spend money? If they spent
money differently then maybe there was a difference. Turns out they didn’t spend money
differently at all. So, I had data on every hospital in New York from Blue Cross was the
financial intermediary for the federal government to pay hospitals through Medicare. So I
had access to all of their data, and stratified by size and scope of hospital they behaved
exactly the same. There was no statistical difference in behavior no matter what the
theory said.
(JS): And you’re measuring behavior basically just by what they are paying for or...
(MP): How they spent their money. If you and I spend our income the same way, we may
have very similar motivations. Since we had very good theory about for-profit hospitals,
and how they are profit maximizers, I wanted to find out if the nonprofit hospitals
behaved in a more philanthropic way or if they behaved the same. Turns out they behave
the same. Part of that was artificial I think because they were reimbursed the same, so
they were only going to be reimbursed if they did a, b or c. If they did something that was
non reimbursable, they didn’t get any money for it, and they chose in general not to do
that. I didn’t look at how the money came in; I looked at how the money went out. Very
interesting, so, I was doing philanthropy stuff back in nineteen whatever that was, ’74, I
guess, mix of for-profit and nonprofit.
(JS): As you were doing this, were you publishing papers or things like that or does that
come later?
(MP): A little bit then, I had a research assistantship, worked on some projects around
Syracuse, but, at least thirty some years ago, the main focus was, get the dissertation
done, then do something else. The model was, get it writ.
(JS): So, how long then did you spend in grad school?
(MP): Three years on campus, I gave myself a three year window to finish the
coursework and pass the exams, get a dissertation started. I had a family so that was my
time frame, three years I’m out of the door. Then I took another year, taught full time and
finished my dissertation while I was teaching.
(JS): And then did you teach at Syracuse or did you go somewhere else?
(MP): No. I went to Union University in Albany New York to teach for that one year. I
was the combined departments of Economics and Sociology, one guy. I was the only one
I think that didn’t have a white coat. Everybody else was very much in the science model.
(JS): And then, once you completed your dissertation, where did you go next?
3
�(MP): I was recruited through a health, I had a fellowship to do my dissertation, and was
recruited by Western Michigan University to come there and do health economics.
(7:10)
(JS): And did that put you into their economics department?
(MP): Yes, economics department. I was appointed there over the fifteen years or so I
was at Western. That moved to being a great appointment for me but a very risky one for
a young faculty person. I was physically appointed in economics, but my time was split
between the Center for Public Administration and the College of Health and Human
Services. So I had sort of three hats but kind of risky thing to do.
(JS): Now, was this a conventional tenure track position or a contract position or what
was it?
(MP): Conventional tenure track position, as I started moving away from my department,
basically made a deal with the dean to protect myself. So, we had a sort of a contractual
arrangement of how the other two departments would be involved in my evaluation and
promotion, because econ was not completely thrilled with having me on their payroll but
working really spending two-thirds of my time outside the department.
(JS): Now, given the nature of your work, was that kind of outside of the experience or
knowledge base of most of the colleagues in the economics department or were there a
fair number of people who dealt with sort of public sector stuff of different kinds?
(MP): Most didn’t. We had some courses in urban economics of course, or transportation,
but I think I was the only one that taught outside the department. One guy might have
taught a class in political, sort of economic political science or something like that. But it
was a pretty traditional department. I was sort of the odd duck, which wasn’t unusual for
me, so I spent most of my time, as that continued on; I spent most of my time in public
administration.
(JS): What kind of sort of research track or program did you develop then while you were
there? What were you getting into?
(MP): Really a mixed bag. With my econ colleagues, it was large scale general
equilibrium models about urbanization, and much of that focused in the developing world
and how urbanization was coming about, whether it was rural to urban movement
because of agricultural revolution or population explosion or whatever it happened to be.
And then some work also on some health care, I kept sort of a health care stream going
along. Over in the school of, what was still then the Center for Public Administration, we
developed a health curriculum, a master’s degree concentration in health, and so I taught
health economics and developed several of those courses in the late, mid to late 80s.
4
�(JS): Alright sort of for a lay person when you’re teaching health economics, what does
that actually mean in terms of course content?
(MP): Sure, it’s applied microeconomics primarily, function of the firm in this case
hospitals primarily, also but also large private practice and at some level insurance
companies. So, the traditional things that you would study if you were looking at any
micro economic slice of an industry, how are they reimbursed or how they are paid, labor
issues in the case of health care you had multiple unions, so part of that was about
reimbursement and expenditures, part of it on some labor theory, a bit of it is how do
hospitals behave, are they profit maximizers, back to my study from twenty years before,
or do they function in some other way. We have a very good theory about how firms
operate if they’re trying to make money, we have virtually no theory about how firms
operate if they aren’t trying to make money, so there’s this constant question about how
does this firm really function? So, really and that was continuation for years of my
dissertation. By the way that question is still out there today. Focused in health literature
on quality of care, cost of care, access to care that came up in the early 1900s at a
conference it’s the topic today, hasn’t changed in over a century. Details have changed.
(JS): Did you start getting involved with sort of outside foundations or organizations, the
Kellogg Foundation for instance or some of these others, or do you start to build up
connections with those as you do your research or?
(MP): Somewhat limited at Western, the focus there was primarily on developing
curriculum, and we also started a, then it was a DPA, doctorate in public administration
offered in Lansing, and then Western was in the satellite business as they still are.
Western has a campus down the road. Thirty years ago I was teaching in Grand Rapids
one night a week for Western with the health concentration, so we exported that
concentration to several different communities, in fact that’s how I got to Grand Valley.
(13:23)
(JS): But you didn’t have much connection really with things like philanthropic
foundations or organizations while you were at Western?
(MP): Not much. A little, obviously there was the ongoing grant writing kinds of things,
but the focus, and I even taught grant writing for a while, but my focus was more
curriculum and student focused. Much like Grand Valley back in those days, Western
was very much a teaching institution. I was never the grant researcher. I did enough.
(JS): Your CV has a good list of published papers and all of that kind of stuff.
(MP): And then for a while I edited a journal, I did a few other things that were...it was
boxes you needed to check, you know, don’t mean to sound cynical but as you know
5
�there are things you need to do if you want to make associate or full professor. You just
sort of have to go through the hoops or the hurdles.
(JS): And you made both of those jumps?
(MP): Right.
(JS): At what point did you come to Grand Valley and how did that happen?
(MP): 1990 I was recruited by Grand Valley to help them develop truthfully a
competitive program with what Western was doing in health administration. It was a very
small department and in fact it wasn’t a department, it was a center within the social
science division back in those days, and there were only four of us. Eleanor French, the
director at that time, short, very feisty lady, Mike Mast, who I think you’ve interviewed,
Bob Clark, who passed away a few years ago, and myself. That was it. There were four of
us and we did it all. Some things better than others most likely, and the interest and the
reason I was hired was to develop a curriculum for a new concentration in health
administration which I managed the one truthfully very parallel program at Western, kind
of picked that up and brought it here. While Western continued doing their version of it,
we implemented something similar, not exactly the same but similar here at Grand
Valley. Focus was on mid-career students, looking for the student with maybe five years’
experience in administration with an interest in health care and moving typically from a
clinical position into an administrative one, or they might have been in an administrative
position and sure wished they knew more of what they were doing. So, that was our
student body.
(JS): Now were you doing this at the graduate level?
(MP): Graduate level only. I taught very little in the past thirty years at the undergraduate
level. My focus is virtually always been graduate or I try to forget about it, I was not an
undergraduate focused faculty person.
(JS): Now, how was it that you got involved with what would become the Johnson
Center, at what point did you start developing that angle?
(MP): Really the second year I was here. I came in fall of 1990. We got the curriculum
which was already partially developed before I got here, put the finishing touches on that
got that off to the curriculum committee. Maybe it was ‘91, started talking with Kellogg,
and my interpretation of what Kellogg wanted, you’d have to ask Kellogg, but my
interpretation is they had an interest in doing, of trying to instill philanthropic ideas and
volunteerism in the undergraduate curriculum. If you read their proposal, that’s what I
take from that. We were primarily interested in graduate study for nonprofit execs and
wannabes. They wanted undergraduate stuff, so we came to this grand compromise, we’ll
6
�do what you want if you let us do what we want. Don Lubbers was involved with a group
of college presidents with Kellogg at a meeting and Kellogg pitched their idea, everybody
thought it was fantastic until Kellogg said, “But we are not going to pay for the whole
thing,” then interest I think dwindled a bit. Don Lubbers was really tuned in to
philanthropy, he was a phenomenal fundraiser, had good people around him including
Dottie Johnson and a host of others that were just neck deep in philanthropy, and so they
well understood what we wanted to do as a center, and that was communicated to
Kellogg. We’ll be glad and we understand the undergraduateness of what they wanted to
do, and I think, this was unwritten, my impression, Kellogg saw the nature of the student
body changing over time, now we’re up to 1990, there’s an awful lot being written about
first generation college students, well if they’re first generation therefore they don’t have
the history that previous college students had. I think Kellogg was concerned that the
underlying understanding of service to the community and philanthropy and giving was
somehow different in new students that we were getting at the college level than students
from 10, 20 years before. Whether or not that’s true, I have no idea. That was my
impression. Through the 70s, 80s you know we did the women’s study thing and
nonwestern world and there were several attempts to kind of infuse in the curriculum new
ideas. I believe Kellogg wanted volunteerism and service learning to be that next bit of
infusion to get students thinking about how to give back to the community.
(20:21)
(JS): On some level, it may have been they may have assumed maybe that first generation
students are looking at an undergraduate education as a credential or a ticket to a better
job. They are looking to sort of improve their own position, and maybe not seeing as far
past it.
(MP): That could well be, and I don’t think it was an elitist position, you know, the
wealthy kids of the past understand all this, you know how you’re supposed to play the
game but these new kids don’t. I don’t think that was it as much as the numbers were so
much bigger. We were getting you know, Grand Valley back in 1990 was what 10,000
students or less.
(JS): Hit eleven thousand in 1990.
(MP): Now we are at 22, 25.
(JS): Twenty-five.
(MP): Western was 14, and it went to 30, you know, so the magnitude of the number of
people on campus was just mushrooming, you know. I’m the leading edge of the baby
boomer; you can’t get any older than me and be a baby boomer. I was born in 1946. Bill
Clinton, and George Bush and I, we’re all the same age. That means there are 75 million
7
�people behind me, and that boom is what Kellogg was interested in, I think. You’d have
to ask them.
(JS): Alright, now, if there hadn’t been a Kellogg grant or this thing had not come up, do
you think there would have been much done in terms of study of philanthropy or things
here at Grand Valley?
(MP): It was beginning to happen in the literature. There were a couple early conferences
that some of us went to, where the chat, the conversation in and around public
administration was beginning to identify the nonprofit sector as sort of the third leg of the
stool. And it was gaining in importance, so there was interest in gee, how do we, public
administration is more than government, we know it’s not business, but it’s more than
government, and by the way is anybody at all paying attention to nonprofits? Basically
the answer was no. So, public administration as a field, I don’t think of it as a discipline,
public administration as a field was moving to begin to incorporate some nonprofit
administration at least, and so we were headed in that direction. We ended up with
concentrations, a concentration in health care that had a set of courses that were contained
almost like as electives within a master’s degree, and we were beginning to develop the
same idea for nonprofit, we had the same in urban, and in criminal justice, there were
four I think, concentrations that a student could select one of, they had to select one. So
there were these core courses in administration, history of the field, personnel, statistics,
policy analysis, those sorts of things, then there were specialized courses if you were
interested in health administration, or nonprofit administration, criminal justice, then you
would splinter off. Then come back together at the end with some capstone kinds of
things. So the idea was to bring this variety of students together for some common
knowledge. Split them off into specific concentrations and then bring them back together
again, and as we brought them back together again they discovered they were more alike
than they were different. They had some of the same problems, may have used different
words, they had a different terminology from nonprofit to health care, but they were both
concerned about getting the grant money and reimbursement and serving a client. So
there was tremendous overlap that they didn’t understand at first, nor did we completely.
(JS): Now, what sort of impact did it have ultimately on our programs here, once the
Kellogg grant happens, what goes on or starts to happen that either couldn’t have
happened or wouldn’t have happened as quickly?
(The phone rings @ 25:11.)
(MP) I don’t think the grants for service learning and all of that would have taken place,
certainly not with the scale it did. Our deal with, let me back up to think about the service
learning piece, our deal with Kellogg was that they would fund us but we had to put up
money as well. It was a shrinking Kellogg component over a period of years. One of the
8
�things they were really interested in was us developing grants to faculty to get them
involved in the community and not much of that had been happening without the grant.
That was a new initiative. In part we were able to dangle dollars in front of a history
professor or someone in who knows where, art, and ask them to go out in the community
and find a connection, take their students with them, and we’ll pony up some grant
money for it. So that was the carrot to get them to do that. I think most of that wouldn’t
have happened without the Kellogg grant. I think we would have had a bit at least of the
graduate concentration but not as much or as fast.
(JS): How does an academic center like this one that you are creating, how is that going
to actually relate to or connect with ongoing philanthropic activities, or organizations
particularly within Michigan? Where are the connections?
(MP): Connections? Again so much of this was historical. There was another
organization in town back in the early days called the Direction Center, and they were
involved with providing ongoing nonprofit support in the form of training and classes and
all that sort of thing. Part of it was contractual work; part of it was in-service training. We
had an agreement with them that we would do the credit level graduate work and not do
the in-service learning kinds of things. They were going to focus on affirmative action
workshop or whatever the latest ADA compliance thing was, they were going to focus on
that. We were going to focus on the academic courses and try and improve the graduate
level students that were working in West Michigan in nonprofit work, and then of course
our connection through Kellogg and then with the Council of Michigan Foundations we
have ongoing work there. A tad later, Kellogg funded a large effort about youth
philanthropy and some of us were involved in that as well.
(JS): Now as this, what becomes the Johnson Center, initially kind of gets off of the
ground, who were sort of the key people in making that happen and what were they
doing?
(MP) Ninety one, ’92, don’t remember exactly, I am sure it’s in a file in some place, the
grant’s awarded, we do a search and hire a new director or the first director, a guy named
Thom Jeavons, came out of a religious philanthropy background, and that I suppose was
the start of the center although it wasn’t called the Johnson Center yet, it was just the
Center on Philanthropy. There was money in the grant to provide funding for some
faculty. I was one of the named faculty. When I came here from Western, I brought along
a journal that I was editing, New England Journal of Human Services, and we did that out
of what’s now the Johnson Center. Published that for a while, and started doing the
earliest part was starting the service learning projects as I recall and getting the
curriculum through the curriculum committee to really get the graduate nonprofit
concentration off the ground. So, key players, John Gracki, out of the president’s office I
think he was associate provost back in those days, Eleanor French was still the director,
9
�Mike Mast worked on this some and had the real undergraduate focus that I didn’t have,
Bob Clark was split between political science and public administration, tangentially
involved with nonprofit, Jeavons, then we had some others that sort of came and went.
(30:55)
(JS): Now to what extent has, the creation of the center, how has that affected the kinds of
classes you teach and the kinds of students you’ve seen in them, and if you’re looking at
the students who were, is it attracting more or different students than you had been
teaching back before this started or?
(MP): Well dramatic change in the student body over the last 20 years. Twenty years ago,
and this sounds like ancient history, you know, twenty years ago was primarily midcareer students in each of the concentrations, required to be mid-career in health care,
turned out to be mid-career, because that’s where we, what little marketing we did, that’s
where we marketed and they were local. We didn’t offer this in Toledo or any place else.
It wasn’t online, so if you couldn’t drive here three nights a week, and it was only an
evening program, if you couldn’t drive here you weren’t going to have it. Little later on
we did some off campus stuff. So, western Michigan, mid-career, sort of nontraditional
students that was our graduate niche. The undergraduates were Grand Valley’s
undergraduates, of the day, and we didn’t have a specific undergraduate course in
nonprofit for a long time until PA 300 came about some years later. But over that time,
the student body at the now School of Public, Nonprofit and Health Administration, if
I’ve got the name right, now there’s that mid-career element, much much smaller, there’s
a foreign student element that wasn’t there previously, an occasional one student, and
now there is a very large pre career component to the MPA, folks that got their degree
last year maybe in psych or soch or history or business or who knows what, and they are
pursuing a master’s degree in public administration.
In those mid-career students, that group now also has some folks that are changing
careers. They used to be at Hayworth or they used to be at somewhere else, but they’re
not anymore and they’re interested in either government or nonprofit, to a large extent
they are interested in nonprofit. That’s the other big change. It went from a Center for
Public Administration that in the name meant government, now, and you have to check
upstairs, but I would bet a third or less are going to be “government students”, two thirds
or more are going to be nonprofit and health, and a good half of those are going to be
nonprofit, so it’s, nonprofit is not the tail of the dog, it’s a very large component of
what’s now public administration.
(34:27)
(JS): Now you’ve got this sort of influx of what we would I suppose call traditional
graduate students in a way, they completed undergrad they go on to grad, so is it now in
10
�part that people go in through college, they recognize there are real career opportunities
in nonprofit and then this kind of work in nongovernmental organizations and actually
targeting that as an area to go work in?
(MP): I think so, if you ask the incoming freshman they wouldn’t answer that in the
affirmative. I don’t think it’s managed to work its way down to the high school yet, as
they go through an undergraduate degree, and some begin to look at, alright, what are my
opportunities when I leave here, some of them aren’t real satisfied with the options and
start looking then for another avenue. Clearly there’s been growth in the service sector
and in the nonprofit sector. There are jobs there, at the moment. If you are really
interested in a job in government maybe your opportunities are a little thin, so where are
the jobs, so part of it I think it is career driven, I think part of that is just the reality of the
day.
(JS): Now as far as the center itself has developed, how has, what have you observed in
terms of the evolution of what became the Johnson Center over the course of time.
You’ve now been able to look at it over twenty years, what’s happened to it over that
time?
(MP): It started out very clearly an element of the School of Public Administration,
housed together, staffed together, separate budgets, but in the same pot. Today, very
separate, physically, in different buildings, different staff, some crossing, but limited
between PA faculty and Johnson Center activity, much less than there used to be, until
whenever it was two or three years ago, whenever the new building was put up, we were
still housed together. Even when we were still housed together, we were on opposite
sides of the hallway, basically on opposite sides of the street, and the PA faculty mostly
did PA faculty stuff, and the Johnson Center had their own staff doing a lot of work in the
community. There was some cross-pollenization there, in part because many of our
graduate students ended up being either interns or employees of the Johnson Center. The
Johnson Center director historically has taught at least one course a semester a year, I
don’t know, in the School of Public Administration, I don’t know if that’s still happening
or not. The previous directors had been faculty members in the School of Public
Administration, whether it was Thom Jeavons, or Dott, or Donna VanIwaarden, and
Donna was a PA faculty that took over that job and kept her faculty title. Margaret Sellers
Walker was a PA faculty that moved to what’s now the Johnson Center, but she was still
faculty. I think we’ve lost that. That’s my impression.
(38:26)
(JS): Does the Johnson Center at this point have its own faculty or are there courses that
are taught that relate to what it does that are those still public administration courses right
now?
11
�(MP): To my knowledge the Johnson Center doesn’t have any faculty. The graduate
programs, the academic stuff is still in the School of Public Administration, I think. But
I’ve been gone for a few months, life may have changed. It’s a non-degree granting and
as far as I know, non-tenure track faculty center. They have folks that work on a contract.
To my knowledge, there’s no tenure there. And they’re in the main, maybe exclusively
except for the director, not Ph.D. folks. They’re master’s level trained in general. I think
that’s true.
(JS): Ok. And do you see the center as providing a kind of complementary function to
what is done in public administration, that if they can focus on a lot of the outreach and
the training for because they run various programs and seminars and all this kind of stuff?
(MP): Very much complementary, noncompetitive, the world is sort of divided up into
credit granting and not. There’s some research that flips back and forth, may be funded
by the Johnson Center and carried out by a PA faculty person, there may be a workshop
given by the Johnson Center that a PA faculty person runs. But I think there’s a lot more
separation now, clearly more separation than there ever has ever been.
(JS): They are off at the Bicycle Factory now.
(MP): Yeah, they got their own little universe over there. We certainly talked about all of
us moving together and the faculty, as I remember, the faculty voted by a very slim
margin not to do that because the faculty argued, rightfully so, that their focus needed to
be where the students were, not off at the bicycle factory. I think by making that decision
though, it created a large space between what they do and what PA does. Without sort of
the constant connection, I believe you lose something in the separation.
(41:30)
(JS): Now to what extent do you see what we’re doing here with the Johnson Center as
being kind of distinctive or unusual in terms of what universities do?
(MP): Clearly, clearly outside the box. There’s only, I don’t remember the acronym,
anyway there’s three of these centers: Indiana, Arizona, and here. The other two are both
academic centers and a Johnson Center-like environment merged. We’re not, although I
think we’re still considered an academic center, you’d to ask the Johnson Center folks,
certainly less academic than the other two. But those three: Arizona, Indiana, and Grand
Valley, that’s it. Those are the three big places. There are certainly other universities, San
Francisco and others that are doing things in nonprofit, but it seems like that triangle, or
triad or tri-something, that’s where an awful lot of work is being done.
(JS): On some level you could kind of look back at the initiative that started this center 20
odd years ago now, as being something of a gamble, let’s go try this and see what
12
�happens which was the kind of thing that Don Lubbers did in a variety of situations, how
successful has that gamble been?
(MP): I think it has been hugely successful. Again we are talking about twenty years ago;
Grand Valley was a very entrepreneurial place back then. Gee, I’ve got this idea, well go
try it, see if it works. It didn’t work, come up with a new idea. It was very
entrepreneurial; ah those days are long gone. It got more bureaucratic overtime, and I
don’t mean for this to sound like the old guy complaining, but it just changed, you know.
Changed for the better in some cases, and I think changed for the worse in some others.
Comparing Western to Grand Valley -- and I taught at Western for 15 years and 20 at
Grand Valley -- very, very different environments. Couldn’t have done this at Western. It
was very bureaucratic then, it’s even more bureaucratic now I think. There was a little
room for innovation because public administration was able to pull off some things, but it
was a much more formal higher-ed model, where Grand Valley was still this young kid
that was growing and you could do all sorts of things. If you had an idea, you typically
skipped the provost, you went right to Don Lubbers, you call, “Hey Don, can I come in
and see you?” “Oh sure.” You go in, you see Don Lubbers, and you pitched your idea and
if he liked it, he gave you a check, basically to go try it and see what happens.
(44:40)
(JS): And this was a pretty big thing, the University of Michigan and places like that had
the opportunity to do this and they passed it up.
(MP): They passed it up. I think we were a gamble on the part of Kellogg. They would
have bet, my guess again, I don’t speak for them, I think they would have been more
comfortable with the U of M, you know some, or at least Wayne State, but Grand Valley?
West side of the state, relatively young, I’m sure we didn’t do nice pretty proposals like
U of M did, but we had the interest and the drive to do it, and willing on the part of the
board of trustees to put up the money. And I think that was the gamble that Grand Valley
was taking. We’ll try this, and we will fund it in a growing percentage over the period of
three or five years to the point where the Kellogg money is gone, and then we’re
committed to continue this as a line-item budget. And the other universities, I think they
were very willing to do it if Kellogg paid for it. But Grand Valley’s model for many
grants has been, we’ll pay part. If we think it’s a good idea, we ought to put up some of
our own money to make the case that we think it is a good idea. Where, I believe anyway,
in general terms, Michigan State or U of M were willing to take virtually any grant that
comes along as long as there’s 100% funding, they don’t have anything to risk.
(JS): I guess this is sort of my final question here. Where do you see the center and its
programs going, what do you think is the most important thing for the center to be doing
over the next decade or so?
13
�(MP): Truthfully I don’t know much of what the center is doing. There’s a new master’s
degree in nonprofit administration. I’m not at either place anymore since I retired. I think
they can be a stand-alone west Michigan center that does what they do, and most likely
they do it very well. My opinion, the center and public administration should get back
together. Quit the squabbling, not that they’re really squabbling, patch up the divorce or
whatever it is, and get back together. I think they can do more together than they can
apart. That’s an idea. But no one asked me.
(JS): The historian did. Ok. In that case I’d like to just close out here. Thank you for
taking time to come talk to us.
(MP): Glad to do it.
(47.56)
14
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/7290ae56072fbad0a448c45c0aa5ff0f.mp4
9b7819efcbee864e3f7452a13af2396e
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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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
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/516">Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project (MPOHP) (JCPA-08). Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives</a>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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2017-05-02
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eng
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audio/mp3
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video/mp4
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JCPA-08
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2006-2008
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Johnson Center for Philantrhopy
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StoryCorps (Project)
Oral History
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Source
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/516">Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project (JCPA-08)</a>
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Payne, Michael R. video interview and transcript
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Payne, Michael R.
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Michael (Mike) Payne, Ph.D., discusses his service in the Air Force, education in economics at the University of Missouri and Syracuse, his study of for-profit and nonprofit hospitals in New York State in the late 60s, and teaching at Union University, Western Michigan University, and Grand Valley State University. He discusses developing health administration curriculum at Grand Valley State University, incorporation of nonprofit administration in the public administration field, and development of the Johnson Center for Philanthropy.
Contributor
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Smither, James
Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership, Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Philanthropy and society
Personal narratives
Grand Valley State University
Education, Higher--Curricula
Universities and colleges--United States--Administration
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JCPA-08_PayneM
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eng
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Type
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Text
Format
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Relation
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Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives
Date
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2012-02-28
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/9886d9011bbbf6ecd941ce51808bbeec.pdf
b5576aa7003c1d1b556a0aea925fe6d2
PDF Text
Text
Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
Johnson Center for Philanthropy
Grand Valley State University
Oral History Interview with Joel J. Orosz, August 18, 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 Joel Orosz, August 18, 2010. Conducted by Dr. James Smither of
the History Department at GVSU. Recorded at WGVU 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 Joel Orosz, August 18, 2010. "Michigan Philanthropy Oral
History Project", Johnson Center Philanthropy Archives of the Special Collection & University
Archives, Grand Valley State University Libraries.
James Smither (JS): We’re talking today with Joel Orosz of Kalamazoo, Michigan. He has
worked with the Johnson Center for Philanthropy at Grand Valley State University, as well as the
Kellogg Foundation. We’ll fill in the rest of the career as we go here. The interviewer is James
Smither of Grand Valley State University. Joel, can you start just by giving us some background
on yourself? Start with where and when you were born.
Joel Orosz (JO): Absolutely. I was born here in Kalamazoo on March 15th, 1957, at Borgess
Hospital, and grew up here, going to the Portage Public Schools, and eventually went to and
graduated from Kalamazoo College.
00:01:02
(JS) What did your family do for a living when you were growing up?
1
�(JO) My dad did a job that no longer exists. He worked at International Paper Company, which is
no longer here. His job was to stack the paper milk bottles as they came off the printing press. A
stacker, it was aptly called. My mom was a waitress at a couple of restaurants here in town.
(JS) You’re not coming from any particularly privileged background or from families that would
have a lot of resources to put into philanthropy per se.
(JO) Absolutely.
(JS) So this is something that you come into more as an adult later on.
(JO) I was a stranger in a strange land when I started with philanthropy.
(JS) Let’s go back. You went to Kalamazoo College. What did you major in at that point?
00:01:54
(JO) I was a History major. Of course, at that time, which was the late 1970s, as I was
approaching graduation, History as a career was pretty much a sure ticket to unemployment. I
recall one of my professors saying that in 1979 there were two openings for history professors in
the country, of course all sorts of historians being graduated. So I thought, better to go into a
different career. Casting about a bit, I hit upon the museum field as a place where someone with
a background in history could find a job, and I decided I was going to be a museum curator. And
then I went to Case Western Reserve University for graduate school. They had a History and
Museum Studies joint masters program. I got a master’s degree in Museum Studies, ready for a
career as a museum curator, which I eventually pursued for three and one half years [laughs], so
much for training.
(JS) So where did you go to do that?
(JO) I was first working in Cleveland, where Case Western’s located. And at the same time as I
was working, I decided to go on and get a doctorate in American History. I worked, interestingly
enough, in a medical history museum, which in many ways is like a museum of torture
instruments. These horrible things: the lancets that they used to bleed people, these electro-shock
therapies. In fact, we used to have school kids in and have them form a big circle holding hands,
then we’d rev up the electro-shock machine and send a shock through all of them. It was great
fun until a cardiologist on our board pointed out that if any of the kids had heart problems, we
might in fact send them into cardiac arrest. So, we stopped doing that.
00:04:21
(JS) Did you pursue the doctorate at Case Western, or did you go somewhere else?
(JO) Yes indeed, got the doctorate at Case Western, graduated from Kalamazoo College in 1979,
a masters from Case Western, joint masters in History and Museum Studies in 1981, and didn’t
2
�finish up the doctorate until 1986. The doctoral thesis was on the history of museums in the
United States before the Civil War. So I was well prepared to be a museum curator. Thought
that’s what I was going to be all my life. Curator, maybe someday become a director. Was
fortunate enough to get a job right back here in Kalamazoo, at what was then known as the
Kalamazoo Public Museum. Now it’s the Kalamazoo Valley Museum, started there as the
curator of interpretation, doing the education program.
(JS) How long did you do that work?
(JO) I was there for about three years. I’d been working in Cleveland, first part time, and then
full time, then, about three years in Kalamazoo, and really enjoyed the work, working mainly
with children, in fact, a lot with preschool kids. That was a feedback-rich environment.
Preschoolers will always let you know exactly how you’re doing. You know, “This stinks”, “I’m
bored.” So you could basically calibrate what you were doing, and say, “Alright, this isn’t
working, let’s try something else.” It was a great deal of fun, enjoyed the museum world.
But then there was this life-changing moment in which the Kellogg Foundation was offering
fellowships for museum educators around the country, the notion being that these informal
education programs outside of schools played an important part in the lives of kids. So let’s
make these educators as good as possible. There were three different programs: the Smithsonian
ran one of them, the Field Museum ran another, and the Exploratorium in San Francisco ran the
third one, all with Kellogg Foundation money. So I was in the region of the country in which the
Field Museum served, so I ended up going off to the Field Museum for training, enjoyed that
very thoroughly, thought I would go back to the museum field, and just be well-trained, ready to
go.
00:07:31
(JS) What did the training give you or consist of that went beyond what you were doing already?
(JO) Well, it was the ability to bring together these educators from around the country, to share
ideas and techniques, kind of do workshops if you will that would allow us to present programs
and critique each other, and sort of bring it to the next level. It was terrific to be working with
peers of mine from around the nation. They were serving different communities than I was.
Talking about how you could bring museum programs to underprivileged kids, to audiences of
color that museums typically hadn’t reached. It was a terrific, terrific program. But what came
out of that for me was a totally life-changing experience, was one day the program director from
Kellogg, who was responsible for that program and whom I had met at a reception, gave me a
call and said, “We’re looking for an executive assistant for our CEO and chairman of the board,
Russ Mawby, and I think you should apply for the job.” Well, being a realist, I was very
flattered, but being a realist I knew that I didn’t have a chance, that there would be all sorts of
people applying for that job, some of them with experience in philanthropy that I didn’t have. I
thought well, you know, why not apply. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll get a courtesy interview with
3
�Russ Mawby. Gosh, it can’t hurt to meet Russ Mawby and say, “Geez, I’m just down the street
in Kalamazoo, and we’re doing some interesting things.” So I figured there would be the
opportunity to get some grants out if it, down the road.
00:09:43
So, I go into my interview, convinced it’s a courtesy interview, and thinking this is a twenty
minute thing right here, and then he’ll shake hands with me and send me on my way. So I am as
loose as I can be. I’ve got nothing to lose, everything to gain. Sitting there in his office and I’m
just chatting away with him. Twenty minutes passes and he’s still asking questions, then thirty
minutes passes and I’m thinking gosh, he’s very courteous, very courteous indeed. Forty minutes
passes and he’s still asking questions. And it dawns on me that he’s serious. This is really an
interview, and I have a chance to get the job. I think my articulate nature went downhill in a
hurry after that [laughs]. I guess I did well enough during the first forty minutes or so that he did
indeed offer me the job.
The fascinating thing about that job is that, as executive assistant, it depends on who sees you on
what day, the sense they would get of it. Because one day I might be sitting with Russ at a
meeting with say, 15 university presidents from around the state. Someone seeing me at that
meeting, making contributions and so forth would say, “That’s Russ Mawby’s right-hand man,
that’s a really important job.” The next day, my job might be driving Russ to Detroit so that he
could make a speech at the athletic club there, then driving him back and then making sure that
everything’s in order because he’s going to be taking a trip the next day. People seeing that
would say, “This guy’s just a chauffeur. There’s no real substance to this job.” It was a sort of an
up and down kind of thing, except that I was smart enough to understand that even when I was
chauffeuring, I was driving a guy whom all sorts of people would just pay anything to get an
hour with. And I’ve got three hours with him when we’re driving to Chicago or Detroit. So I just
treated that as the opportunity to seminar with one of the great leaders in philanthropy. It was an
education that was just unbelievable in the whole history, and war, and workings of
philanthropy.
00:12:46
(JS) How long did you do that particular job?
(JO) I was, three years as executive assistant, from ’86 to ’89. Russ had a very clear-eyed view
of that job. As he told me right at the beginning, he said, “You’re a young man.” I was 29 at that
point, “You’re a young man. You don’t want to retire as somebody’s executive assistant. You
want to move on and do other things. But it’s a good way to start.” That it certainly was. Russ
had the notion that he should give me exposure to the programming side of the foundation, allow
me to take a few grants and work my way into programming, and eventually pushed me out of
the nest and totally over to the program side, which he did in 1989. Just as a side note, Russ had
a real record of hiring young men, and it was always young men. He felt very, being a gentleman
4
�of the old school, he just couldn’t imagine hiring a young woman and sending her in the dark
into a parking ramp to get the car. That just was not something he could imagine. My
predecessor in that role was Jim Richmond, who later went on to become the CEO of the Battle
Creek Community Foundation, and the Frey Foundation in Grand Rapids. My successor in that
role was Dave Egner, who became head of the Michigan Nonprofit Association and now is the
CEO of the Hudson Webber Foundation in Detroit. And then another successor, Jim McHale,
became executive vice president of the Kellogg Foundation. So Russ was a pretty remarkable
mentor in that way.
00:14:56
(JS) What specific position then did you move into after those three years?
(JO) I moved into what was then called an associate program director at the Kellogg Foundation.
I don’t believe that position exists anymore. But very much analogous to the assistant and
associate professors at a university, signifying that you were not a full program director yet, but
you had an opportunity to get there if you worked hard. So it really was a sort of a new person’s
position or a young person’s position that allowed you to aim to become a program director. I
learned very quickly that – you recall I said earlier that I was in a feedback-rich position at the
museum with the little kids telling me exactly what they thought – I learned very quickly that I
was now in a feedback-poor position as a program officer. Because whatever you did or said, no
one was stupid enough to say, “Man, you really blundered here, my friend.” Program officers,
program directors, have no power to approve anything. That is the province of the officers and
the board, but they have absolute power to turn down anything. It didn’t matter if you were the
president of the University of Michigan. If you came to me and I didn’t think the program would
work, I could say, “Well, sorry Dr. Duderstadt, we’re not going to do that.” People learned very
quickly that if there’s someone with the absolute power to turn down your request, better not get
her or him angry, or let them hold a grudge. So I could show up to a meeting and drool all over
my tie, and everyone would say, “Oh, magnificent contributions.” [laughs]
(JS) What did the job actually consist of? What were you doing day to day?
00:17:21
(JO) That is a really good question. And it sort of depended on the program director exactly how
the job was put together. But the basic job of the program director was to find and recommend
programs that were worthy of funding by the foundation. And then, once the project was funded,
to manage that program and try to get the most out of it. So, we had a number of things that we
could do to find programs. And that could range from really devising them yourself, some
program directors liked to do that. They thought they knew quite a bit about education, for
example, and could devise education programs, and find people to run them and get them
funded. Other people would sort of go out and beat the bushes. Go out and work with networks
of people they knew in the field, and say, “Who’s doing the best work in this?” Amazing when
5
�you ask that question, who’s doing the best work in say early childhood education, the person
you asked it to frequently said, “Well, modestly speaking, I am.” You could go out and work
your networks to try to get it. Or, because the W.K. Kellogg Foundation was one of the very
largest foundations in the country when I worked there, really, you could just sit in your office
and the phone would ring, and people would have ideas that they would pitch to you. So, how
active you were, how proactive you were, was really sort of a personal preference. So that was
the first part of it; finding the projects, because Kellogg was not an operating foundation. We did
not manage our own programs. We were a grantmaking foundation; we gave money to other
entities that ran the programs. So that was the first part, finding it.
The second part of it, of course, was convincing the officers and the board of trustees that this
was a project that was worthy of funding, which required a fair amount of salesmanship, a fair
amount of gathering of data and presentation. In fact, if it was a big enough project, you literally
had to present it to the board of trustees at their meeting, stand up, make the presentation, take
the questions that they had afterwards, which was just horribly stressful kind of thing, because it
was sort of like a doctoral defense. Anything was fair game. It was considered very bad form if
you did not have an answer to a legitimate question. And since just about any question was
legitimate, it really was a stressful thing because you could have worked on these projects for a
year. There’s a million dollars riding on it, there’s people’s jobs riding on it, and the wellbeing of
a lot of kids or other beneficiaries riding on it. You really didn’t want to be the person who said
something stupid or didn’t have a good answer. And then the board would say, “Well, let’s not
do that.
00:21:23
(JS) So you were pretty actively involved in moving projects or programs from the initial idea or
planning stage which would usually come from the outside, to actually promoting it. When I
think of conventional sort of academic type grants, the expectation is basically all on the
proposers. You could put together a package and send it forward and people just review it and
then thumbs up, and thumbs down, but not an expectation that the program officers necessarily
do that much unless if you’re doing it right, give you advice on how to make yours look better
before it goes forward.
(JO) Right, that’s a key distinction. A lot of government funders, for example, set out criteria,
and then they have a list of objective things that they’re looking for. They read the proposals that
come in, they grade them and you know, you get the money or you don’t, based on that. Kellogg
was very much more involved in the process. The program director had an opportunity to really
help shape what went in. And the dynamic was, because you knew it was going to go to the
Board of Trustees, assuming it was of any size, and you knew what the board wanted and didn’t
want, what they liked and didn’t like, you very quickly began to say, “Ok, I think I can sell this
component, but I don’t think I can sell this one. So, I’m just saying, that you could leave it in
there if you want to, but I think that could be a deal breaker for our board.” And the tradeoff
6
�there, the government way of doing things has the virtue of being consistent and fair to
everybody. Because everybody knows what the criteria are, they send it in, every proposal gets
graded in the same way, and the ones who get funded are the ones presumably who are best. The
Kellogg way of doing things is much more subjective and much more of a sort of a horse-trading
kind of thing.
The value of the Kellogg way though, was that if you were really creative, we had general
criteria, but if you were creative and came up with something that we hadn’t thought of but we
said, gee, that really is a good idea. You had much more ability to shape your program in that
way. So, it’s looking for good ideas, developing those good ideas and selling them to the board.
And then once it’s been passed by the board, trying to manage those projects. And Jim, I use
“manage” in the loosest possible sense of that term, because a program director, really, you’re
really not the boss, no one’s actually reporting to you. You can make suggestions, but the
Foundation has made the grant and the money is already gone, so it’s not like you can say,
“Well, I’m going to completely cut off your money supply,” unless it’s a multi-year grant. But
even then, it’s sort of like being the President of the United States, and having only one thing,
and that’s a nuclear bomb. Everyone knows that the only way you would use it is if it was just
absolutely the last thing to use, that you’d exhausted everything else. Because after all, no
program director wants to say, “Alright, I’m not going to pay you your second year because
you’ve completely screwed up,” because then people start saying, “Well, what happened here?
Why didn’t you see this coming? Haven’t you been managing this program?” So the
management side of it is mainly monitoring and making suggestions. Sometimes begging or
bluffing people who are going down the wrong path. But it’s not management in the traditional
sense of the word.
(JS) You don’t have an accountability system set up the way they would, say within an
institution, where we give you this money, you have to fill out these reports and give these things
back to you. What did you expect to get back from some of these places that you gave the grants
to?
00:26:26
(JO) There was an annual reporting system that came out, but of course it became... it’s like the
old joke in the Soviet Union, which was, we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. The
annual report from the grantee, of course, it was always in their best interest to say everything’s
going well. In a sense, it was in my best interest to believe them, because if everything was going
well, then I’d done a good job, and my due diligence and my work and management and
everything was going well. If they admitted something was going wrong it was usually because
they couldn’t possibly hide it. It was just out there. And then I had to make a decision about, do I
get involved and try to help them? Do I start threatening to take away money? How do I respond
to this? If you step back from this picture, you’ve always got a bias toward working on new stuff.
Because there is the 5% payout rule in private foundations that says that you pay out 5% of your
7
�net asset value every year in grants, or if you fall short, the government just simply confiscates
the shortfall, 100% tax on the shortfall. So, you had to get money out the door. And if the
foundation is growing, that target keeps going up. You don’t have to manage programs. So, the
tug is always toward doing due diligence, getting new projects in, getting those approved. And
the management side of it, of the projects you’ve already funded, that’s just sort of stuff you do
when you get a minute. There was an awful lot of, geez I hope that’s working well.
00:28:45
(JS) Do you have any sense of what proportion of these programs actually did work well? Were
real problems just an occasional thing or how does that go?
(JO) Fortunately, we did hire a lot of evaluators to look into projects. For the most part, because
we were so careful on the front end in selection and so forth, for the most part, I would say about
75% of the projects either hit the goals that they had laid out or came very close to it. Of the
other 25, there were probably 20% were just, they sort of bumped along, they didn’t embarrass
themselves, but they didn’t do exactly what they hoped they would do either. Probably only
about 5% had real problems. Rarely was there dishonesty involved. Mainly it was just complete
inability to do what they said they were going to do. There were some situations where people
said, “That’s what Kellogg wants us to do, that’s how we get money, so we’ll go ahead and say
we’re going to do that, even though we really don’t have that much experience or expertise in
that area. They just ended up failing. They were successful in getting the money and not
successful in doing much with it.
(JS) Now would organizations get reputations after awhile? Like be careful about giving money
to these people over here or these guys are a good investment over there.
00:30:31
(JO) No question. The really good ones rose to the top pretty quickly. You had this sort of
informal network of program officers both within the foundation and with other foundations,
who would say, the High Scope Foundation in Ypsilanti is terrific. They’re always on time with
their reports, they know their business. They deliver on what they say they’re going to do. And
then you would also get the scuttlebutt on the organizations that promise big and deliver small.
(JS) Do program officers get assigned particular territories or types of project, or are you just all
over the place?
(JO) That depends very much on the foundation. Some do it geographically, so that a program
director will have a territory just as a salesman would have a territory; other places are set up sort
of by subject area and people work cooperatively on that. And Kellogg was set up mainly that
way. As a program director, I had projects around the country. Ironically, the only place I didn’t
have projects was Battle Creek, because we had a separate Battle Creek programming unit. I was
8
�able to work around the country. And in some cases, some foundations allow people literally
work around the world.
(JS) Did you have a particular subject area or content area that was yours?
00:32:14
(JO) I started off in the youth and higher education programming area; worked there for a couple
of years. Then, we had just a tragedy. The fellow, who was just starting the philanthropy and
volunteerism program, a really interesting and colorful guy named Pete Ellis, just literally
dropped dead one night. And I inherited, literally inherited, his portfolio which was the
beginning of – and this I probably need to backtrack a little bit to explain.
Foundations have been around in the United States since 1867. The first one started just a couple
years after the Civil War and big foundations like Kellogg since 1911. Foundations were nothing
new. But, because foundations typically were focused on either managing their own programs, or
more typically making grants to other entities, foundations had never really begun to think of
themselves as an industry, if you will. As a result, they were just pretty hopelessly disorganized.
Some foundations worked together, others didn’t. Some foundations shared what they were
learning with each other, most did not. The insight that Russ Mawby had was that, gee, wouldn’t
it be useful if foundations began to talk to each another, and perhaps to organize together, useful
in any number of ways. Find out what your sister foundations have been learning about their
programming for poverty reduction, or for youth development, or for sustainable food, or
whatever they were supporting. Find out which have been the good grantees and which have
been the bad grantees. Learn about new thinking coming into the field. Some foundations did
reach out to universities to look at the latest scholarship, most didn’t. And then too, of course,
there was the question of protecting yourself. You know, Congress was going to be passing laws
that bear on foundation work. Maybe we should be organized to try to affect that the way that
other entities are.
So Russ, in 1972, established the Council of Michigan Foundations to bring people together. But
there we were, 17, 18 years later, late ’80s, and we simply did not have much organization in the
field, other than the Council of Michigan Foundations. So one of the first things Russ put me to
work on, in my inherited portfolio, was to see if we could pull together the nonprofit
organizations in Michigan into an association that would, like the Council of Michigan
Foundations, promote professional development, research, education within the field, and also a
government relations side, so that we could represent the interests and the concerns of nonprofits
to state government and to national government. So, that was one of the first things I did, was to
work with the big nonprofit associations, because that’s what makes it so hard to think of
nonprofits as an entity. Even, if you go to business, whether you’re Microsoft or a mom and pop
grocery store, you’re all united by the profit motive. You’re trying to earn a profit here. Whether
you’re the city council of Byron Center or the Congress of the United States, you’re governing,
9
�you’re elected, you have to pass ordinances or laws. Everyone understands that government and
business is part of a sector. But when you get to the nonprofits, it’s almost impossible to think of
all these strange and wonderful things that do so many different things, as an entity. You’ve got
education, you’ve got health care, you’ve got human services of any broad number of types,
you’ve got arts and culture organizations, religion, environmental organizations, all part of the
nonprofit sector. And you’ve got entities that just, literally these entities that I incorporate and
I’m the only person who’s employed by the nonprofit and the office is my basement. I mean
that’s a nonprofit organization, and Spectrum Health is a nonprofit organization, revenues of
hundreds of millions of dollars, and thousands of employees, and buildings all over the place. It
had been very difficult for all these organizations to think of themselves as what they had in
common as nonprofits. It took a few years but we did finally get what was first called the
Michigan Nonprofit Forum into operation that eventually morphed into today’s Michigan
Nonprofit Association, where all the nonprofits come together and work for their common good.
00:38:46
So that was the beginning. Then we worked on a number of other things that we thought were
important. Michigan Campus Compact, trying to get the students at Michigan’s colleges and
universities thinking about community service, and doing community service, which was terrific.
We organized the Michigan Community Service Commission. I was a charter commissioner on
that for three, three year terms; nine years. Michigan Community Service Commission basically
exists to seek the government support for volunteerism and community service that comes
through AmeriCorps, that comes through the Peace Corps, or VISTA, and channel those funds
into places of need in Michigan. Then of course, one of the things we’re very proud of, was we
started the Johnson Center for Philanthropy at Grand Valley State University. I was the program
director who made the grant that got that started
(JS) What were you wanting to see the Johnson Center do? Why was it important to go and
create that at that time?
(JO) Well, that really was Russ Mawby’s vision again, and Dottie Johnson of course was part of
that thinking as well, although the Center wasn’t named for her until several years later. The
vision was that universities and colleges typically did a pretty darn good job of teaching students
about the importance of the free enterprise system, the importance of government in a
democracy. Those two pieces of the puzzle were being handled pretty well. After all, we’d had
departments of business for a hundred years; we’d had departments of public administration for
60, 70 years. But, there really wasn’t much going on about the nonprofit sector in philanthropy,
where so much of our lives are lived, and so much of the quality of life is created. So the notion
was, that wouldn’t it be terrific if universities were to teach students about, and there’s so many
ways you can do it. For example, in my field of History, you can look at the Civil Rights
movement as a political movement, or the Women’s Rights movement as a political movement,
and that’s certainly true as far as it goes. But 99% of the people involved in those movements are
10
�volunteers. They’re not getting their paycheck by working for a Civil Rights organization.
They’re actually contributing their time, and their talent, and their treasure to make it work. So
we thought, gee, wouldn’t that be neat if that perspective began to be taught, and if service
learning, the notion that you give service as you learn, is an integral part of learning, if that got
into the curriculum.
So, this is another funny thing about philanthropy. I organized a meeting in Lansing, in late
1989, no pardon me, late 1990, one year later, in which we invited every president of every
university and college, every four-year university and college in the state. And Russ basically
laid it out; he said we think Michigan needs a center for the study of philanthropy in the
nonprofit sector. And we are willing to put a considerable amount of money on the table to make
that happen. Of course, the presidents were, “Yes, we need a center for the study of philanthropy,
yes by golly we need that Kellogg money to get it going. Yes, yes, yes.” Many of them were
quite eloquent about how this was just terribly important. And then Russ dropped the bomb on
them, and said, “And we’ll be expecting a considerable match from your institution. We
certainly want to get this started, but we don’t intend to support it forever. We think that it would
be really a show of good faith if you were to start matching the money right away.”
00:43:52
Well, the air immediately went out of the room. Suddenly…many of the great institutions in this
country, and I’m talking about Harvard and Yale among them, have had centers for the study of
philanthropy, but they are there only so long as that center could raise the money to keep them
going. The university puts nothing into it. Yale had the first one in ’76; it no longer exists
because they couldn’t keep raising money for it. Harvard had one for a while; it’s gone because
again, they couldn’t raise the operating funds. So we went from having 50-some college and
university presidents cheering, and saying, oh this is great, we need it; to actually, we got out of
that three proposals, in which the college or university said we will put a substantial chunk of
money on the table in order to get this grant.
Far and away, the best offer came from Don Lubbers at Grand Valley State. We then had an
interesting issue with some board members, because the board was totally with us that Michigan
needed a center for the study of philanthropy. They were totally with us that there needed to be a
match in evidence of real support. They got very skittish about it being Grand Valley, because
some of the board members bless their hearts, had a real elitist point of view. What they really
wanted, they really wanted the University of Michigan to have it; if the University of Michigan
didn’t take it, then, well okay, perhaps Michigan State, or maybe even Michigan Tech, because
those are places that have pretty tough standards, well known nationally, etc. etc. When they
were looking at what they referred to as second-tier institutions, Oakland University was another
one that had made an application. They just weren’t thinking that would be accurate. So it was a
tough, tough sell job to get that through. Don Lubbers was a fascinating guy, and he certainly
was helpful. When you saw Don in a room full of university presidents, you probably would not
11
�be, he would probably not be in your top five, because so many of them got up and were so
eloquent and so forceful, and you could almost hear the violins playing behind them as they said
what they were saying. But when it came to delivering the goods, a lot of those very eloquent
people just disappeared into the woodwork, and Don delivered the goods.
00:47:26
So, 1992, we made a grant, $990,000 to establish what was called the Center for Philanthropy
and Nonprofit Leadership. Don matched that. Thom Jeavons was hired, quite a respected scholar
of religion, especially in its philanthropic context. He launched the Center. And the Center for
the first seven years of its existence was very much focused on GVSU, on getting the service
learning and nonprofit sector and philanthropy into the classroom. There was a great deal of little
grants that were made to professors to help them get that in there. As a result, GVSU I think is
probably the best in Michigan, and maybe one of the best in the nation at helping its
undergraduates to learn that the nonprofit sector in philanthropy is an important part of American
life just as business and government is.
Wasn’t until ’99 that the Center began to grow significantly. Dottie retired that year, the Center
was named after her in that year. She retired as the CEO of the Council of Michigan
Foundations. Center was named in her honor in that year. The library of the Council of Michigan
Foundations came over to GVSU, and an endowment for its upkeep. So we have now one of the
best libraries in the country on philanthropy, volunteerism, nonprofit management, that stem
from that initial gift. So that was – and then of course Donna VanIwaarden became director in
2000 and the pace really began to pick up with the founding of the Community Research
Institute and then major Kellogg support that started in 2001. So the Center went from being two
or three people for the first seven years of its existence to becoming a thirty person operation
within a few years.
00:50:04
(JS) Let’s backtrack a little bit to you as working in the Kellogg Foundation. You’d started out in
kind of an assistant or associate type position. Now, did you move up from that into regular
program director and did you stay at the level or did you go farther up the organization?
(JO) Within a year, ’89 I was named associate program director. Within a year I was promoted to
program director. Then, we had a relatively short lived management level that was called
coordinator. The coordinator was in between a program director and a vice president, basically,
making sure that an area, the philanthropy and volunteerism area that I was in charge of, worked
coherently, that all the program directors were working towards the same goal, and that the
programs had a coherence to them that wasn’t just a bunch of people picking out their favorite
stuff. I did that that from late in 1990 until ’95 when those positions were abolished, and I think
rightly so. Alternately, there was nothing a coordinator was doing that a vice president couldn’t
be doing just as well. During that time I coordinated first philanthropy and volunteerism, then I
12
�also coordinated the leadership programming, from ’93 to ’95. It was a middle management
position with all the joy of a middle management position; not much power, and a lot of
responsibility.
00:52:00
(JS) And you weren’t working as directly with the people who were actually proposing the
grants and so, less interesting, in that sense.
(JO) Exactly, it became much more of a paperwork kind of thing, and much less of what you
really wanted to do, which was to work with, and in fact, in foundation work that is the problem
with management across the board. The managers go up the ranks to become vice president.
They get up in the morning and they say, “Well, I’ve got a choice. I could work on those
performance reviews and have a couple of tough conversations with people. I could sign a lot of
paperwork and keep things moving. Or, I could meet with Nelson Mandela.” [laughs] The bias
always is toward, oh, let me sit in on this programming meeting because it’s interesting and
exciting, and you want to do that, as opposed to the drudgery of paperwork that you really don’t
want to do. So things tend to pile up on foundation administrator’s desks.
00:53:15
The other thing that I was able to do; two things, and this intersects very much with the life of
Kathy Agard. In 1990, Dottie Johnson came in, well pardon me, it was ’89 when I first got
involved. Dottie Johnson came in and said, the community foundation system in Michigan is not
a system, really. It’s just a bunch of individual community foundations, that some towns have
them, some towns don’t. There are a lot of rural areas in particular that have no access to
community foundation services. And Dottie’s idea which was just simple and elegant and
brilliant in many ways was to say, “Look. Let’s get a big carrot and dangle it in front of every
community in the state.” And that big carrot was that we would give, the Kellogg Foundation,
would make a challenge grant of up to a million dollars. It would have to be matched two for one
by the local community. But then they could get it and create their own community foundation.
Dottie was very wise in saying, let’s not do a million dollars or nothing, let’s let them raise as
little as $10,000, or pardon me, as little as $20,000 to get a $10,000 Kellogg Challenge. Then,
having achieved that, let’s let them come back and do a little more and so forth. That became the
basis – well, and then there was one other thing.
When Dottie pitched that to Russ Mawby, Russ said, well that sounds really good, but the
Kellogg Foundation is really interested in youth. Could you get young people involved in
philanthropy in a substantive way? So what we ended up putting together, Russ and Dottie and
Kathy Agard, who was hired to run the program, and me, was what was called MCFYP, the
Michigan Community Foundations Youth Project. Not the niftiest of acronyms, but there you
are. What we did was to dangle that carrot. We said we will give you up to a million dollars, if
you can raise two million locally. Our million has to be endowed in a youth field of interest fund
13
�in your community foundation. And then the income from that fund will have to be granted by
young people, what we called Youth Advisory Councils, or YACs. They have to be made up of
kids 12 to 18 and they make the decisions. You could have an adult advisor, but the kids make
the decisions about the grants. This program worked absolutely brilliantly. We established 23
new community foundations around the state and got all portions of the state served. Even if you
live in the middle of the Upper Peninsula and there are far more deer in your county than there
are people, you still have access to a community foundation so that you can leave money to your
community, or get a grant from the community foundation, which is very exciting. What we
think is most exciting, is that we’ve got 86 Youth Advisory Councils now. There are more YACs
than there are community foundations because some community foundations serve several
counties. And each county has its own YAC. But, the thing that’s so exciting about this, and I
have witnessed several of these things, we had a lot of skepticism initially, people said, well you
know these are kids. They don’t know anything about philanthropy. They’ll just give money to
their friends, and it won’t be very thoughtful or useful. They won’t take it seriously. They had a
million objections. But we said, look, if you want the money, if you want the challenge grant,
you’ve got to form a YAC. That’s just our bottom line.
00:58:13
Well, what happened of course, is these kids not only took it seriously, they in fact took it so
seriously that often they just beat up the poor people who came in looking for grants. I was in
one of these meetings once as an observer. The head of the local YMCA was sitting there with
me. And he looks in, and he smiles, and says, “This is a bunch of kids in there.” He says, “Watch
this, watch how I take care of this.” He walks in there like he owns the place. And the first thing
that happens is, one of the young people of color, after he makes his presentation, says, [points]
“You don’t serve any of the kids in my neighborhood. Why?” The guy was like [speechless]. He
had no answer for it. These kids are asking these really tough questions. I mean questions that
adults might be afraid to ask, or maybe too polite to ask. One young woman says, “What if a girl
comes to you pregnant and scared and alone? What do you do?” The Y director, he’s unbuttoned
his shirt and he’s loosened his tie, and he’s perspiring freely. These kids took it extremely
seriously, and made incredible grants.
PART TWO
(JS) We were talking about the Kellogg Foundation’s encouragement of having youth councils
and so forth. Where did you get the kids to serve on these things?
(JO) That is a very interesting question and a very interesting answer. Because what we did was
to work through the local high schools and say that we wanted to get a wide diversity of kids.
And of course everyone nodded and they went to the National Honor Society and got the kids to
serve on these YACs. And we said, no, we want wide diversity and they said, “There’s a couple
of black kids in the National Honor Society.” No, no. What we’re looking for is the whole
14
�gamut, because it was our firm belief that leadership ability is scattered about equally throughout
the population. So yes, you have people in the National Honor Society who are real leaders. You
also have people who are running gangs who are real leaders. You’ve got women who are
leaders, men who are leaders; you’ve got younger kids who are leaders, older kids who are
leaders; kids who are about ready to drop out who are leaders. It was a real paradigm shift for
these advisors to think that way. It took a lot of work to make sure that these YACs represented
different schools, represented kids on the honor roll, kids who were about ready to drop out,
single moms, kids of all colors. It was an interesting battle.
00:02:02
But once we got them into it, then you would think these advisors had invented it, because they
suddenly realized, my gosh, this kid who was about ready to drop out, the problem was she’s
bored to death by what the offerings are. She really does have leadership ability and it’s the first
time in the YAC that she’s been offered a chance to exercise it. So, some of these kids turned out
to be great. We in fact had one high school counselor who took us up on it more then we
realized. This was up in the Grand Traverse region, ended up with nine out of eleven kids on the
YAC adjudicated. The chair had been arrested for breaking and entering, but these were kids I
mean who were not buying any wooden nickels from anybody. They really pushed hard on those
grants and made excellent grants. So, it was an eye-opener for them.
The other thing, a big mistake we made initially was to say that the Youth Advisory Councils
could have some adults on them. We found out very quickly that was a problem. One great story
that illustrates that, in Jackson, one day the Youth Advisory Council kids came in, in a group. It
was made up of about two-thirds kids and one-third adults on the Youth Advisory Council. And
they told the director, “We quit.” He said, “Well, why?” They said the adults on the council are
shooting down every idea that we put forward, every one. “We tried that back in ’57 and it didn’t
work.” And it may be the case that they had tried it back in ’57 and it didn’t work but now we
were up to 1997 and the world was different. So the director of the community foundation was a
very quick thinker and he said, “Well, you can’t quit.” And they said, “Well, why can’t we?” and
he said, “Because I just fired all the adults. [laughs] Now you go back there and you make those
things work.” Which they did and you know and they had great success. And then too, these kids
were willing to tackle things the adults weren’t willing to deal with. A number of them said
we’ve got a race problem in this country and it’s here in our community and we got to deal with
it. The adults were like, “Oh god, that’s radioactive. We don’t want to touch that.” But a number
of programs that led to racial dialogues and cross-racial dialogues, and programs of education,
and workshops came out of those YAC programs that the adults wouldn’t go near.
00:05:16
So it was just a huge success, and these YAC-ers, now there have been nearly ten thousand of
them now since the late ’80s, many of them have come back to be leaders in the community in
15
�any number of ways. You know, running the youth soccer program, or trustee of the community
foundation, or advisors to YAC programs. They really learned grantmaking. And in a number of
them, they also learned fundraising. There’s another great story about one young woman who
was about 15, going along on a call to the richest lady in town, and they’re trying to raise money
for the YAC. They make the pitch, and the grand dame says, “No, I’m not going to do it. No!”
Just cuts them off, says no. And the adults, of course, are getting up and sort of bowing as they
leave, “Oh, thank you for considering this,” and so forth because they’re going to come back in a
few weeks and ask for money for the hospital or for the local college or whatever. And the 15
year old girl is still sitting there. And she says, “Why did you say no? You’ve got the money;
you can give it to us.” And of course all the adults [gasps], no one says that to this very wealthy
and very powerful lady. And the donor is just stunned because no one has ever said this to her.
And finally, she says, “Well, I don’t know exactly why I said no. Tell me a little more about
what you want to do. Maybe I was too hasty.” Half an hour later, they walk out with the grant
they asked for. The adults have had some heart incidents, but [laughs]. So the kids are willing to
ask the tough questions and because they’re kids, often then can get away with it. It’s just been a
huge success and these YACs are endowed, they continue every year. They bring in a new group
of kids. A number of them have worked for us at the Johnson Center. They’ve been just terrific
kids who have a lifetime of contributions ahead of them.
00:07:52
(JS) Now, in total, how long did you spend with the Kellogg Foundation?
(JO) The total was about 15 years, from 1986 to 2001. By 2001 I had reached the point where I
was feeling like I was beginning to repeat myself. We’d gotten a lot of great things started, they
were doing well. I was seeing a lot of proposals that looked very much like the proposals that I’d
been working on for the past several years. And, there was one other thing. I’d gotten a
professional study leave in 1999; six months to write a book on grantmaking. And Jim, I tell you,
it is the best book that’s ever been written on grantmaking. And I say that without fear of
contradiction because it was and remains the only book ever written on how to be a grantmaker.
And it basically, while there’s no generally accepted standard of excellence in grantmaking,
basically I wrote down what I’ve learned over the years. And it was a way for people coming
into the field to say, alright, here’s one way to do it. And nothing like that had existed before.
And I became convinced that what the philanthropic field needed was some education in
grantmaking. Because far too often, it basically consisted of getting hired, and getting an
orientation of the building, and then said, that’s your desk, go make good grants. And there are
techniques, there are good practices that you need to know, and not knowing them means
ultimately that the people who apply for money are suffering, and the people who depend on
them to get that money are suffering, so, better to do it right in the first place.
And I was eager to give that a try, so came over to the Johnson Center with some money from
the Kellogg Foundation to start the first school for grantmakers, aptly named, The Grantmaking
16
�School. And that was in 2001. And I’ll always remember my second day at the Johnson Center
because that second day was September 11, 2001. It helps to fix things in your mind.
00:10:54
JS: Alright, so basically you came into the Johnson Center. Do you come in initially just to work
on the grant or were you coming in there with the idea of ok, I’m going to be here and stay and
build the School?
JO: Definitely to be here and stay and work on the School and other things as well. The Johnson
Center, of course, was one of the things that I’d helped get started, had a long relationship, very
close working relationship with Dottie, and the idea of helping to build it was very enticing. So
definitely came to stay. Also it was terrific at that point, I was traveling about half of my time at
Kellogg, and at that point we had a lot of kids who were just entering adolescence. We have four
children and spending more time at home and trying to keep control of that chaos was appealing.
So definitely came to stay.
00:11:59
JS: Tell me a little bit about The Grantmaking School and how did you set it up? How does it
work?
JO: It really is a delicate thing. Because you can’t pitch it to grantmakers by saying, you really
have never been trained. So you really don’t know what you’re doing, and you really should
learn - which is the way I’d like to pitch it [laughs]. But, you know, you can’t get grantmakers
that angry, a) because they’re by now, they’re a bit thin skinned. They’ve lost the, so many of
them come from feedback-rich environments and now after working a few years in a feedbackpoor environment, their skin has gotten quite thin. And if you tell them the inconvenient truth,
they don’t like it and have a tendency to just tune you out. So what we have had to do at The
Grantmaking School is to say in essence that we are all about advanced grantmaking, about
excellence in grantmaking. Come to us from the base where you are and we will help you to
become a Jedi grantmaker. That is sort of the pitch. And what we get, unfortunately, are not the
people who really, really, really need to be there. Because they are not only ignorant, they’re
ignorant of their own ignorance. And all the feedback they get is that they’re doing great. So,
why bother? What we get is the people really who are pretty good already, who are serious about
this, and want to do a good job and have taken what opportunities they can find, maybe there’s a
seminar that their regional association of grantmakers puts on or they’ve heard there’s a book
that mentions a little bit of grantmaking. You know many of them have read my book before
they come in. And they come hoping to get better. And I think that’s what we do. We can really
take good grantmakers and make them into excellent grantmakers. That’s the value that The
Grantmaking School adds.
00:14:34
17
�JS: Do you do anything to target people who are just getting into the field, the very new ones?
JO: Yes, we try very hard both with the kinds of marketing that we send out and also working
with individual CEOs of foundations to say, gosh, you know, this is a great time to get someone
in there and give them a good basic grounding before they begin their career. Because there are
things that are fairly subtle about grantmaking, for example, just the language that you use, it has
to be extraordinarily conditional. Because, grantseekers, if it isn’t conditional, grantseekers think,
oh, the grant’s in the bag. I learned that the hard way early on. When I talked about, they said
what’s the process like, and I say well you know you send in a proposal, and I work on it, I send
you some questions, and then I take it to the board, and the board passes it. Well you know I was
thinking I was speaking as a hypothetical, and what they were hearing was, this is first step,
second step, third step, we get the money. As it happened their proposal really didn’t match up. I
had to give them a call and say, I’m sorry, we can’t fund this. And first there’s a shocked silence
on the end of the line. Then they said well, we’ve already hired people. And I said why did you
do that? And they said because you said the first step was this, the second step was that, and then
the third step and we thought we had the money. So just something like that, to be
extraordinarily careful, to say that there are no guarantees, that the first step is we consider it, I
might turn it down right then. I know I sounded like I was obsessive compulsive. But it’s terribly
important to not give people an implication that they’re going to be funded.
So The Grantmaking School talks about that. It talks about the kinds of things that you can do.
For example, most program officers have absolutely no idea about budgets: how they work, what
they mean, you know, the balance sheet of the organization. Is this organization, when you get
their financials, is this organization healthy? Does it have enough operating reserve to last for
several months if no more money comes in the door, or are they just on the verge of shutting
down. Because one of my colleagues at the Kellogg Foundation once made a grant of over a
million dollars to an organization that was on the verge of bankruptcy. They used the money, not
for the educational program that was funded but rather to try to keep the organization running at
which they failed. And not only did the organization go bankrupt, but all of that million dollars
plus had been spent on paying creditors and the electric company, and so forth, none of it had
gone to the project that had been funded. So there are just basic elements of good practice every
grantmaker should know. And that’s what we teach.
JS: Now do you do this mostly in short seminars and workshops and that sort of stuff?
00:18:33
JO: For the most part. There of course are some publications that we give them. We have a web
presence that’s helpful and they can ask questions. But for the most part, it’s face to face
programs where people can be with their peers and bounce ideas off of each other, and our
faculty is far more the guide on the side rather than the sage on the stage, because different sizes
of foundations operate differently, different regions of the country, you know, what’s considered
18
�to be just good philanthropy in New York might be considered to be really intrusive and over the
top in California. So we need to have people come together and talk about the different ways
they do things.
JS: Alright, now beyond The Grantmaking School work, what other kinds of things did you do
while at Grand Valley?
JO: Well, one of the big things we did initially was an experiment that has not been as
successful, but it was something we needed to try at the time which was the Nonprofit Good
Practice Guide. Essentially aggregating everything that we could find about good nonprofit
management and getting it onto a website, so that the people who get promoted through the ranks
especially, you know, they become executive director and the first day they wake up they say,
“Wow, now I’ve got to manage a board and I’ve never managed a board. Now, I’m totally
responsible for the finances of this organization and I’m really not very comfortable with
finance. Now I’ve got to hire and fire people and I’ve really never done that before.” So that they
would get good solid basic information and referrals to organizations that would help them with
those issues. It was a good idea. I think we built it pretty well. But it turned out that a lot of other
people had that idea as well. A number of them were better financed than we were and better
able to market what they had. So the Nonprofit Good Practice Guide still exists but it’s not the
800 pound gorilla in the field, it’s one of many. So that was a noble experiment that didn’t work
quite as well.
I was able to be helpful in the development of the Community Research Institute [CRI], never
ran it or anything, but helpful in getting them some of the things that they needed both through
grants and from the university. I was interim director a couple of times while at the Johnson
Center and one of my great achievements was the $36,000 closet. In the DeVos Center there was
a little storeroom basically that was right by our area and the first thing was fighting three other
departments for it and finally getting it. But then what we needed it for was the servers, the
computer servers. CRI needed a place where they could be locked down and absolutely safe
because there was so much confidential information on those servers we had to limit access to
them. As we were working with James Moyer, running facilities, we said well, there’s going to
be a lot of heat generated by those computers and we got to get that heat out of there. How do we
do that? Well, it turns out the easiest thing to do would have been to run a vent up to the roof of
the building, but James couldn’t do that because there were rules about what’s visible from the
street and having this big cooling tower going up there would be visible. So we ended up having
to run a vent through the building in this convoluted way, out through the U Club roof and out
the wall there, which involved $36,000 worth of equipment and workmanship. But it had to be
done. It was the right thing to do at the time. It just hurt to send $36,000 into cooling equipment.
And let’s see, there were a couple of other things too we worked on as well, helping to get The
Foundation Review going with Teri Behrens, who is editing that. It makes the Johnson Center
and Grand Valley the home of the only refereed journal in philanthropy, which we hope will be
19
�supported adequately by the field. Cause it’s a funny thing. There are a lot of PhDs in
philanthropy, but they don’t see themselves as being in philanthropy as a field. They see
themselves as a nurse or a historian or a doctor or a public health specialist or a planner. They
see themselves in the field they started in and philanthropy is not their professional field. But
we’re trying to raise the professionalism of the field through that journal. And just the simple
thing of, if a foundation pays for evaluation results, wouldn’t it be great if other foundations had
access to those results, rather than having them buried in the morgue somewhere in the initial
foundation? So, working on that as well.
00:25:12
JS: Alright, if you kind of look back over the career that you’ve had in different aspects of
philanthropy and the study of it, are there other particular things that kind of stand out in your
experience that you haven’t brought in here yet?
JO: One of them is the Learning to Give program. After Kathy Agard left MCFYP she started
Learning to Give program. And that was a specific effort to teach the giving of time, talent, and
treasure, to kids in the K through 12 system. And that has always been a problem because if you
go to K through 12 teachers and say here’s a curriculum on philanthropy, they’ll say, well thank
you very much, but I’ve already got far more than I can teach that’s mandated through the
Michigan standards. And you can get in line with the 86 other professions that want us to teach a
curriculum on economics or a curriculum on, you know anything that will be of importance later
in life. It seems like everybody has a curriculum they want to foist on the schools. Well, what
Kathy did, and the genius of this was, that she went through the Michigan standards one by one,
K through 12, and said alright, this lesson has to be taught on money, for example. Alright, we
can write a lesson on philanthropy that fits in with that standard. And this lesson can satisfy that
lesson on finances. And so that’s what Kathy and her associates did, one by one, wrote lessons
that fits the standards. So they can go to teachers and say, we would love you to teach this lesson
on volunteerism or on philanthropy or whatever and look, here’s the standard it fits that you’ve
got to teach anyway. So it’s a readymade lesson written by teachers, so it fits in the classroom
and it solves a problem the teacher has, it doesn’t add another layer on to it. And that has been
just a tremendous success in reaching kindergarten through 12th grade kids, teaching them about
the importance of sharing their time, their expertise as they go into professional associations, and
their treasure. So we’re very proud of that one.
00:28:07
JS: How do you go about actually getting them to use it? It’s one thing even if you’re creating
something that the curriculum that they’ve already got the whole thing worked out already or the
principal wants them to do it this way or whatever. Are there ways or strategies of getting it into
the classroom or what seems to work in terms of selling it?
20
�JO: Well, one of the things they experimented with, with pretty good success, was working with
an organization called The LEAGUE. And The LEAGUE has a basic concept that what if we
made community service into something that would be as competitive among schools as sports.
So, you literally have a league, you have standings, and the kids can say, yes, we moved ahead of
Central High now, in doing service. And teaching the Learning to Give programs is part of that.
In other schools they’ve gone in to failing schools as defined by No Child Left Behind, and said,
ok, these curricula that you’ve been given have not been working and the teachers say, you can
say that again. And say, well, how about these lessons? Give them a try. Because the one thing
about philanthropy is that we often think of it as something that the Bill Gates of the world do
and not us. But the fact of the matter is that 89% of Americans give something, whether it’s their
money, in relatively modest amounts, or their time as volunteers, or just sort of helping relatives
and family members. So when you get down to it, those kinds of lessons are things that very
much are relevant to our everyday lives. And kids understand what it means to share some of
your lunch with your friend whose family doesn’t have much. Of course it’s usually sharing
something you don’t like all that much anyway, but it’s sharing, none the less. So that has been a
helpful way of getting that into school programs.
00:30:46
JS: If you were to go back to say when you were in college or starting graduate school and
somebody were to tell you, this is where you’d wind up, what would your reaction be?
JO: Oh, I would have laughed. I would have thought, oh my gosh, because growing up in a lower
middle class home, if anything, I would think that we would be the objects of philanthropy, not
working as part of the giving side of it. So that has been just a huge surprise and I think it
underscores the critical importance of what Grand Valley does on a day by day basis, which is to
offer a liberal education to its students, because we’re in a world where we not only change jobs
frequently, but we change careers frequently. And in fact, the whole concept of a career is
probably now a relic of an earlier time. My dad worked for 41 years for International Paper
Company and when he retired he was not first on the seniority list, or even second, locally. There
was one guy who had been there 45 years and a woman who had been there 43. People used to
have careers working for a place, now we get jobs.
And the flexibility that a liberal education gives you to move outside of what you might
specifically have been trained for and to do work in some other way, in some other field,
something you never dreamed of, I think is just critically important. I never, never would have
imagined that I would be handling money. My math skills are fairly rudimentary, but to be
directing large sums of money. I never would have imagined that I would be dealing with
budgets. I never liked budgets of any kind. Never imagined that I might be sitting down with a
university president or similar muckety muck and doing negotiations for things. So I just think I
was very fortunate to have a liberal education at Kalamazoo College. The students at Grand
Valley are extraordinarily fortunate to have that opportunity for a liberal education that we’re
21
�turning out. Because there is just no way to guess what the future’s going to throw at you, and
what opportunities are there. And in fact, along those lines, I still get, from time to time, people
call me up who’ve been in fairly specialized professions in the law or in medicine and they say,
can you help me get a career in philanthropy because I’ve done my field, frankly I’m getting
kind of tired of it and I’d like to broaden my horizons and do things that I haven’t done before. It
is kind of limiting to have three years of law school which prepares you for a legal job one way
or another and the field that you’re constrained within that or trapped within that. Far better to
have lots of things you can do.
00:34:48
JS: It’s sort of an interesting perspective on that because if you look around at popular culture
now, are ads for online universities or things like that that show up on television. A lot of it is
we’re going to train you for career X and you’re going to make X amount of money and go out
of there. But that’s most all they’re going to do. And much of what they don’t have that Grand
Valley offers is that rest of it, which looks from that perspective just sort of like excess baggage,
but in the broader prospective, not necessarily.
JO: Right, I have done a little talking with some of the various folks from online universities and
they are very focused. In fact they say, if we’ve got a program in say, dental hygiene, and the
market for that dries up, we drop that program. We just cut it, because we’re not going to train
our kids for jobs that don’t exist. At one level, I think that’s admirable and a good thing, but on
the other level, I just have known far, far too many people who have started out as dental
hygienists and have said after four or five years, you know, I’ve exhausted the possibilities of
this job. I don’t want to do this the rest of my life. And if your only training, and I guess what
you can say then is well, alright, fine, you go back to that online university, and they’ll train you
for another specific job. I suppose that’s possible but it just seems to me that it’s far better to
learn how to think and learn how to reason and be flexible and then when an opportunity comes
along you don’t have to go to the University of Phoenix for two years to get it, you can just grab
it right now. So, maybe I’m the last of the old crusty generalists, but I think that’s what we need.
JS: It makes actually for a pretty good story and you’ve done a very good job telling it. I’d just
like to close out here by thanking you for taking the time to do it.
JO: Well, thank you. It’s been a privilege to be part of it.
00:37:21
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�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/a5e17921dfeddb1864b6940d136f30e1.mp4
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Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project Interviews
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Philanthropy and society--Personal narratives
Family foundations--Michigan
Charities--Michigan
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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.
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/516">Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project (MPOHP) (JCPA-08). Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives</a>
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JCPA-08
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2006-2008
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Johnson Center for Philantrhopy
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StoryCorps (Project)
Oral History
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/516">Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project (JCPA-08)</a>
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Orosz, Joel J. video interview and transcript
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Orosz, Joel J.
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Joel Orosz discusses his education and work at the Kalamazoo Public Museum, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and the Johnson Center for Philanthropy at Grand Valley State University. He authored a book on how to be a grantmaker. He shares stories about the development of the Council of Michigan Foundations, Michigan community foundations with Youth Advisory Committees, Michigan Youth Philanthropy Initiative Project, Learning to Give, and the Johnson Center. He discusses Johnson Center programs: The Grantmaking School, Community Research Institute, The Foundation Review, Nonprofit Good Practice Guide. He reflects on the importance of the nonprofit sector in philanthropy and the value of a liberal education.
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Smither, James
Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership, Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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Philanthropy and society
Personal narratives
Charities
Michigan
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JCPA-08_OroszJ
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eng
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Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives
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2010-08-18
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https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/760362c8c017cfa408cc59e453cfdab2.pdf
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Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
Johnson Center for Philanthropy
Grand Valley State University
May 27, 2010
Russell G. Mawby
Chairman Emeritus of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation
This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the
manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to the Johnson Center Philanthropy
Archives at Grand Valley State University.
Preferred Citation: Researchers wishing to cite this collection should use the following credit
line: Oral history interview with Russell G. Mawby, May 27, 2010. "Michigan Philanthropy Oral
History Project", Johnson Center Philanthropy Archives of the Special Collection & University
Archives, Grand Valley State University Libraries.
James Smither (JS): We’re talking today with Russ Mawby, who’s Chairman Emeritus of the
W.K. Kellogg Foundation and has done quite a few other things over the course of his career as
well. The interviewer is James Smither of Grand Valley State University. We’re conducting this
interview for the Johnson Center for Philanthropy at Grand Valley State University. Mr. Mawby,
can you begin by just by filling in some background on yourself? Let’s start where and when you
where you born?
Russ Mawby (RM): I’m a native of Kent County. Grew up on a fruit farm up north east of
Grand Rapids, in what we used to call the East Beltline fruit district.
(JS) And what year where you born?
(RM) I was born in 1928.
00:00:55
(JS) Was your family able to keep the business through the 30s and the depression?
(RM) Oh, yes. My folks were farm kids in that community. Both of them grew up on fruit farms
and went to Peach Grove School, a one room school which was on the corner of the farm that
now is famous as Robinette’s Apple Haus. So we were a mile south of Robinette’s at Orchard
View Farm. My mom and dad graduated from eighth grade and then went on with life.
�Fortunately, my dad was encouraged by the man he went to work for, Oscar Braman, was
encouraged to get some further education. So in 1913 when he was 18 years old he got on the
train in downtown Grand Rapids, had never traveled, got on the train went to Lansing, got off
and walked to East Lansing to Michigan Agricultural College and took a ten week short course
in fruit growing. That literally changed, I’m sure, the future on the Mawby family because it
changed his perspective, my folks got married and then bought Orchard View Farm in 1925. So,
we’re in the fruit business. Both of them were life-long learners and set an example on the
importance of education. So the four kids, my two brothers, and myself, and my sister all went to
high school at Creston High School. That was before consolidation. Family planning had us four
years apart for sixteen years. My folks got us to and from school seven miles away every day,
just the commitment. And the expectation then, that if we wished, we would have education
beyond that. They were just great parents and encouraged every kind of opportunity for the four
of us.
00:02:55
(JS) The period here when you’re going up, this is the era of the Depression and then the Second
World War starts and so forth, how much of an effect did those kinds of things have on your
family, or the business, or yourself? Or what do you remember about that?
(RM) Well, about the depression years, they were tough. Less so, on a fruit farm in some
respects. My dad was a good manager. He was an innovator in terms of the fruit industry,
became highly regarded in addition to having the fruit production. [He was a distributor for
orchard ] He specialized in marketing with the changing from the old-fashioned service grocery
store to self-service and carts and so forth.
(JS) Can you explain that difference for an audience that won’t know what you’re talking about?
(RM) Alright, well, before we got to what we now call self-service grocery stores we would into
the store [and be waited on]. We would go to John Heyn’s little grocery store next to the Polly
Meat Market, adjacent, and we’d stop and John Heyn’s himself would say “What you would
like today Mrs. Mawby?” and five pounds of sugar and two cans of peas, and they would collect
it, charge you, and then take care of the next customer. Well, that all changed with the concept of
self-service and so instead of taking in bushel baskets of apples where they would be weighed
out for the customer, it was prepackaged, just as you see now. The stores sold five pound bags of
apples and my dad was one of the first to do that. Many of the fruit farms were transitioned from
the old dairy farm. When most farms where diversified and they had a few dairy cows, and a
little bit of fruit, some chickens, and some pigs so that they weren’t specialized, and as they
moved to expand fruit production they simply got rid of the cows, converted the basement of the
barn into a storage, which was not really satisfactory. So again my dad was one of the early ones
to build a fruit storage, first cooled by ice and then with refrigeration. He also became a dealer
in, for Niagara Sprayer and Chemical Company and so got to have a great reputation in the fruit
industry. That caused him to be engaged beyond just the farm and to share that kind of new
dimension from the situation which many kids would have had. Similarly my mother was very
much engaged. She was on the school board, she was treasurer, she was engaged in the
community, and both of them particularly looked to the extension service of Michigan State
�University in all aspects of family living, and educational opportunities and so forth. So it was
just a great environment in which to grow up. A lot of kids in our little Orchard View School
were not living on farms. We, in addition to having fruit you see had, of course, one or two cows
for the family milk supply, we had some chickens; we canned everything from the garden and
the orchard all summer so winter was taken care of. And the folks never talked about poverty or
hardship or so forth. Some kids had just a rough time and they couldn’t get a warm coat for the
winter so you’re conscience of that. Many of the kids in our Orchard View School, their folks
were immigrants, and so they were the first generation of American citizens. The kids, my
classmates, in every instance, their parents, that I can remember, they were from the Netherlands,
and Italy, and Poland in particular. In our community, they might speak a little of their native
tongue at home but never outside and expected the kids to just, deal always in English. So it was
a rich experience during that time. We learned to work. I had tasks, my older brother, my sister,
my kid brother, all had tasks as a part of the family enterprise and you felt rather than making
work, you were doing something which was really useful.
00:07:36
Now two youth programs really changed my perspective on life. One was 4H Club work. And so
our local Orchard View group had a 4H Club; wood working, electrical projects, soil and water
conservation, raising pheasants to release for pheasant repopulation, etc. It was learning skills
which are still useful. The other aspect was the group organization because we had a club and we
elected officers; and so we had a President and a Vice President for social activities, and a
treasurer and so forth. We had projects of community service. We knew simple rules of order,
Robert’s Rules of Order. Useful kinds of skills engaged in our community in useful ways. That
provided them the first opportunity for me to visit the campus of Michigan State University for
4H Club week, stay in the dormitory and begin to think, gee maybe I could do this. My dad was
on two state organizations: one the Michigan Apple Commission and the other a Land Use
Planning Commission. Those usually met at the Michigan State University in the Union
building. And on occasion he would take me along, give me a dollar and when they started
meeting and I could go find a hamburger and knew where the ice cream shop was on campus,
but again got comfortable with Michigan State. My older brother, like my dad, went to a fruit
growing short course. I decided to go for a baccalaureate degree, had some scholarship assistance
through 4H and other activities and majored in Horticulture, Pomology, you know that pomology
is fruit growing, Olericulture is vegetable growing, and floriculture, you know for sure. So 4H
really made a dramatic difference in my life.
00:09:52
(JS) Now the other thing of course that goes on in this period is the country winds up in a war for
four years starting with Pearl Harbor. Now do you remember hearing about Pearl Harbor or
learning about the start of the war?
(RM) Oh sure. I remember it dramatically. I was a freshman in high school, going to Creston
High School, from a little two room country school, and remember Pearl Harbor vividly; it made
an immediate impact of course. We did a lot of things in school. One of the things that my dad
suggested is why don’t you take some nice apples and give an apple to anybody who would buy
�saving stamps for war bonds. I think 25 cents would buy a savings stamp, so a youngster could
buy that and we would give them an apple. Things like that, and some of the teachers
volunteered to come out and work Saturdays and Sundays on the farm, helping with harvest in
the fall. So there was a different spirit. And as a freshman of course, the older classes were
graduating and off they went to military service. And in my senior year down in the front of the
Old Kent Bank in the Creston Community there’s a war memorial that I spoke at the dedication
of that war memorial of the deceased, would have been in the spring, I suppose of 1945 when I
graduated. So we did have that impact, rationing was a reality. Interesting, living on a farm at
that period of time I had a driver’s license at the age of 14. I could do all sorts of thing in the
farm business. I was never an athlete. I played in the band. Fall was apple harvest, and I’d get
home from school, pickers would be out picking and we’d load the apples and get done by 9:00
at night and go get ice to cool the storage. It was, in retrospect a wonderful set of circumstances
in which you felt a useful part of what was going on not only at home but in the community, in
the country, and in the sense in the world. One of the realities that still troubles me I think, is that
our society over time now has tended to prolong what I would call adolescence into even the
mid-twenties before people really assume an adult role for themselves and for others because it
was quite different at that point in time.
00:12:48
(JS) You had plenty of people who would go to school only through eighth grade and then go
into the work force, and that sort of thing, so you really would start early and certainly anybody
going in the military at age 18 or19 had to grow up pretty quickly. Now for yourself, as the war
is going on and you’re going through high school, did you assume the war was going to be over
before you got in it or were you figuring well sooner or later they were going to catch up with
you?
(RM) A lot of my classmates, some of them quit school to get in before VE day was right at the
time of our high school graduation, VJ day followed. So you hoped the war would be over but
didn’t really know. That was a four year period, really the whole four years that I was in school.
(JS) Right.
00:13:32
(RM) I wanted to mention the other youth organization was Boy Scouts. In our 4H club that was
really kids in the community and our neighborhood and so forth. We didn’t have a Boy Scout
Troop, but my folks, our church, North Park Presbyterian Church, sponsored a troop and that’s
where we went to service and that’s where I became a Boy Scout. Now that was a completely
different experience; more a military structure in which you had the Scout Master and the
different ranks and so forth. And with kids that were completely - no one else from Orchard
View was in troop 43. So it was a different kind of experience. Not the participatory and
democratic decision making process, but learning discipline and all sorts of other things and the
scout oath and the scout law and so forth. Both of those experiences - one of the interesting
things was that, between my - in summer 1944, the Department of Conservation in Michigan was
having trouble keeping up the fish ponds and the roadside tables and a lot of things that needed
�to be cared for in state parks and a lot of their workers had been drafted into military service and
so our scout troop with a troop from Jackson was recruited to go up to Higgins Lake
conservation camp, establish a boy scout camp there and troops came up and spent two weeks
each time. So I was involved in helping create that and then we helped the Conservation
Department clean fish ponds and repair buildings and tables and so forth. Again, a way of
engaging young people in a very, seemed to be important task that needed to be done. So those
all set a value standard for me with my parents because both of them were actively engaged in
some way with Red Cross, the United Way and so forth. My dad was the [Civil Defense]
chairman for our square mile when we had tests of blackout services. So I remember riding with
him with no lights on around to see if we could see any lights anywhere in his service area. They
had training at the township hall for people in first aid techniques and so forth. As a scout I had
gotten my merit badge in first aid, and so Red Cross would come out and use me as an assistant
in doing those things. There were just a lot of ways in which you felt you were trying to be
helpful in the total effort. So it was a good growing-up process. One of the real challenges today
it seems to me, in our society is to find ways in which young people can contribute and do for,
rather than always having things done for them and it just changes your mindset about your role
and your sense of responsibility for others.
00:17:00
(JS) I’ve interviewed quite a few people of your approximate generation and I’m trying to think
if there’s anybody with quite as many connections to service organizations and activities and so
forth as you’ve listed right here and I don’t think so. I think individual experiences are
characteristic of a lot of people, you just seem to have a lot more of them together in one person
and one life then a lot. But I guess that kind of naturally gears you towards getting involved with
service organizations, community outreach, and a lot of that because that was always what
people did. So you go off to college, and then in the time when you’re then at Michigan State,
and getting your bachelor’s degree and so forth were there groups or organizations you where
connected with or programs…?
(RW) Oh gosh yes. Again it was quite an experience to go to East Lansing. GI Bill was in effect,
the dormitories were filling with veterans who should have had priority. I was in a little boarding
house, became a member of an agricultural, social, and professional fraternity the second and
third year, that added a different dimension because I became very active then in that
organization on campus, President of the chapter, and then went on in adult life to be very active
in the national structure and network of friendships that made a difference. In the final analysis
only people are important, and it’s how you relate to people and engage people that you can
broaden your perspective and learn. So an interesting experience. The first two years of my
major in Horticulture was a broadening experience of basic college, some liberal arts, science,
and history, and so forth. But basic courses all across: agriculture, dairy science, animal science,
soils crops, entomology and so forth. At the end of my second year the head of the Horticulture
Department stopped me in the hallway. I was a good student, good grades anyway. And he
stopped me and I was surprised that he knew who I was. And he asked me to step into his office
and I thought uh-oh now what? He said, “Russ, you’re a good student we’re proud of you,
pleased that you’re majoring in Horticulture. I have just one suggestion for you. If you end up
wanting to be a horticulturalist as a career, you’ll have to go ahead and get a master’s degree and
�probably a Ph.D. [We will make you a specialist then]” And so he said, “My suggestion for you
for these next two years, junior and senior year, is take as few courses as we’ll let you get by
with and still have a major in Horticulture. Take as few courses as we’ll let you get by with and
still have a degree in the College of Agriculture, and use all of the rest of the time to sample this
great university.” He said, “I don’t care, great religions of the world, philosophy, science,
whatever you are interested in sample this great university. You will never have a better chance.”
Now that was another intervention and I did that. And I found myself in class, you see, with
nobody else from agriculture, students who knew nothing about agriculture and it was an
interesting set of interactions. That led me to be involved on the State News newspaper and a
couple of honorary societies, Blue Key and so forth. So again, it was a broadening experience.
Then, interestingly between junior and senior year, that would be summer of 1948, the 4H club
program nationally launched an international exchange program and I was one of 17 selected
nationally to spend the summer in Europe. And so we went overseas in an old troop ship that had
just been painted so you had to watch where you sat because you would end up with gray paint,
and spent a summer in the United Kingdom. Others went into Italy, France, and Denmark and so
forth. But again a very broadening experience, it was after the war, the damage was still there;
strict rationing of gas, of eggs, of cheese, and so forth in England. Again, sort of a dimensionchanging experience.
00:21:39
(JS) Now did you stay in one place most of the time in England or move around a lot?
(RM) No, a lot of - spent time in Wales which isn’t England. I marvel at that little country, that
little island with the Welsh, and the English, and the Scots and you’d think they’d be all, but they
aren’t all mixed up yet; [laughs] so, but mostly in Northern England. But went to County Kent
also which is the heart of the fruit industry in England. That was interesting, the East Malling
Research Station where the first experimental work of the dwarfing of apple trees. We use to
have the old standard trees and they, Malling number nine is one of the standards now for all of
the orchards that are small, semi-dwarfed trees. So it was just another life-changing experience.
So I graduated in the spring of 1949, was sort of tired of academics. Looked at variety of options,
had a possibility of going with Michigan Farmer Magazine, because I had taken enough
journalism courses that I could have had a major in Journalism probably. Journalist graduates
were having trouble getting jobs, but because, in addition to being able to write a little bit, I had a
specialty. So I could have gone with “Better Homes and Gardens,” [laughs] the garden section of
the magazine. Alpha Zeta, the agricultural honorary nationally for students in agriculture,
established a fellowship program and had awarded one in 1948. Unbeknownst to me the advisor
of our chapter of East Lansing had nominated me. So I got a telegraph saying, “Congratulations,
you can go to graduate school.” So instead of going to work I went to Purdue University, to
major in Agriculture Economics. I was anxious to get a broader perspective into the broader
issues of agriculture including management, marketing, public policy and so forth.
(JS) Did you select Purdue because they had the right kind of program? Or how did that happen?
00:24:04
�(RM) Yes, I had taken Economics and Agriculture Economics courses in that grand design of
broadening. And my orientation has always been more toward the practical and the applied;
putting together new knowledge and using it in different ways for purposes. So I looked at
others, more of them where theoretical. Purdue had more of an orientation that I found attractive.
So I went to Purdue. The draft continued but I didn’t volunteer and for education they simply let
me bubble along and I finished a master’s degree at Purdue. I took a job there in Agriculture
Economics extension working but then got a draft notice. So, Ruth and I got married, figuring
that very quickly I’d be going into military service, well assuming that next month I would go.
Well the draft board said, oh no that was an extension saying you can’t go now, you have to wait
until something. She was then working in the extension service in Kent County. So I started my
doctoral program at Michigan State. And that continued until the fall of 1953. I was an
Agricultural Extension Specialist then. Farmers for the first time became eligible for Social
Security in 1951 or 2. I was in charge of developing an educational program to inform farmers
how they could qualify for Social Security retirement benefits. We did that in a variety of ways:
presentations around the state and by radio. And that was the beginning of television. And so we
did television, kinescopes they called them, Big Films, for a half hour. We did thirteen shows for
a quarter of a year. You would tape these things called Rural Round Up or Country Cross Roads
and I was hosting these with different specialists on television. And then ship them out to the
stations in Escanaba, Marquette, and Traverse City and so forth. So that was a great experience.
And then in the fall of 1953, I went in the US Army. I was the oldest, I was then 25 years old. So
in basic training they had all these sharp football players and I was trying to keep up.
(JS) Where did they send you for basic training?
00:27:00
(RM) Fort Knox, Kentucky, and basic training that fall. Then they made the assignment to Camp
Chaffee, Arkansas, in field artillery, I think capitalizing on my farm background they sent me to
field. I was in fire direction control, which is the firing instructions for the big 105 howitzers.
Went through that course, eight weeks, Ruth took a leave and came down and we had a little bit
of time but during basic training just a couple of times. Then I was held out after completing the
course as a replacement instructor because they would recruit…
(JS) Let me back up with this a little bit. How easy or hard was it for you to adjust to Army life,
the discipline and the drill and the rest of it. Was it an easy transition for you because of your
background?
00:28:05
(RM) My attitude is always, you know, you just make the best of whatever situation and adjust
to it, not going to gripe about it every morning. So it was just, get up in the morning make your
bed be sure it’s smooth enough or you’re going to catch heck, be sure the firing knobs on your
rifle are clean so you’ll pass inspection and just do whatever needs to be done.
(JS) And did you kind of fall into a leadership role on some other level at least among the other
recruits because you were the old guy?
�(RM) Not during basic training, I really didn’t want to be head of a patrol or anything, so I just
tried to behave and do everything that needed to be done. But then I was held as an instructor and
spent the rest of my two years at Camp Chaffee. That’s when Ruth came down; living on private
pay and then PFC, I rose to the rank of Corporal and President Eisenhower froze rank, or I might
have been a Sergeant but I didn’t make it. So we lived in the community, we had a little one
room apartment in Fort Smith. Again took advantage of the opportunity. She was a skillful,
talented seamstress, loved sewing, loved tailoring, and furniture refinishing. So she linked up
with the YWCA and would teach classes and got acquainted with women; we went to church; I
became a member of the Toastmasters club for speaking, so you got acquainted with people in
the community. So it was a great experience. Now a lot of my colleagues on the staff had college
degrees and thought they were important, smart, and they spent all their time grumbling about
this waste of time. And we just enjoyed Arkansas, made friends in community and again it was a
great experience and I’m thankful I had that experience because first at Fort Knox met kids, you
know, of all backgrounds of center city. The guy in the bunk, Mac McCloud, couldn’t write his
name. Just came from a desperate background situation and so you had a different perspective if
you took advantage of the opportunity to get acquainted, to learn.
00:30:39
(JS) At this point the army was in the process of racial integration as well. Were there black
troops training along with you?
(RM) Oh sure, oh yeah. McCloud was black, African American from Cincinnati. So I just made
a point of again, of taking advantage, trying to look at the positives. We gained friends. We
would invite people to go out when we where going to have a tube steak dinner, that we could
afford hot dogs. We tried to see points; we visited Winrock [Farm]. [Governor] Winthrop
Rockefeller had developed this big estate with Santa Gertrudis cattle. I was intrigued with those
things, went to rodeos, just benefited from Arkansas.
(JS) Took advantage of what was there.
(RM) Yes.
(JS) So you do that for two years, then do you come back to Michigan after that?
(RM) Yes. I was really on leave from Michigan State University. I had a faculty appointment, so
I was on leave for two years and came back to finish my Ph.D. degree and again an extension
specialist responsibility. That would have been in the fall of 1955. Then, to my amazement
[laughs], in May of 1956 I got called to the Dean’s office. “Russ, can you come up 3:00 this
afternoon?” Yes sir. The Dean and the Director of Extension said “Russ, we want you to start
July 1 as the Assistant Director of the Michigan Cooperative Extension Service responsible for
4H youth programs.” I was 28 years old. My predecessor to my seat had been the state 4H Club
leader for 30 years, a marvelous man, who was retiring. The Dean said “We’ve convinced
President Hannah; he said ‘gosh Russ isn’t very old.’” The Dean said “I just told him that this
was the right thing to do”. So anyway, 1956 was a big year. I [assumed] that responsibility. Ruth
�and I had learned that we would not be having biological kids, so we went through the interesting
experience of dealing with the Department of [Human] Services I guess it was called, to try to
adopt a child, and that was completely unsuccessful. The agent came out and inspected the house
from top to bottom and talked with us and she said “I regret to inform you, you will never be
able to adopt a child.” And we wondered [why], Ruth’s major was in Home Economics. We said
“Could you explain why?” She said, “You have too much education. These children aren’t born
to people with education.” I had a Master’s Degree and Ruth had a Bachelor’s Degree, and we
would never be able to adopt a child, which didn’t seem to me sensible. So, we then went the
private route and Karen joined our family when she was one week old that fall. So it was just an
exciting year.
(JS) And she probably wasn’t really fazed at all by your educational level either.
(RM) No, that’s right. It didn’t bother her a bit [laughs]. We were challenged sometimes, but she
wasn’t. And then we, later on, a couple years later when she was two we adopted her older
brothers, who tragically had been in foster care for four years. They were five and four years old.
At age five, Doug could not, now just think about it with what kids are doing now, at age five
Doug could not spell his name, couldn’t count to ten, didn’t know colors. Doug and Dave came
with one paper bag, each had a broken toy, and one change of underwear, and that was what the
state of Michigan provided. So I still think some improvement needs to be made in that sector of
society. Anyway, that started our family, and I was on the faculty then at Michigan State and
responsible for the 4H program in the 83 counties of Michigan. Tremendous opportunity,
responsibility, and advanced to the rank of professor, and thought probably my career would be
in the academic world, maybe someday a department chair or Director of Extension, maybe a
Dean, or whatever, and then life changed again. [laughs]
00:35:46
(JS) So what happens that shifts you out of that?
(RM) Well, to shift out of that. Okay. I was enjoying what we were doing, life was great, the kids
were doing fine, lived out on a couple acres out east of East Lansing, had a pony, and life was
good. I got a phone call. One of my realities of life, I have never applied for a job. [laughs] I got
a call from a man who I had become acquainted with through the National Agricultural
Extension Center for Advanced Study at the University of Wisconsin. I had been interacting with
them, and by then had completed my doctorate and was moving into leadership circles in the 4H
Extension nationally. So he had taken a position with the Kellogg Foundation as Director of the
Division of Agriculture. He was leaving to go back to the University of Kentucky and said “I’m
calling [for] Dr. Morris who is the president of the foundation and would like you to come down
if you would and talk about an opportunity.” And I said “Oh gosh Glen. I’m happy here,
everything is going well. I’m not sure it’s fair for me to come down.” “Oh,” he said, “just come
on down and get acquainted.” So, I went down [laughs] and got acquainted and was just
intrigued with the opportunity. The [W.K.] Kellogg Foundation, we’ll talk about in greater detail.
So I joined on December 1st, 1964 and became the Director of the Division of Agriculture. I
commuted back and forth so the kids could finish their school here at Williamston. We bought
�40 acres here and built this house in the summer of 1965, moved in in August and been here ever
since.
(JS) Tell me a little bit about the Kellogg Foundation itself. What was it and what was it doing at
the time you joined it?
00:38:00
(RM) Okay. We will go into more detail perhaps about Mr. Kellogg because any organization in
effect is the consequence of the people who comprise it. Mr. Kellogg started the Kellogg
Company in 1906, and then based on that success created the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in 1930.
Concentrated for the first ten years on seven rural counties, and then, with the advent of World
War II, expanded some specific programs in the health field nationally, and then became
involved in Europe in the post-war period for about a 30 year period of time. And concentrated
on three broad areas: one was education broadly defined from early childhood and the whole
concept of lifelong learning, continuing education and everything in between; second, health,
and a broad approach. Most foundations working in health concentrated on medicine and the
medical profession physicians. Kellogg concentrated first on public health for disease
prevention, health promotion, and then medicine, dentistry, which was not included [usually in
health programs]. It’s an interesting story of why dentistry is not a specialty within medicine like
ophthalmology is, but is a completely separate discipline. So, medicine, dentistry, nursing, allied
health professions, and health services administration. It was a very broad approach to health.
And the third, labeled agriculture, but really concerned with food systems, because good health,
first of all is dependent upon nutrition, food systems; then the whole concern with the quality of
rural life and rural community development. My area was that broad area of agriculture. We
were organized in seven program divisions, of which agriculture was one of them.
Active then in Latin America as well as nationally, and in Europe. They had gotten involved in
Latin America at the beginning of World War II. The State Department invited major
foundations like Kellogg and Rockefeller and Ford and so forth, to get together and talk about
the western hemisphere, saying we don’t know what will happen in Europe, we don’t know
about the Pacific, but the western hemisphere will have some common concerns for the future,
and would you think about ways of getting interaction with South America? The Kellogg
Foundation followed through on that by starting fellowships in Latin American countries that
had basic training in medicine and dentistry and nursing and so forth, but not a place for
specialization. The foundation developed a pattern in which they would work with an institution,
usually a university in; let’s say Colombia, where in nursing they wanted to develop a specialty
in pediatric nursing. The foundation would grant a fellowship to the university, not to the
individual. The university would identify the individual then, the recipient, and the foundation
worked out a fellowship study program at the University of Michigan, or Harvard, or wherever
the right pediatric nursing. So that the link was with the institution, the person who came as a
fellow knew she was coming to get a training to go back to perform a specific task. Her graduate
advisors all knew what she was doing. If there was research, she probably did it back in her
country. The brain drain was virtually zero. So many of those international programs, people
came here and didn’t want to go home. But here, the link was clear, and so 95% of those fellows
in medicine, dentistry, nursing, hospital administration, public health, returned. Then, the natural
�thing was this Kellogg fellow goes back, needs some library resources, needs other…so you
began to help the develop whole department, changed the nature of programming; then, in that
process after the war, broadened it in Latin America to include food systems as well. So, that’s
where the foundation was. Growing out of this interesting problem in seven counties here in
south central Michigan, the foundation then had followed through because they worked on, for
example, the consolidation of the one room school into a consolidated district because otherwise,
rural kids didn’t have a chance to go to high school. They soon learned that administering a
system like that is different than just being a classroom teacher, so, educational administration.
The same thing was true in the health, hospitals, helped create a hospital in each of these seven
counties seats, but running a hospital is different than being a good surgeon. So, health services
or hospital administration developed. Then, in working in these seven counties, they began to
take the school board, school superintendent, the principals, and so forth, hospital boards, public
health boards, would go to Ann Arbor or East Lansing or University of Chicago for a short term,
three or four or five days. They’d get on the train and go to Chicago and have an intensive
learning experience related to hospital operations, health services. But, one of the challenges was
then, how does the university accommodate that kind of a short term learning experience? So,
the first of the Kellogg-assisted University-based residential centers for continuing education, the
Kellogg Center in East Lansing. About the fourth one was at the University of Chicago. It was
East Lansing, then Georgia, then Oklahoma, then Chicago, and so forth. Did 12 of those
demonstrations on lifelong learning in variation. So, that’s where the foundation was at the time I
came in. They sort of completed that moving on next as a major player in the whole spread of the
community college effort nationally. During the 60s, for four or five years in the 60s, there was a
new community college opened every week, somewhere in the United States. Just a boom and so
again it was training of leadership for organizational development, second curriculum
development, and third business operations; with graduate fellowships at 12 major public and
private universities across the country.
00:45:58
(JS) So where was agriculture in all of this? You talk a lot about the education and the health
dimensions and so forth. But agriculture seems to be maybe someplace else?
(RM) Well, yeah, because it was a little later start. The emphasis was on food systems,
dissemination of new technology both in the developing countries of Latin America, but in the
U.S. Leadership Programs changing curricula and then all things related to the quality of rural
life. Education, and of course the wonderful thing now is modern technology so you are no
longer isolated as you once were, but concerned with community development, health services,
education, across the board, so, a very broad definition. Now, one of the realities is that when I
do have a job, I want to know what my job is, but I don’t want a very narrow job description. So
I know what I need to do, but I also want some freedom to do beyond that. As now the new
Director of Agriculture working with Dr. Morrison with total staff at the foundation I think
including everyone, including the elevator operator, 26 of us there. We talked about a couple of
ideas. One was the use of new technology, computers. As an undergraduate I had worked at
Farm Record Keeping System for farmers around the state. They sent in their little account books
and we had to add them up and so forth. All computerized, so the foundation helped in the
computerization of farm records, you know efficiency records and dairy production and all of
�those applications, dissemination of new technology by computer, and so forth. Then, concerned
with developing farm, agricultural, rural leadership, and the theme there was leadership for
agriculture in an urbanizing society. So we developed Farmer’s Study Programs across the
country. One of the interesting things we were studying then was rural poverty, and started with
a major program in the Appalachian Mountains. And then, we were sitting at an advisory group
for programs in agriculture including Dr. T.W. Shultz who was an agricultural economist at the
University of Chicago.
00:49:02
Ted Shultz was on our advisory committee in agriculture talking about rural poverty. He is the
one who really pioneered a lot of the study on the returns to society of investments in higher
education for people, and what are the returns to society of these investments. He said, in the
South, for blacks, this was just after civil rights legislation, ’65 ’66, the opportunities are
tremendous, but there are more black students in the public black universities than in the private
ones. But foundations were working with [the private institutions] Spellman and Howard and so
forth. The land grant universities were established originally in 1863. This is history, in 1863,
one in every state where land was given to be sold to create a college. In 1890, there was a
second piece of legislation that established a separate, segregated black school in each of 13
states. They were training mostly teachers for segregated school systems, some students to go on
from there into professions of medicine, nursing, law, and so forth, and in theology. This was a
dramatic time for change. So, here I am, head of agriculture, again talking with the president and
with the board of trustees about [rural poverty]. So I self-invited myself to seven of those
institutions saying I was going to be in the area, and I’d like to come by and visit, would it be
alright? I went and talked with them about the opportunities they saw now with the changing
realities and so, provided assistance then, for example, the first one had been North Carolina
A&T where they wanted to move their College of Engineering to accreditation. They needed to
send some bright faculty members away for advanced degrees. So, we provided that they would
select the study center, in turn, we would try to get their study institution to provide some
counseling help back and visiting professorships, and so forth. We did that at Fort Valley, I don’t
know if you are familiar with Fort Valley in Georgia, North Carolina A&T, Alcorn A&M in
Mississippi, and so forth. Talk about a tremendous educational experience for me in going to
those institutions talking about the realities of how you live in a segregated situation; fascinating.
There’s more details. I was at Tuskegee, which is sort of public and private. It was awarded land
grant money but was a private institution. I happened to be there at the time of Farmers’ Day.
Dean Benny had asked me what experience I’d like while I was there and I said one thing I
would like to do is visit two or three farms and two or three rural schools where your students
come from. So we did that, where the wallpaper on the house was newspapers, and so forth; the
school with just a desperate situation.
They had Farmers’ Day, and Benny was getting uneasy because they had programs in the
morning, and Tuskegee was loaded with people, they all had free lunch at the Union. With such a
crowd, it was running late and getting anxious about getting the program started. The choir was
going to sing and so forth. I said “Gosh, I don’t see that any of the places we visited, they don’t
have to get home for chores.” He said “That’s not the problem. They’ve got to be home before
dusk. It’s at dusk that my people have trouble.” You know, it is just mind boggling to this old
�farm kid that people were living in that circumstance in the late ’60s. That’s the way I
approached it. Got very much involved, and then to my surprise and I guess everybody’s
amazement, I became Vice President of the foundation for programming across the board in
about 1968 and became the CEO in 1970.
00:54:03
(JS) That’s pretty quick on the whole…
(RM) They were desperate apparently; [laughs] and I became President and served as the CEO
for 25 years during a period of dramatic growth. My first year at the foundation, just briefly,
fiscal year 1965, total payout, you know, expenditures, $12 million, about $1 million a month, a
lot of money. When I retired in 1995, payout was $1 million a working day…
[End]
PART 2
(JS): You are already to the point where you had now become; you have sort of taken over the
Kellogg Foundation, in effect.
(RM): That’s right.
(JS): You were talking about one of the changes was just the amount of money that they were
spending. Where did all the other money come from?
00:00:26
(RM): Ok. Well we need to go back, just a brief history of the Kellogg family. The Kellogg
family came to Battle Creek because of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. They came through
Pennsylvania, into eastern Michigan, became active in the church; the headquarters then and still
to some extent, is in Battle Creek, very important. So the Kellogg family came here, and Mr.
Kellogg, W.K. Kellogg was born in 1860 as the seventh son in a family of fourteen. They were
very active in the church, and his oldest brother was sent by the church to medical school to
come back to Battle Creek and start a hospital, clinic in Battle Creek. The family operation, the
business that his dad had, was broom making.
W.K. dropped out of school at about age 13 and went to work as a salesman, then went to Texas
to start a broom factory for the church. Came back to Battle Creek, and his brother Dr. John
Harvey Kellogg had started the hospital. Dr. Kellogg was an innovator, a very charismatic
person, changed the name to the Battle Creek Sanitarium, not Sanatorium, but Sanitarium with
an emphasis on lifestyle, and the Adventist faith of no caffeine, no alcohol, no tobacco, and a
vegetarian diet. He hired his kid brother, W.K. to be the business manager. So at about age 20, he
became business manager of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. And it grew and was a very successful
operation, and the Kellogg brothers of course began to experiment with what you do with grain
besides cornmeal and oatmeal, and that led to granules, and led to flakes. They developed a little
�production operation for those products to use at the San, and they became very popular. W.K., a
business man, wanted to start marketing them and the doctor refused. He said that would not be
appropriate. I think the medical profession has changed now, [laughs] but he thought it was not
appropriate to commercialize it.
In 1906 when W.K. was 46 years old he quit his job with the San and started the Kellogg
Company. He was a very successful business entrepreneur. We won’t go into all the tough
experiences he had along the way, but he was concerned with a good product, a healthy product,
good for the customer. He wanted to be a good employer, he wanted to be good, a good
investment for investors, and those were his goals. As he became successful, he was a genius at
marketing techniques, had this beautiful Sweetheart of the Corn back in 1909 and 1910,
advertising. It was a real change in the old American diet of bacon and eggs.
00:03:46
So, very successful, started the business, and then, as he realized he became a man of wealth, he
formed a little fellowship corporation - half a dozen friends in Battle Creek - to help him make
some decisions about how he could use some of his money. He said, “I know how I will invest
my money: I’ll invest it in people. I want to be a good steward of that which divine providence
may provide.” Those are his words. He wrote diaries and letters and so forth. He formed this
little group and out of that immediately began to demonstrate in addition to being a business
entrepreneur; he was a social entrepreneur. The first was to provide for, in celebration of his 65th
birthday in 1925, funding for a civic auditorium to benefit the total community, but to have as a
part of the Battle Creek Pubic Schools. So, it would have an educational emphasis; would be
used not just for civic events in the community but all the time. That was an innovation of
linking private funds with public funds for a purpose.
He had a grandson who fell from a second story window as a youngster and was badly damaged,
[with] physical and mental limitations. So he was concerned about opportunities. In his own
hand he said, “Here I am with all of my means. I have done everything I could do for Kenneth,
and I could do so little. How desperate people of lesser means must feel.” So again, when the
Battle Creek Public Schools were building a new neighborhood school, he went to them and
asked them to design the school so that it would be accessible. No steps, the classrooms,
everything to accommodate people of handicaps, a swimming pool. At that time most of the kids
in wheelchairs were polio victims, and so the swimming pool had a raised [edge, so] they could
come up in their wheelchair and sit into the pool. The teachers were trained, and kids from all of
the schools of the City of Battle Creek and beyond were bused to Ann J. Kellogg School,
mainstreaming the handicapped in 1929. So he was a social entrepreneur.
00:06:20
In 1930 he was invited to Washington D.C. by President Hoover to attend a White House
conference on children and youth. He came home and in effect said, “Well, I need to organize
my philanthropy differently.” So, he established the W.K. Kellogg Youth Welfare Foundation
because he was concerned essentially with kids. Named a board, and a director, started planning
in June, very quickly they decided that that was too narrow. So much of what determines the
�quality of life for kids is determined by things beyond: jobs, housing, and sewer and water,
recreation, hospitals and all the rest. So they changed it in the fall, to the W.K. Kellogg
Foundation, still with the same mission of helping people help themselves for the betterment of
mankind, but with a special concern for children and youth. So that has characterized the
foundation since then. [The trustees decided to confine their activities initially to even more
counties surrounding Battle Creek.]
00:07:35
Then he had a particular concern [for rural youth]. He had built a home at Gull Lake, outside, a
summer home and became quickly aware that none of the kids out here could go to high school.
It was twelve miles to Kalamazoo, ten miles to Battle Creek, so he worked with the local school
districts. Under Michigan law at that time, one and two room high schools could use tax money
to pay tuition to go to high school but they couldn’t use tax money for bricks and mortar outside
of their district. So he said, “If you can figure out…if you do want a high school, consolidating
grades one through twelve, and if you, if you can figure out how to operate it, I’ll build it for
you.” Over the door it still says W.K Kellogg Agricultural School.
So the emphasis shifted then to these seven counties, in public health, plus then hospitals for
access, school consolidation, and improvement of libraries. That led then, through the whole
decade of the 30s as their area of concentration here in seven counties. That led then to concern
with professions, like educational administration, public health administration, health services
administration, the whole concept of outdoor education. Built three school camps in which kids
during the school year would spend a week on nature education outdoors and then the camp
operate during the summer. So that was the decade of the ’30s; he was directly involved.
00:09:42
It’s interesting in the history of that period, the trustees in their report said we studied the issues
of importance in these seven counties and it was really health care and educational opportunities.
They studied then what other foundations were doing nationally. And they decided in their words
that “our resources will be used essentially for the application of knowledge,” in other words,
putting to use that which is already known. And says specifically, not research per se; research is
important, but we need to encourage its use. Not relief because other sources are taking care of
desperate poverty, but the application of that which [is already known]. What greater service can
we be, than to help people in their own lives, in their family, in their community, and their
institutions use that already known. That’s been then the characteristic of the foundation ever
since.
He also would say the foundation doesn’t have a problem, people have problems, communities
have problems, institutions have problems. We can’t solve all problems so we need to identify
some issues of special importance like education, like health care access, and then simply say to
institutions, to communities, “If you share our concern with this issue and have a plan to do
something about it, we’ll try to help you.” So rather than the foundation saying, now this is what
needs to be done and this is how you have to do it, if you’re going to get money from us; it was
�the opposite, saying if you share your concern for early childhood care in contemporary terms,
with a single parent or with both parents working daycare for children is tremendously
important. But the answer to that is so different in Grand Marais in Alger County in the Upper
Peninsula than it is in downtown Detroit that you can’t decide in Battle Creek how it should be
done. So, you simply indicate and then program it in that direction. So that’s been the
characteristic of the foundation through time.
00:12:04
(JS): Was that at the time an unusual approach? Was it more common to do outreach by saying
“Here, we have things; we want to come and do them for you.” Because in a way what you are
describing sounds like an awful lot of grant application procedures now, where if somebody says
I want to go do this thing and then you apply to foundations and try to find someone to fund it.
Was that a relatively new thing at the time?
(RM): Yeah, relatively new in the foundation world. More typically, they would identify a
problem and design, prescribe a solution, and if you wanted to conform to those requirements, it
was sort of a request for proposal versus simply identifying the issue and saying, “If you have an
approach that you think will really work in your community, we’ll consider it.” So that has
continued to be the pattern, and it made Kellogg, in many respects, different from a lot of the
major grantmakers. To some extent, you know, foundations change. I’m talking about the
foundation through 1995, and the Kellogg Foundation is completely different people now, so to
some extent it’s probably different because people make it different. One of my great goals was
somehow to be true to the vision and the values of the man who made it all possible. They
operated as a foundation for the first five years, the board would develop a budget, they were
going to build these units and so forth, and he would fund it. In 1935 then, if you look at our
annual report, there are really two foundations. One is the W.K. Kellogg Foundation with the
board that makes the grants and so forth. It has a small portfolio of its own. The big trust fund is
the W.K. Kellogg Foundation Trust, into which he put his share of ownership of the Kellogg
Company in 1935, 56 percent of the value of stock at that time into perpetual trust for the benefit
of the foundation. Now that’s an interesting interlock because the foundation trust, the
foundation has to report quarterly to the trust to say that they’ve had a board of trustees that met
monthly, in Battle Creek. We’ve gotten that modified so once or twice a year they can meet
elsewhere, hold a conference call to do some Battle Creek business, but get trustees out to site
visits. But basically, he was committed to having a monthly meeting of the board of trustees,
oriented specifically to hometown Battle Creek. So that made pretty clear some of the things that
he felt were important as he developed the concept of his foundation.
00:15:23
(JS): So then was the growth of the company, the value of the company, then directly affect what
kind of resources the foundation has to work with?
(RM): Oh yeah. That’s right. The foundation [originally had only Kellogg stock, now as a result
of the] Tax Reform Act of 1969, the foundation has a diversified portfolio. Now, the interesting
thing is that the growth of the foundation as I described, has been largely due to the tremendous
�success of the Kellogg Company over its now 100 year history. So, it’s been hard for the
diversified portfolio managers to keep up with the success of the company.
My predecessor, Dr. [Emory] Morris, was a wonderful man. He grew up in the town of
Nashville, Michigan. His father was a horse and buggy doctor in Nashville. Emory Morris went
to University Michigan Dental School. Didn’t go back to Nashville, went to the big city, Battle
Creek, to practice, and got involved with the foundation first of all when they started these
summer camps. They got dentists and doctors to come out and volunteer to give exams. So
Emory, I suppose was the newest dentist in town so he got the responsibility of organizing the
volunteers and then he became an employee in 1932, became the CEO in 1942, and retired in
1970.
00:17:32
He knew Mr. Kellogg well. I tried to benefit from his understanding. And then I made a point of
getting acquainted with grandchildren of W.K. At that time there where five living
grandchildren. Many of them were living in California and in Chicago, very little connection
back with Battle Creek. I tried to reestablish that, got especially well acquainted with two
wonderful grandsons: W.K. Kellogg II, who went into business in Chicago and then retired in
California; and Norman Williamson, Jr. I tried to learn more about Mr. Kellogg and his values
and his vision. So I wanted to be true to that, yet in a contemporary sense because Mr. Kellogg
himself was a change agent. He wouldn’t be doing things today as he did them in 1920 if he were
here. That’s never quite the way I approached it saying, what would Mr. Kellogg do? But tried to
look at his vision and it was in those letters at the time of the commitment of his fortune that he
ends up saying, “I’m glad the educational approach has been emphasized. Education offers the
greatest opportunity for improving one generation over another.” So consistently education and
then the multiplier effect of training professionals with different skills and different even values
does change the availability of delivery of services.
00:19:20
(JS): Now at the time that you became executive director, were there particular issues or
problems that were kind of in the forefront or that you really had to focus on or wanted to focus
on? What direction did you go in once you took over?
(RM): Well, programmatically, just moving in continuing the emphasis upon life-long learning,
which was a new dimension. Most universities didn’t see any organized responsibility for that
phase of education, so continued in those areas. The tremendous growth in the community
colleges was going on. We were moving then particularly in the proving of opportunities for
minority education, African Americans specifically then. Moved later to a quite different
problem of Native Americans and they were establishing their own institutions. There are now
37 or 40 Native American colleges. And then some institutions developed a particular orientation
to Hispanics, although that doesn’t seem to be quite as different as the African and the Native
American. So moved in a variety of areas like that, programmatically.
�The big challenge immediately, the Tax Reform Act of ’69, 1970. I am the CEO. There were a
lot of good provisions in that Tax Reform Act, one was the required payout. If you’re going to
have tax exemption, you need to be a benefit to society. But it was on a formula basis to be
established each year by the Secretary of Treasury. You couldn’t determine what it was, and they
related it then to the rate for short term Treasury Bonds that moved toward 12 percent. If you
looked historically, portfolios don’t perform that, the best long term study going back into the
early 20s is the University of Chicago. That’s where you come out with about a 4 ½ to 5 ½
percent, and that’s what we managed, but had to appear before the Wilbur Mills Tax Committee
and so forth to work on those issues. But the first reality was that in Michigan, foundation people
didn’t know each other. A wonderful guy named Bill Baldwin was head of the Kresge
Foundation in the fall of ’69 as all of the discussion was going on in Washington, had invited
foundation people in Michigan, 25 or 30 that he invited to lunch over at Meadowbrook Hall over
at now Oakland University. And so Emory had me go with him. So I became CEO and became
immersed in that. The payout was the big concern. Excess business holdings was a problem to
us, and we felt since Kellogg’s stock was publically traded - the big problem in a privately held
foundation if it wasn’t publically traded, how do you value it in terms of payout requirement?
The Kellogg stock was publically traded and we thought that could be separate. We were
unsuccessful in getting that changed. One very positive was the encouragement of the
Community Foundation, in which people like me who will never be able to establish my own
foundation can have the Mawby Family Fund as a little unit within the Battle Creek Community
Foundation and don’t have to worry about all the paperwork and the tax returns and so forth, but
can operate in a modest way with that. So a lot of good things.
00:23:29
I called Bill Baldwin and said, “Well, now that we know what the law is, we ought to have
another meeting and see how we can get acquainted in Michigan to working on these issues.” He
said, “Well, I invited you to lunch last time, you ought to invite us to lunch this time.” [laughs]
This is getting into the role I tried to play, a concern with infrastructure within philanthropy in
Michigan. I worked on inviting people from family foundations, from independent foundations
like Mott and Kresge and Kellogg, family foundations like Dow, community foundations like
Kalamazoo, and there were a few, and then corporate grantmakers. So we had lunch and talked
about the advantage of having a statewide meeting, getting acquainted and so forth. And so I was
chairman of the first conference of Michigan foundations. We met over in Ann Arbor at a motel
that had a Schuler’s restaurant. That was a fascinating experience, and that’s where I first got
acquainted with S.S. Kresge, Stan Kresge was there; just a delightful guy. That’s another whole
story. I’ve been blessed with great experiences. But one of the exercises we did at each luncheon
session was to talk about the future, each meal session. So the first question, “Should we begin
thinking about a conference another year, next year? How should that be planned and
organized?” So out of that process we ended up, by noon on the final day, three days, with a
committee established to plan next year’s event, a committee to think about organizing some
way for continuity, so moving from a conference to a council, and third, how could the whole
thing be funded? That led to the creation of the Council of Michigan Foundations, as one of what
we call RAGS, Regional Association of Grantmakers. [CMF is] the strongest of any of the
country, the premier. We’d be in desperate problems with state and federal public policy issues
and so forth if we didn’t have this organization working on improving governance, the governing
�boards, the trustees, staff, preparation, pre-service and in-service training, policy issues, and all
the rest. So that created the Council of Michigan Foundations, but then when you begin to work
in difficult public policy issues, like payout for example, foundations can lobby, but on very
narrow topics. We can’t do anything on health care or education or economics. We are just
directly related to the legal status of foundations. So, the ones who are the really important then
in most of those public policy matters are the grantees. I always call us the givers and the doers.
In our mindset at Kellogg, I always said the most important players in this whole process of
philanthropy are the ones who are making it happen in the lives of people and institutions,
communities, and neighborhoods. Everything we do [as grantmakers] should be un-bureaucratic,
we should be responsive, we should have quick turnaround time. The greatest disservice you can
do to an applicant is to delay the decision, particularly if you sense it’s going to be negative.
That’s the worst thing, to wait and wait and wait and wonder if it’s going to happen, because if
you’re the applicant, you don’t want to go off on another direction if the answer hasn’t come yet.
So our attitude was always, get back, and if you’re going to be gone, your secretary or someone
else can handle that problem, particularly if it’s a crisis.
00:27:40
We began to recognize the importance of collaboration between the grantmakers and the
grantseekers; with the grantseekers, the ones who do, because they have contact with legislators
and congressmen and all of their communities. If it’s an issue, for example, on the liability
responsibility of a volunteer, and if you’re a volunteer and something happens to one of the kids
or the adults, do you have personal, legal responsibility? So, all of the different aspects of
nonprofit organization operation. Again, through informal conversation, [it was] decided that we
needed to do something about bringing together the nonprofit world differently. I see the world
simplistically in our society; one is the for-profit, business-making sector of society. That’s the
generator of resources, and so that’s tremendously important. That’s the private sector. The
second sector of course is public sector of government at all levels. Very important that we have
good government locally, in the school district, the village, county, state, nationally. So that’s
imperative. The third is the nonprofit sector. Usually, of course dependent upon the private
sector, but usually with a lot of relationships both in policy and in practice, because most
nonprofit organizations get some tax money also in one way or another with all of the things
going on. So, those three sectors, and we needed to get together. In consultation, picked ten
statewide nonprofit organizations that had operations statewide in education, and health, and the
arts, we had the United Way, and so forth, invited these ten organizations to come together,
bringing two people: one, the chairman of the board, the citizen volunteer which is on the chair
of the governing board, and then the chief professional officer, chief of staff.
00:29:55
So we invited those 20 people to sit down and talk [on areas of common concern]. Immediately
of course, those in Big Brothers Big Sisters are in competition with the YMCA for money. So,
we’ve got an element of realistic competition but, on more important issues, a lot of common
concerns. We identified the business of recruitment of trustees and their training and how they
understand their serious responsibilities in governance, staff issues, etc. One of the big problems
for small scale nonprofits of course are benefits; health benefits and retirement benefits. By
�collaboration our little unit can’t do it but we can be a part of the Michigan Nonprofit
Association. So out of that meeting we set up [special committees], looking at what are the
common issues, what can be the goals, what are the kinds of things to go on, what about the first
meeting, how do we put together an organization and how might it operate long term.
The first meeting we called the Michigan Nonprofit Forum, just come together and talk. And
again out of that a process, leading [to organize] legally as a forum, three or four years later
named it the Association. And again, it just makes such a tremendous difference in the viability
of the nonprofit sector broadly. That was the second one that I got to be the founding chairman
or whatever.
Third, the Council of Michigan Foundations was [established in] the early 1970s. The founding
date of MNA is 1990. In 1991 too then, there were two developments that began to take shape.
At the federal level, there was talk of a domestic Peace Corps, of providing [service]
opportunities [for youth;] became AmeriCorps in which young people, people of all ages, but
basically it’s people from 18 to 25 could come together [in programs of public service]. If there
was going to be funding, there had to be an entity created in the state to manage that. And so I
was involved in the planning of the Michigan Community Service Commission. I did not
become a member of it, but helped organize that including funding to get it started. Then, [later
I] actually became a member. The commission is governor-appointed and Governor Engler was
concerned as his term limit was coming up and Mrs. Engler chaired the commission. How do we
make the transition to the next administration? [They wanted a credible citizen, without strong
political identification.]
So, the Governor and First Lady asked me to become a member of the commission and be
chairman. When there was a year and half yet in his term, I became chair, to deal with the
transition. Then of course Governor Granholm was elected and contacted the First Gentleman,
Dan Mulhern, lawyer by training, great volunteer, great leader. Both he and the Governor
committed to mentoring. So we met with Dan and persuaded him that he would be the public
chair, so I resigned as chair but have continued on the commission at the Governor’s request.
00:33:56
Then the fourth [statewide initiative on philanthropy] that I’ve been involved in is Dorothy A.
Johnson Center on [for] Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership. The whole area of philanthropy
had not been a recognized field of study: research, concentration, education and so forth. But it
started in some limited ways at Case Western Reserve, Yale and [elsewhere] with a course or
two, or with a little office side lined, not a part of the intellectual life of the institution. The one
exception was at Indiana, where with marvelous support from the Lilly Endowment, Indiana
University had created the Center on Philanthropy. Bob Payton became, maybe the second head,
the real dynamo in orchestrating the development of that. Bob had a distinguish career in
academia, had been University President, Ambassador to a couple of African countries and then
was one of the corporate grantmakers for one of the big oil companies, Esso I think. Anyway,
Bob did a great job of integrating the concept of philanthropy (giving of time, and talent, and
treasure) [throughout] the institution. They have adjunct professors in every college: in law, in
engineering, in business, as well as the social sciences and so forth.
�I think that’s the goal at Grand Valley State, to make [philanthropy an integrated part of the
institution]. Because whether your life is in teaching or one of the professions or business, your
civic responsibilities require you to, the expectation is that you, so that having a part of it in the
process.
The Lilly [Endowment] was the major funder; Kellogg became a major [partner]. I was never on
the board of the Center, but they have an advisory group very much engaged, a major supporter
again with another donor out of New York City. So began to feel that in Michigan, we needed to
have a [university-based] center on philanthropy somewhere because this concept even in the
private liberal arts colleges where you would think it would be a natural because they’re
dependent upon that their lifeblood, not in the curriculum much of anywhere.
00:36:25
(JS) But it wasn’t a conventional academic subject. It didn’t fit into a box. And again in a way
it’s also the application of things as opposed to the theory.
(RM) That’s right…So, wanted to get it in [Michigan]. In my role, I was on first name basis with
the Presidents of a lot of the colleges in Michigan. We had a lot of activity with the University of
Michigan, with Wayne State University, with Michigan State, with Western Michigan, with
some of the private schools. And then as Grand Valley came along, became engaged there. So
finally what we weren’t successful in getting any spark, you know got to have somebody
somewhere that wants to make it happen. So finally invited all of the public and private colleges
in Michigan, so Alma, Hope, Calvin, Grand Valley, all invited to a meeting; talked about the
idea, just talked about what’s going in, had the report of what Indiana was doing, etc. Had a
roundtable discussion and we adjourned, said, let us know if you have any interest. And there
was one spark. [laughs] Good old friend Don Lubbers, whom I’d known a long time. And so
that’s why the center is at Grand Valley State. Comes back to that whole notion that people make
things happen, money doesn’t make it happen in itself. Money’s useful but money doesn’t make
anything happen.
00:38:00
(JS) Of course, Lubbers was certainly an entrepreneurial spirit but if he was somewhere and saw
a good idea or whatever he wanted to go with it. I kind of miss that now but that’s a personal
aside. But anyway, so pick up on that. But, what did he have to do or what had to happen then to
actually sort of make that center happen? He says, “Okay, good idea...”
(RM) Yes, well then, you unearthed it, that’s up to them. How do they want to organize it? Look
at what Yale’s doing, Case Western, their own experience, and so forth. How would you
organize it? Again, the contribution that the foundation can make in those discussions of
someone, if you’re working on whatever the child care or whatever, and an applicant comes, is if
you can sort of sometimes be helpful saying, well have you seen what they’re doing in South
Chicago or what they’re doing in Los Angeles or whatever. Have you thought about this, that, or
the other? So there would be discussion based on, we’d talk with, how are they organizing
�things, how do they get adjunct professors in engineering and business to be concerned about
philanthropy and so forth, so interactive process but it really has to be the grantee. In my
judgment, if a foundation put together a blueprint saying this is the way you’ve got to do it if
you’re going to do it with our money, it’s a dead issue. It’s never the university’s program. That
was the philosophy, Mr. Kellogg’s philosophy I believe, that he had always had confidence in
the volunteers, he wanted the citizenship leader, he had great respect for the professions but he
respected them, and he didn’t tell them how it ought to be done. He monitored, he was very
much engaged, concerned, etc. So that’s the general philosophy that I tried to build in as we went
through tremendous expansion. So those are the four areas in Michigan. [CMF, MNA, MCSC,
and the Johnson Center for Philanthropy]
Now at the national level, I was involved with the Council on Foundations, which is the
counterpart of CMF. It was located in New York City. There were two entities there: the Council
on Foundations and the Foundation Center. The Council on Foundations, and if you please, a
trade association with this group, the Foundation Center, an intellectual fact-based resource, had
to be credible.
00:40:33
Now there was a pressure to put the two together, and I resisted that along with others saying
that’s the wrong way. If the Council becomes the factual resource about their own business, it
will never be credible; it has to have an autonomy. The net of that was to move the Council on
Foundations’ headquarters to Washington where the political action is. The Foundation Center is
still in New York City. It has relationships with individual libraries and has some other major
centers. I had not been engaged directly except indirectly in supporting of the center. The
foundation had been involved long before my time in helping create the Center had helped create
the Council on Foundations, but the big foundations didn’t participate, and that needed to be
changed. And so, I was a part of a smaller group to get Ford and Rockefeller and Carnegie and
the rest of us active. Not dominating, but we had to be a part of the game to make it
comprehensive.
But then they invited me at the Foundation Center - they needed to move from old technology,
ballpoints pens or whatever, to computers. And so they came out in 1987 and asked me to
become engaged with the fundraising drive. And they needed to raise $7 million to computerize
the Foundation Center. They had put together a grand plan, we were going to have regional
groups, and we were going to have a national group, and we were going to have a celebrity group
and I said yeah, I agree with the purpose but that’s a bunch of busy work. We ought to be able to
raise $7 million with 15 phone calls. So we did. But we raised $10 million. I went on the board
then and was chair in the transition of leadership there. And then went off the board. I was on the
board for five or six years of the Foundation Center as we made the transition both in technology
and in leadership. I was also on the board of the Council of Foundations. And we had gone
through, and I hadn’t been on the board but they had two or three different executive directors
that hadn’t worked out well, and became a member of what I always called “the search and
seizure committee.” [laughs] I got Jim Joseph, just an exciting guy who was with Columbia,
[inaudible] and got him to be the president. Then I was chairman a year, then the darn, I guess it
was House Committee, wanted to take up the excess business holdings again and I was on the
�wrong side of the issue, so I resigned as chair because I was going to testify saying, “If the stock
is publically traded it’s different than a privately held [asset].” So I was very active at the
national level, and chaired the policy committee of COF, for two, three years and so forth.
00:43:59
So I had the privilege of being involved in a lot of those issues. Interesting at the foundation
then, itself, one of the issues was making philanthropy a legitimate area of study concentration
and so forth in the academy, and the second one was leadership. Because it was a long time that
the great debate was, are leaders born and so inherited and Lord so-and-so passes it on to his kids
and so forth or can leadership skills at all be taught? There was just absolute division of thought
on that. My own orientation was well, there is such a thing as positional leadership if you get to
be president of the country, you’re in a leader, that’s a power position. But there are lots of
leadership opportunities. My definition of a leader is pretty simple: a leader is anybody who sees
either an opportunity or a problem and does something about it. And if it’s recreational activities
in the neighborhood for the kids, it’s a different person that’s going to start a little league softball
team, than someone who is going to deal with public access to technology and healthcare,
whatever. So, had observed that in applications, and I’d learned so much about health and
education and all sorts of things that were just fascinating, some mysteries became very
concerning. Anyway, felt that we were getting proposals by superb specialists, but none of the
serious problems can be dealt with by one specialty. And the key in leadership then, is to develop
a capacity beyond your own specialty to mobilize the others whose skills you need in order to
put the whole package together.
I always use the example in Michigan simplistically, the underground water supply. All of us
drink underground water. Ok and we’re concerned with purity of underground water. That’s
basically the responsibility of township government. It’s not even county or state, it’s township
government. But if you’re concerned with underground pollution, you have to be concerned with
technology, you’ve got to know soil structure, and filtration rates, and etc., and you have to see
where the underground streams are going, so you’ve got to have that technology. But the
solutions then in dealing with those were all political, and economic, and institutional. You have
to get the township board, the county board and the state. So you’ve got to mobilize those
specialties. So we had superb specialists bringing in proposals designed on their specialty,
inadequate to deal with the problem.
00:47:15
So in 1980, the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Mr. Kellogg’s foundation, we created the
Kellogg National Fellowship Program, a leadership program specifically to recruit young women
and men who had already established some degree of expertise and even reputation in their field.
And they’re probably in their late twenties, early thirties, late thirties, varied. But generally in
that, let’s say the age of the thirties, could join in a three year fellowship experience to broaden
their perspective, and coming together for group seminars on issues in this country and skills and
so forth, having an international experience both collectively as a group and individually. Each
then to develop their own study plan which had to be outside their specialty, it just can’t make
me a deeper sociologist. I’ve got to get into something quite different, and it could be music, or
�medieval history, but broaden your perspective. And develop skills then in helping to look at
issues that need to be addressed collectively, skills to bring those together. And so we started the
Kellogg National Fellowship Program in 1980. Sort of announced it saying, gosh we are going to
do this in celebration of the 50th anniversary. There ought to be at least one group of Kellogg
Fellows. If it seems to have promise we’ll continue it. If it doesn’t then we will just write a grand
report saying we celebrated. [laughs] Well it became dramatically successful, and you find
physicists with theologians with economists.
The toughest group for us to include, the academic world could accommodate and visualize that
very easily, business, a little more difficult, and in your business career, some degree of risk in
moving out of your track to broaden. In some areas of the academic world, real risk in moving
out, because you’re suppose to get narrower and narrower, not only your left foot, it’s the big
toe, so in specialization. So some problem there, but the most difficult for legal reasons was to
engage anybody from the public sector, if there were a growing administrator in the department
of public health, department of education, difficult. But bright young people and just fascinating
the kinds of experiences they had, and again practical experiences. I remember meeting with a
group you know that were going to spend the night in the emergency room at Detroit Metro
Hospital. Well, you know, they saw a sector of society, you know they’d been teaching at a
university, never saw the kinds of people, the kind of problems that people out of desperation,
the only place they could go to was the emergency room. We tried to get them into a whole
variety of settings, nationally and internationally. Following that then, we began to get more
acceptance of the concept of leadership and I’m surprised you know now, I look at catalogs and
College of Medicine will have two or three courses focusing on leadership, or engineering,
business and so forth. So that it, I think, is becoming a credible area and I think the foundation
had a useful role in that.
00:51:29
So, those are just some thoughts about some of the areas that we tried to give emphasis. We had
some early starters, that (I retired in ’95) I wish they had continued but didn’t. One was foster
care, the whole concern with families for kids. We had demonstrations in seven different places,
some at the county, some at the state level, with a goal of termination of parental rights when it
seems so obvious that it ought to be done. A lot of kids are held in that terrible situation for three
or four or five years beyond when really they need to get out of a dysfunctional home family
situation. So goal was one policy regarding parental rights, still protecting but not making - it’s
really disturbing to me when you read about a youngster who’s been adopted and seven years
later the dad comes back and had never signed the release. So this youngster that’s had a family
for seven years is now put back with dad who didn’t care.
So parental release, and then one foster care family and permanent placement within a year,
because these little guys we dealt with have been in eight or ten foster care families, no
continuity, no tomorrow for them. So some disappointment, but that just disappeared. But that’s
just changing and life moves on. So those are some of the thoughts about that.
(JS) We covered an awful lot of material here and I want to return a little bit to the business of
sort of philanthropy as an academic discipline or something to train people in. Why was it
�particularly important to kind of get that established and to launch programs and do this? What
was the need there for that?
00:53:47
(RM) You know, a part of it, one of the unique aspects of the founding of America it seems to
me, is that it came in with no governmental structure. And most of the initiatives, because there
was no government, was voluntary action. Four of us decided our kids needed a school, and
we’re going to do something about that and we get others and we start a school. Or we need a
health clinic and so forth.
It developed really in our society as a great tradition and sort of an expectation. We give more as
volunteer time. We lend our talent to the board and to volunteer leadership. We give money. The
biggest source of funds, of course, is individual giving, not foundation giving, not corporate
giving, it’s individual giving. That needs to be sort of an expectation of good civic responsibility.
Usually it’s not been incorporated in an organized way, even in courses, where I don’t see how
you can study history, for example, without recognizing that it was all volunteers that ran the
Underground Railroad. It never would have happened otherwise because government couldn’t do
it, but citizens did. Issue after issue after issue, it’s volunteer action that get things started and to
try to build that in, and to learn some lessons on how, why people are motivated, develop a
concept of accountability, sense of responsibility. I go back to five basic values when I look at
anything. I’ve looked at the value of honesty, the value of caring, the value of respect, (I may
disagree but I can be respectful and respect for other positions) sense of responsibility for self
and beyond self, and then fairness. We don’t very often talk about those things as being
important in life. All you have to do is look at what happened in greed in the last two years.
Ethics has been destroyed.
00:56:13
PART 3
(JS) You’ve done a lot here in terms of laying out sort of the set of principles and ideas that you
followed and worked with and have kind of followed main parts of your career path and so forth.
Is there a particular initiative or thing that you kind of got involved in or helped promote that you
are kind of particular proud of that you haven’t brought up yet?
(RM) Well, as I think nationally, internationally, we haven’t talked about geography. I
mentioned the foundation started in seven counties, spread nationally into Latin America in
1942, to Europe after World War II and went for about 30 years. And the concern in Europe,
why would a foundation go to Europe after World War II? It was because of food systems. After
World War I, Europe industrialized, and they imported raw materials and food. Food production
and agriculture stagnated. They were still using the technology of the teens in the ’40s. And
when the Germans came in and took the food, those countries did not have the capacity to feed
themselves. They were concerned with the revitalization of food systems and then the quality
again of quiet life in the countryside. So the foundation became involved with fellowships in
�Finland, Sweden, Denmark, West Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the
Republic of Ireland.
00:57:58
As the director of agriculture I had to go to those countries each year, tremendous experience,
but a concentration on fellows coming here for advanced study in all of the specialties of
Agriculture, Engineering, and Marketing, and Horticulture and so forth. Plus then an emphasis
on women’s role in community life, the most powerful women’s organization I ever experienced
was the Irish Country Women’s Association. Marvelous example of where women took the
initiative in changing the role of women in society through their organization. It was a time
when, for example, women couldn’t study in the college of agriculture. The concern then with
rural youth also, and 4H or young farmers’ clubs and so forth, so fascinating period of time, then
Europe changed.
We began looking then as a board at geography and studied the continent of Africa, which is a
very troubled continent, then looked at Latin America. In 1980 we began to phase out over a five
year period of our direct involvement in Europe and doubled our activities in Latin America, all
the way from Mexico south and then began to look at Africa. In 1985 then, and it was a period of
course when apartheid in South Africa became a great issue, appropriately so. The Kellogg
Company was experiencing shareholder requests to divest, get out of South Africa. And Bill
LaMothe, who was then chairman, and I was on the board because of my role with the trust, and
when you’re at the company board meeting you have a completely different professional
governance role then at the foundation concerned with every shareholder and their best interest.
Shareholder requests a couple of years to divest, and Bill said to the board of directors simply, “I
can’t do that,” he said, “We have been there since 1947, I’ve been there, I’ve given our
employees 25 year pins, we have more than exercised the Sullivan Principles, we have blacks in
every aspect: finance, and production, and sales. We are involved in the villages in improving
schools, and housing loans and health services.” He said, “I can’t. If we sell it will go either to a
German company, Japanese, or South African and all of that will be lost”. So he asked three
members of the board to go to South Africa and talk with anybody we want to before we go,
anybody there, come back with a recommendation to the board of directors. And named Pete
Estes who had retired as President of General Motors and had gone through a lot of those
exercises with their operation in South Africa, Paul Smucker of the jam and jelly company and
me. Now I had talked with our [Foundation] board ahead of time then because we had been
thinking about South Africa, so I went with, in a sense, two questions in my mind, as we met
with labor leaders, Kellogg was the first to have an organized black labor union. Went into the
villages, talked with government officials, both sides of the issue, came back and recommended
that the company stay. That leading the playing field you can’t make much difference in the
game.
01:01:56
And I recommended then to our board that we begin a program of bursaries. There I discovered
that most of the big universities were all integrated, and in their judgment there were more
qualified blacks to come to the university than they had scholarship support for. So we picked
�five areas. We picked the health professions, food systems, education, business administration,
and public administration, because there need to be more blacks qualified in all of those fields
with new opportunities. Then in talking over there, they said people from foundations, they come
and talk to us and then nothing ever happens.
So we authorized the vice president to go and meet with those universities, half a dozen of them I
think initially, to talk about their situation and to end up right at the end of the meeting saying,
we’ll start. You’ll have 20 fellowships starting this fall for undergraduates. We’ll see them
through to the completion of their degree so long as they continue to make progress. [snaps
fingers] It started immediately. That would be 19[85]…I went in February and the first group
was that fall, quick. So that five years later, apartheid of course ended much more quickly. By
then some of these people could move very quickly in the bursaries. So geographically moved in
that way and then expanded the program after I retired. So I’ve been pleased with some of those
initiatives, sort of counter, but it’s back to what’s right. [laughs] What should you be doing.
I want to mention also; I talked earlier about youth and prolonged adolescence. Council of
Michigan Foundations had a goal of spreading the community foundation concept throughout the
state. You had it here there and elsewhere and voids in some areas. They wanted to develop a
program so we could say that every community in Michigan has access to a community
foundation. You get to the northern part in the Upper Peninsula, it’s not the population base and
economic base to have a community foundation, but you can have regional ones, and sub-groups
within one organization. So they came with a proposal and we talked about that. That was
encouraging, but then said, well this looks interesting, put together your plan as we talked about.
But please think about how you might engage teenagers. How can we get kids more responsibly
involved? Because they’ve got energy, they’re smart, they have the right values, they want to do
things. And they came back with what they Michigan Community Foundation Youth Program,
MCFYP. Each community foundation, in order to qualify, the foundation could qualify for a
Kellogg matching grant up to a million dollars, but to do so they had to establish a youth
advisory council.
01:05:15
The Kellogg money had to go into the youth account. Now the matching, they could use it in the
youth account or they could put it into whatever their local situation was but Kellogg dollars: a
youth account. The kids involved then in managing it, particularly in making grants from the
income. So in every community foundation you would have a youth advisory council, basically
high school age, 14, 15, 16 through high school. Sometimes if they go to a community college
they may be still local but whatever.
And, gee, I’ve sat in on some of those meetings. They’re tougher than the foundation board. You
know they’d say, “Well that’s fine Jim, that’s a good idea but if you change this and this you
could get that done for $75 instead of $90. We’ll give you $75.” [laughs] Very thoughtful,
careful. And we’ve done, on some of these things, longitudinal studies to see what happens later.
And you’ve got ten years later, they’re now graduated, they’re working, they’re married etc., etc.
But they are engaged. I’ve just been pleased with that youth initiative.
�The other change that we accomplished then in Michigan, in order to be on a nonprofit board you
have to be 18 years of age, on a board of directors. But we got an exception. A nonprofit board
can have 16 and 17 year olds on the voting board. Now there’s some specifics: the majority have
to be adult. Increasingly you think about the YWCA board, or the Urban League board or on, on,
and on, even a nursing home board, if you get kids involved, the service projects out of school
will began to relate to nursing homes, etc. So it just begins to make a difference, so excited by
that change.
(JS) Now, are there particular things that you tried that really didn’t work in terms of that stands
out in your memory?
01:07:35
(RM) There were three things that again, you hear me coming through and that’s just because
people had the privilege of having a certain role based on experiences in the past. One that I
really hoped we could do something about is to do something to strengthen the role of the
America family. The role of the family in the lives of so many kids has sort of disappeared,
disintegrated, unraveled; and most kids who end up as unproductive adults are a consequence of
inadequate home and family situation in the early years. Look at those who are in prison or
perpetually on welfare, etc., etc., just a disastrous kind of dysfunctional situation. We did some
things but never really felt we found any way of addressing that tension.
The second area that I am continued to be concerned about is our public school system. I’ve
given speeches on this for the last 25 years; we’ve done some bits and pieces. But basically the
public school system was established and institutionalized in 1835 with Horace Mann in
Massachusetts after the North West Ordinance 1787, support for the one room country school,
when he put together the curriculum: start school when the potatoes are dug and quit school
when it’s time to plant corn. And it made sense in 1835, doesn’t make sense now, that ten weeks
of the school year is wrong, the school day is wrong, with the state changing the role of the
family and yet some of those things are just locked in. We made a little difference in the middle
school, but, and some interesting little demonstrations, but nothing which has changed anything
in the system and I’m really concerned now that Michigan, you know, is moving to an 18 year
stay in school. I think just that compounds the problem unless we change the nature of high
school for so many kids. Not every one of them see any reason for four years of math, and to
make that a requirement to be a high school graduate is just going to, seems to me, be
counterproductive. And every youngster needs the opportunity to go to college and every,
certainly ought to do something beyond high school. Not necessary a baccalaureate, it would be
disastrous. A lot of jobs wouldn’t get done if we all had to have a bachelor’s degree. So, we’re
just not facing that issue at all.
And the third is even more subtle and it’s reinvigorating caring, in what I call the caring
professions. This is an old farm boy, doesn’t know any better, he thinks when he’s practicing
pulling weeds out of the garden. The caring professions, what are they? Health obviously;
education obviously, every effective teacher is a caring teacher despite the details that are
imposed; third, the whole welfare social services system; fourth, the judicial system; fifth,
theology.
�And we’ve lost so much of the caring component and we benefit from superb specialization and
so forth, but somehow the caring dimension is not encouraged and is not in a sense rewarded. A
teacher now in the third grade classroom and the seventh grade classroom success is based on a
MEAP score, which is something that’s just quantifiable in very specific terms, and no credit at
all for the nurturing, they call it soft skills, of human relationships. The biggest problem whether
it’s the family or neighborhood or the county or the world, is people getting along with people.
And those are the soft skills and we have no way of putting caring…
(JS) You can’t quantify them or put them on a test.
(RM) You can’t, and that really troubles me. That’s unfinished business. I was never smart
enough to identify, I always saw my role as a CEO to identify with people and stay out of their
way and help whenever I could.
01:12:31
(JS) Alright, well, it makes for a very good story, so I’d like to thank you for taking the time to
tell it to us today.
(RM) Good!
01:12:35
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/020a4e1705e46f8f4f614dbb4b328619.mp4
d795e39b112664440cd54164d98014cb
Dublin Core
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Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project Interviews
Subject
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Philanthropy and society--Personal narratives
Family foundations--Michigan
Charities--Michigan
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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.
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/516">Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project (MPOHP) (JCPA-08). Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives</a>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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2017-05-02
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eng
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audio/mp3
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video/mp4
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JCPA-08
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2006-2008
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Johnson Center for Philantrhopy
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StoryCorps (Project)
Oral History
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/516">Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project (JCPA-08)</a>
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Mawby, Russell G. video interview and transcript
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Mawby, Russell G.
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Russ Mawby discusses his youth on a fruit farm and involvement with 4H and the Boy Scouts, his agricultural studies at Michigan State and Purdue Universities, and his military service in the US Army. He reflects on the history of the Kellogg family, the Kellogg Company, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and his work as CEO of the W.K. Foundation. He details efforts of the Foundation in Michigan and abroad, his involvement with the Council on Foundations and the Foundation Center, and his work developing the Council of Michigan Foundations, Michigan Nonprofit Association, Michigan Community Service Commission, and the Johnson Center for Philanthropy. He concludes with reflections on the initiatives that have given him the most pride, and those that still need the most work.
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Smither, James
Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership, Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Subject
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Philanthropy and society
Personal narratives
Charities
Michigan
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JCPA-08_MawbyR
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eng
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a>
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video/mp4
application/pdf
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Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives
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2010-05-27
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/3ce8ed1073718d1c9505021f3eee71fc.pdf
71dc576528aefc5c35f25c9568f793c0
PDF Text
Text
Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
Johnson Center for Philanthropy
Grand Valley State University (GVSU)
September 10, 2010
Myron D. Mast, Ph.D.
Professor, Grand Valley State University, School of Public, Health and Nonprofit
Administration
College of Community and Public Service
The Council of Michigan Foundations, Johnson Center for Philanthropy at Grand Valley State
University, and GVSU Libraries’ Special Collections & University Archives present an oral
history interview with Myron D. Mast, September 10, 2010, conducted by Dr. James Smither of
the History Department at GVSU, and recorded at WKTV studio, Wyoming, 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 Myron Mast, September 10, 2010. "Michigan Philanthropy Oral
History Project", Johnson Center Philanthropy Archives of the Special Collection & University
Archives, Grand Valley State University Libraries.
James Smither (JS): We are conducting this interview for the Johnson Center for Philanthropy
at Grand Valley State, and the interviewer is Dr. James Smither of the Grand Valley State
University History Department. Professor Mast, can you begin by giving us a little background
on yourself?
Myron “Mike” Mast (MM): Okay. I was born in 1940, a year before Pearl Harbor, in eastern
South Dakota- rural area. I lived there approximately twenty years until I left to go to college.
(JS): What kind of school did you attend out there?
(MM): In elementary school, actually the first three years were in a one-room schoolhouse,
which was cool, two different one-room schoolhouses. Then I began attending a parochial school
in town, two-room school and did that until the eighth grade. And then nine through twelve, my
parents sent me and my older brother to a parochial school about 75 miles away, where we lived
with another family while we were attending school and came home every weekend.
(JS): When did you graduate from high school?
�(MM): I graduated from high school in 1958 at age 17.
(JS): What did you do at that point?
(MM): I started going to South Dakota State University, didn’t know what I wanted to do, but
South Dakota State University was within ten miles of our home. And played a lot of pool and
snooker with a good friend and he ended up getting his college degree there. I dropped out and
took over my older brother’s truck driving job. My older brother left to go to college, so I just
stepped into his position and held that for about two years, drove a truck.
(JS): Alright. What got you out of that?
(MM): Well, it is a little hard to say, but I think I knew that there was really not much future in
eastern South Dakota. You know, farms, small farmers were going out of business. Certainly my
parents encouraged all three of us boys, I was the middle boy, and we had two younger sisters,
but encouraged us to go to college. After my oldest brother went it just seemed easier to go.
Actually, I lived with him and three, four other guys in an apartment when we went to college.
We went to Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which was our church-related school.
That was kind of the stepping stone to get out of eastern South Dakota.
(JS): What did you major in at that time?
(MM): I majored in Political Science. That was kind of ironic I guess. I really liked history, but
my older brother was majoring in History, and I didn’t want to major in the same subject area
that he did. I had already taken a couple of Poli Sci courses and I liked them, so I majored in
Political Science, got a minor in History. I think ended up taking enough courses for a major as
well, but really had only the declared minor in History and a minor in Economics and a major in
Political Science.
(JS): By the time you graduated, did you have any idea what you wanted to do next?
(MM): Yes. It seemed important to me to go to graduate school because I didn’t want to be a
high school or elementary teacher. I didn’t get a certificate or anything like that. I got a general
bachelor of arts. During my junior year I began dating pretty single-mindedly with the young
lady that I ended up marrying. We both graduated in 1964, she with a teaching degree. She was
from New Mexico. With respect to graduate school, I applied to the University of Colorado in
Boulder, and I applied to the University of Arizona. I was accepted at both places; she was able
to get teaching positions, well I think the one in Arizona came through after she had accepted the
one in Denver. There were a lot of teaching positions available in those days, and she taught
junior high for three years while we lived in Denver and I attended grad school in Boulder. That
was for three years, and then of course this was during the Vietnam era. A lot of young folks
were going to college. And so some prof. came up from Lamar State University, Beaumont,
Texas, knew my mentor, I guess, at University of Colorado and asked if, you know, “Do you
have any good graduate students that could teach for us?” I accepted the job and went down
�there and taught for two years before I got my doctorate. I taught from 1967 through 1969 at
Lamar State University.
(JS): On these college campuses, what sort of atmosphere was there? Were these places where
you had anti-war protests or other things going on? Or were they more quiet than that?
00:05:50
(MM): When I left Colorado in 1967, there wasn’t a lot of activity going on, oddly enough. I
know in my own mind, at that point, I was strenuously against the war. I don’t know that I took
any action or even wrote any letters. When we got to Texas, there it was a little more difficult to
be anti-war. It was a conservative, Bible-belt area, and there were problems. Robert Kennedy
was assassinated, Martin Luther King was killed while we were down there, and those kinds of
things. And we had a child. Our first child was born there. But when I got back to Colorado in
1969, indeed, on campus, yes, we ran into lots of interesting things. One of the interesting things
was that I was a, what was I called, I think a Teaching Assistant or something, and I had a class
of 250 students. And I was working on my doctorate yet at that time, and I was taking the final
two courses that I needed to take to fulfill the degree requirements. I [taught] a class of 250
students with, I think, three or four grad students who were assisting me. I was a grad student. It
was in the fall semester, and it was after Kent State.
(JS): Probably 1970 then.
(MM): Could have been 1970 then by that time. Yeah. Yeah sure it would have been. They [antiwar protesters] called a strike, and the headquarters for the strike was right outside my
classroom. So, needless to say, I didn’t meet classes. I think for a week or more we skipped. I
think some of the profs probably met classes elsewhere, but I didn’t. I didn’t dare to run the
gauntlet. Yeah we got involved in a little bit of it there.
(JS): What were you actually doing your doctoral work on?
(MM): We had to choose a major area, and I chose Public Administration. I did that early on
already in 1964, ‘65. I thought I wanted to go into city management. That was my first intention.
If I had gotten the MPA degree, I would have immediately became eligible for the draft, and
probably been drafted. I was 26 or so, and I didn’t want to go in anymore at that stage. So, I
petitioned the department and I think there were others who did the same thing, if I could work
directly towards a Ph.D. I had decided really I didn’t want to be a city manager anyway. You had
to wear a tie and, you know, dress up all the time. So, they allowed me to work directly towards
a Ph.D. At the time that I went to go teach in Lamar State University in Beaumont, Texas, I was
working directly on a Ph.D. I had passed my comps, my Ph.D. comps by the time I got down
there. But I had to finish two courses yet when I came back in 1969, and of course I had to do the
dissertation.
(JS): What was that on?
�(MM): My dissertation was on planning and zoning. I can’t remember the title, but looking at
four models to explain planning and zoning decisions. I looked at legal model, a planning or
professional model, a political model, and an economic model. I used questionnaires that I
passed around to three different kinds of communities. The Planning Commission members
mostly were the ones who responded and City Council members as well.
(JS): What range of area were you doing that across? Were you doing them just locally? Or did
you send them out to other parts of the country?
00:10:13
(MM): No, it was just Colorado. Boulder was considered to be my university town, you know,
rapidly growing and so on. Then I went to one suburb, which is now called, I think it was called
Westminster at that time, and it was a new residential suburb primarily. And then Pueblo,
Colorado was an old established, well it wasn’t decaying, but it was certainly an old, established
community. I was interested to see if there were different kinds of attitudes affecting decisions at
that time. It was an interesting project. I did try to send parts of it off to get published, and gave
up after a while. You know, just thought, “Well, it got me my Ph.D. That’s what I wanted.”
(JS): When did you finish that?
(MM): I intended to have it finished [by] the fall of ’71, at which time I was scheduled to go
teach at Ball State University. I had accepted a position there, but I caught the mumps. I didn’t
know that I hadn’t had them as a child. I caught the mumps and for about two months I was
unable to do anything practically. I went to teach at Ball State, fall of ’71, and I finished the
dissertation in the spring of ’72 and defended it at Colorado.
(JS): Were you teaching Political Science there?
(MM): Political Science. I was in the Political Science department. I don’t believe I taught any
Political Science, American Government or anything like that. I taught Metropolitan Politics and
courses like that, but I taught mostly Public Administration at Ball State University.
00:12:08
(JS): How long did you stay there?
(MM): I stayed there for four years and was making satisfactory progress towards tenure, but my
wife’s relatives were in Grand Rapids. At any rate, in ’75 I was hired by Grand Valley and so got
a promotion from Assistant Professor to Associate. I thought that was a nice, easy way to do it.
Grand Valley’s salary structure and summer time opportunities and so on was a little bit better.
We had two children by that time. My wife had a good job in Ball State in Indiana outside of
Muncie. She was teaching in a high school, and was never able really to get back into teaching
after we got into Grand Rapids because by ’75, ’76, certainly the year after we got here, the job
market was just terrible for teachers.
�(JS): What was Grand Valley like at the time you got there?
(MM): It was confusing. It was a different kind of university structure then, although, I was still
a novice. I had only been in universities for six years. Grand Valley was a cluster college, and I
went into the College of Arts and Sciences, the main one, and then there were the other three or
four. It was kind of interesting. It didn’t take me long to really feel that I fit in. There were
fantastic opportunities to get to know people, people in the community. We had a lot of adults in
classes because of various federal programs. I taught in what was called the School of Public
Service. Even though Public Administration was my area, I had a lot of Criminal Justice students
in some of my classes. They were in-service people for the most part, going back to school on I
guess it was called the Safe Streets Act. Their tuition, book expenses and so forth was all paid by
the government. It was a bit intimidating to come into a classroom and know that any one of
them could arrest me [laughs]. You know. And corrections people too we had in class. So, it was
fascinating.
(JS): Were you teaching essentially Public Administration at that stage?
00:15:07
(MM): Yes. I taught one class, Research Methods that was used by all the students in the School
of Public Service, which included Legal Studies majors and Criminal Justice and Public
Administration. For a while, I taught another senior-level class that was used by all of the
majors, but for the most part I taught Public Administration. Yeah. And then of course, in, what
was it 1981, ’82 I believe we began to reorganize and, well, there were just lots of different
things that happened then. I no longer taught much for Criminal Justice, although I ran our
internship program when another fellow retired. That must have been about 1978 or thereabouts.
I ran the internship program then until 2004, and that was just a super experience, you know.
(JS): What kinds of places were you sending interns to?
(MM): Well, initially from 1978 until I think about 1989, I had Criminal Justice, Public
Administration, and Legal Studies interns. So, Criminal Justice students, a lot of them would go
intern at state prisons, Kent County Jail, Allegan County Jail, etc. Police students would intern
with state police or city police. There was a cadet program going on I think with the Grand
Rapids Police Department, and students would work the front desk and that kind of thing. Public
Administration students would go into working with city managers and other governmental
positions. We had pretty good arrangements with a couple of federal offices, the Department of
Agriculture office. We had a student there, you know, subsequent students there over a period of
four, five years. Legal Studies students would go to work in law offices or for the Legal Aid
Society, that kind of thing.
00:17:30
(JS): Over the course of that next decade or so, did you get involved much by way of larger
research projects or grants or other things like that? Or take fellowships anywhere or anything?
�(MM): No. While I was at Ball State, I had a National Science Foundation Grant to study at the
University of Minnesota one summer, and the emphasis there was Public Policy and Public
Policy Analysis, which was a new development that was coming into Political Science at that
time. It was a marvelous opportunity, although, I was supposed to learn statistics there that
summer and I did not [laughs] - terrible teacher. But anyway, at least I blamed it on, well the
other faculty members that were at that fellowship thing also complained about the stat. prof. But
we had a lot of economics and systematic thinking, that type of stuff. So that was a very good
experience. From 1975, no I had no grants, no, did I? At Grand Valley, I had a sabbatical in
1981, and I had a sabbatical in 1980…
(JS): Probably 1989…
(MM): 1989. Yup, and another sabbatical in 1997 or so. That was about it. I didn’t, it just
seemed like we were inundated from 1982 on with program development and students. Already
in 1975 when I came to Grand Valley, the real important thing, I mean, we stressed good
teaching. We stressed scholarship and all that. The overwhelming thing that we had to
concentrate on was growth: recruit students, help them get through, you know, advise them, get
them placed in internships and that kind of stuff. So we spent a lot of time on student [matters].
(JS): And at that time, the standard teaching load would have been twelve hours.
(MM): Oh yeah. [But I had released time as Acting Director of the School for Public Service,
1977-1980. And I coordinated public administration programs from 1982-1987].
00:20:01
(JS): So you’re really a full-time teacher primarily and that’s what your job is essentially.
(MM): Oh yeah, absolutely, all the way through really. It wasn’t until the mid to late ’90s that
my teaching load began to get to the point where I should have been able to do more research.
Not that I did, but I should have been able to do a lot more. Yeah.
(JS): One of the things that happened at Grand Valley over the course of the time you’ve spent
here is that the programs have developed that are connected to public administration and
nonprofit studies, philanthropy, and the Johnson Center itself. What sort of relationship have you
had with some of those different branches as they have developed?
(MM): Well, let’s see. From 1975 till 1985, ’86 I can truthfully say there was no thought in my
mind of teaching nonprofit or developing a nonprofit program or anything like that. But, I had to
come up with a sabbatical proposal a year before I actually could take my sabbatical, and I don’t
remember what my sabbatical proposal was, but it had to do with budgeting. I modified it, you
know, at some point, and directed it towards budgeting in nonprofit organizations. By the time I
took my sabbatical in 1989, it was perfectly obvious to me that this evolving and developing area
of Nonprofit Studies was very important, and that it was not just an opportunity for Public
Administration as an area of study to encompass nonprofits, but that it was appropriate that it do
�so because public and nonprofit, I think, go together much more closely than nonprofit and
business, or so it seemed at the time. I think it is still true.
There were stirrings in academia in the late 1980s, there was a conference called and I didn’t get
word of it because we weren’t members of the National Association of Schools of Public
Administration and Public Affairs. There was no such thing as accreditation in those days, but
we had this national organization that we could have been members of, and [because of the cost]
we were not. So, I wasn’t on their mailing list. Well, there was a conference of some sort held in
the Chicago area, and I later on got material from it. That’s where they began talking about
Public Administration as an area of study within Public Administration programs.
(JS): Nonprofit as an area within…
(MM): Yeah, Nonprofit as an area of study within Public Administration programs.
00:23:13
(JS): From there did you go and actually begin to develop a single course or a program?
(MM): Yes. We hired a new faculty member to be, well, we went through another reorganization
at Grand Valley and we became a School of Public Administration in the fall of 1990. But,
already in 1989, we were almost functioning as a separate administrative unit. We hired Eleanor
French who was a perky, older woman, but boy she was sharp and she knew what we wanted to
do and what we needed to do. She had excellent contacts in the outside world with both
Nonprofit and Health Administration. She was able to work better with upper-level
administrators at Grand Valley than what I had ever been able to do. She joined our department
in 1989, and I was on sabbatical and she was beginning to run the department. We had no
records, and I mean it was just a disaster. So, I would meet with her, usually for a martini or
something on a Friday during my sabbatical. We would talk about what had transpired so far and
where we should go, and I think she got a lot from those meetings as to what had been going on.
By the end of fall 1989 I felt prepared to begin developing a course, and the question in our
minds was, do we want to start this on the graduate level? On the undergraduate level? Or what?
Eleanor, meanwhile, was working with people in the administration, John Gracki, Dean Travis,
and working with the Kellogg Center already beginning in the fall of 1989. Certainly by 1990
she was well on her way, writing for a grant, and in order to get this grant we had to have some
kind of curriculum in place or at least ready to be in place. I checked just today to see you know,
when did I do this? I wrote up three courses: one of which was called Nonprofit Organizations,
another one Nonprofit Management and Policy, and I don’t remember the name of the third one
now. At any rate, we had three courses that were going through the curriculum committee at the
time that she was writing for the grant. I got to teach the first one in the fall of 1990. The really
interesting, I mean there are several interesting things about this all. Nonprofits have been around
for forever in the United States, but nobody had written much about them. There was an article
about Andrew Carnegie or something about giving away your money, you know, and that was
part of what we studied. But, I had to have a bibliography with each one of these courses that I
proposed. It was hard to come up with half a dozen books that related there to, and a few articles.
�While I was on sabbatical, I attended a conference on nonprofits in Seattle, and met some people
there. That was very helpful. Somebody from the New Social…
(JS): New School.
(MM): New School, there we go, in New York City, and Carnegie Mellon, Mellon, Carnegie
Mellon, yeah. That’s in Cleveland, right?
(JS): Pittsburg.
(MM): Pittsburg…Oh. What’s in Cleveland then?
(JS): Case Western.
(MM): Hmm. Well, it was one of those. Somebody from the University of San Francisco, is that
a private school?
(JS): Yes.
00:28:01
(MM): I spent some time with each of them or attended their sessions and talked with them and
got a lot of good ideas. It was a small conference; there weren’t very many people there. It was
apparent to me that this was an area that was really going to go gangbusters because, well, this
was the time President George H.W. Bush talked about a thousand points of light. It was
apparent what was happening in the field of public administration, and I mean it was pure,
perfectly apparent that public administration was contracting out more and more governmental
functions to nonprofits, and that it was working fine. This was a great thing.
(JS): What proportion of your teaching over the next decade or so got directed toward nonprofit
rather than public administration generally?
00:29:00
(MM): Well, really by the mid ’90s, I was hardly involved with nonprofits anymore other than,
when we wrote the grant, the grant was funded for a million dollars I believe. Eleanor didn’t get
as much credit as she was due, but we loved her for it, at least those of us who knew. The grant
called for four different things. One was for a degree emphasis at least in the graduate program
with courses. Second was for philanthropy and nonprofit as an area of study to be infused in
other courses, much as we would do with ethics or something like that, that it would just kind of
be part of the general area of study. Third, the grant was to set up a center for the study of
nonprofits. The Center for the Study of Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership is actually what it
was called. The fourth thing had to do with the community somehow. I can’t recall how. That
didn’t affect me as a faculty member. But, as a faculty member, even though by 1996 or so I no
longer taught anything purely nonprofit, it was a part of all my courses and it was a part of all
�our thinking, and advising students, placing them for internships in nonprofit organizations. It
was just a booming area.
(JS): As the Johnson Center, what became the Johnson Center for Philanthropy was getting set
up, what connection did you have with that, or were you helping with the grant writing process
or implementation of it?
(MM): I really didn’t help with the grant writing process other than to develop those three
courses for Eleanor. I may have provided some other information, but I don’t recall a lot. We
hired a new faculty member who I think had more nonprofit experience than I did. I had been
involved in Boy Scouts and YMCA type programs, and I was on a board of a nonprofit
organization in Grand Rapids at that time. But, otherwise, I had not done a lot of nonprofit type
of work. I had read some books [laughs]; book learning. But, I think Eleanor in writing the grant
worked with the Kellogg Foundation, and I think the two of them more than anything, decided
the boundaries and the emphases of this grant, what we should try to do. Out of that came these
four different things. I don’t think anyone was necessarily in the driver’s seat on that, although
perhaps Kellogg was more than anything else because Joel Orosz was at Kellogg Foundation at
that time. [He later joined GVSU.] I asked him to serve on a panel at a conference in Lansing
and he came and I met him and we talked. So I had some contact, but we didn’t really work
together on the grant at all. I’m sure he worked with Eleanor.
00:33:12
(JS): Once we get to the mid ’90s and beyond, what has really been your area of focus in
teaching and work since then?
(MM): Since the mid ’90s, I’ve taught always the “bread and butter” course of Research
Methods. Already back in the 1980s, we had made Research Methods in the Social Sciences into
a cross-disciplinary course. I would have History majors in there who were getting a B.S.,
Communication majors, people from Soc, Psych, everywhere. I would always teach Research
Methods, that was more than a fourth of my teaching load. Another fourth of my teaching load
was always the internship program. I taught Human Resource Management on the undergraduate
level. I’ve been teaching that for [35] years I guess. For a while, we had no one to teach
Budgeting. We had an adjunct teaching Budgeting. I knew that she didn’t want to do it much
anymore, so I sat in the class with her. I asked her if I could visit the class. Of course I had taken
a Budgeting class you know, in grad school. So, I sat in the class and decided, you know, I could
do this [laughs]. So I taught Budgeting for a while. I’m not sure I did a very good job but, you
know, you step in if you have to. But I only taught the Nonprofit Organization twice. I taught it
the first time, had fifteen students in it. People who were, I mean I could’ve just let them talk all
night. I didn’t have to say much of anything. I didn’t really lecture very much at all. We had
presentations and material. I remember Barb Van’t Hof, for example, who just recently passed
away. She was very active in nonprofit work in the community. She was in that class and
eventually got her Master’s Degree with us. But there were a lot of others who knew more of the
practical aspects of nonprofit organizations than I did.
�(JS): So you had basically a class that had people already involved in this kind of work in one
way or another?
00:35:43
(MM): Yes. Yes. One of the younger students worked for the Lutheran Social Services
Organization I think it’s called; something like that. Yeah, there were a couple of police officers
who were involved in parochial education with their children and served on school boards and
things like that.
(JS): And you taught it a second time? How much later?
(MM): I taught it a second time, and it did not enroll as well. I guess it was in the winter
semester. I don’t know what the deal was, but we only had about six people. One of the students
was extremely knowledgeable and willing to contribute above and beyond, so it wasn’t a boring
semester for me. I mean, it turned out to be very good. But, I felt that I was just stretching myself
too thin. We hired Mike Payne, we hired Donna VanIwaarden, and these were people who could
teach in that area, [and] didn’t want to teach in some of the areas that I had been teaching in. So,
I just kind of let it go. Plus, we hired Thom Jeavons, I think whom you know, and I guess he
must have taught a course for us each semester I think in addition to his other duties with what
came to be called the Johnson Center.
00:37:16
(JS): Over the course of the time that you spent at Grand Valley, how would you characterize
how the school has changed?
(MM): We’re much bigger [laughs]! We’re much better. Certainly the faculty is, we’ve got a
bunch of bright people on the faculty that I associate with daily. I’m very impressed, almost
intimidated, really good people. And our students are so bright. My goodness. Not that we didn’t
have bright students back then, but we certainly had some very marginal students as well who
had a hard time making it.
(JS): Because some of the kinds of things that you teach, you are really in a position to feel a
little bit of the pulse of what kind of undergraduates go through and see the traditional students
as well as the nontraditional ones that you might get in Public Administration. So, you do have
something to measure them by if you are teaching the kind of the course that an awful lot of
people take. You’ll see that.
(MM): Yeah. I think particularly, I guess Research Methods because Social Science Research
Methods involves some statistical analysis and some methodology and it was kind of a foreign
course to a lot of, particularly the older students. I had a lot of police officers particularly, “What
do I have to take this for?” [laughs] So, I would try to make it relevant to their interests and their
needs. When I started teaching that in 1975; there was nothing I could adopt for a good text
book. I think the first Criminal Justice Research Methods book, and it was also applicable to
Public Administration, came out finally about 1980. If I had had my sabbatical earlier, I could
�have written it [laughs], but, well I wouldn’t have done as well. It was a good book. That was a
challenging and hard course to teach. I don’t teach it much anymore because we’ve reorganized
and we now have a PA Research Methods class that’s taught by another faculty member.
Students are generally smarter. By the time they take this Research Methods class they’ve had
Statistics. And of course, we have the technology. We have a statistical program that we can use
in class that they’ve used in their stats class. So we can cover just a whole lot more material and
make it a more meaningful class, I think. Things have really changed since the mimeograph days
[laughs] it seems like. Wow!
00:40:30
(JS): What do you think have been the biggest problems that have accompanied the growth? I
mean, I got to Grand Valley in 1990, and they had eleven thousand students and that was a lot
more than a decade earlier. Now we are at twenty five or something like that. What problems
have you seen come up during the course of that time?
(MM): Well, when I got there in 1975, the initial controversy was, do we want to have any
graduate programs? There was the Seidman Graduate School of Business because it had been
endowed. That was okay, but do we want to have any other graduate programs? Well, starting
just after I got there, a couple of graduate programs in Education, and that kind of opened the
floodgate I guess. And so, even the hardcore liberal arts, undergraduate emphasis type of people
who were afraid of losing money, status, etc., began to realize that probably graduate education
was an okay sort of thing. But, it really wasn’t until the mid ’80s and ’90s that we really got
going with graduate education.
Another major problem that I think Grand Valley faced was that we were a commuter school out
15 miles from Grand Rapids. Not much housing on campus at that time, very little; just the
dorms and the Ravines. We began teaching off campus in Muskegon at Muskegon Community
College and downtown Grand Rapids, Union High School; wherever we could find rooms to
teach in, we would teach some classes. I supported that idea. I thought that was a good idea.
Then in the mid 1980s we got land next to the Grand River and built the Eberhard Center which
opened in 1987. Well that was our foot print in Grand Rapids, and I was confident that we were
going to be able to grow and prosper as a two campus university. I knew there were things that
had to be ground out yet as to who should be down here and who should be out there, you know,
but… like in 1987 when we started when the Eberhard Center opened up. In 1990 the Public
Administration programs moved downtown into rental quarters, 25 Commerce. Western
Michigan University’s master’s program in Public Administration program was just mopping up
the whole area of western Michigan. Now, it’s all us. You know, it took ten, fifteen years, but we
hired good people, good faculty. Boy!
(JS): So how large has the Public Administration program become?
(MM): I think we have about 250 graduate students. They’re not full time, all of them of course,
but 250 graduate students, which was an unheard of figure to me because I remember the Dean
asking me one time, this would have been 1985 or ’86 just after I had taken over the graduate
program. I had coordinated it for about seven, eight years there. “How big do you see this
�getting? Where do you see it going?” “Oh,” I said, “I think we’ll probably top out at 60 or 70.
That’s about, that’s a good sized graduate program in Public Administration nowadays.” Well, it
was in the ’80s, but [not now anymore]. He didn’t like my answer then either [laughs], and of
course I was wrong. We really did grow way beyond, but we hired additional faculty too and that
helped us to grow. We have about 250 graduate students and we have about, I would guess
around 150 undergraduate majors.
(JS): Is it generally less common to be doing that kind of thing as an undergraduate major?
(MM): Yes. There are about a hundred schools in the country that offer an undergraduate major
in Public Administration, and there are a lot more than that that offer graduate degrees in Public
Administration. MPA, the master program, or the master’s degree, is really considered entry
level into professional work. But, I think the undergraduate degree has helped us serve the
interests of a lot of people who wanted to get into the nonprofit world and couldn’t quite see
themselves going on for a master’s degree, either for monetary reasons or they felt it was too
challenging or whatever. They would get a bachelor’s degree and do fine in the nonprofit, in
many of the smaller nonprofit agencies as event planners, fundraisers, and things like that.
(JS): To look back over your teaching career and your time at Grand Valley, is there a particular
aspect that you enjoyed most or are most proud of?
00:46:04
(MM): Oh, let’s see. I think it was difficult to let go of things as we grew. Obviously, you know,
there came a point when I had to absolutely sever myself from any contact with Criminal Justice
students or Criminal Justice practitioners really because there just wasn’t time. I mean, there
were too many people. That was difficult to do. And, the Legal Studies program in the mid ’80s
just had no one to run it, so I tried to kind of keep it going. We had part time instructors. I wasn’t
the coordinator of it or anything like that, but I know that I helped it stay alive. Now, we have
excellent faculty, you know, it’s an excellent program, it’s accredited by the American Bar
Association, all this kind of stuff. Things have just, just boomed. But, the difficulty I suppose
along the way always was you know, you had to [let go]. Okay like in nonprofits, here I got
involved in nonprofit study, taught a couple classes then realized, “I can’t spread myself that
thin.” And we had others, Thom Jeavons and so on, who came along, and that was their interest
and that was their expertise. Well, let them do it then. It was great. It was, it was fun.
(JS): So you had what was, eventually became three or four different jobs.
(MM): Sort of, yeah. Oh man. Yeah. It was pretty rough and tumbled. I came here into a faculty
of five, five people. I was the sixth, and that first year, I had never run into anything like it that
was so much acrimony. There were the two older folks, and then there were the two younger
folks, and then there was me and Bob, an older guy who tried to, you know, keep them from at
each others’ throats. It was not a fun time. I mean, it was challenging in a way, so I suppose it
was fun in that sense, but I lost some sleep over it I know that.
(JS): Did the dynamic change as you brought in more people or people retired?
�(MM): What happened is one of the persons, took a two year leave of absence, and that helped.
Then another retired. I think he was encouraged to retire. But personal relationships-wise, there’s
always controversies in small groups, even in medium-sized groups. But I’ve had, in my opinion
anyway, excellent relationships with my colleagues since 1980, thereabouts. I’ve had, you know
when I think about it some [excellent colleagues], Jim Walker was a Criminal Justice prof. that I
was instrumental in helping to hire in 1977, he tragically died I guess it must be seven, eight
years ago now. Good guy, you know, you could just talk to him about anything, anytime and he
didn’t feel threatened. He didn’t threaten me I guess, and we just always got along well. And
then my favorite colleague, I suppose was Bob Clark, who is now deceased. He retired probably
14 years ago. He would be well into his eighties by now. Just really a nice guy, an Irishman from
Chicago you know; had good times. He taught in the Political Science Department but came into
the Public Administration program when we reorganized in the early ’80s. So, I got to know him
then. We worked together well.
(JS): Now at this stage of your career you’ve kind of moved towards the phased retirement
business or what are you doing now?
00:51:48
(MM): Yes. I’m in my fifth year of phased retirement. When I asked for phased retirement I was
eligible for Social Security and I thought, “Well, I’ll ask for five years.” That’s what I thought
the growing rate was. I guess it was. There were others that were asking for five years and got
five years. So I asked for five and they gave me five. I didn’t think I would use five, but you
know the economy kind of went in the drink. My 401(k) took some hits, and I’ve been healthy
and I guess I still am enjoying it. I’m finding it harder to learn people’s names, students
[laughter]. I can’t… I don’t know. I’m having a hard time with that. Always in the past, I would
know everyone’s name by the third week of school maybe, maybe the fourth. It was a thing that
came [easily], but this will be my last year. I intend to try to retire. I’m kind of looking forward
to it. I think I’ve done this long enough.
(JS): Do you have an idea with what you’d like to do with the extra time once you’ve got it?
(MM): Well, yeah. I’ve got a lot of books I’d like to read. We have one son here with two
grandchildren that are in their teens now, and so who knows, in another ten years if I’m still
living I’ll have great-grandchildren probably. And then we have a son in Austin, Texas. He and
his family have two little ones. So, what we’re starting to do, starting last year and the year
before I guess already, is to spend some time down there in the winter. We finally bought an
inexpensive condo down there and are renting out part of it. We can live in part of it when we’re
down there. So far that’s working out okay. It’s hard to run rental property that’s twelve-hundred
miles away. It’s been working out okay. I guess I don’t plan to do a lot of traveling. I would like
to explore my home state more, South Dakota. I’d like to explore Michigan more. I don’t feel
that I’ve been around enough. When I grew up in South Dakota, I grew up in the East River part
of South Dakota, and the West River part is just west of the Missouri River and is just a
completely different state. I just would like to know more about it I guess. Michigan, I’ve never
been to Houghton or, I’ve been to Sault Ste Marie, but I haven’t been around as much as I’d like.
�So, that kind of traveling and in Texas we’d like to do some traveling. New Orleans, I’d like to
go there again, but I don’t think Europe. While I was teaching at Ball State University I had a
chance to teach in Europe at Air Force bases. Ball State had a contract with the U.S. Air Force,
so we spent six months in Germany, two different locations. I taught graduate classes to Air
Force Officers. You know Monday and Tuesday and Thursday nights we would teach or
something like that. And then Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, man we’d pile in the car and go
here, there, everywhere. Over the 4th of July we were in Paris which is, you know, a matter of a
few hours drive from where we were and everything’s close. And that was fun. That was really,
we had a good time. Ran out of money, of course, we never got to Rome [laughs]. We got into
Italy quite a ways, got to Florence and Pisa and so on. And then, while I’ve been at Grand
Valley, I kind of inherited from another faculty member a program that involved graduate
students shadowing sort of, their English counterparts in Bristol at Bristol University. It was with
Bristol University and they set up the contacts that we made. We would go there and we would
live for a couple weeks in Bristol. And I did that one year. My wife came with me and we spent a
week in London and you know, marvelous. I wouldn’t mind going back to England again, I
guess, that would be fun. It gets to be expensive to do that kind of travelling and I don’t know
that we’re going to have that much money. We’ll see.
00:56:46
(JS): So much for the 401(k)….
(MM): You know, it just depends.
(JS): Before we close out the interview, are there other particular things that stand out in your
mind about your career, your time at Grand Valley that you haven’t brought in here yet?
(MM): I think we need to say a couple more things about the philanthropy and nonprofit study
because I mean the grant, of course, that Eleanor got in 1990 or 1991 was certainly the impetus
for it, but Thom Jeavons only stayed, I think, a couple of years and then left. And then we hired
Dott, Dott somebody, Dorothy [Freeman] somebody, can’t come up with her last name now. And
she was good too, but only stayed a couple of years. Well, with that kind of, we were still feeling
our way. It really took off, I guess, with Donna VanIwaarden, who was our faculty member in
Health. And I remember being kind of perturbed, you know, “Gee Donna, we need you to teach
Health. How come you’re gonna do that?” She was just so remarkably effective at it, in my
opinion. She, I don’t know when she took over as director of the, what we call the Center for
Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership. She must’ve taken over maybe in 1996 or 7 or 8,
something like that. She got the grant renewed, got another grant, got a couple grants, I think.
And by that time also, Dorothy Johnson was getting interested in our program. She probably had
been involved in it earlier, I just wasn’t aware of it. Her involvement and Donna VanIwaarden,
and you know, by the time we moved into the DeVos Center in 2000, we were a respectable
Center for the study of philanthropy and nonprofit leadership. You know we didn’t, we weren’t
in the same league quite yet with University of Indiana or Arizona State, but, we eventually got
into that league too I guess, or so it seems now. Dorothy Johnson certainly was a big push. And
in general, well I know we’ve gotten some grants from other sources. And Margaret SellersWalker, who also taught in our program, was very much interested in nonprofits, had been active
�in nonprofit work, and even though she was a faculty member in Public Administration, she was
much involved with the Johnson Center. And just respected people from the community began to
pay attention to us. We began to have more interactions of that sort. It just boomed. Now did,
Kathy take over when Donna...? Yeah, Kathy took over from Donna.
01:00:24
(JS): Do you see this as an area where there’s still more room for growth and development?
(MM): Well, they’ve gone in directions that I’ve never even thought about. I mean, that shows
you how much attention I’ve paid to it. They’ve really, for example, they, I think Joel Orosz
began this teaching grantmakers how to make grants. You know how to evaluate grant requests
and things like that, a Grantmaking School. Well, that’s nationwide as far as I know. And Joel
had to kind of had to step off due to health concerns. But that’s one big thing that has gotten us a
lot of attention. We also got involved with American Humanics [now called Nonprofit
Leadership Alliance] and that was funded initially by the Johnson Center. Let’s see, when did we
start American Humanics at Grand Valley? I guess about 2003 probably, 2002.
01:01:09
(JS): And what is American Humanics?
(MM): Let me tell what American Humanics is. American Humanics was developed by several
large nonprofit organizations. The leaders of these nonprofit organizations got together: Boy
Scouts, Girl Scouts, YMCA, and things like that, America Cancer Society, Red Cross, and so
forth. Got around the table and said, “What do people need to know, coming out of college to
come to work for our kinds of organizations? They should know…” They more or less set out a
curriculum. And it was called the American Humanics curriculum. And they do not give a
certificate or a degree or anything like that, but they recognize a program as being affiliated with
American Humanics. They, it costs thousands of dollars per year, I think, to belong to that
organization. And students come out then with at least, it’s not on their transcript, but they
certainly have some sort of a certificate saying that they’ve taken the appropriate number of
courses.
When we joined American Humanics with money from Kellogg to do this, we hired a young
woman from Denver who worked with us for a couple years and did a good job, but left when
her husband had an opportunity in Colorado to go back. Then we hired Quincy Williams, who’s
just been dynamite for us. Quincy worked with American Humanics in their headquarters in
Kansas City. Some, I think, some family connection helped bring him to us. He’s now our
American Humanics man. Gee, you know, that’s been a big boon on campus because it’s not
public administration, it’s the entire campus. Anybody can major in anything and take a select
series of, I don’t know, five or six courses, and do an internship and attend a national conference
and that’s it. You’ve got your American Humanics. It’s garnered a lot of attention, I think, for
the study of nonprofits, and for philanthropy in general. So I think that’s a development that a
colleague of mine, Martha Golensky, who’s now retired for some time, she and I went to a
conference in Kansas City to explore whether we ought to join American Humanics and we
�came back and said, “Yes, we ought to join.” This was probably, I don’t know, 1990 or
something. Of course, there was no money to join at that time. We didn’t, but we knew about the
American Humanics program for a long time. That’s been a real good way to instill the study of
philanthropy and nonprofits into a wider range of students at Grand Valley. So that’s been kind
of surprising to me.
I think the community, CRI, Community Research Institute, is that what it’s called? Gustavo
[Rotondaro] is involved in that. I’ve looked at some of the data that they collect and it’s
fascinating, it’s just marvelous to look and play around with that. They do other kinds of things.
Let’s see, what else do they do? I know that we have some kind of tripartite agreement with
Arizona State and Indiana University and Grand Valley where we have exchanges of scholars
and I believe there’s an opportunity for people from Grand Valley to, for example, get a Ph.D. by
not being on campus all the time at Indiana University. It’s really been quite an honor for Grand
Valley to be in that league I think. And I think we belong in that league. Indiana University was
ahead of us a little bit. And that’s kind of one of the interesting things I think about the study of
philanthropy and nonprofits. It’s wholly appropriate that Indiana University be the, one of the
leading lights in this area. Because I taught at Ball State for four years in Indiana, and the whole
political culture is very citizen-oriented, very civic involvement, spoil system also, but anyway,
citizen involvement in public affairs. And that’s where the nonprofit area of study and public
administration kind of married up. Under those terms, you know that we’re both involved in
public affairs. One is a little more altruistic; the other is a little more mechanistic, maybe, a little
more efficiency administrative in orientation. But we’re all involved in the same game. So, it’s
been exciting to see the evolution of things the way they’ve gone. Fantastic. Been a great career,
can’t believe it, can’t believe it.
01:07:36
(JS): Time moves fast sometimes.
(MM): I guess so, I guess so. I was looking at some old papers today, just kind of to refresh my
memory as to how we started this in the late ’80s, early ’90s. There were a couple of memos that
I wrote that were pretty…exclamation points [laughs]. I don’t know, I guess I must have, you
know, had some strong feelings about various things. I certainly have always felt that there’s a
certain amount of ideological, what, discomfort between public administration and nonprofit.
Part of the underlying theory, I think, of philanthropy is to keep government smaller, diminish
the need for government a bit and allow civic and citizen involvement. I think that’s appropriate.
But it does kind of cause sparks once in a while when either one side or the other side pushes too
hard.
So I need to finish out this semester and be around for a few events next semester. I won’t be
teaching next semester because I’m teaching full time this semester. That will be my half time
work completed at the end of April. I guess I will clean out my office and throw away a lot of
things that I don’t have room for at home really and don’t really want to keep anymore
[laughter]. Some of these things, you don’t want to let go of. You really want to, kind of live it
over again. Although some of the stuff, I’m glad to get rid of.
�(JS): Thank you for taking the time to come in and talk to me and tell me about it.
(MM): Thank you for giving me a chance to roll on. I hope I made some sense. I think, you
know, we’re in a good place for philanthropy and nonprofits really in western Michigan because,
I didn’t mention that, but you know we’ve just benefited enormously from philanthropy, local
philanthropy. I mean, the DeVoses could have given their money, you know, anywhere. The
Amway folks, this is their community, and it still is. I mean, third generation. That’s marvelous. I
mean, that’s been a real boon for the Grand Rapids area, the whole west Michigan area. So, I
hope they, I hope this kind of thing continues, because I don’t have that kind of money to give
around, but I can benefit from it, you know. We all benefit from it.
(JS): We can teach the people who work for them to it better.
(MM): Yes. Okay, thank you.
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/35166eb55c8139712c966ef7e6fff87a.mp4
ce1a851cd49edf8e4527d2184f385e0e
Dublin Core
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Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project Interviews
Subject
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Philanthropy and society--Personal narratives
Family foundations--Michigan
Charities--Michigan
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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.
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/516">Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project (MPOHP) (JCPA-08). Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives</a>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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2017-05-02
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eng
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JCPA-08
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2006-2008
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Johnson Center for Philantrhopy
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StoryCorps (Project)
Oral History
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/516">Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project (JCPA-08)</a>
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Mast, Myron D. video interview and transcript
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Mast, Myron D.
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Myron "Mike" Mast, Ph.D., discusses his early life and education in South Dakota, his move to Grand Rapids to attend Calvin College, and his graduate work at the University of Colorado. He discusses the development of public administration as a field of study at Grand Valley State University, the role of faculty in shaping the School of Public and Nonprofit Administration, development of the nonprofit curriculum and the Johnson Center for Philanthropy, and his plans for life after retirement.
Contributor
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Smither, James
Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership, Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Subject
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Philanthropy and society
Personal narratives
Charities
Michigan
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JCPA-08_MastM
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eng
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video/mp4
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Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives
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2010-09-10
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/b0d3144e22965e68f5e272d0443332b2.pdf
2389689b0016701c20005fa56d431ec1
PDF Text
Text
Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
Johnson Center for Philanthropy
Grand Valley State University
Oral History Interview with Dorothy A. Johnson, May 5, 2011
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 Dorothy “Dottie” Johnson, May 5, 2011. Conducted by
Dr. James Smither of the History Department at GVSU. Recorded at GVSU, 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 Dorothy A. Johnson, May 5, 2011. "Michigan
Philanthropy Oral History Project," Johnson Center Philanthropy Archives of the Special
Collection & University Archives, Grand Valley State University Libraries.
James Smither (JS): We’re talking today with Dorothy Johnson, better known as Dottie
Johnson, of Grand Haven, Michigan, who has had a long career in philanthropy. We’re
doing this interview as part of a series for the Johnson Center on the study of
Philanthropy at Grand Valley State University. The interviewer is James Smither of the
History Department at Grand Valley. Now, Dottie, can you begin with some background
on yourself. Start with, if you don’t mind, where and when were you born?
Dorothy Johnson (DJ): Oh my goodness, James. I was born in Los Angeles, California,
September 29th, 1940. My parents had built their home in 1935 in Inglewood, on Park
Circle, better known as Morningside Park.
(JS): And what did your family do for a living at that time?
(DJ): My father worked at Paramount Motion Picture Studios for 40 years, on the back
lot. He had nothing to do with any of the theatricals. He was head of the scenic
department; made sure all the pieces went together. And I recall, he let my brother come
and work there during the summers, but he was not interested in having his daughter do
that. My mom was a volunteer. It wasn’t until I was in college when she went into real
estate, and was quite a business woman.
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�(JS): With your father working on movie lots, did you ever get to go see him at work?
(DJ): Oh yes. In fact, many of my friends certainly enjoyed birthday parties, getting to go
to the back lot. I mean this goes way back. We saw, some of the old movies. Bing
Crosby, Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour, they sent Christmas cards, it was kind of fun.
(JS): Alright, now what kind of education did you have?
(DJ): I went to public schools, had a fine education in California. California’s public
school system then was really one of the top in the nation. After graduating from
Morningside High School, I went to the University of California at Berkeley. I was there
for four years, majored in Speech, got very involved with student government. Actually
was vice president of the student body and through that had the opportunity of meeting
people like John Kennedy, President Kennedy, Robert Frost, the first Russian astronaut. I
had an office. I didn’t even realize it when I ran for office, I was paid $85 a month, and a
secretary. What a deal!
(JS): Did you have an idea of where you wanted to go or what you wanted to do after
that?
(DJ): Well, actually, at Berkeley, I was a Speech major, and I wanted to be a teacher, I
thought. In the interim, I learned of the Harvard Radcliff Program for Women in
Business, which is the first year of the Harvard Business School. This is a program that
had been in existence about 43 years, a graduate program. We had the same classes, the
same courses, the same cases as first year students at the Harvard Business School, who
only admitted men. Harvard Business School was the last graduate school at Harvard to
admit women. Anyway, I had the distinction of being in the last class. It’s hysterical now
to go to reunions and find yourself the “youngest” at those reunions. I did not complete
my MBA; I met my husband there, who was also at the Harvard Business School. He
convinced me that it was a very good thing to be married immediately. In hindsight, do I
wish I had my MBA from Harvard? Yes. But as he said to me at the time and it’s proven
to be true, “What can you do with it that you can’t and haven’t done without it?”
(JS): Was he farther ahead of you at school or the same year?
(DJ): Oh, do I have to tell? He’s five years, five and a half years older than I am. So he
wanted to get on. We moved to New York City. I worked for J. Walter Thompson. There
were twelve men in an executive, junior executive training program, and one woman: me.
(JS): How did you get into that? Was there just a network connection kind of thing out of
Harvard? How did that work?
00:04:50
(DJ): Yes, there are connections. As part of the year that I had, I spent six weeks at J.
Walter Thompson. Those were called internships. Frankly, my boss had attended the
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�Harvard Business School and I think he was curious to see what a woman could do. I’ll
never forget, my first week on the job, the head of then Life Magazine, which no longer
publishes, the head of advertising took me to lunch at Danny’s Hideaway. He sat there
and drank two martinis while I drank iced tea. I was much more comfortable talking to
him about his children that were older than I am than about the latest media campaign.
Later I asked him, “Why did you invite me for lunch then?” and he said, “Because if you
make it big time, I’ll always be able to say, I took you to lunch your first week.” [laughs]
(JS): So you’d impressed somebody.
(DJ): Oh, I don’t know about that.
(JS): What kind of work did they have you doing?
(DJ): I was a media space buyer, looking at demographics. This goes back so far, I
remember the computer that we had, which now today is handheld, took up an entire
room. There were binary cards and flashes and such. We did analysis work, and we
worked with what the pursuits of the clients were and what media match that you might
have.
(JS): Were there any big or large accounts you worked with? Or brands or things we
would have heard of?
(DJ): Oh yes. I worked on many large accounts because particularly then that was J.
Walter Thompson’s niche, Lever Brothers, some of the soap products. I have to say;
sometimes it was a little difficult to get excited about a soap product. But it was more
watching the results of the advertising, seeing the sales that would be generated, and the
importance of all of that.
(JS:) How long did you stay in that?
00:06:55
(DJ): We were there just for two years. From New York, my husband suggested that we
move to Grand Haven, Michigan, where there were some family businesses. Fortunately,
he and many others put together JSJ Corporation. So ultimately, Mart became CEO of
JSJ. I was 25 years old, moved from New York City, having lived in Los Angeles,
Boston, and San Francisco. It was a bit of a surprise. You know, to be honest, you
couldn’t blast me out of there now. I threw myself into the volunteer circuit at that point.
(JS): What kind of work did your husband’s business do?
(DJ): He’s a graduate chemical engineer with an MBA, but it’s a diversified
manufacturing business, automobile parts, boring things.
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�(JS): So they’re manufacturing things. What was the first thing you volunteered for or
signed up for once you got out to Michigan?
(DJ): [laughs] I have such a funny story on volunteering. We had been here four or five
days. We received a call from my husband’s old boss, Jim Perille, who said, “Friends of
ours are going to live in Grand Rapids, and I’m going to be there, and couldn’t we get
together?” Ultimately we invited them to come to brunch at our home on a Sunday.
Audrey Snite, who was then chairman of the West Michigan Girl Scout Council, came
and we talked. Keep in mind; we didn’t even have children at this point. Before it was
over, she asked me if I would serve on the board and be vice chair. So I said, “Audrey, let
me learn a little bit more about the Girl Scouts.” I had been a Girl Scout, so I certainly
was…but that’s how that all started. Truly, things happened in rapid fire. I was raw meat,
25 years old; I had worked in advertising, and now I’m living in this small town. It wasn’t
too many years later I was asked to be on the state United Way board, the state Arts
Council board, and then one thing led to another.
(JS): Did you have a family as well?
(DJ): I am very pleased to tell you we have two daughters. They are now; one daughter is
living in St. Louis, another right here, she’s a doctor married to a doctor, in Grand
Rapids. Growing up, let me say, we wanted a family, thought it would happen
immediately. And when it didn’t, that is when I ensconced myself in volunteerism.
Eventually, it did. Our daughters are very close in age; we’re a very tight knit family,
which is very special to us. But, by volunteering for these organizations…oh, let me say
also, I was one of two women, first women on the Grand Haven Area Planning
Commission. I was doing a lot of different things. I realized that I wanted to focus my
life. It needed some focus. About that time, two leaders in Grand Haven, Vin Erickson
and Miller Sherwood, worked together to create the Grand Haven Area Community
Foundation. At that time, I was asked to be a member, and then to serve on the board. So
I was helpful to them, in fact served as the third president.
00:10:44
If you’re asking me where this all came from, so I worked on the Community
Foundation, coincidently was invited to go to then the Conference of Michigan
Foundations. I had laundry piled up everywhere and two little rug rats running around. I
thought that was a pretty good deal. At the same time, I needed to focus. So I went to this
conference, sat between Harding Mott and Stanley Kresge. Before it was over, keep in
mind I was quite young then, they asked me to join their board. So I did. Talk about
circumstance, and this was fluke. And then, and you have to stop me when you want to,
because this story goes on and on. There was a staff position became available, 15 hours
a week, and I raised my hand and said, “I’m interested.” They weren’t so sure I was
interested. I said, “No, I’m serious.” I commuted to Grand Rapids to work with the
Council of Michigan Foundations. I was the sole staff person. I was supposed to work 15
hours, I probably worked close to 40. After a while, I suggested that we move the office
to Grand Haven, Michigan and the board supported that. John Hunting was extremely
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�helpful. He shared the office space with the Conference. And there’s a whole story to tell
about how Russ Mawby put that all together.
(JS): I would like to back up a little bit here. Explain the time you got involved, and what
was the Conference of Michigan Foundations doing, and why was it over here and not
say over by Detroit, where everything else is?
(DJ): Interestingly, it was then called the Conference of Michigan Foundations which
became the Council of Michigan Foundations. Russ Mawby, who was then the CEO of
the Kellogg Foundation, recognized after the 1969 Tax Reform Act, when literally twothirds of the tax act that year dealt with foundations that we needed to tell our story
better. Thus, he invited nine people, and they decided in turn to have a conference. I, as a
board member of the Grand Haven Area Community Foundation, received an invitation.
So that’s how I personally got involved. Then, as things evolved, they had a staff
develop, which was two years later. I must say, giving any advice to a student is,
volunteer for everything. Do it. Be present. Be creative. When the staff position became
available, I accepted that. We’ve grown today; the association has offices in three cities
and a large, large program.
(JS): Is some of the reason for its location in West Michigan because that’s where there
are a lot of private foundations and so forth?
(DJ): Originally Kellogg, being in Battle Creek is why Russ convened that. Fortunately in
our state, if you think about it, there’s Flint, with the Mott Foundation, Dow Foundation
in Midland, and of course Battle Creek, and Grand Rapids has numerous foundations, but
they’re not as large as some of the others, although that may change over time. Quite
honestly, I think the board appreciated having the office in Grand Haven, which was not a
threat to anybody. Many associations go to Lansing, but we wanted to do things beyond
tax policy. All it meant was a lot of driving. Don’t ask me how many miles I put on cars.
(JS): Moving to Grand Haven then inspired the thing.
(DJ): Yes.
(JS): You’re bringing up two girls while you’re doing all of this. Did you bring them
along to stuff that you went to or find other stuff for them to do?
(DJ): Actually I was very fortunate. I had been volunteering, and I really didn’t start fulltime work until our children were in kindergarten and in first grade. I also was blessed
beyond blessed, with a woman by the name of Cory Hyma, who still works with us 40
years later, who was very thoughtful in helping us with our children. It also helped
coming from a family, my husband’s family had sisters who would at a moment take a
child to a ballet lesson or a birthday party. As they say, it takes a village.
(JS): You do the same kinds of things relying on family and your friends and whatever
else is available.
5
�00:15:33
(DJ): You know, this is a good point. I look at life as you throw balls in the air, your
marriage, your children, your career, your volunteer work, your friends. They can’t all
stay up there at the same height at the same moment. It’s a matter of keeping a fair
balance.
(JS): As you were getting very actively into this larger scale of organized philanthropy
and started being on the boards of these foundations and working with what becomes the
Council [of Michigan Foundations], were you often the only woman in the room? Or by
then had they started to open up more and have more of a balance?
(DJ): Interesting question. Actually, I was the first [outside] woman on the Kellogg
Foundation Board. I would say back then, and that was in 1980, it was unusual. There’s a
story even with that. The then CEO Russ Mawby, who had known me through these
years of developing the Council, asked me in my professional role to help him diversify
the board and find some women. So I remember coming home that night and saying to
my husband, “You’ll never guess what I get to do now, and that’s find the right woman
for the Kellogg Foundation. I would love to do that and I know I could.” But that’s not
going to come over the transom. So I diligently put a superb list together with
background information on each candidate. We had set a meeting date three weeks later
and Russ, when I got to the meeting, said to me, “How about you?” I said you’ve got a
deal [laughs]. In terms of other boards, one thing does lead to another, and that’s what I
would tell students. Take on even a grunt work job, because you’ll never know where it
leads. I was very surprised when he invited me to do that. Out of that grew involvement
on the corporate board of First of America, which led to National City. So, you really
don’t know what’s around the corner.
(JS): When you’re on the board of one of these foundations, what do you do?
(DJ): Depends on the foundation. I started my career out; I was on the board for 9 years
of the Grand Haven Area Community Foundation. There, we raised money and we gave
money. I think when I finished being president, we had reached $225,000 and they’re $60
million today, so take heart in that. The grantmaking role is, what do you do? Selecting
the CEO is key, setting the value systems, the vision, the goals, the strategies, the
priorities, the focus, all of those things.
(JS): How often did you meet on these boards, especially say, Kellogg?
(DJ): The Kellogg Foundation, by the donor’s requirement, meets monthly, in Battle
Creek. Over the years that’s changed. When I started, it used to be a one day meeting.
Now it is an overnight with several hours on each side of that.
(JS): Were some of the others less intense that? Or is that a little bit unusual?
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�(DJ): Yes, private foundations by and large – the Ford Foundation meets three times a
year. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Mr. Kellogg, as the donor, wanted people to understand the
programming, wanted them to be in Battle Creek, not in Chicago or in New York, to feel
the needs of the people, and Battle Creek was extremely important to him.
(JS): As you were getting engaged and involved in foundations, what kinds of things did
you really have to learn on the job?
00:19:44
(DJ): One thing I would say, finance is key, and particularly, I’m going back – the
women’s lib movement was just starting then. I always have told young women, if you
can read a financial statement, more power to you, because that will distinguish you. I
don’t necessarily mean accounting, I mean understanding what a financial statement is.
So my year of graduate work at the Harvard Radcliff Program really helped me in good
stead. You continually learn on the job. When you work with a staff foundation like
Kellogg, you learn program expertise. The other valuable thing is to be a generalist, and
not join a board with a single mission in mind, which I think can be very valuable. You
need to understand not only content, but psychology, people, and how the world works.
(JS): What was the Conference and then Council of Foundations, what did it see as its
mission, its job as it evolved?
(DJ): I had a terrific 25 year career with the Council of Michigan Foundations. Our
mission was to enhance, improve, and increase philanthropy. We were the largest
regional association of grantmakers in the country. Not only did we work with present
members, in terms of helping them to do their work at their request, we worked with
people considering forming foundations. We were responsible for the Michigan
Community Foundation Youth Project. We have community – every citizen in the state
of Michigan is now served by a community foundation. I’m very proud of that. We
worked with tax policy for donors, both at a national level and also in the state. There’s
been the Community Foundation Tax Credit that looks like it’s going to be eliminated
with our current issues in our state. But then also laws that affected private foundations:
the excise tax, which was as high as 4 percent, now it’s down to 1 percent. With the
payout that used to be exorbitantly high and now is 5 percent, those kinds of tax policy
issues. We also did some things like started the Michigan AIDS Fund, when there was an
interest in a particular area.
(JS): How do you think the organization changed over the course of time while you were
working for them?
(DJ): Well, our organization had a 21 member, does have a 21 member board of trustees.
It’s a union of many different opinions, and people work together to effectively make
things happen. We actually were the incubator for several philanthropic endeavors here in
the state of Michigan, and why? Because we had a dynamic board who brought issues,
they could see that they could get things done by working together. Michigan Campus
7
�Compact started at the Council of Michigan Foundations. The Michigan Nonprofit
Association started. We worked with then Governor Engler’s wife, Michelle, and others
on the Michigan Community Service Commission. There were a lot of things that
evolved. People saw you could get things done, and they brought opportunities to us.
(JS): What sorts of backgrounds would people bring with them when they would join the
board?
(DJ): Interestingly, the board of the Council of Michigan Foundations, that’s why I was
so fortunate to be asked because at that point I filled a slot. I was relatively young, from a
small town, and I had had a decent education. So, I was asked to participate, and I had
had a lot of volunteer experience. To serve on that kind of a board, in this case you
needed to either be staff, or a donor, or a board member of a grantmaking entity and
whether it be Kellogg, Kresge, Mott, Ford, Dow, GM, whatever, or here in Michigan,
some of the smaller foundations. It all evolved. In fact, I chaired a national foundation
conference when I was a volunteer with the Grand Haven Area Community Foundation,
because they needed all kinds of components.
(JS): You’ve been talking about state level activities and local ones and so forth. How
much of the national structure is there, that these foundations are part of?
(DJ): Well, it’s interesting. The Council of Michigan Foundations is a regional
association. Today there’s 30 or 40 of those. Michigan has always been the largest. Rob
Collier is the CEO, does an incredible job. Technically, each one is self-contained. But
we do have a national organization, the Council on Foundations. We have Independent
Sector, we have the Foundation Center, we have the Better Business Bureau, the National
Council of Family Philanthropy. I served on all those boards. I’m old; I’ve lived a long
time [laughs]. But, again, it’s representing what you can from a small area, which in this
case was Grand Haven or the state of Michigan. There’s no legal overlap there. As we
talk more about philanthropic education, all of that experience built into that.
(JS): That actually is the next step being, how do we go from simply being actively
involved in these organizations to doing things to promote education in philanthropy just
like we do here at Grand Valley now at the Johnson Center.
00:25:48
(DJ): It’s interesting how the Johnson Center and I am honored beyond belief, when I – I
never called it “retired,” when I “graduated” from the Council of Michigan Foundations,
that was my parting gift. The Council of Michigan Foundations members raised the
financial support and worked with then Don Lubbers, who was president. But I want to
go back 10 years before that. This really grew out of the wisdom of Russ Mawby and the
Kellogg Foundation. It grew out of the wisdom of Bob Payton from the Indiana Center on
Philanthropy. They recognized the value of the academic underpinnings of a center on
philanthropy and what it could contribute. They recognized that it’s not just one
discipline of fundraising or whatever, it is an entire discipline. It could be history, the
8
�history of philanthropy. It could be economics. How does tax policy play into this? As
you look at that, there was really nowhere to go for that kind of general background. So
Bob Payton, and I must say with tremendous financial support from the Lilly
Endowment, started the Indiana Center on Philanthropy. I was privileged to serve on that
board for six years, chaired it for a couple years, so I learned a lot then. In the meantime,
Russ Mawby, from Kellogg was saying, now what are we going to do in Michigan? The
Council of Michigan Foundations, and the Kellogg Foundation, sponsored in Lansing for
every public and private university, college, in the state. We extended an invitation to the
president and one faculty person to come and learn about what this was. Brian O’Connell,
bless his heart, from Independent Sector was the speaker. The whole idea was to motivate
these educational institutions to do something. Now, I knew that there were a lot of
individual professors doing things, but there wasn’t one center. When that was all said
and done, Don Lubbers at Grand Valley, they submitted the winning proposal to the
Kellogg Foundation and that’s what started the Center on Philanthropy here at Grand
Valley, twenty years ago.
(JS): It was originally just down the hall from me, Thom Jeavons in his office. What was
the purpose of the center going to be? What was the idea behind it?
(DJ): In ways I want to go back just a minute and say, why did grantmakers feel the need
for philanthropy education? We had this Michigan Community Foundation Youth project
which was tremendous, and continues to be. Out of that we recognized some students
knew a lot about philanthropy. They probably learned it in their homes or their churches.
Other students knew next to nothing. If we ever were going to sustain this, students
needed to know more. So that was one more underpinning of why this all began.
(JS): So the idea is more than simply providing some practical training for professionals,
but also to communicate to a broader audience what philanthropy is and how it works?
(DJ): Yes, well said. I would say, the center, when it began, and it’s refocused and done
much more than in the beginning, as you would expect. It was really there to work with
nonprofits in a community, to assist them with technical assistance, to train staff and that
was all very important. As our center here has evolved at Grand Valley, the fact that we
have CRI, the Community Research Institute, we have the nonprofit education, is all very
crucial to what we’re trying to accomplish here.
(JS): What kinds of things do people who are looking to go and do work for a nonprofit
or something like that and get involved in these foundations, what kind of knowledge or
training should they have, and what can a center like this help give them?
00:30:33
(DJ): I would say students; so many students come to me and saw, “I want to work for the
Dow Foundation.” “I want to work for Kellogg.” “I want to work for Ford.” Doesn’t
happen like that. You need a background, an academic background, ideally. Ideally you
will major in something that is a passion of yours. Today, you can go to fundraising
9
�schools and you can become a development officer. There is a clear path for that. But
program officers, at a foundation, the Gates Foundation. Name one. Those people didn’t
start out at 22 and say, “I’m going to be that.” They had experience. So, understanding
how that all evolves, working on internships, those kinds of things. But having some
academic grounding and a discipline is very crucial to a future career in philanthropy.
(JS): One other dimension that has come up in some of our other interviews, is that part
of the reason for getting more organized and doing more to provide training and study
was, you had a lot of people who were involved in foundations, or even family members
in these foundations, second and third generations of people. Are there things that you do,
or this center like this can do, or your council did, that supports them or helps them?
When they inherit the role in a way or they fall into it somehow, is there guidance or
direction you can give them?
(DJ): It’s interesting. Part of my work at the Council of Michigan Foundations was to
work with individual donors, both those who already had foundations and those who
were considering it. And there’s some tremendous success stories. The worst, in my
mind, was when the parents both passed away, the three children couldn’t agree. This is
in a Detroit area foundation, so they had to divide it three ways, and that did not fulfill the
purposes of what their parents had hoped would happen. But, yes. I think that both the
Council of Michigan Foundations, and certainly now the center here at Grand Valley can
be extremely helpful to families and family foundations. Michael Moody is the new Frey
Chair professor and it has been very well received. What can they do? They can do
surveys, they can share experiences. Sometimes families like to talk to a neutral party,
they like to talk to me, I was totally neutral, about what others are doing and how they
can learn and what they can do better.
(JS): You’ve done a variety of different kinds of volunteering. One of the things that you
did, for a significant portion of your time, was you served on the Board of [Trustees] for
Grand Valley State University itself. How does working on a university board relate to or
compare with working with these foundations?
00:33:47
(DJ): It was a real pleasure to be on Grand Valley’s board. I served with three different
presidents here, chaired actually the search that brought Mark Murray in. The difference
between a university board and a foundation board, I would say the foundation board,
you hit the ground hard. With the university board, just by the nature of the size of the
budget and the size of the staff, you can be involved and you have major decisions to
make, but it’s not as much hands on. Fortunately, I was appointed, I feel by the Governor
– he actually asked me originally to be on Central’s board. I can’t believe I said this, but I
said to him, “Governor, I believe when you’re on a board, you need to give of your time,
of your resources, and right now between my husband and myself and our children, we
are sending modest contributions to nine schools, can’t do another one!” [laughs] But
then I said, “If it was Grand Valley, I’d say yes in a heartbeat.” He said, “I’ll think about
it.” I put the seed in and a couple of years later, I was very fortunately to be able to do
10
�that. Because I believe in giving back, and volunteering, if you have a young person now
starting, volunteer as much as you can. You will be observed by others about what you
can do and how you do it and you never know where it will lead.
One question that you had asked on the list that I have was what are the issues in
philanthropy right now as you see them? I’ve been very blessed; actually my whole
career has been in philanthropy. Some people asked me when I quote “graduated,” when
did this all start? And I said, I think was 8 years old in the 3rd grade in Mrs. Jones class.
We were told to bring 10 cents to buy a harmonica. The whole class was going to learn
how to play harmonicas, can you believe it? I knew that one of our student’s family, that
wasn’t going to be possible. So I went to nine other of my friends, and said why don’t we
all bring 11 cents? We’ll never tell, it’ll just get done. I think that was the first time. My
mother was a volunteer, and I watched her with the Red Cross, the Community Chest,
before the United Way. So that’s where that all started.
00:36:33
Bubbling this up, I see four issues in philanthropy right now that I think have to keep our
eye on. One is obviously resources, no matter what size nonprofit you’re on and I’ve been
involved in all kinds, Kandu Industries when it was a $10,000 budget, in Grand Haven,
and it’s now Ottawa County more than $3 million I understand. But, resources are limited
and nonprofits have to be very effective in their expenditures. I think the second issue is
the proliferation of nonprofits. If you see something you – there’s a million and 500
thousand now that have IRS [determination]. If you want to do something, I’m all for it,
do it. But see if you can collaborate with another because, because there’s so many, you
may be passionate and it may last for 10, 20 years. But what’s going to happen to it? You
need to think about that. The other, third issue I would say is tax policy. In our country,
we’re going to have President Obama wanting to make changes to the charitable
deduction. Fortunately, in the United States, we’ve had that for all these many years, and
we’ve all benefited from it. Whether we’ve given or been the recipient. So tax policy is
going to be a huge issue. I guess the third, from my nonprofit colleagues, are career paths.
It’s changed drastically since I initially got involved. Compensation now for many
nonprofits is where it should be. One in ten jobs in the state of Michigan is nonprofit.
People don’t think of it like that, but it is a career path and we have to maintain the health
and welfare. Over these last three years, I know compensations have been either frozen or
reduced. It’s of concern to me that people be rewarded for the fine work that they’re
doing.
(JS): It’s not as if they’re necessarily being compensated on the same scale as a corporate
CEO or something like that. Where there’s not really any particular ceiling to it. They
have set salaries. There’s not a whole bunch of stock options that you can get as part as
that package.
(DJ): I think a young person when they go into the nonprofit sector, today they know
what they’re getting themselves into. They’re not going to become wealthy, but they
should be able to be comfortable.
11
�(JS): Now if you look back on the career you had and the different things that you’ve
done, if you go back to being a kid back in California, starting all of this, if someone told
you, say when you were 10 or 15 that you would wind up doing the set of things that
you’ve done, how would you have responded to that?
(DJ): That’s a good question. You know, I don’t think I would have been shocked,
because I have always been interested in nonprofits and volunteering, but I’ve also been
very interested in the corporate world, my church. Now, if you told me I was going to be
living in a small town on the shores of Lake Michigan, I think I would have been
surprised [laughs]. I was very fortunate. I had two grandfathers who I never knew, they
were deceased before I was born, but they were both ministers. I think there was an ethic
of service. I sort of fell into the corporate piece, I will say, because of my business
orientation and interest. But I didn’t go out seeking that. And I guess to a young person
today, that’s why I say be as much a generalist as you can. If you need to, satisfy another
pursuit with volunteer activity. It’s very worthwhile.
(JS): Are you still active with particular groups or boards? Do you still have things that
you’re doing now?
00:40:58
(DJ): Currently, I’m on the board of the Grand Rapids Symphony, I’ve always enjoyed
classical music, also the Princeton Theological Seminary. I’ve continued on the board of
the Kellogg Foundation, and the Kellogg Company. Over the years, I’ve had many
different interests. Fortunately, I’ve been given opportunities to serve.
(JS): Have you learned to say no?
(DJ): [laughs] Not too well. But I did when I stepped down from my job. And I give this
advice to others. I’ve had to say this to other people, focus, focus, focus. Because I’m no
good to a nonprofit just to accept it. I said wait at least six months before you accept any
serious commitment. Because there certainly will be opportunities, and let’s face it. I help
people give their money away, so people wanted me to help them. Well you can’t do it
effectively, totally. Another experience that I had that I found very valuable, for ten
years, I was on the Corporation for National and Community Service. I was appointed by
President Clinton, and reappointed by President Bush. That budget is AmeriCorps, Learn
and Serve, VISTA. It got up to nearly a billion dollars a year that this volunteer board
was helping. That was…again, as a generalist, you were able to relate to those issues.
(JS): Is that board experience going to be different from most of the others just because of
the scope of it and the national orientation?
(DJ): Yes. To be honest, serving on a government board can be very frustrating, very
frustrating. There are laws that you never knew existed. Making effective change quickly
is just not possible. But, all of that said, the greater vision was fulfilled.
12
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/589b82a226160a08688c8ba97d002858.mp4
a7ffbd3be710de0e57cfa7e22c1f0808
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Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project Interviews
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Philanthropy and society--Personal narratives
Family foundations--Michigan
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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.
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Dorothy "Dottie"Johnson discusses her early life in Los Angeles and her education in public schools and at UC Berkeley and Harvard. She talks about working for J. Walter Thompson in New York and about moving to Grand Haven, Mich. where she began a family and a philanthropic career with extensive volunteer work. She describes how she became involved with the Grand Haven Area Community Foundation and other organizations and how she began her 25 year career with the Council of Michigan Foundations. The interview includes her thoughts on issues in philanthropy today and advice for young people starting their careers.
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Smither, James
Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership, Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
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Michigan
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Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives
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2011-05-05
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https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/1d33728234815cc2c734f899298c67df.pdf
39905213ab501d557907b6d59801a539
PDF Text
Text
Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
Johnson Center for Philanthropy
Grand Valley State University
Oral History Interview with David G. Frey, May 7, 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 David G. Frey, May 7, 2010. Conducted by Dr. James
Smither of the History Department at GVSU. Recorded at David Frey’s office 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 David G. Frey, May 7, 2010. "Michigan
Philanthropy Oral History Project", Johnson Center Philanthropy Archives of the Special
Collection & University Archives, Grand Valley State University Libraries.
James Smither (JS): Now Mr. Frey, can you begin by giving us a little bit of
background on yourself, start with where and when you were born?
0:00:18
David Frey (DF): I was born January 1942 in Blodgett Hospital in Grand Rapids,
Michigan.
(JS): And what did your family do at that time, what was your?
(DF): My father was President and Chief Executive Officer of Union Bank and Trust
Company, which his father had actually started in 1918. And he had gone to the
University of Michigan, graduated in the class of 1932, and actually did some graduate
work, received a Graduate Degree from Rutgers University in banking, and served in the
Navy during World War II, and raised four children, and lived primarily in East Grand
Rapids throughout my younger years, and then moved elsewhere within the city. He also
founded Foremost Insurance Company after World War II, 1952, which became the
nation’s leading insurer of recreational vehicles and mobile homes, and other sorts of
Oral History Interview with David Frey, May 7, 2010
1
�small boats, small yachts, motorcycles and all the related sorts of vehicles that were very
popular.
(JS): How many children were in the family?
(DF): Four children, my sister is the oldest. Mary Caroline, she goes by Twink, and then
my older brother John, and I’m the third. And my younger brother is Edward Frey, Jr.
who goes by Ted.
(JS): And what kind of education did you have?
0:01:42
(DF): I went off to private school, at Cranbrook School in Bloomfield, Michigan and then
proceeded to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from which I have a A.B.
in 1964 and a JurisDoctorate degree in 1967.
(JS): How did you pick North Carolina as the place to go?
(DF): Well, it’s an interesting story, but I was on the track team at Cranbrook School for
boys, and the track coach had gone to North Carolina in the early 1940s, and we’d spend
every Spring vacation, we would drive down to Chapel Hill and spend a week in the field
house at the football stadium. We’d practice twice a day, and then we’d run against the
Duke freshman and the North Carolina freshman and we would go up and run against
some of the prep schools in Virginia, and then come back to Michigan two weeks later, or
three weeks later and we would be in great shape and there would always still be two feet
of snow on the ground, so were really ready for the track season. It gave us a great
advantage though. My time at Chapel Hill was very persuasive and I had a great
experience there. In fact, some of my children have attended the university, so we have
had a great relationship with the university.
(JS): Did you go straight into Law School after undergraduate?
0:02:56
(DF): I did. I was deferred through Law School during the Vietnam War, a bachelor but I
signed up for the Navy in the spring of my third year of Law School, and was given a
deferral through the bar exam, passed the bar exam, and proceeded to Newport, Rhode
Island to get a commission in the Navy, six [correction: three or four] months later.
(JS): Were you doing an Officer Candidate School there?
(DF): I was. OCS in Newport, Rhode Island.
(JS): Well, since you are talking to the Director of the GVSU Veteran’s History Project,
I’m going to have to ask you a few questions about that. What did your training program
consist of?
Oral History Interview with David Frey, May 7, 2010
2
�(DF): Well, I think I reported right after Labor Day of the fall of 1967, the bar exam was
in mid-August and graduated in February of 1968, commissioned as an ensign. It’s a
basic training about navigation, all different, sort of the basics of what a naval officer
needs to have to be qualified to be an officer. And then proceeded to San Francisco where
I went to a Damage Control School for two or three months I think it was. Treasure
Island is in the bay underneath the Oakland Bay Bridge, and then I was assigned to a ship
in the Pacific and flew to Guam, and met my ship in Guam.
(JS): Did you choose Damage Control as an area that you?
(DF): I was assigned Damage Control School. Almost every newly commissioned ensign
went to some sort of a school for some specific training.
(JS): So you weren’t getting to pick off of a list, you were just sent somewhere?
0:04:42
(DF): I may have, it has been a number of years, but it was a good experience, I’m glad I
did it. It’s very practical and useful in case there is some sort of a problem at sea, as you
can imagine. So you really do have to know where to go and what to do if for some
reason you have to - if the ship’s been compromised in some fashion.
(JS): Had you chosen the Navy specifically?
(DF): I did.
(JS): And what motivated that?
(DF): Well, my father was in the Navy. He had a great experience; I had an equally great
experience. And I like the traditions of the Navy. I have a lot of respect for their roles in
both peace time and war time. It was my only choice, my first choice, and only choice. It
was the right choice for me, and I never look back except with great appreciation for my
experience during the Vietnam War.
(JS): What ship were you assigned to then?
0:05:37
(DF): The first ship I was assigned to was actually a research vessel. We were doing antisubmarine warfare research in the Pacific. I was only on the ship for a portion of the West
Pac tour, then I went back to San Francisco, she went in the dry dock. Then I went out for
the second tour, and in the middle of my second Pacific tour, I was reassigned to a staff
position in Sasebo, Japan, which is a Naval Base on the west coast of the Kyushu Island,
the southernmost of the three Japanese Islands, where I served as an aide and flag
lieutenant to Rear Admiral A.A. Burgner, class of 1940 Naval Academy.
(JS): What sort of place was Sasebo when you were there? How could you describe it?
Oral History Interview with David Frey, May 7, 2010
3
�(DF): Sasebo was a very special Japanese naval base which we commandeered after
World War II. The Admiral staff was embarked on a large A.R., which is a repair ship,
and they alternated every, for six months out of San Diego, California. We had an
Admiral staff was embarked on the flag ship, he had a staff of a dozen or two young
naval officers, and some not so young, and we were responsible for all of the logistic
ships of the seventh fleet as they came into the seventh fleet, and we also had the two
hospital ships off of Vung Tau where soldiers and civilians were medevacked after being
injured by the Viet Cong or Viet Cong’s related…
(JS): The North Vietnamese.
0:07:18
(DF): Right, the North Vietnamese. We also had some repair ships up in the Mekong
Delta for the swift boats. If a swift boat hit some sort of a mine in the Mekong and was
compromised, it could get to a repair ship; we could turn it into a war ship relatively
quickly. So we traveled a lot in country, almost every month and sometimes twice a
month either to Yankee Station and/or up into the Mekong Delta, or the hospital ships
down near Vung Tau. So we spent a lot of time in the war zone, never in combat per se,
but a considerable amount of time in the war zone.
(JS): What sort of understanding did you have at the time of what the war was about or
why you were there or were you not thinking about that so much as doing your job?
(DF): Well, I think that you do your job because of why you are there, and we were there
to protect the political sovereignty of the South Vietnamese, as it turned out as we all
know, we were unsuccessful in doing that for lots of reasons which lots of people have
written about and will continue to write about for a long time. But I think it was a seminal
event in the history of, certainly the twentieth century, of our history and produced some
very difficult, I would say, byproducts, if you will, socially in this country. It was a very
difficult situation, but I must say I was mightily impressed by the caliber of the forces
that were in Vietnam and of the Seventh Fleet or wherever I went. There’s some
remarkable young men, mostly men at that point in time, or in the late 1960s, however,
on the hospital ships were staffed male and female and they operated around the clock. It
was an incredible facility, it saved a lot of lives, and it was an amazing bunch of
dedicated men and women. I was proud of them then, and I’m proud of them today. We
sent the best of our American youth over, unfortunately some did not come back.
(JS): Did you have much occasion to work with any of the South Vietnamese Naval
personnel?
0:09:32
(DF): On a very limited basis. Most of our time, when we weren’t in country or visiting
hospital ships or out on the carriers on the Seventh Fleet, or actually touring on some of
the supply ships, the ARs, the AEs, the AOEs, and so on and so forth, was spent in Japan.
So most of our interaction, proportionately was probably with some of the Japanese, and
even that was rather modest, because we were on a US Naval Base in Japan.
Oral History Interview with David Frey, May 7, 2010
4
�(JS): And actually on a ship a lot of the time.
(DF): On a ship. And that’s where most staff were, although he [the Admiral] and his
wife lived in Naval housing, as did most of the married members of the staff. I was single
at that point, so I lived on ship board.
(JS): How long did you stay in the Navy?
(DF): I was in almost three and a half years, or something like that. Six months getting
commission and I got out about a month or two early, early release because by the late
1960s we were starting to down-size our commitment to the South Vietnam and troops
started getting early outs and we started to shrink our force and our presence in South
Vietnam. So I did get out a month or two earlier than planned, which I think I got out in
January, February, excuse me December of 1970. About three months early.
(JS): Did you give any thought to staying in?
0:10:58
(DJ): I did. I had a great tour of duty; I had some great bosses and senior officers. I was
impressed with them then and I’m just as impressed with them today. They were
committed to representing their country, and they did a masterful job under very difficult
circumstances.
(JS): So, why did you decide then just to…?
(DJ): Well, I think I was a little older than most of my contemporaries in terms that I had
already received a graduate degree and was probably one rank behind some of my peers
who had gone right from either the Naval Academy or undergraduate degree. So I was a
little bit behind and my real passion since I was a little, young boy was to be in the
banking business, which I did.
(JS): Did your family want you to come back too? Was that…?
(DJ): I don’t know. You will have to ask them. Both of my parents have been gone now
for 20 years. I think they were glad that I did not come back immediately. Actually, I
moved to New York City, and lived in New York for three or four years and worked for a
bank in New York City on Park Avenue and got some training and had a lot of fun. I met
a lot of my, actually, a lot of my friends from the University of North Carolina and some
from Virginia and Washington Lee, some of the schools in the southeast, had already
started in New York. Some didn’t go into the military for medical reasons or because of
their marital status or one thing or another. So it was sort of like a reunion when you got
to New York because there were all these great friends that had been there for one, two,
three or four more years and starting their careers in banking, finance, investment
banking. Some worked for the District Attorney’s offices in lower Manhattan. Great
experience.
(JS): How long did you spend in New York then?
Oral History Interview with David Frey, May 7, 2010
5
�0:12:53
(DF): Three or four years.
(JS): So, when did you move back to Michigan?
(DF): I moved back to Grand Rapids in 1974 I believe it was, in the spring of ’74.
(JS): Was that right about the same time that your parents established the Frey
Foundation?
(DF): It was. They didn’t include us in a lot of those discussions, but I was included in a
couple discussions. Actually, in New York with the Council of Foundations which was
then headquartered in New York, as I recall. But they talked about it, not frequently, but
they were not secretive about it, but they were also private people and they did not share
with us the scope of their philanthropy or necessarily the donees or grantees of their
philanthropy. But, mostly within the city and selectively other places. And we don’t even
have all of those records, and I don’t know that it would shed a lot of light on it. Because
once it was permanently funded when my father passed away, we had to reestablish, or I
would say establish the four of us our focus areas. What were we interested in? What
were our passions? What could we agree on in terms of focus areas and try to chronicle
those so that we started bring some discipline to the grantmaking process. And while
you’re doing that, we also had diversification issues within my father’s estate. Some of
which were easily done, others were more complicated. So, we retained Goldman Sachs
to help us diversify the assets so we could get a more mature and diversified asset
portfolio from which we would make our grants.
(JS): As best you know, while your parents were alive, how did they run the foundation?
How did they manage things?
0:14:42
(DF): I think the two of them just sat down and either proactively, in some issues I’m
sure, or passively. It’s sort of an awkward word because they weren’t passive people, but
when somebody comes to you for example, for a gift to the new public museum, that’s
called passive grantmaking. I would chose a different term, but that’s the way that it’s
generally described, and I think they did some of both. And as I said, we don’t have all
the records and I’m not sure we need to. They did it quietly, they did it, I think,
effectively, and they used assets of my mother’s and father’s estate that would lend
themselves to their philanthropy. They did it very quietly for fifteen years until my father
passed away, from 1974 to 1988. He passed away in July of 1988. So, for those fifteen
years they really ran it themselves and those decisions were private decisions that they
make just between the two of them.
(JS): Do you have any sense as to what kinds of causes or issues they were particularly
interested in?
Oral History Interview with David Frey, May 7, 2010
6
�(DF): I think they have always been interested in the future of the city. I mean, they had
deep roots in the city and believed passionately in the city, and believed passionately in
Grand Valley State University. They were in the forefront of those who worked very
hard, both in Lansing and in western Michigan to garner support for the founding of the
University. So, they had some passions, the Episcopal Church was one of them, and my
mother went off to prep school at Emma Willard in Troy, New York, and I think they
made some gifts to her private school that she had great affection for. Most of it was
within the city or within the western Michigan community. That’s where their roots are,
that’s where their passion was. They believed in it, they appreciated what the city and
region had done for them, and they were just sharing their good fortune with others.
(JS): Now, you get to the point there when your father dies, was that in 1988 when it
happens?
(DF): Right.
(JS): And then, this is now being thrust upon you. You talked a little bit here just a
moment ago about some of the stuff that you had to deal with. How much time and
energy did it require for you and your siblings to get this foundation set up?
0:17:20
(DF): It took a lot of time because we were settling the estate; we had meetings almost
weekly with lawyers and accountants to deal with a myriad of issues. And so it was very
time consuming and doubly so because of this foundation which required a lot more
effort on the part of the four of us because of the mandatory IRS requirement that you
must distribute five percent of the average assets of the previous year. So, there is a
draconian penalty for not doing that, we chose to try to do that, which we did. And I have
to give high credit to my sister and two brothers, they were, I was on a full time career,
traveling a fair amount, and not here when I was on business activities in Detroit,
Chicago, or elsewhere. So, it took a lot of time and energy. Plus, at the same time we
were doing that we were having an executive search for an Executive Director. We had to
have somebody that could actually do this day-to-day, and none of us, or I should say it
the other way, all of us wanted to have a dedicated Executive Director, a non-family
person who could really run a small office of about five or six people and manage those
people every day so that we could do the things that our lives required us to do, raising
families, whatever.
(JS): How did you go about actually finding an Executive Director?
(DF): We talked to Russ, the first phone call actually that I made was to Russ Mawby,
who was then the head of the Kellogg Foundation. He gave us some names, we hired a
search firm as I recollect, and gave that name to a search firm, and this was 22 years ago.
We hired someone who had Kellogg Foundation connections and then we found an
office. We had to find a space downtown, we wanted to be in the city, which was the
focus of our parents’ passion, and get an architect to design us some offices, build it out,
decorate it, and so on and so forth. This - are very time consuming and sort of all in a
Oral History Interview with David Frey, May 7, 2010
7
�relatively short time frame, but at the same time dealing now with my mother’s newly
diagnosed terminal illness, which just added more on top of more. So it was a very hectic,
sort of stressful year or two in there.
(JS): About how long did it take then to actually get to the point where you had the office
set up and staffed and up and running?
0:19:55
(DF): Well, I think, I can’t recall exactly. I would say within the year I think we had a
staff. And we had a lot of friends of the family who were very helpful who had some
great suggestions on some staff people. We were able to find some pretty talented people
who were looking for a different challenge, and you know family foundations are unique
in many respects. There are three basic kinds of foundations: there are corporate
foundations, family foundations, and community foundations. We are obviously one of
those three, but because it is a private family foundation and has different grantmaking
requirements per the IRS and different, as you can imagine, DNA issues if you will.
(JS): As this got going, how did you define what the foundation was going to do? You’ve
set up this foundation, what kinds of activities will it target, and how will it determine
what it does?
(DF): We started to work on that ourselves, we found out that we needed to get
somebody, a third party, if you will, somebody who had some real family foundation
insight, experience, so we found a very talented individual who helped us walk through
some of that. It really does take a non-family member to be that impartial…
(JS): Arbitrator?
(DS): Guide to sort of help you focus in on what it is that you want to do, and it’s turned
out really, extremely well, being we have five focus areas, and we all have our different
within those five. We probably each have different priorities, so what might be my
number one priority might be my sister’s third priority and my brother’s fifth priority. If
you add them all together, there is a concentric circle where we all buy in to these five
areas, and the only difference amongst the four of us is, which is your priority, and rank
them. And as they say, they don’t all coincide, so what we basically do is in the fifth one,
it is support philanthropy, and so it is a relatively smaller piece of our annual activity. But
the other four, we all allocate the same number of grant dollars every year, even though
every year we may not use that allocation because the way the grants come in aren’t
always in perfect proportion to one other. So, over some reasonable period of time, it all
averages out and we keep very close tabs on it so that we don’t, for any extended period
of time, or at least unwittingly, over-allocate to one of the four focus areas.
(JS): What are those four focus areas?
(DS): Well it’s changed a little bit, but it’s women’s and children’s issues, civic issues, an
all-other category, environment, we are very passionate about the environment, and the
fifth is the support and embrace philanthropy and promote it where we can do so
Oral History Interview with David Frey, May 7, 2010
8
�reasonably and get some outcome out of it. We do believe in outcome, so I refer to it as
outcome-based philanthropy. We want a high, what I call stick figure factor, stick factor
so that when you distribute funds for a specific purpose, for a grant, then it actually gets
done the way the grantseeker has suggested it should or would get done. That does
require a lot of front-end research, and that’s the way you need to do it. You need to front
load your grantmaking process so that you err on the side of overdoing the front end a
little bit so that you’ll like the outcome a lot better. And then in fact, in many cases we
are able to vie some suggestions to the grantseeker as to how they might alter their thing
a little bit to get a better outcome than they originally envisioned.
(JS): For people who are coming in from outside of this field who are not used to this
particular kind of work, when you are talking about front-loading and so forth, what does
that actually involve and who is doing what, sort of…
0:24:25
(DF): Due diligence, we have staff; we have some people who specialize in the
grantmaking process. They do on site visits, they take the grant application, in the case
that someone is coming to us, and review it, ask the right questions, do their due
diligence, interview the grantseeker, or grantseekers if it’s more than one. We do a quick
but thorough study on the composition of their board, and make sure that it’s got some
gender equality to it, some ethnic equality to it, or balance I should say, and that the
application itself is well thought out, that the numbers, that the budget that they’ve
prepared for this project, whatever it might be, is sound, defensible, and will achieve the
desired result. So, it is really about asking the right questions. We try not to overdue it,
but you have to have some core information upon which you, they can make a
recommendation to the trustees. We meet four times a year, we do our grantmaking in the
afternoon, we do our investment activity in the morning. It’s taken a while to get there.
We used to try to do it over two days, but now we got it to the point where we can
actually do most of it in one day, which is, you know, for people who have careers, jobs
and other commitments, which we all do, time is important. So, we try to make it a time
sensitive and time efficient process, but still be effective in our grantmaking, and we
really do think we are effective in our grantmaking. We are very pleased with almost all
of our grants’ results. Every now and then a problem arises and we can approve a grant
extension because we have some rules about when you must comply with a grant and if
you don’t, we are more than willing to give you an extension for six months, a year, or
even eighteen months, but at some point if you don’t fulfill your original mission then the
grant will be cancelled. We don’t distribute our funds, our grant if we make a grant for
$100,000 or a million, we don’t write that check until you’ve raised 80% of the overall
budget. So, until you get to the 80% mark, we are still holding the funds. When you get to
80%, that is a clear enough signal to us that you can have a successful program and
successful support from whatever your sources of support are, that we feel comfortable
then writing the check.
(JS): So you generally look at what you’re doing as helping somebody who is already
getting support from other places or has other resources and then you put in something on
top of that.
Oral History Interview with David Frey, May 7, 2010
9
�(DF): Right. We believe very strongly in partnering, and we think strong partnerships
create better outcomes. It also makes the grantseeker do their homework more thoroughly
and more completely. There are some who for reasons of time and other reasons would
like to have their project or program supported by a relatively modest number of
grantmakers. It requires less time, and so on and so forth. We would, in most cases, not
all, would rather see a broader base of support where more people are buying into the
thing, more people are watching the process and making sure that the outcome is as
promised. And that all goes to the credibility and the integrity of the grantseeker. We
want these grantseekers to be successful. We will help them be successful in a couple of
different ways. One is doing our homework up front, one is not distributing our grant, if
it’s approved, until they have commitments for 80% of the total budget, and then we do a
follow-up at the end of each project. They are required to submit a report, asked to submit
a report of the project once it’s funded and running.
(JS): Now, is this set of practices, as far as you can tell, is that fairly typical of
reasonable-sized foundations or do you do more of this kind of homework than a lot of
family foundations do?
(DF): I’m not the one to ask that question. I think you will find a range of processes. We
try not to be overly burdensome to the grantseekers, but we still, there is a fine line
between getting the information you need so that you can ask the right questions because
it really is all about making them successful. We want them to be successful. If we do
sufficient homework and request sufficient information, we can ask the right questions,
make some suggestions perhaps, and have a higher probability of a successful outcome. I
think everyone, there probably are some basic rules out there. We’ve sort of developed
our own but I know that we all talked to other individuals involved in foundations and
they all have a little bit different take on it depending on where they’re located, what their
focus areas are, you know, whether it’s for operations or for capital or whatever or some
combinations. Most of ours are capital related, but not all. Or, many of ours are capital
related, but not all.
(JS): Let’s steer the course a little bit back sort of to your own career trajectory a little bit.
We have gotten you into a period of 1988, 1990, in there some place. You worked with
your family to get the foundation set up and so forth. In your own career at this point,
what are you doing, what position are you in at about 1990?
0:29:58
(DF): I’ve got two young sons and four step children, some are in college and some
aren’t. The two young boys are ten and seven, so you know, and I’ve got a full time
career. I am very busy, and enjoyably so. I like challenges and I like being a dad. I try to
be a good one. So I had to fit the foundation activity in with a lot of other things.
Meanwhile I was on the Board of Trustees with the Grand Rapids Community
Foundation, ended up being the Chairman of that foundation, had already done my
United Way thing. I was on the Board of United Way for several years. I chaired a
campaign in the early 1980s so, I always had lots on my plate. I did everything I could to
be a good trustee of the Frey Foundation. I didn’t have perhaps quite as much time to
Oral History Interview with David Frey, May 7, 2010
10
�devote to it as some of my siblings, and I thank them for doing what needed to be done
because it wouldn’t have gotten done without them. It really had to be a family to get it
organized and get it up and running, and to set up the board meetings, and so on and so
forth.
(JS): Was the United Way the first larger scale rather charitable foundation or work that
you got involved in or were you doing things before that?
0:31:25
(DF): Well, it was the first, we were sort of raised in the culture that you get engaged, if
you want to have a successful community you better get engaged in the business about
what’s going to make it great. The United Way is one of those things and has been for
years, decades, important to our family, then and now. It was something I wanted to do,
and I was asked to participate. I was asked by the campaign leadership in the early 1980s.
I was happy to do it. It was a great experience, great experience. I met some incredible
people. It’s a little bit of a different organization today than it was then, but you know,
the world has changed. So, you know, how they allocate their funds is different now then
it was then, and that’s fine. That’s the primary foundation activity that I was involved
until the Frey Foundation came in seven or eight years later. I think by having done that,
there are certain parts, even though that’s a community foundation as opposed to a
private family foundation, there are certain principles of process and so on and so forth
that were very helpful to me and providing maybe some suggestions in regards to the
Frey Foundation when it was first starting.
(JS): Where does the Michigan Community Foundation, or was it the Grand Rapids
Community Foundation that you were involved in as well?
(DF): Yes.
(JS): When did you get involved with them and how did that happen?
(DF): That was…
(JS): Because at the United Way and then you kind of carried that over…
(DF): Right, into the Grand Rapids Community Foundation. I started in the late 80s in the
Grand Rapids Community Foundation. I think I chaired it in 1992 while I was still a
trustee then of the Frey Foundation, so I was sort of wearing two hats at the time. That’s
where I really learned some processes about investment committee activity and the
committee’s structure in the Grand Rapids Community Foundation that were very helpful
I think in terms of the Frey Foundation. If I misspoke myself I apologize.
(JS): That’s okay. It seemed to kind of follow logically, but we wanted to make sure we
had the right sequence.
(DF): It actually followed sequentially. I mean, I learned a lot from the United Way too,
but that’s a different sort of, you know they allocate funds in a different way, with a
Oral History Interview with David Frey, May 7, 2010
11
�different process. They are very much community-based, so on and so forth. The Grand
Rapids Community Foundation has some similarities to it but, you know, it’s been a
phenomenal success, has had great leadership, and now, interestingly enough, we partner,
we the Frey Foundation partner with the Grand Rapids Community Foundation and with
Steelcase and DeVos and some of the other private foundations or corporate foundations.
Once again, we find some concentric focus areas, and some non-concentric, but some
very concentric which we could all sort of get involved in and make a difference. And a
big difference in some cases.
(JS): Now, you had mentioned early on that your parents kind of kept a lot of their own
activities and priorities barred to themselves, but at the same time on a broader level, they
were communicating to you the idea that you need to give back or to be involved in the
community.
0:34:41
(DF): Yeah I think so. That was a dinner table conversation before they ever thought
about having a private family foundation. It was just part of what makes communities
great. It was imbued in us that if you want to have this great community wherever you
are, that you have to be a participant. Bystanders don’t get things done. You have to roll
up your sleeves and get engaged in some way or another with whatever your passions are.
Whether it’s the arts, whether it’s social issues, whatever it is that drives you. Get
engaged; balance it with your other priorities and with your other responsibilities to your
family, your profession, so on and so forth. But there is a piece of you that you should
share with the community or with your church if that is what you choose. You do have to
sort of balance yourself, and I guess the people that I would consider the most successful
are those people who have the balance in their lives that makes them a fuller, more
complete, more well-rounded individual because they’ve done that or are doing it.
(JS): Do you think that it helped you at all in terms of your own activities locally that you
had seen as much of the world as you had and gone and done and as many things as you
had at different places first. Do you have a perspective that might be different than if
you’d stayed in Grand Rapids the whole time?
(DF): I think so. A lot of people think I’ve never left. I went away for twenty years. I left
to go off to private school. That was a great experience for me. It was a game changer, an
absolute game changer for me. It opened my eyes, gave me a whole new vision for the
world and where I could go. Then I lived in Japan for two years, lived in San Francisco
for six months, then in Japan, then in New York. I lived in North Carolina for seven
years. So I have lived in some, and enjoyed every place I have lived. I met some
phenomenal people, and I’ve enjoyed my experiences, and I’ve encouraged my children
to do the same. I think you are a more rounded person if you’ve had the opportunity and
taken advantage of the opportunity to go out and see what’s out there in the world. So,
my two sons, and some of the step children, we try to travel with them so that they would
feel more comfortable traveling, that they would be more comfortable with different
languages, different currencies, different dining habits, different cultures. It makes you
appreciate what is out there. It’s a phenomenal planet, for all our woes, which there are
Oral History Interview with David Frey, May 7, 2010
12
�many; there are just lots to learn and lots to experience. I think you’re a better parent,
you’re a better citizen, you’re a better corporate person if that’s what you do, or a better
government or whatever you are if you can have some worldly experiences.
(JS): In addition to the United Way, the Grand Rapids Community Foundation and the
Frey Foundation, you have also been involved in different kinds of civic organizations
and things. You were with the Grand Action at some point…
0:38:00
(DF): I remain at Grand Action. We are getting on close to twenty years. Dick DeVos,
John Canepa and I started in I think it was 1992 or 1993. It followed the Grand Vision
Committee, which Dick DeVos chaired, so but for Grand Vision, there wouldn’t be a
Grand Action. We’ve been doing it now for eighteen years plus, and it’s been a great
experience. All three of us I would say are about twelve years difference in age, very
different in many respects, but we are committed to the city and committed to the region.
We’ve tried to help build the city and help create some energy, and we hope we’ve been
successful. We’re not done yet. We’re now working on the urban market, and we think
it’s got tremendous support from the general population and we’re at the early stages of
trying to get some funding from a half a dozen foundations, the seed money that we can
hire an architect and start getting organized. In the past, in our other three major projects,
we’ve had an anonymous donor that gave us the seed money, and then subsequently
down the road they would identify themselves, but at least initially they chose to be
anonymous. In this case, it doesn’t lend itself to being a donor-driven or a named
opportunity. I think it’s going to be very successful and very exciting, and it sort of
stretches the footprint of the city to the south a little bit to Wealthy Street. We’re very
excited about it; we’ve had a consultant who has been terrific. We think it’s a $27 million
project, probably $30 if you add in the real estate, but we think it is going to be very
exciting.
(JS): A certain portion of people who may view this interview and so forth are likely to
be from outside of the Grand Rapids area and west Michigan and so forth. Fill in a little
bit of the background, for instance, what exactly was Grand Vision and what was it
expected, intended to do, or what was the idea of it?
(DF): Grand Vision was designed to explore the feasibility of a large convention center
and an arena. They went about that for two years, hired Rossetti Associates, an
architectural firm out of Detroit, who actually did Auburn Hills Arena, and Deloitte and
Touche to do some economic [forecasting]. So, two years later they came up with the
recommendation, the conclusion that yes, we could build an arena and yes, we do need an
enlarged convention facility. So, some of us said well look, here is the recommendation,
now who is going to do something with it? So we morphed Grand Vision into Grand
Action and John Canepa, Dick and I got together and said why don’t we just take the
recommendations and get going here, which we did. Initially, in hind sight, we were
going to try to do the arena and convention center at once. We unbundled them,
thankfully, because of the time it took. The arena went first, because we had a clean site.
It was a parking lot at a sight of the former Union Station which was a train station here
Oral History Interview with David Frey, May 7, 2010
13
�for a hundred years or more, and it was taken down several years ago. That was the
easiest piece of real estate to deal with, and the city was a great partner, the county was a
great partner, the state was [too]…it worked out well. That was the first one, and when
we got that one done and open in ’96, we went to the convention center. That was a
bigger project and much more complicated because it required the movement of the
County Court House and the Grand Rapids Police Department to new locations.
Complicated on top of that was the site, which is bounded by Michigan on the north,
Lyon on the south, the river on the west, Monroe on the east, had some sub soil issues,
erosion issues, which we had to shore up and it got more complicated, but we go it done.
So, in exchange for a convention center, we got a new police station, we got a new
courthouse, and it worked out great.
(JS): And in some way, I’m someone who has lived now in this community for twenty
years and has seen a lot of this happening, actually in the process of moving some of
those things out, you helped to redevelop or reuse some other parts of the city. The police
department went into a failed downtown mall complex, for instance and so forth.
(DF): Right. There you go. You got it.
0:42:46
(JS): I, having been from the Midwest, having seen plenty of Midwestern and
northeastern, west belt cities, I kind of look at Grand Rapids and look at a lot of these
other places and think it’s really pretty remarkable what’s happened here.
(DF): It is. We are counter-trending is what we are doing. We’ve always, our unspoken
byline is let’s not let the economic woes of the state, which are substantial and they’re
real, restrict our activity or our commitment to the city. We’ve been able to do this with a
lot of private dollars. We got a fabulous new J.W. Marriot Hotel because of the
convention center. A lot of things have resulted from it. We’ve had tremendous
development south of Fulton Street because of the arena. Twenty years ago you may not
have chosen to walk down that after dusk. One of the really interesting little side stories
about the arena. When we built the arena, we made a promise to the Heartside
neighborhood, that a lot of people who live in Heartside, unemployed, partially
employed, underemployed who have various disabilities, and are medicated for some of
those disabilities. So, a certain percentage of the employees at the Van Andel Arena
today are hired from the Heartside neighborhood. They can walk to work; they don’t
have to rely on public transportation or their own transportation. They have a job, in
some cases for the first time, many of them are part time employees. But it has given
these people a sense of self pride and purposefulness that they maybe have never had
before. Those are the little stories that you don’t read much about. We read about Elton
John and the Eagles and the great, you know Faith Hill. But, every day there’s some
people that will walk to work at that arena who are doing meaningful work and taking
enormous pride in themselves, and that’s just really important.
(JS): Now, you are also involved with the Downtown Development Authority in Grand
Rapids.
Oral History Interview with David Frey, May 7, 2010
14
�(DF): No
(JS): That is more of a public partner in some ways with what…
0:44:47
(DF): They have been a great partner with Grand Action. The city, the county, the DDA,
the State, and even the Feds, the Federal government helped us do some, about $7 million
of infrastructure for the convention center. We had to redo some, move a lot of stuff
around below grade. We’ve had great partners; Governor Engler was a great partner for
the convention center. We’ve just had great partners all the way. The interesting thing
about Grand Action has been in that all of these three projects, the one we didn’t talk
about was the Meijer Majestic Theater, the Civic Theater, fabulous restoration, very
different. We’ve always, particularly in the first two, always got private sector
commitments, pledges, before we went and asked the city, the county or the state to do
anything. We always told them what we were doing, we were very open. So I think we
had a lot of credibility when we went to Lansing, or to the county or to the city saying we
have raised X millions of dollars, we’ve got pledges for X millions of dollars. Please
partner with us and either donate the land or do something to help us get this thing done.
We’ve been met with very welcoming yeses.
(JS): You had mentioned at the beginning of the interview that you were sort of retired
out of...
(DF): Right.
(JS): What kind of official positions or responsibilities do you hold now?
0:46:15
(DF): I was chairman and CEO of Union Bank Corp. when we merged in 1986 with NBD
Bank Corp. out of Detroit. My job after that merger was to manage the western Michigan
part of that corporation. Four mergers later, we are now part of J.P. Morgan Chase. I
retired about five years ago, and I keep an office in the Chase building, and I have lots of
activities on my… I still spend a lot of time on Grand Action, I currently am chairman of
the Frey Foundation, I have done some fundraising in the past for the University of North
Carolina Chapel Hill, I have a great commitment to that university. I have been active in
the University of Michigan campaign that was recently completed very successfully. My
wife went to Michigan, I have a couple kids who went to Michigan, my sister went to
Michigan. We’ve made some wonderful grants to the University of Michigan from the
Frey Foundation, both for the Ford School of Public Policy, and we recently endowed the
Deanship at the Business School in honor of my father who was in the class of 1932 and
a passionate Wolverine.
(JS): As chairman of the Frey Foundation, what do you actually have to do?
(DF): I chair the meetings, I help coordinate the agenda. Because I’m in town, my two
brothers are out of town, my sister is a trustee emeritus and not as active, she has her own
Oral History Interview with David Frey, May 7, 2010
15
�foundation, Nokomis Foundation which she chairs, I get involved in some things that I
wouldn’t be involved in if I lived some place else and was sort of a non-resident
chairman. I do a lot of things in terms of some of the grantmaking activities or the special
needs that I have to get involved that normally I wouldn’t necessarily because I’m
available, I’m in the city and I’m downtown. I do keep very busy; I try to take a little
time off. We have a winter place, residence in Florida, and I’m back and forth every ten
days or two weeks for three or four or five days. In the summer time I’m here Mondays
through Wednesdays, sometimes Mondays through Fridays. I am trying to take a little bit
of time to have some fun. I’m passionate about the city, and actually as we speak I’m cochairing the Capital Campaign for the new Seidman Business School with Doug DeVos.
We are trying to raise $25 million of private funds for what will be a $35 to $40 million
project on the west side of the river. It is going to be a stunning, a stunning building
designed by Robert A.M. Stern, one of the great American architects in New York City.
He is also the Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, and he did the Ford School of
Public Policy in Ann Arbor. We had interviews with some terrific national firms. It’s
going to be a great project. I’m still raising money for Grand Valley and trying to raise
money for Grand Action when we get into the fundraising mode. These projects that we
get, like Urban Market, take a considerable amount of time to get them positioned right
and in some cases to get the private donor involved and so, I’m fully engaged.
(JS): Yeah. Yeah. There is retirement, and there’s retirement.
(DF): I’m flunking retirement. Everyday I flunk retirement.
(JS): Right. You are talking about building the Seidman Business School for Grand
Valley State University. Grand Valley, when it was established, was built out in the
middle of a cornfield in between Holland and Muskegon and Grand Rapids in part
because the land was cheap. But, over the course of the past several decades, it has built
up a very substantial presence in downtown Grand Rapids.
(DF): Right.
(JS): It’s on the west side of the Grand River, which is opposite of where the proper
downtown activity mostly is. And that’s another area, kind of like the area around the
arena on the south side of downtown that has really changed a lot with that investment
building in.
0:50:20
(DF): Right. It’s interesting. I had expected that with the downtown campus that we
would see perhaps more development of the west side. We have seen some development,
it has been very positive, but it has not been on quite the scale that I had expected. Maybe
when the Business School, again I think we need some more dormitories or family
housing, married housing, or whatever, just on the south side, immediately south side of
Fulton Street. Maybe that will spur some more development of the other commercial
activity, restaurants, other sorts of stuff. But, it has developed some, not quite to the
extent that I had envisioned.
Oral History Interview with David Frey, May 7, 2010
16
�(JS): But you didn’t have as much of the core downtown infrastructure right there, which
you had with the arena and the convention center. You do get into residential
neighborhoods or some kind of industrial districts pretty quickly.
(DF): Very quickly. My grandfather was born on the corner of Straight and Douglas
Street. I know the west side pretty well. In 1880, believe it or not.
(JS): Alright. Now, is there any kind of advice that you might give to somebody, say,
second or third generation member of the family who has a family foundation who is
going to be getting involved in that, or maybe they’re facing the prospect of a changeover
from the first generation, the founding generation over to them. Are there things to watch
for, or prepare for that could help them as they move forward?
(DF): We invite all of the next generation to our meetings and they are spread all over the
country. There’s nine I think, and they can’t all attend every meeting. We have four
meetings a year. Some can attend on a more regular basis, others, some have young
families, some have careers that don’t permit them to attend very frequently, but we try to
encourage them to so that they can see what the process is like. I encourage all of them to
get engaged in some volunteer activities so they can see how volunteer organizations
work, whether it’s a community foundation in the community in which they live, or
something so that they develop a sense of contributing, volunteering, and start to learn
about committee structure and so on and so forth. They may learn that in their day job,
whatever that may be, but if they don’t, this is a great way to learn it because we should
not be the sole source of their training or their experience. They will be much more
effective trustees of the Frey Foundation if they’ve had experience elsewhere. I think this
is certainly true of me, and I would think it would be true of others if their schedules and
personal life permit it. So I encourage that greatly, but I think the biggest challenge,
unless it is prescribed in the document itself by the initial grantors or donors who endow
it, unless it’s in the documents the transition from one generation to another is the most
challenging. Who should be? Who should not be? How do you pick who gets picked?
How long should they serve? You know it’s serious stuff. There’s serious thought, and in
some cases there are room for some very helpful consultants who can help you avoid
some of the problems that other families have had for lack of good counsel. It can be
done. The question is who and when, and for how long, and particularly if you have
multiple branches, who don’t necessarily live in the same, and even if they do live in the
same general community. That is the process we are in as we speak.
(JS): Are there concerns about losing sort of the focus on the particular area? In this case,
this was very much a kind of Grand Rapids and west Michigan-oriented foundation that
your family has kind of spread itself into different parts of the country. Do you have
things in place that will help to keep the focus?
0:54:42
(DF): We think, I think you’ve got to define focus a little bit, but we are in agreement that
the headquarters of the foundation will remain in Grand Rapids. We do our grantmaking
spread throughout western Michigan, really on the north western quadrant of the state of
Oral History Interview with David Frey, May 7, 2010
17
�Michigan so far. But, we make exceptions like the University of Michigan; we actually
sent a very nice grant to Detroit to help send a strong message that it’s important for this
entire state that Detroit be successful. So, when they started redeveloping their riverfront,
we sent a pretty significant grant to help them do that, even though it wasn’t in the total
scheme of things huge, but it was an important message and a pretty good sized number.
We want the office to be here. Will the grant making mix change? It could. Too early to
say. But, we think we’ve got it pretty well honed right now. We partner with the Kellogg
Foundation, in fact, to start the Petoskey-Harbor Springs Foundation as well as the
Charlevoix Community Foundation. We have been major funders along with Kellogg to
get those two foundations up and running. Since then, they’ve grown exponentially with
the State gifts, inter vivos gifts, and gifts from all kinds of people who all of a sudden,
who had no exposure to the world of community foundations to embracing them and
advancing them in an enormously rewarding way. It’s been a real experience because
neither of those counties or communities had community foundations. So, we were able
to partner, and it’s been a great lesson in the benefits of the foundation.
0:56:36
(JS): One other grant that your foundation has made was to create the Frey Foundation
Chair at the Johnson Center for Philanthropy at Grand Valley.
(DF): Right.
(JS): Can you explain a little bit what that chair is and what it’s for?
(DF): Based on our experience, that we think that if we can get the right candidate, or
series of candidates over some period of time, that we can bring a lot of enlightenment to
the process so that family foundations, and even non-family foundations for that matter,
will have a resource that they can go to when they have some of these issues that we’ve
faced. We’ve resolved some of them on our own, but some we’ve asked consultants to
help us with. They’ve been very helpful. We think it’s a great teaching platform. There
has been a huge increase over the past fifteen years in the number of family foundations
that have been created. There is a different mentality out there in the new generation of
family foundations, much more demanding, much more outcome-based for their grants,
and much more, you know, diligent and disciplined in their expectations of their grants.
We try to do that. There’s a new generation’s even more determined to ensure the right
outcome. We think Grand Valley is the right place to do it. The Johnson Center’s going
to be terrific. We are hoping that somewhere along the line we will have a chair for each
of the three kinds of foundations. A Professor of Corporate Foundations, a Professor of
Community Foundations combined with a Professor of Family Foundations. So you will
have all three legs of the stool, and you will have an absolute phenomenal resource that
can compete with any other university who holds themselves up to be the preeminent
source for all foundation knowledge and wisdom. I think we can respectfully challenge
those institutions if we get the right candidate here and a little bit more heft, if you will,
within the faculty at the Johnson Center.
Oral History Interview with David Frey, May 7, 2010
18
�(JS): This is also a period now where you are getting increasing numbers of people
actually getting professional training and education to actually go and work for nonprofits
and for foundations and so forth. And part of what we are trying to do here is that. So you
are starting to get students who are learning this and being part of this program and
connected with it. There’s still not a whole lot of programs out there yet that do that, so
you are in a position to promote something that is still…
0:59:14
(DF): There are a couple of universities that have carved a niche out, and I am not
probably the greatest or the most knowledgeable on who’s the best of the best. But, as I
said, I think with this professorship and a few other key positions created and filled,
Grand Valley can respectfully challenge whoever is out there and do it I think with great
integrity. Interestingly enough, for basically a regional university, this is one discipline
that doesn’t require gaggles of professors and assistant professors and so on and so forth.
With a relatively small number of professors, you can be a national force. You can be a
national name in a niche, unlike the History Department or the English Department.
There are so many great universities with great English Departments and History
Departments or Math Departments that requires a lot of people, a lot of professors. This
takes fewer people. You can take a regional university with a national, much like you
know the Athletic Department at Grand Valley has had enormous success, a Division III
school, very successful, made a real name for themselves and the university. I think the
world of the Johnson Center can be equally as effective, and we are going to actually,
part of the grant is to encourage and promote some symposiums on philanthropy in Grand
Rapids and elsewhere, and elsewhere, but in Grand Rapids. Bringing in the best talent
that we can periodically to have symposiums and conventions or whatever it is to
stimulate philanthropy and to make it more effective than it already is.
(JS): I think that has done a pretty good job of laying out here what your vision of things
is.
(DF): Right.
(JS): And certainly what your own experiences have been. I would just like to thank you
for taking the time to talk with me.
(DF): You are welcome. One of the things that you didn’t say, the interesting thing about
family foundations as opposed to the other two is, we are really not in the development
business, so our staff looks a little bit different than the community foundations.
(JS): You don’t have to raise money.
(DF): We don’t have to raise money. Some family members may chose to give gifts
while they are living or are testamentary when they pass away. Corporate foundations are
even different, because some of them are funded with the stock of the corporation, and
dependent on dividends, some are not. It’s a whole different world. They are very
different, but the good news is in this particular part of the world, we have some
overlapping and concentric focuses that allow us to do some really great stuff, and not
Oral History Interview with David Frey, May 7, 2010
19
�compromise the areas where we don’t have concentric or nonconcentric focus areas. Do
your own thing over here. I think we have a great camaraderie and great partnering with
the foundations in central-west Michigan and it has been very rewarding, very satisfying.
(JS): Thank you.
(DF): You’re very welcome. Thanks for the opportunity.
Edits from David Frey were incorporated into this final transcript.
Oral History Interview with David Frey, May 7, 2010
20
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/c60617cf09e61060a765e10495ce0f14.mp4
7dde7e6f3ba1bf8c20ff7d5b3f0a3544
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Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project Interviews
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Philanthropy and society--Personal narratives
Family foundations--Michigan
Charities--Michigan
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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.
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/516">Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project (MPOHP) (JCPA-08). Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives</a>
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Oral History
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Frey, David, G. video interview and transcript
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David Frey is chairman of the Frey Foundation, a Grand Rapids, Michigan based family foundation. He discusses his early life, education, service as an officer in the Navy during the Vietnam War, and work as chairman and CEO of Union Bank, now part of J.P. Morgan Chase. He discusses how his parents established the Frey Foundation and how they inspired their children to participate in the community. He shares how he and his siblings built the foundation and how they are involving the next generation. He discusses the foundation’s focus areas and outcome-based philanthropy. He discusses his service with the United Way and Grand Rapids Community Foundation, partnerships with other foundations, fundraising for universities, co-chairing the capital campaign for the Seidman Business School, and establishment of the Frey Foundation Chair at the Johnson Center. As one of the founders of the Grand Vision Committee, which became Grand Action, he was interested in building a convention center and arena with a promise of employing those living in the Heartside neighborhood of Grand Rapids.
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Smither, James
Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership, Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
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Philanthropy and society
Personal narratives
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Family foundations
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Frey Foundation
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JCPA-08_FreyD
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eng
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2010-05-07
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https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/c33564ab68257b4e58b37a0ddc7c5db1.pdf
8d7d809b0e8fbbaf62da936433a32801
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Text
Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
Johnson Center for Philanthropy
Grand Valley State University
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 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 Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010. Conducted by Dr. James
Smither of the History Department at GVSU. Recorded at WGVU 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 Virgina Esposito, February 18, 2010. "Michigan Philanthropy
Oral History Project", Johnson Center Philanthropy Archives of the Special Collection &
University Archives, Grand Valley State University Libraries.
Note: Corrections and additional information added by the interviewee are indicated in
brackets.
James Smither (JS): We are conducting an interview today for the Johnson Center for
Philanthropy at Grand Valley State University. We are beginning an oral history series
conducted with both area philanthropists and people who are, sort of, in the business or
profession of philanthropy in one form or another.
Today we are talking to Virginia Esposito who is an expert in the study of family philanthropy
and foundations. She is currently a visiting fellow [scholar] here at the Johnson Center at Grand
Valley State University and she also runs her own organization which studies family
philanthropy. And what we’re going to do is sort of turn things around a little bit, because she
will work with people and ask them to talk about why they do what they do and how they
understand it, and now we’re going to ask some of those questions of her.
The interviewer, by the way, is James Smither of the History Department of Grand Valley State
University.
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
1
�Now, Ginny can you start by telling us a little bit about your own background? Just to begin with
where and when were you born?
00:01:00
Virginia (Ginny) Esposito (GE): Oh my goodness, I was born in Philadelphia, and I was born
in 1952. And my parents had only been married a few months when my father was sent to Korea.
So I’ve never lived in Philadelphia, but my mother went home to be with her family so there’d
be somebody around, and that’s how I came to be born there.
JS: So where did you grow up then?
GE: I grew up in the Marine Corps. I grew up in all of the places that they sent my dad except
those that we could not go to. I didn’t go to Viet Nam, didn’t go to Korea, didn’t go to Lebanon.
But we went to mostly up and down the Atlantic and into the Caribbean, and so I grew up there.
And I was lucky enough that when I got to high school, which is the place where you’d like to go
[be a bit more settled], my father was young enough that he thought he could retire - having been
in the service since the World War II. He decided he could retire and start a new career at a
young age, and I could go to high school in one place. So I will say that I have spent most of my
life in and around Virginia, southern Virginia, went to school in central Virginia, and I now live
in northern Virginia.
JS: So where were you living when you were in high school?
GE: In southern Virginia. I was living in Norfolk, Virginia. It was really important to my father
that we all go to Catholic school. And he found there was a Catholic school in Norfolk, good
college prep education, and every single one of us was going to go through that school. I was up
at the top of the group, so that’s how all [of us], all the ones underneath me, could go [to the
same high school]. Yes, he felt that when the last of us graduated they should dedicate the doors
or something to him for the tuition.
JS: Did you go on to college from there?
00:02:40
GE: You know I did, and it was, it was really a sort of process of being a little ignorant and very
inexperienced. I’m the first person on either side of my family to have gone to college. It was a
huge, big deal but there wasn’t a lot of prep, you know, for what that would mean. And I looked
around and there were really terrific colleges in Virginia, where I wanted to go to. And at the
time the University of Virginia had a women’s college. It was actually Mary Washington
College of the University of Virginia. It’s since been separated. It’s since gone co-ed. There are
men on that campus now. But for me, I loved the notion that it was a liberal arts school, I could
study in every single department in the college, which is something I really did want. It was
small, so someone who was a little more, well, not really willing to put herself out, you know,
could find a niche somewhere. It offered great work study, and I was very excited about that, and
it actually was the right choice for me. I actually planned to leave and go on to the University of
Virginia my junior year and ended up changing my mind.
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
2
�JS: Did you get a degree in anything in particular?
00:04:00
GE: Yes, actually I studied languages, got a degree in Spanish. I studied, I actually took
advantage of the fact that back then you paid one price; you could take as many classes as you
want. So English became very important. Education, studied a lot of education and history. So
there were a fair number of majors and related fields. I really did take the liberal arts part
seriously.
JS: As you were doing this, did you have any idea where you wanted to go or what you wanted
to do when you got out?
GE: Not a clue. I studied the languages first and foremost because I’ve lived in a country that
had [where] English was not the first language, and as a kid it had been easy to pick it up, and so
I was intrigued at that. And I actually found there was a lot of advantage to being able to speak
different languages, and at one point in my college career I was actually taking five. And I
thought this is just fabulous, communication, this is just so wonderful, you know. And I sort of
vaguely thought maybe diplomacy, maybe something foreign service, something along those
lines. But the other thing that work study did was, candidly, created a debt to the state of
Virginia, so I knew that the first thing I was going to be doing was, unless I was willing to pay it
back, was to go and teach in the state of Virginia. By the time I took a few education courses and
I actually did student teaching and things like that, [I] thought I like this, I think I can teach and I
did. I did that for six years. I left college and went into teaching Introduction to Communications
and foreign language and three levels of Spanish actually.
JS: And where were you doing that?
00:05:40
GE: I was doing that also in southern Virginia in Hampton which is [in] the Hampton roads area.
And after a couple of years moved back over the river to Norfolk and did the little commute.
This was before it was so crowded that you couldn’t possibly think about crossing that river
every day and I did it. And I did that, as I say for six years, and by about the end of the fifth year
I recognized that I loved the classroom, but this wasn’t what I wanted to do longer term.
JS: That’s actually a fairly common experience with teachers in a lot of different ways. What sort
of was it that didn’t seem to fit or what were you looking for that you weren’t getting?
00:06:24
GE: That’s a great question because there was a part of it that was a little bit depressing because
I genuinely loved the classroom experience. I came into the system that year with about seventyfive rookie teachers, the year that I started. I think I was the last one to be there that stayed. It
was really all of the other stuff besides teaching, the fact that languages, communications, these
kinds of things were always on the chopping block. I think of the six years, I can say this for
certainty, every single year, I was told that they weren’t sure if they could continue to fund
languages, so [I] didn’t know if I would have a job. There was a lot of school board stuff, and
city council stuff, and it wasn’t a great time economically, so there was a lot of, lot of tension.
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
3
�And it just felt like, you know, there’s something about the kids I’m relating to but I missed the
other thing that I studied quite a bit in college. In fact I had done several art history tours of
Europe, I’d been studying northern European and Renaissance art. I really loved my art history
and I thought, you know, maybe arts administration. I still was attracted to this notion that it
wasn’t [going to be] government now and it wasn’t going to be business. It was youth and this
nonprofit sector, but I thought it was going to be arts administration. And I knew Washington,
D.C. had some great programs in arts administration. And so I left my contract and moved to
Washington with no job but, I was going to look for one.
JS: All right so you were just going to go try to take a job rather than do a graduate program—
GE: I was going to do a graduate program but I was going to have to do a graduate program
while I worked. I did not have the resources and didn’t want to acquire the debt that would have
said, I was going to get to do it full time. In retrospect, probably should have bitten the bullet and
just done it, but since it probably would have been a mistake in terms of what I wanted to study
longer term, you know, maybe it wasn’t. I have little patience with regrets but I wanted to be
going to school but to be also working.
JS: How long did it take you to find a job?
00:08:50
GE: Well, I was told that this was a terrible, terrible environment to be looking for work. And I
hit the pavement in what was at that point, I think, the hottest summer on record in Washington,
D.C., so I never showed up for an interview that I wasn’t soaking wet. But I gave, gosh youth, I
gave myself like I was going to find a job in two weeks, you know, and mostly through blind ads
and a couple of, you know, agencies and things like that, and I actually found three but picked
the one that I liked the most.
JS: And what was that?
00:09:35
GE: Well I had answered a blind ad for a Phil Org. That’s all it said in the ad: P-h-i-l O-r-g. And
my father, you should know, and my grandfather had both been interested in stamps, so I said to
myself, well I’m either going to be in stamp collecting or charity. You know it’s philately, it’s
philanthropy, I don’t know which, but I’ll show up. And it was very, very interesting because the
same day I interviewed for what you would have thought was my dream job, I did an interview
at Youth for Understanding on student exchange and it had everything that I’d been very
interested in. My last year of teaching, I took eighteen junior high school students through
Europe. Now one could have thought that would have ended my high school, I mean teaching,
career and it sort of did, but it was a celebration rather than a last straw. And so here was Youth
for Understanding and I was going to get to work with student exchange. I was going to get to
help people appreciate other cultures. It was a much more senior position and it was a much
better paying position.
And the Phil Org that I did the blind ad for turned out to be the Council on Foundations, which
had recently moved from New York to Washington, to take advantage of the, sort of, need for
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
4
�foundations realizing they needed a better representation on the Hill. They were still reeling from
the 1969 tax act, and so they were regrouping in Washington. The position that I had was, sort
of, very bottom rung, as I said did not pay quite as well as the other position. But there was
something about it. There was something about the work they were doing. There was something
about the sort of scrappy nature of an organization regrouping in a new city. There was
something about the fact that it was very clear that, in addition to what I needed to do, I was
going to get to pay attention to a lot of other things in philanthropy and in the organization.
And I was offered the two jobs within ten minutes of each other. In fact, it was my Friday
afternoon. It was me convinced that I was not going to get a job offer. My friends were about to
take me off to the beach for the weekend to console me and at quarter to five one call came and
at five to five another one came. And everyone was sure it was going to be the Youth for
Understanding job because it made such a fit with what I’d been doing, and it absolutely wasn’t.
It was total gut. This is what you want to do.
JS: So you take your Phil Org job—
GE: Yup, I take my Phil Org, no stamps.
JS: What was that like then? You go into work for the first time. What do you wind up doing
right away?
00:12:30
GE: Well, the first thing that I was supposed to be doing was I was supposed to be helping the
number two person in the organization. Well actually I guess he might have been number three,
he was the executive vice president, but back at that time they had two senior people. And I was
supposed to be his assistant. And he had a whole lot of areas he was responsible for and there
were only two or three of us that worked for him. So it was even the second day that I discovered
a whole area of work. And it was these, we were the national association of grantmaking
foundations and corporations, but there were all these regional ones all over the country. And
there was this, right behind where I was sitting, was this gigantic filing cabinet of stuff but
nobody was paying attention to it, so I finally was like, well, Can I figure this out? And I went in
there and I found that somebody had starting to do a survey, and someone was looking to, at the
time the relationships between national and regional weren’t great, so is there something that I
can do here? And it’s very interesting when you think about where I’m sitting today because I
got very interested in the work of those regional groups, and one of my very first contacts in the
field of philanthropy, one of my very first committee members and first teachers was Dorothy
Johnson, for whom the Johnson Center at Grand Valley is named. And so it was a lovely sort of
coming around to come back to her.
From there I quickly got into the education function and that was what made sense. There were
not a lot of people there who had experience in putting together curricula. There weren’t there
people who understood different formats for education, weren’t used to the facilitation of groups,
and that was just a natural place for me to go. So within about two years; I had a major position
in grantmaker education. And I was able to really get into everything from their annual
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
5
�conference that brought people from all over the world to smaller conferences that focused on
individual kinds of activities.
And I really credit the people who came into the organization for making it such a terrific place
for me to be because after about a year or two of doing one thing I would sort of feel like [it was
getting repetitive]…okay, and they’d come to my door and say, Well, how about [taking] this
[on]? And so I went there for two years; I stayed for seventeen. But I did nine different jobs
[and] every time, it just seemed it was a natural other thing I could give to the organization. And
they were really flexible about that, so within education if I was interested in doing, what about
programming for new people? Okay. What about veterans? What about trustees? It’s actually
how I ultimately would get into family. But I also credit it with really, really building the sort of
liberal arts aspect to my education, because in bringing people in to speak to grantmakers, I got
to meet some of the most wonderful, inspiring leaders around the world, because I was their
point person. I prepped them to understand philanthropy and to bring them in. And that was
incredibly great work. I would go out and read the books they’d written. I’d learn everything
about them. I’d, you know, get to know them well. It was such a great job. It was so great.
JS: What sorts of people are these that you would bring in?
00:16:08
GE: Oh, my goodness. Everybody from, there were so many, Jonas Salk and Leon Sullivan and
Bishop Tutu and Jimmy Carter and Gloria Steinem, and, you know, all of these people that
philanthropy would want to hear from, leaders, you know, who had been just amazing leaders.
And I’m sitting there, the point person for what they do, and going [to] wherever they lived and
talking to them about the audience, and making sure that they were well prepared to do a good
job. And in some cases we did things where, okay, I’m going to prep you or okay, we’re going to
work with Bill Moyers on a series that he’s going to do on philanthropy. It was just a constant
education, especially if you liked that part of it, if you loved that, which I absolutely did. So
while the details of putting on programs could somehow drive you nuts, I’d also be sitting in an
audience going, this is the most terrific opportunity for somebody, you know, to get to do this
and to do this at this personal level, not just to hear them, but to work with them in getting this
done.
There was a conference where there was some serious, serious tension between different
communities of color in that city. And the committees and the organization decided that Maya
Angelou, for example, would be a perfect person to come in and do a major session to, sort of,
talk to everyone about the need for all of us to find a way to do this work together. And it was
very sensitive, I mean, there were people that didn’t think she should come. There were people
who thought that maybe the whole thing should be boycotted or called off. And I remember her
grilling me about why she should do this, what role could she play. And I answered every
question she had, and at the end of it she was like, “Honey, if ever I were needed, this is it.” And
so that’s just one little, out of dozens of them. So here I was getting to know philanthropy at the
most intimate level, but also at the most expansive level, and also getting these inspiring leaders,
and who were coming, you know, to me as the chief cook and bottle washer, but still it was
there.
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
6
�JS: Aside from Maya Angelou, are there particular people out of this assortment that maybe
particularly surprised you or impressed you beyond maybe what their record or credentials
would have indicated?
00:18.46
GE: Yes, I think when you grow up and you take your basic science, you know, you think, okay,
you know, Jonas Salk and Salk vaccine and this kind of thing. What I remember about Jonas
Salk was that his mind was so much more expansive than science. He saw connections and
applications in everything. He was a person [whose] deep values guided what he did. He didn’t
necessarily want to talk just about science or his own accomplishments. He wanted to talk about
what we were all doing to, you know, make the world a better place, a more global community.
He was so not what I expected; he was so not what I expected.
And then there were other people who were more personally, just they were very inspiring, they
were very moving. I remember right after he won the Nobel Peace Prize, the president, then
President of Costa Rica, Oscar Arias came, was doing our conference. And right before he
arrived, his most important mentor in the field passed away. And so the man who arrived in
Toronto for our conference was really grieving. And, I knew he had to rise to the occasion, but I
also somehow figured out I needed to respect a little bit of the space. So there had been a sort of
day of activities that people had planned for mostly press and things like that, and somehow we
all knew he just needed a day going off by himself, you know, just dealing with all of this, and
then when he came back of course did this absolutely fabulous, amazing job.
You know, some people you expect to be very sort of lofty, maybe above it all, and they were
incredibly down to earth, and there were a few we expected them to be down to earth and they
weren’t so much. But I still remember those that there were surprises, it was that whole notion of
surprise.
One my very, very favorites was Leon Sullivan, the reverend in Philadelphia who had founded
the whole notion of opportunities, you know, industrial group that in inner cities provide job
training and good educational efforts, and this was just a model around the country. A minister
who had seen his ministry, not just [as] his congregation, but all of the community and what can
we do [to] raise up communities through job training, and one of the greatest African American
leaders this country has ever had. And I mention African American because at the time both my
CEO and Chair of my committee were distinguished African American leaders, but they were,
you know, clearly [a] generation down from Reverend Sullivan. So when the three of us went up
to visit Reverend Sullivan in his little tiny cramped office, the two of them, these amazingly
accomplished men that I just had such respect for, turned into like little students at the feet of this
man, and I was just shocked that here were these two people who obviously really valued his
good opinion, and were just so eager to please him. And I have to tell you he had demands and
expectations of each of them, but he clearly knew each one of them, knew what they had
accomplished. And at the end of it as we’re sort of all filing out of this little office, he gets to the
first one and he says, "Okay. I know what you’ve been doing in Cleveland. You’ve been doing
really great work." And he goes, "I’m really proud of you. I am so proud of you." And, you
know, there’s this man, he’s beaming. "I’m so proud of you." And this big bear hug. And then
comes my boss and he goes, "I know what you’re doing for philanthropy. I know what you’re
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
7
�doing down there in Washington. I am so proud of you. I’m so proud of you." And then I’m the
next one through and I look up at him, and he was really, really tall, and I said, "It’s okay, Dr.
Sullivan, my mother’s proud of me." And he points to the table where all the literature from the
conference was and he goes, "Honey, if you think I think those two did all that work, (laughter)
you’re crazy." He goes, "And I’m proud of you," and there was this big bear hug. So sometimes
it was just those moments where life isn’t the way you predicted it, but it teaches you an
openness, you know, that I now still value to this day.
JS: I would think that on some level people who choose to be involved in philanthropy, and they
commit themselves to it by and large, are going to be a fairly good-hearted bunch and wish well
of people most of the time, and so a certain amount of that will happen. It probably isn’t always
exactly quite that way or there are other motivations for doing it, but a lot of the time to really
make that kind of commitment there has to be some heart there. Now an awful lot of your work
has focused on family foundations.
GE: Right.
JS: Can you tell me a little about when and how you came to go in that direction?
00:23:48
GE: That’s a good point. At this point now of my career I was doing education on every single
level there was. As I said, you know, if it was corporate, I helped start a corporate conference
and a community foundation conference. We grew that annual conference from a few hundred
people to over 2,000 people. I was really; I was doing conferences in other countries. I was
always, always interviewing people in the field to talk about, what were the issues we weren’t
tackling, what were they dealing with that they really could use some, you know, support for.
And one day I was talking to some people I knew really well in other capacities, but they said to
me, You know, it would be really helpful if you would look at those of us who work in
foundations where the donor, or mostly at that point, relatives of the donor were still involved.
And I was a little taken aback by the suggestion not because it was inappropriate but because,
well, wait a second, isn’t that how all foundations starts with a donor, and an awful lot of these
foundations involve their family? Why has organized philanthropy or the infrastructure, if you
will, of philanthropy, never done anything in this?
So I went on the road and started talking to people about that, and I found out that, for the most
part, organized philanthropy was not really comfortable with the family aspect or the trustee
aspect even. It was mostly comfortable supporting the people who were the professionally paid
staff folks in these foundations whether they were community, private, or corporate, and
specifically program officers. So we were really good at putting on great environmental
programs for environmental program officers, but maybe not much looking at governance, much
less family dynamics. And I found out that there was not a lot of excitement about doing this
because people thought it could potentially bring down the reputation of philanthropy as
something that was very much a serious responsibility. It was very professional. We had
systems. We had experts. We had forms, you know. And if you start talking about these
volunteers and all this family stuff, what will the world think about philanthropy?
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
8
�And so we decided to start on a very small basis. I said, "We’ll just do one session within the
whole big conference. And we’re not even going to have a program per se. We’re going to do an
open-ended facilitated conversation about, what are the issues?" And we called it, All in the
Family. Boy, were we creative. And we put it in a room that we would normally put an
experimental session [in] which would hold about 150, and well over 250 people showed up for
it. The fire marshal was screaming at me. And it was hugely successful. And I mean I lost track
of how many issues people were talking about. It was so successful that we did it a second year.
There was still nervousness, probably a little more so because now we were articulating the
issues. We did it a second year and creatively we called it, All in the Family Part Two. And it
was just amazing. And people were after me right after that and they said, This is so terrific.
We’re talking about things we never have. How do we link family goals and philanthropy? How
do we understand when to bring in adults that are the next generation into this? How do we
understand what the donors really want? Do you want to involve your family? And if you do
what does that mean? What about this family foundation we’ve heard about that, at the time, that
is splitting up because they can’t get along? What is that all about?
00:27:40
JS: At this stage of things, these first couple of sessions, are the people who are attending and
participating still sort of the professional staff types out of these foundations?
GE: Nope.
JS: Or are you getting some of these actual family members and things—
GE: We’re getting family members, and they were the family members who were mostly also the
staff for their family foundations. Or we were getting the professionals who were the CEOs, they
may have been non-family members, but they were CEOs of family foundations themselves. But
for the most part we were getting family members. We were not getting the professional staff.
That didn’t happen for years.
But anyway, they said, Well what if we put on a little conference just for us? And for a year or so
we [were told], no, can’t do that, can’t do that. And I’ll never forget the reason we finally could
do it was because the chair of the education committee, my education committee, was the
president of the Ford Foundation. Now, you need to know that for a lot of people in family
foundations the Ford Foundation was sort of like the antichrist. This is what happens when
donors don’t take good control of what’s happening with their foundations. It could be like
Henry Ford’s Foundation. And don’t we think Henry Ford is spinning in his grave? Well, that
was just sort of nonsense.
JS: Why would people have thought that?
00:28:56
GE: People thought the Ford Foundation, there was this incredible perception that the Ford
Foundation was off all around the globe doing fairly liberal, all these socially conscious things
Henry Ford would never have, and had anything to do with that. Well, first of all, I always was
sort of impressed that people knew what Henry Ford would have done. But part of it was because
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
9
�Henry Ford’s son had had a fairly dramatic exit from the board. And so people thought this must
have been a parting of the ways of a family and a foundation, and look what happens when you
don’t stay on top of your foundation as a donor. These people will take it and run with it. Now
incredible misperceptions, incredible presumptions about what Henry would have wanted and
done.
But, here’s this Ford Foundation that everybody sort of talks about what you don’t want to be,
and here’s the President of the Ford Foundation telling the Council on Foundations, “We
absolutely need to do this. If we can’t do this, who can?” And she was the one who sort of [made
it possible], it was ok, I could go off with the first meeting. And I was told to have very low
expectations. And don’t call it a conference. Just call it a meeting. And I prayed that about 30
people would come and 75 came. And it was, it was hugely successful. They are still doing them
to this day. And the last one I did for the organization was in 1997. There were over 800 people
that came.
Now, in the course of doing that work I obviously got to learn a lot about what families care
about, what issues they’re dealing with. I had to plan the sessions for those meetings. I really got
interested in families and how they give, and how I could help them give. And there was just
something about it. I really enjoyed it but I was doing it as a part of all my education
responsibilities. Until one day in 1985, I was part of a staff that went to a program being held at
Stanford University on The Future of Private Philanthropy in America. And it was really a very
multifaceted, very sophisticated program. It brought in policy makers, it brought in
academicians, practitioners, donors, you name it, to talk about what did it take to really
encourage and sustain a healthy philanthropic sector. And it was very lofty, very exciting, lots to
learn. And at the very, very end of that conference they were taking closing comments from
people, and I must tell you that throughout the conference there were lots of sort of nasty
comments about, and this was their phrase not mine, rich people. You know, if rich people
would just do this, if rich people would just do this, and so we heard a lot about rich people from
time to time. At the very end of the conference this woman, and I knew her, I was very fond of
her actually, but who was very quiet through the entire program, she’s been furiously taking
notes, stood up, and she said, like I said just going around for closing comments, "First of all, I
have to confess to this audience that, I am a rich person." Everybody’s like… okay, didn’t realize
you were in the room. No. But then she said that in hearing about policy and in hearing about
effectiveness and favorable legislation and all this kind of stuff there was one thing she hadn’t
heard anything about, and that was joy. And she said, "There is great joy in the privilege of doing
this work, the opportunity to do this work, and the people that you get to see and meet doing it."
She said that if she thought she could communicate that joy to her children, that she’d be doing
her part in ensuring the future of private philanthropy in America. And it was Lucile Packard.
And it’s just one of those moments where you sit there and [are moved]. [The] fights about
whether we should be working on family issues, sort of all came together. And this is what I
wanted to do. I really wanted to focus on this area.
And several years later my mentor in the field, the one who'd been working with me for ten
years, Paul Ylvisaker died. And it gave me a chance to think about what I wanted out of my
career. I’d been doing this work very happily for a long time. But what did I really want to do?
And it was not to be an administrator, not to be the head of the largest department at the
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
10
�organization with nine or ten different functions in it; it was to get to go back and dig deep into
the program, and it was the Luciles of the world I wanted to do this with. And so that was, that
was really the moment, and then the death of Paul Ylvisaker was the impetus for deciding I was
going to change tracks.
00:33:50
JS: Were you able to change tracks within your existing position organization at that point?
GE: That’s a good question, because I didn’t assume so. And I also want you to know that I was,
I had huge respect for the President of the Council on Foundations at that time, James Joseph,
who went on to leave the Council to become the ambassador to South Africa, had been my boss
for a long time, and given me lots of opportunity and support, and I wasn’t going to make a
change without talking to him. I automatically assumed it had to be somewhere else. I mean if
you’re vice president of this gigantic department and you want to make this change to this
concrete area that doesn’t even exist in the organization you work in; you assume you’re going to
have to go somewhere else. I had no idea what that meant, I just thought I’d have to go
somewhere else.
So I went to talk to Jim, and to tell him. And Jim understood. He’s the one that had brought Paul
to the organization, and he knew what working with him had meant to me. So he was inclined to
be sympathetic. So at one point he said, “Well, Ginny, why do you need to go somewhere else to
do this? Why don’t you do this within the Council? And you can leave your position.” He
wanted me to stay a vice president. I talked him out of that. I said, "Please don’t make me go to
officer meetings anymore," (laughs) I talked him out of that. He said I could stay in the
organization. I could start a program on family philanthropy. He said, "You can research, you
can write, you can convene meetings, all under the rubric of the Council." He goes, “You’ll be
doing something good for the Council, and you’ll be doing something good for yourself
exploring the area.” So it was really terrific that somebody was willing to be that flexible about
this. And he did, he let me leave that whole department and found a new VP, let me change,
created a different title, created a small team of people that I could work with. There were people
immediately ready to provide funding. There were folks in the field, most specifically and early
on, the Packard Foundation interestingly enough, by now Lucile Packard had passed away, but
who came right in to provide it so we didn’t even have to rely at first on the general budget. We
could do it with great support from the field. And so he let me do that.
Now, it wasn’t all going to be peachy keen, because right after he made this plan and we put it
into effect he was named Ambassador to South Africa. And also it was the time when Jesse
Helms was sort of holding the State Department hostage. And so he was refusing to hear the
confirmation hearings for new ambassadors. So poor Jim had to sit as sort of a lame duck
somewhere torn between the Council and being the new Ambassador for almost a year while
Jesse did his thing.
And so when new leadership came in, new issues surfaced about whether or not family
philanthropy was really the going forward calling card. And there were some just concerns about
that, some very legitimate. When an organization is in transition, I learned that they just want
people to help keep the oars in the water. And when you are part of a new initiative that is
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
11
�changing the composition of Council membership, that is changing the kind of people
participating, you’re now talking about trustees and donors as well, and some people saw family
philanthropy at odds with other kinds of philanthropy, well we weren’t keeping the oars in the
water; we were, not intentionally, rocking the entire boat. And I think there was great energy and
excitement about that as a future vision for the organization, but I think the dynamics of an
extended transition meant that there was just great, great concern. And so it was very difficult to,
sort of, you know, to do some of that and to be faithful to an organization I’d worked at for such
a long time.
So it was a three year program. I had hoped that it could be renewed as most other special
initiatives were at the Council. It ended up not being renewed for a lot of politics. But even
before it wasn’t renewed, I had decided that I was now ready to take this and take it somewhere
else. I was very proud of the fact that what was being left behind at the Council was a great
conference for families, there was a newsletter, there were issue papers, there was a real strong
foundation for what was going forward. And as a part of my transition, I offered to do whatever I
could to help prep new staff so they’d be positioned to do this well.
But over the course of that three years, I started talking to people about what, not just what did
the Council need, but what did the whole field need. And what I realized was that family
philanthropy happens in lots of places. It doesn’t just happen in family foundations. It happens in
community foundations, it happens at the Jewish Federation, it happens in gift funds, it happens
in giving circles. It’s in family businesses is where it usually starts. The new family offices were
holding it. Banks have tremendous amounts of family giving. And we didn’t see this whole big
field of family philanthropy. Then people were much more comfortable with the term just family
foundations. The field defined it by the legal structure people chose. I saw, my experience with
families was they don’t define themselves by their legal structure. They may have had precious
little to do with choosing the legal structure. They defined it by what their goals were for
involving the family or for what they wanted to give to. So what I saw was you can’t just help
the Council on Foundations, I wanted to help figure out how to help all those people.
So I started talking to some of the best minds in family philanthropy, people who really
understood this, and people outside of family philanthropy just to test my assumptions. And
because being Sicilian we love a good fight, and god knows I’d been getting one. But anyway, I
started asking them what they thought would be the most useful thing for the field in terms of
advancing family philanthropy. And what we decided was that it was impractical to assume that
every one of those organizations was going to be able to develop expertise about family giving,
but every single one of them needed it. So the regional associations here in Michigan or in the
Southeastern Council or Northern California, the Jewish Federation in Cleveland or in Los
Angeles, Bank of America and Citigroup, these people all were going to need it. Now the only
way they were going to do it or access it, is if an independent, non-threatening, read noncompetitive, organization with a collaborative spirit about how it was going to develop it and
share it, could be formed. And so I started doing the background work for what would become
the National Center.
It is so important for me to say that I did this work for over eight months with any sense that I
was going to go and work there, none whatsoever. I was being a good staff person. I was
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
12
�facilitating discussions, writing concept papers, getting the papers tested. I did focus groups,
individual interviews. What is this amorphous thing? I remember sitting in a little, tiny Italian
restaurant in Washington with cocktail napkins, each with a separate word on them, while we
mixed and matched what would the name of this thing be. You know, the biggest discussion was
about the preposition. We really worked on that for. It was going to be for family philanthropy
not on or of. I remember that, with no sense that I would work there. After a point in time I went,
you know, this is going to be so cool; I hope they’ll give me a job. And I even thought I know
exactly who should run this. I had it in my head who should run it.
00:42:32
And the very last focus group, a couple of things happened. One, someone came to the focus
group who was affiliated with another organization and I think felt a little threatened by the
concept of this organization getting going, thought it would somehow harm his baby. And he
was a little feisty, scared the dickens out of the person I thought was going to run this. He later
on was like, you know I just don’t think this was meant to be. And I was like, okay your
participation or the organization? Because if it’s your participation that’s your call, but if what
you’re saying is what’s not meant to be is this organization, I can’t accept that. And he said, well
it was his participation. Well, I went frantic. The next day I was to meet with a prospective
startup funder. And I, all of a sudden, don’t have anybody that’s going to run this. So the next
morning, having been up all night screaming, crying, yelling, in the New York Hilton, I met two
of the people who had been most involved, the two people who had been the most involved in
the founding of it. And I’m telling them this story and they’re both looking at me like I’m nuts.
And I was like, what? They said Ginny, there is not a person in this country who thinks the head
of this organization is anybody but you. And I went, what are you crazy? No. I was honest to
goodness, genuinely taken aback. I, all of a sudden doing good staff work for something I
desperately believed in, shifted a little bit, both because I’d lost this person and because they’re
telling me that’s not how all these people perceive it. And I will tell you quite specifically, I not
only grew up with no ambition to be a CEO, I actively resisted it. For all the reasons I hadn’t
really wanted to advance within the Council system, it wasn’t administration that was interesting
to me. And may I please tell you that I left arts administration because I didn’t want to do public
speaking and raise money? And (laughter) now all I do is public speaking and raise money. So I
was really shocked.
But I said, you know what, you guys need to give me some time to deal with this; but regardless,
I will go to the meeting with the funder. And so I showed up at the office of this person who had
been really forward thinking about how this [new center] could think differently about this, and
that their organization could invest significantly in the concept. And really also understood that
he needed to do stabilizing funding for the first, you know, six or seven, eight years, which was
really terrific too. But he’s also treating this just de facto as if now you’re the president, and as
the CEO this is what you’ll do and dadadadada. And I’m thinking oh gosh, do I have a lot of
thinking to do, cause now I’ve gone from asking for a job to, this is yours to do.
I left; this was all in New York in conjunction with my very last family conference. I went back
to Washington. There were some things going on in the organization, some changes at the
Council, and me just sort of cementing the fact that it was really time to move on. And I went
home one night, and I, this is a little side out of one of those secret things you [rarely] tell people,
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
13
�I have a collection of the art used in creating the Disney classic movies. As a part of my
wonderful renaissance art background I developed an interest in animation. So in my house are
all these cartoons and drawings from the great nine old men of Disney and they’re mostly in my
den. So I went home and, something I’ve never done before, I pulled this blanket, sort of, up to
my chin and this incredible calm came over me. And I said, "You’re going to do this. And the
worse thing that can happen is a few cartoons are going to come off the wall." You know, it
wasn’t the investment in the money, it wasn’t the risk of it, it was just, the right thing. And it was
so much the right thing that I felt, I wasn’t even euphoric, I wasn’t sad, I was just very, very
calm. And it wasn’t the way when I hired my first [staff] person. I threw up for two days hiring
somebody else. I could take the risk myself but the thought of being responsible for somebody
else made me nuts. But it was really the right thing to do.
And the whole notion was that this organization would be very collaborative, very noncompetitive. We weren’t going to be a consulting firm. We weren’t going to be a competitor
membership association. Everyone assumed we were going to compete with the Council and the
Regional Associations. And I’ll be very candid with you, if back then in 1997 we had opened up
the National Center for members; we would have had hundreds of members, because in my first
six months I got two hundred inquiries for how to join. But I had to keep saying to people, we
want you to support the membership organizations that you already support. We want to work
with and through them. And that and I had to say to consulting firms and people that were
advising donors, I don’t want to be a consulting firm. I’m not going to compete with you. I want
to know what you’re doing and if you’re doing good work we want to be able to send families to
you, but we’re not your competitors. If I published a major piece for the field, [I] didn’t want to
put Bank of America’s name on it, because then Wachovia wouldn’t use it. So I had to deal with
all of this how are we collaborative? And we found the exact right [name]. Thanks to a very,
very good, strong, strong founding board, it developed really well. It has repercussions later on
for the fact that collaboration doesn’t always build the best sustainable financial model, but it
builds the best model to really be able to do this work in a very diverse field.
But that’s, that’s how I ended up choosing, so I left my job at the Council in May of '97. I was
supposed to have three months off. I was working on a four volume series of family foundations,
huge; it was called the Family Foundation Library. It actually was delayed. It went all the way
through my break, up through July, but I finished it. I learned to never agree to put out four giant
books on the same day that all are going to fit in the same slip case. And I was going to take a
nice long break before I started the National Center and I actually was driving to the designer’s
on my way to Dulles. But I ended up leaving formally in July of '97. Worked again through
August to get the book finished, and went off on a vacation and came back and the National
Center, while I was in Ireland, the National Center’s incorporation papers came through. And
when I came back to the U.S. they told me that, and so on September 8th I went to work. All by
myself.
JS: Aside from some of this business of convincing people that you’re not a competitor, you’re
not a consultant, you’re not up to anything, what would you regard maybe as the biggest
challenge of getting this thing up and running?
00:50:34
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
14
�GE: Well there were a couple. Obviously the first one was, this person who had always been,
who had done some administrative work but was largely a good program person, a good
education type person, already had to run out, while I was doing that library series, learn how
about nonprofit law, nonprofit incorporation, nonprofit finance. I had to find space. I had to find
materials. The startup grant got delayed because of a funny hitch in the fund that was releasing
the startup money. And so I figured out that it was a really good thing that none of my credit
cards at the time had anything on them because I could max them out buying office equipment
(laughter). I’ll never forget one of my favorite startup memories of the National Center is
standing once in an Office Max, or whatever it was, Depot, whatever it was, with a friend of
mine, holding a fax machine going, "Is it the MasterCard or the Visa that I still have room on?"
(laughter) And so part of it was just me shifting gears. You can’t afford to just be a program
person when you have to run an organization.
And the first thing I had to do was build a great team of people who believed in this: a great
attorney, a great financial advisor, a good human resources person, and a terrific board. I read
everything there was to read about founders of nonprofits and the mistakes they’ve made. I really
did. And I had a little list of all the things I was going to be cautious about doing. For example, I
read that one of the biggest mistakes founders make and their boards let them make is that they
start a board and they put everybody on it who just loves them dearly, and is going to "amen"
everything they say. And that can’t happen, that just can’t happen. There was so much personal
identification with me because of this; there had been a fair amount of notoriety in leaving the
Council on Foundations. Seventeen years I’d been there. One woman wrote me a note, I’m sure
she meant it to be a compliment when I was leaving, she said, "I can’t believe you’re leaving,
you’re like a fixture." And I was like, oh my god, I’m the plumbing of the Council on
Foundations. But there was a fair amount of notoriety, and I use the word notoriety, there were
some people who were very happy and there were some people who were very angry. And so I
really wanted the National Center to be more than the place Ginny landed. So I needed it to be
not so identified with Ginny. So I decided (working with some people who really understood
governance and nonprofit governance) we were going to put the board in thirds. I was going to
pick one third people who loved me. Not that who would say everything I did was wonderful,
but they were very supportive, and I could trust their judgment…a lot. The second, I was going
to [choose] people who I sort of vaguely knew in the field, but I had a lot of respect for their
approach. And another third, people who never knew anything about me but who either
represented a wonderful diverse perspective or position, brought something wonderful to the
group. I also wanted a board that wasn’t all family foundations. There were going to be
community foundations and banks and advisors and consultants. It was, you know, fabulous.
Nobody thought this group could work together. It was wonderful. So the first thing was
converting a program person to a nonprofit executive, and everything that came with it. And it
would have been very easy to have stayed in the program mode and just tell people just be nice
to me because this is really hard, you know.
The second thing which in some way was fundamentally more important and probably more
difficult, although when it’s finally started to happen it was really brilliant and very reinforcing.
You asked a question that my board asked at our first board retreat. We decided at the board
meeting that winter, by the fall of 1998 we were going to have our very first board retreat. I had
worked on this wonderful program. We were meeting at Pocantico which was [on] the
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
15
�Rockefeller estate up in Terrytown, Hudson [River] area of New York. I thought, how great to be
on the grounds of one of [the great] philanthropic families, first family. And the day our retreat
started was the day of my mother’s funeral. And I had to fly from the funeral to Tarrytown, and I
hadn’t been to bed for three days. And I just remembered here was this incredibly important
meeting and there were a lot of people going, maybe you should just stay home. And I was like,
what are you kidding? So finally I got there and I said, "Okay, the only thing I want you to do,"
and I said this to my chair, I couldn’t say it to the whole group, "Just don’t ask me anything
hard." I said, "Please don’t ask me anything hard. I have no brain. It’s so mush." And you can
laugh about it now because the circumstances were comical; at the time they were just miserable.
But you just talked about all the things we weren’t. And that was what we spent a lot of time
telling people. Well at this board retreat, I had one particularly insightful board member, who I
wanted to kill, say, "I think I understand all the things we’re not and why. What do we stand for?
Ginny, would you like to take that question?" (laughs)
JS: Gee, thanks.
00:56:38
GE: Yes, really, so much for nothing hard. And I did what every good facilitator did was I
punted it around for a little bit and said, "Let me throw that back to you and let’s get into a
discussion." But what it did is it affirmed the fact that we could comfort people by telling people
what we weren’t going to do to hurt them. But to inspire and engage them we had to get them
behind what we were. And it led, that discussion, led to me going back to Washington and
creating the statement of values and guiding principles for the organization. It was almost like,
and if you’ll please forgive the self aggrandizement this appears, but as a great student of
American history, why people thought it was important that the American colonies had to
articulate why? They just didn’t want people to assume why there had to be a revolution and this
statement of independence. I said, "Oh my, it is the same thing. We have to have a statement
where we articulate what we are and why and why this has value." And not only that, but it could
not be lofty. It had to be grounded. And we had to put that statement out and say, If you ever see
us do something that is contrary to one of these values or principles, you need to call us on it
because we want you to do that. And so I would say the second hardest thing was reaching the
decision that we needed to do that work, to do it with a very full heart, and with a real strong
sense of what that was going to say to the world about what we were. And I’m very, very, I’ve
written so many things in my life, I am no more proud of anything other than that statement. And
it really did, it was our chance to say this is what’s important to us. And I’m really happy, on our
tenth anniversary we had the board review the statement to see if it was holding up, and it
absolutely did. They wrote, well they approved, a timeless sort of statement that was at the same
time very relevant. So I would say those two things were the hardest for me both on personal
levels, one operational, one fundamental.
JS: What was it essentially that you said you stood for?
[Change tapes.]
JS: We were at a point in the conversation where I was asking, can you just lay out briefly what
you see the core values really are?
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
16
�0060:10
GE: Well first of all, one of the things that we wanted to say was that we valued all family
philanthropy. We valued all of the vehicles people could choose. We valued all the motivations
and, you know, inspiration that brought them to this point and all of the variety of program and
vehicle options that they had. We believed in excellent, ethical, effective philanthropy but
beyond that, we had a great respect for the diversity of options and choices that people would
make. We wanted to be a very, very collaborative organization. We valued our colleagues in this
role; we wanted to support their work and their ability to serve their family constituencies. And
we were going to be very respectful partners in that work. And we valued the voices of families.
Everything that we did was going to have that lens. And when we wrote, we were writing for the
whole field we hoped, but the family perspective, the family voice, was going to be included.
And so we were going to shift the way we had, that philanthropy had been writing specifically
for a staff audience, and we were going to write as if every opinion and perspective had value.
For example, it’s not enough for me to put out a paper on funding the environment for program
officers, if I’m not going to write also for trustees about why should this be a priority or how do
you want to think about this as a priority. So we were going to change and make sure that that
perspective was respected and valued. And we wanted to the extent we could, to tell it through
the stories of families that we wanted to be that voice, we wanted to have that trust, we wanted it
to have that honesty and that integrity. And so there are actually about nine or so principles.
Don’t give me a quiz. At one point I could probably do it.
But then the second thing that as I said was very important is beneath each principle we wrote
how our work was going to reflect that. And we were essentially saying to the field, we expect to
be held accountable. And part of that, I would have to say overwhelmingly ninety-five percent of
that, was that chance to articulate what you value and how you were going to work. Five percent
of it was because there was still a lot of controversy. And we wanted to respond to that, not in a
defensive way, not into answering attacks, but as if to say, this is who we are and you have every
right to be concerned if we do something other than this.
JS: Because of this, the emphasis that you’ve got, a lot of these family foundations in many cases
are local or regional or you’re reaching out to state and local councils and so forth, you go all
over the place; you talk to all sorts of people in the process. And we’re in an area right here in
Grand Rapids where we have, it’s a small city, but it is a city. It’s got some major businesses
based here. There’s a certain number of families with their own foundations that have done very
significant things locally and beyond. How characteristic is the Grand Rapids area or West
Michigan of other regions in the country? Do we have things here that are distinctive in certain
ways or do we fit a pattern that you see a lot of?
00:64:00
GE: Let me start with a little bit of the how I came to know about this, the preface, because it’s a
great coming around to where we started, and then talk specifically about western Michigan.
First of all you remember my second day at the Council and that filing cabinet about regional
associations? I took to them like crazy. And that group of the regional associations around the
country, the Council of Michigan Foundations, the New York Regional Association,
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
17
�Philanthropy Northwest, you name it, and my very first programmatic job was working with all
of them, and I worked with them my entire career. When the National Center got started, the
regional associations were the most open to working with the National Center. They were the
first at the plate to say, We have family members, how can you come and help us do this work
better? They were the first group to start inviting me out to their area and it was all because of
this relationship we’d been building up since 1980. So and Michigan, as I said to you that very
first meeting in 1980, there was the president [Dottie Johnson], then president of the Council of
Michigan Foundations. So I had really gotten to know their organizations and staff, and to some
extent their membership as well. First of all, they were willing to accept me in a very different
role. Now I’m not this educational facilitator, I’m this sort of program expert or whatever. And I
came out and started listening. And western Michigan was very clearly one of the areas I needed
to pay attention to. In some ways it is incredibly distinctive and in other cases quite
representative.
Let’s start with the distinctive. You say Grand Rapids is this small city. For a small city it has a
very, very rich, very vibrant family philanthropic community. The numbers of families who are
extraordinarily generous and active here is uncharacteristic of cities this size without a doubt.
You have only to walk around this campus and look at the names on buildings to get a real sense
of not only how diverse and rich this community is in philanthropy, but in how committed they
are to western Michigan. That is one of the areas where it is fairly typical too, that many family
philanthropies start with a very strong commitment to the region in which they’re based, even
when the family begins to move away from that. They really, really care about that community,
having a university, having an opera, having, you know, a good Y, having whatever it might be
as you look around Grand Rapids. This is very, very typical of the kind of commitment families
tend to have to their region. But there’s just nothing typical about the numbers of families, the
extent to which they’ve been generous for a city its size, you expect to see this in a city much
larger. And I know of much larger cities that don’t have the same profile, for whatever reasons,
they don’t have the same profile or the same sort of picture of family giving.
JS: One of the things that at least stands out to a more general audience in this area is, you have a
certain number of families that are fairly visible with their giving and in a lot of cases the first
generation founders are either still alive or are of the World War II generation and have passed
on only recently. But now we’re seeing future generations kind of getting involved and doing
different things and spinning off in different directions. That kind of thing is going to happen
with family foundations across the country. What particular types of problems do you see
confronting family foundations that are really sort of front burner issues now for you?
GE: Well let’s split that community out to the two you talked about.
For those foundations that were formed during the big, big period of foundation formation, 194660, there is a tremendous period going on right now of foundation transition. Transitions are the
most vulnerable and the most exciting. They hold the most potential for promise and for disaster.
We did an almost eight year study of multigenerational family philanthropy in this country. It
was the first one ever done, published a few years ago, and transitions were a huge focus of that,
because some families handled them very well and some don’t. So the biggest transition is a
transition of leadership and participation. And that’s just one. Who will be called into service?
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
18
�Are they well prepared for that? Are they committed to this work? Are they doing it by duty or
by choice? Who will provide leadership? Who will be left off? So there’s a whole set of very
difficult choices around leadership succession, everything from inspiring and preparing to
selecting leadership. There’s a huge programmatic transition. To what extent will this
philanthropy be able to continue the work it has been doing? Within the parameters of the
intentions and instructions left behind, is the family still committed to that same area? What if
everybody left western Michigan? Is the money going with them? Are they still going to have
some sense of legacy and responsibility to what the donor’s original giving looked like? What if
the family is just all over the map in terms of their interests? Where they live? And what if their
sense of the family philanthropy is, not so much, ask not what you can do for your foundation,
ask what your foundation can do for you, you know, and if that is the case, how do you switch
the dynamic? So the second big difficulty and struggle for those foundations is understanding
what it is we’re going to do together. To what extent are we looking for a shared sense of
purpose, a shared giving mission? And to what extent are we going to accommodate individual
perspective and interests? And that’s a huge dynamic that starts at about the third generation.
And depending on the number of family members, gets more or less difficult. Depending how
many of them have moved away, how many of them have married people that understand the
dynamic or fight the dynamic. So there’s a whole generational succession around family and
there’s a whole generational succession around program. Both of those provide ample
opportunity for struggle.
For newer foundations I think that’s a different kind of struggle, not only newer foundations but
all the new vehicles. Because in that case there’s been tremendous momentum and real vitality
about how these people, mostly younger people, you know. The notion that this is something that
happens in your seventies, well that’s just changed. This is some- I mean very, very, wonderful
philanthropic leaders at a very young age, people who have been running their very own
philanthropies in their fifties for awhile, and this is not something you do in that last stage of
your life anymore. For them the challenges are different. Do they want to engage another
generation? How do they feel about perpetuity? Not so much for some of them. And there’s been
a lot of knocks to some of those great late 20th century donors. The economy has certainly caught
them up short. There’s been criticism of some of the way they approached this work or did this
work. Did they make enough of this decision, enough of that decision? Were they respectful
enough? Were they active enough, generous enough? And so for them I think the challenge is
how do you maintain that momentum and vitality? How do you take that enthusiasm with which
you entered this, and find a way to sustain it as something that’s an important part of who you
are, and then whether or not it’s going to be an important part of your life and your children's’
lives going forward? So I sort of compartmentalize them that way.
JS: What kinds of problems have really come up from the large scale economic downturn like
we’ve had? You have a lot of money in investments and the investments vanish. What happens
to family foundations, what kinds of things happen to them at that point?
GE: Most family foundations in the last year or two lost between, average thirty to forty percent
of their assets. That’s an amazing hit.
JS: Cause these are endowments that generate the funding for everything.
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
19
�GE: These are endowments, exactly. Now there are a lot of people in advised funds and other
kinds of giving vehicles where it might be pass through, not that they weren’t hit either, you
might have less to pass through. But for those who put money aside to ensure that the giving was
always there for the community, that endowment took a thirty to forty percent hit. And that’s
significant, some it was more, but thirty to forty percent. The good news is that we’re starting to
see the ones that stuck it out, recovering. Some panicked and pulled it out, so they’re not
recovering so quickly. But for those that took the hit, lots came on the table.
“Oh my gosh. I truly knew that it was good philanthropic practice to make multiyear grants. I
wanted my grantees to be able to count on the fact that they were going to get money every year
for three years whatever it might be. That’s good practice, it stabilizes them, it’s good for me.
Well I might have made those promises based on one set of assets, and now I’m dealing with
another set. So that may cause me to do everything from realize that, do I really want to do
multi-year grants in the future? Even though I’ve been told there’s such good practice for
grantees?” Or, “all of the money that I have for discretionary giving is tied up in promises that I
made two years ago, what do I do with all these people who have critical needs right now? Do I
end up going above a threshold of payout that means I’m dipping into principle? I may be, you
know, fundamentally endangering the ability of the corpus to go forward especially if I’m
interested in perpetuity. How do I make the most effective choices now? Do I pick a few
organizations I really care about and do my best to sustain them, or do I try and take a lot of
organizations that are struggling and make small grants?” There are a lot of choices. And so for
families, the economy presented all of those.
JS: What do you do for those families? Or what kind of assistance can you provide?
00:15:05
GE: Well first of all one of the first things that we did is that almost immediately when we
realized what was happening, we commissioned a fairly immediate, we were not going to be able
to do a long, longer term study, [we’d] do that later. But we did a very intense canvassing of the
family philanthropy community and asked them, How are you responding to the economic
crisis? What issues are you facing? How have you made choices? What helped guide you in
those choices? What resources were helpful? And we immediately put out a major paper. I think
it was called something, Families Step up: Dealing with an Economic Crisis. We wanted people
to understand these issues are things we’re all facing. Here are some questions that we think you
need to answer more immediately. And here are some that you may see more fundamental to
your choices going forward.
And one of the things we were trying to do was to help people not start questioning their long
term strategy, we don’t want people to start dumping multi-year grants because of the immediacy
of need, but we did want them to be able to answer some questions. We also wanted to give them
some models of how their colleagues were handling this, so that they could see some options in
this. We wanted to be prepared as a staff to what these issues were and [how] we were called on
[to help.] The interesting thing was, the National Center is a grantmaking resource center, but in
order to do its work it has to be a grantseeking organization. So we were sort of caught at the
crosshairs of this too. People had less money for us too. Our phones never rang off the hook as
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
20
�much as they did [then]. With everyone from trying to figure out what do I do, to I lost
everything. [Or,] my attorney general is after me because I invested with Bernie Madoff. What
do I do? So I mean we heard it all.
But one of the next things we did was try to identify the two or three fundamental [issues] being
tested by the economy. And one of the most significant was payout and perpetuity. And so we
immediately went into work to help people understand how they could begin to think about
those. There were a lot of foundations that said, Do I have to give up my commitment to
perpetuity? Some said, I absolutely do have to give it up. I’ve got to get money into these
nonprofits and I’ve got to do it now. If I’m in trouble, god knows they are. So a lot of people
started worrying about this. But we had other families go, wait a second; we’re not giving up our
commitment to perpetuity. But we’re certainly going to step up the payout, because they need it.
Now, when this crisis is over, we’ll reassess and reevaluate. And maybe we go back to a practice
where we’re still committed to perpetuity. It might be off of a smaller corpus. But we’re not
going to not be there for the people.
And the one thing about family philanthropy that distinguishes it is this is not a professional
obligation. This is not a dispassionate kind of activity. Last night [I was part of] a conversation,
[and] we had this moment where we touched on self interest versus community interest. Families
don’t see those as distinct. They’re part of the community. If they care about things in the
community, if it’s important to them, they assume it’s important to the community. And since the
community are the ones teaching them and helping form their commitments, they see that sort of
synergistic relationship, but more importantly they can’t imagine their communities without
these nonprofits. And so for them it’s not a matter of, I’m sorry I’m keeping to five percent, I’ll
see you after the crisis is over. These are organizations they’ve been committed to in some cases
for generations. And in some cases they’ve served on their boards. They know how much they
mean to the community. This is not a bloodless transaction. They feel, you know, what’s going
on so it’s really very, very stressful. Now this does not mean there have not been foundations
who go, nope we’re going to try and keep as close as we can, but for the most part family
foundations will stick with the grantee for a longer time and payout an amount greater than other
kinds of philanthropies. So payout, perpetuity, those kinds of issues, very much called into
practice. That’s what we could do and do more immediately. And do a lot of handholding. Oh
my.
JS: That kind of gets us back, sort of, to the people which is kind of where I wanted to wind up. I
mean you had sort of mentioned the Lucile Packard story with the idea there that an awful lot of
this involved that joy, I really think you’re doing something important and valuing it. You’ve
gone out and talked to a lot of family members from these foundations, and so forth, and in this
country and in other places in the world, and so forth, and are there, I expect there’s a lot of
them, but are there particular examples of some of these people that you meet where that quality
kind of stands out in terms of the way they talk about what they’re doing or how they value what
other, people kind of stick with you a little bit in your mind more than others?
00:20:19
GE: Specifically, specific individuals?
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
21
�JS: Yes, well you don’t have to name them necessarily, but the kinds of things—
GE: No absolutely. First of all I’m always, always impressed that family members want to talk
about their grantees. And the sort of lighting up of the face comes from talking about the people
that they’ve funded and that sort of inspired them. I mean the notion that so many of them sort of
want to be calling the shots. There’s almost this living vicariously through the wonderful work of
grantees that I love. I was speaking recently with someone, there was a study commissioned
recently on the role of sabbaticals for nonprofit executives and a group of family foundations
commissioned it. And I was talking and what I was appreciating is an example of that particular
story, is that when this person talked about the nonprofit leaders in the community, she was
talking about them as this enormous community resource, and that the leadership of those people
had to be as valued as any other political or business leader that that community relied on. And
that the opportunity to give them a chance to take a break, to renew, to energize, and to come
back; she said for small amounts of money sabbaticals cost [they could do this]; it's a small
foundation. She said what we’re able to do to say, Look we can’t do this work we don’t have
your passion your talent but we could do whatever we can to support you. Now a lot of
foundations wouldn’t think of supporting a sabbatical as a program, project, you know,
operating, whatever it is, grant. She saw that value of leadership and they inspired her quite a bit.
Another thing that I love, I’ve met and I’m thinking of someone in the Midwest who at a time
when it was very unpopular recognized that they were doing some things, and they had
historically been involved in voter registration projects and a lot of things that were controversial
at the time. This family not only had a very, very large family philanthropy, they had a very, very
prominent international business. And there came a time when the reputation of the business was
being attacked because of the work of the philanthropy. And this leader, the head of the family,
had to say at one point, we weren’t going to back off. If the business was harmed because we
believed in voter registration or the job training projects or whatever as we might be doing in the
south, mostly they were funded in the south, that’s the way it’s going to be. But this is what we
do. But what I loved about that was the behind the scenes story, because it was, this donor was
incredibly enlightened please don’t get me wrong, and he was very, very committed to the work,
but at one point, as I understood it, he was feeling a little vulnerable cause he was the CEO. And
he was, well maybe I should be paying attention to them, am I doing the wrong thing? And at
that moment his sister who was also very prominent, very active in the community, very big
leader in the company, stockholder, called her brother she knew exactly the moment he needed
to be called and going, "I am so proud of the work we’re doing in the south. I’ve never been
more proud to be a member of this family or a stockholder of this corporation." And it was just
the thing he needed to say, "Our business could be hurt by our giving and we’re going to, we’re
going to suffer through that if that’s what it takes."
I mean, there absolutely have been. I remember once the wonderful privilege of talking to Irene
Diamond and most people would know Irene Diamond because I think as the story goes, she’s
the woman who discovered the script that became Casablanca. But she also married Aaron
Diamond and who was very well off. [They] had a foundation in the mid-80s about the time
America was understanding something called AIDS. And they had a large, large foundation, the
Aaron and Irene Diamond Foundation. And the two of them thought about this crisis and what it
was doing to the communities they knew and cared about. They were based in New York. And
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
22
�they realized that for them perpetuity wasn’t going to be the answer. This was a crisis and they
wanted to step up. And they committed to a ten year spend out of what I think was about $160
million. And they were going to do everything they could to influence the AIDS crisis in this
country. They were going to put money into medical research, they were going to put it into
hospice, and they were going to put it into education and prevention. And many, many of the
breakthroughs in the way we helped prepare people, treated people, and did research, were
possible because of a massive commitment to doing something bold, and something not really
popular if you think about the mid-80s; we were all still talking about blame back then. And they
were like, this is not the time. And they did. And they had a wonderful executive director who
worked with them to go out and learn everything they could about a crisis that was still in the
making. They almost had to become the experts, and to spend that money well and spend it in a
finite period of time. That was genuinely, genuinely important to them.
And yet I go up to the family in the Pacific Northwest, its six generations at the table later and
you look at Laird Norton, which was Weyerhaeuser money. And you realize that here’s a family
where the six generations of adults of philanthropists is still getting together, still talking about
what this means to the family, and how we do it well. And it’s really a wonderful image for me
to carry when I go to that first generation family who’s going, oh my goodness, how do we get
started? How do we get started? But so many people who’ve just taken that moment, that great
story, and helped me understand it. And I think the nicest thing for me is, I have interviewed
hundreds and hundreds of families, and one of the things I’ve discovered is that first of all most
people are a little reticent to talk about their giving. Now, it’s not because they’re necessarily
unassuming people or even that they’re necessarily humble, but this is not something they think
they do, they do it out of passion, they hope they do it well and they’re even proud of it. But they
don’t know that what they do as such is an example for other people. And or they think if I talk
about it, it sort of feels a little messy. But when I tell somebody that if you’ll talk to me about
your experiences, especially the things where maybe it didn’t go so well, somebody else could
learn from it, all of a sudden, oh, I’m going to talk to you. I’m going to help you. And if
somebody else could benefit from this then of course I will. I mean so the generosity isn’t just
financial. It really is, if I can share the experience…
But there are people who have been just profoundly moving. I mean, it’s not that it’s without
error but they, all that they feel, is palpable, the responsibility they feel, the privilege they feel,
which essentially is what Lucile was saying. A woman that I interviewed for the most recent
piece talked about the fact that she really thinks that this is a way that the family can relate to the
community in very important ways, important to the family, and important to the community that
we care about this. What can we do well? She feels that sense of partnership. And she’s the one
who said to me, sometimes we underestimate the love part of philanthropy. Especially when you
think that the word [philanthropy] itself [means] love of mankind. And she said, you know, it’s
the best part. It’s the best part.
And I think that’s an interesting dilemma for me personally because I live in this environment
where effectiveness is everything, and I sit down and people will say to me, Well how do you
measure your impact? Not just those outputs, how do you measure your impact? And I hear
donors talking about that, and I think it’s very important that people understand what it is they’re
trying to accomplish, and whether they’re getting to that. But I loved too the quote in the most
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
23
�recent study where someone says, "I hope that doesn’t lead us to a place where there’s a disdain
for the more charitable work that is sometimes needed in a community." Because it is important
to be effective and have evaluation processes that make you understand whether or not you’re
being effective, but it’s also important that the caring that you bring to this is evident. It’s the
best way to keep you grounded and engaged and certainly the most inspiring way for me.
JS: I think you’ve told us quite a bit here about what family philanthropy is really all about, and
in certain ways what is distinctive about this as an area, and why it’s important to actually both
study it and find effective ways to support it without trying to impose some other kind of
external model upon it. And so I think at this point I would like to thank you for coming in and
taking the time to talk to me.
GE: Thank you very much. It was really a terrific experience. Thanks. I learned a lot myself.
Oral History Interview with Virginia Esposito, February 18, 2010
24
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/18d0c22260146a022c4ac28bd9b0996b.mp4
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https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/8f3c0d47969306503dc14a785a70f4b3.mp4
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Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project Interviews
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Philanthropy and society--Personal narratives
Family foundations--Michigan
Charities--Michigan
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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.
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/516">Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project (MPOHP) (JCPA-08). Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives</a>
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2017-05-02
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JCPA-08
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2006-2008
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Johnson Center for Philantrhopy
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StoryCorps (Project)
Oral History
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/516">Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project (JCPA-08)</a>
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Esposito, Virginia video interview and transcript
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Esposito, Virginia
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Virginia Esposito (Ginny) is the Founding President of the National Center for Family Philanthropy. She discusses her early life, education, and work as teacher and administrator at the Council on Foundations, and CEO of the National Center for Family Philanthropy. She also discusses meeting inspiring international leaders, experiences with her mentor Paul Ylvisaker, the origins and development of the National Center, regional associations of grantmakers, and the Grand Rapids philanthropic community. She shares discoveries from hundreds of her interviews with families about family foundation transition, the economic issues of payout and perpetuity, and the challenges and feelings of responsibility and joy of foundation giving.
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Smither, James
Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership, Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Subject
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Philanthropy and society
Personal narratives
Charities
Michigan
Associations, institutions, etc.
Women
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JCPA-08_EspositoV
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eng
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Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives
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2010-02-18
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https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/e4bfab2b709ffe8b7d8e0af510db9c14.pdf
aad6e9ce47d137423b071422bac06614
PDF Text
Text
The Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
Interview Log Sheet
Storyteller: Thomas F. Beech
Interviewer: Bonnie Allen
Date: 10/16/06
Time: 37:33
Facilitator: N. Pumilia
Location: Kalamazoo
(1:15) Apache Corporation TB working in Minneapolis, MN. Met the head of the
Minneapolis Foundation, a philanthropic organization. Now works at the Fetzer
Institute
(3:30) Discuss his transition from business world to philanthropy
(5:00) Describe what practices non-profit could adapt from business world
(8:00) Discuss his early mentors and guides, learning forgiveness, listening,
sense of humor, Pastor from Catholic Church: John Gardener, taught that
dialogue was most important aspect of philanthropic work
(12:30) Describes work in Ft. Worth, Texas With Johnny and Shirley Lewis, and
obstacles they overcame
(14:30) Advice to young people interested in philanthropic work. Effective work
is done by those who are passionate about what they do
(19:00) Discusses issues with the people approaching those involved in
philanthropic work, a level of discomfort around the issue of money
(23:00) Power that comes from having money can be a difficult aspect of being a
philanthropist
(25:30) Heart of philanthropy, grew out of courage to teach: a program designed
to teach teachers how to teach from their own unique person
(27:30) Retreats take to encourage dialogue and storytelling amongst groups of
co-workers
(29:00) work with law and society has work in Kalamazoo
(30:00) Discusses how he came to work for Fetzer Institute. Focused on the
“power of love and forgiveness” reconciling inner and outer life, what is deeply
important to us to how/where we live, who we live with
(34:00) Discusses connectedness and similarity disconcerted between mission
and work of Fetzer with other organizations
�(35:00) Talks about the importance of story telling and individual experiences to
the work
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/d18c3b007eec62c93cc30a056f30fce9.mp3
9fe9e6399d6581536f522e8350255442
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
Rights
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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
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
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.
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/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
JCPA-08_Beech-Allen
Title
A name given to the resource
Conversation with Tom Beech and Bonnie Allen
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Beech, Tom
Description
An account of the resource
Bonnie Allen, attorney at the Center for Healing and the Law, interviews her colleague Tom Beech, President & CEO of The Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo, Michigan, about his history in philanthropy and what he's learned along the way, including: dialogue being the most important aspect of philanthropy; the most effective work is done by people who are passionate about what they do; that the power that comes from having philanthropic dollars can be difficult; and that storytelling is critical to the work of philanthropy.
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
Family foundations--Michigan
Charities--Michigan
Fetzer Institute
Women
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio/mp3
application/pdf
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Grand Valley State University Special Collections & University Archives, Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives, Council of Michigan Foundations StoryCorp Interviews
Relation
A related resource
Johnson Center Philanthropy Collection (JCPA-08)
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sound Portraits Productions
StoryCorps (Project)
Michigan Radio, Grand Valley State University Special Collections & University Archives
Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2006-10-16
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/79f04eb6bffc92fb26742cbb478784c6.pdf
ebbb161c550f921c97fbaa1518d23664
PDF Text
Text
The Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
Interview Log Sheet
Storyteller: Tara Kutz
Interviewer: John Donkersloot
Date: 6/24/07
Time: 42:06
Facilitator: M. Premo
Location: University of Michigan
(1:00) Discuss the Youth Advisory Committee (YAC) in Delta County, how she became
involved because of a friend
(2:00) Donkersloot discusses how a sport teammate got him involved to go to meetings
of the MCYFP
(3:33) They are inspired by what the problems of the community are
(3:52) Inspired by the leaders of the foundations
(5:37) Inspired by young leaders
(6:30) Empowered to affect change, given the tools to cause change
(7:50) Philanthropy shows power to engage in the community
(9:05) Kutz feels that it’s not just rich givers, but youth in community that also use funds
to influence positive developments
(10:04) They discuss how youth can affect/cause change also
(11:25) Discuss how grant-making instills increased respect and responsibility to the
community
(13:30) Favorite grants
(18:00) Discuss how grant-making has become a passion- involved with the State Farm
Youth Advisory Board
(19:05) Discuss how Kutz got involved in the State Farm Advisory Board
(21:00) This opened their eyes to service
(24:00) Showed a social responsibility for people with wealth
(28:00) Discuss how the State Farm grant stands out in Kutz’s mind. CPA- personal
economic education
�(32:00) Discuss the important grant to Donkersloot
(35:00) They discuss the critical skills learned from technical realities of grant-making
(36:36) Critical thinking- deep benefit throughout the process
(38:00) Grant-making in general is a fun process
(39:13) Their eyes have become opened beyond homogenous local community
(40:00) Discuss how honored they are by peers, change at youth
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/42a800b8f58872f537dd35a17750edea.mp3
ca0282d04c5da519bf9df17a646ed0f7
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
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Sound
Text
Moving Image
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
audio/mp3
application/pdf
video/mp4
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
JCPA-08
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
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.
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/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
JCPA-08_Kutz-Donkersloot
Title
A name given to the resource
Conversation with Tara Kutz and John Donkersloot
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Kutz, Tara
Donkersloot, John
Description
An account of the resource
Youth grantmakers and Michigan Community Foundation Youth Project members, Tara Kutz of the Community Foundation for Delta County, and John Donkersloot of the Community Foundation for Holland/Zeeland talk about how each of them got involved in Youth Advisory Councils and the ways youth can and are making a difference in their local areas.
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
Family foundations--Michigan
Charities--Michigan
Michigan Community Foundations
Women
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio/mp3
application/pdf
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Grand Valley State University Special Collections & University Archives, Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives, Council of Michigan Foundations StoryCorp Interviews
Relation
A related resource
Johnson Center Philanthropy Collection (JCPA-08)
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sound Portraits Productions
StoryCorps (Project)
Michigan Radio, Grand Valley State University Special Collections & University Archives
Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2007-06-24
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/fb3cc2f37575176d1eff771859f49098.pdf
48e1e6b89f6c523d82b0cc8118718802
PDF Text
Text
The Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
Interview Log Sheet
Storyteller: Russell Mawby
Interviewer: Kari Pardoe
Date: 10/16/06
Time: 42:02
Facilitator: Elaine D.
Location: CMF- Kalamazoo
(0:55) How Russ knows Kari
(1:00) How Russ became involved in philanthropy- his childhood, parents, Boy
Scouts and 4-H were huge influences
(2:20) His career is philanthropy, how it began. Dec. 1964 he joined the staff of
the W. K. Kellogg Foundation
(3:58) How Kari got involved in philanthropy- her parents, family and
background, and how she joined the Youth Advisory Council
(5:15) Russ’s time at Kellogg- went from Director of the Division of Agriculture to
the CEO- the positions he held, talks about the vision of the future of the
foundation
(10:40) Russ talks about CMF’s move to larger community foundations and Russ
helped start the Youth Advisory Committee for these foundations
(12:28) Kari remembers when she first became involved in the Youth Advisory
Council
(13:20) Adopting a family at Christmas time, they were living in a house with dirt
floors
(14:30) How she decided to go into non-profit (not business) after college, and
what she does now
(15:20) Learning to Give- develop k-12 curriculum to teach kids about
philanthropy, Russ talks about how it started, goes into the history of
volunteerism
(19:50) Examples of what philanthropy these young people do, Russ “the only
thing that matters is people, not money” his definition of a leader
(22:50) Russ remembers his work in Latin America with Kellogg Foundation and
when they started working in Africa in 80’s- his visit to South Africa during
apartheid
�(26:20) What direction Russ thinks foundations should go in, he remembers the
first meeting of CMF, how it formed and the formation of Michigan Non Profit
(30:15) The great challenge of early childhood- everyone needs a loving adult, the
need for organizations to collaborate (grant makers and non-profit)
(32:38) How philanthropy has had an impact on his personal life, talks more
about his involvement with 4-H, he talks about the pitfalls of philanthropy work
especially as a CEO
(35:49) His 5 values: honesty, compassions, respect, responsibility and fairness
(36:45) His hope for philanthropy, what his legacy will be, wants to be remember
that he cared
(38:08) The 3 areas he’s disappointed, haven’t improved with his philanthropic
work: supporting a healthy family structure, bringing caring back to the
professions (health, juvenile, etc.) and systematic changes in public education
system, haven’t changed since institutionalized in the 1830s, society has changed,
schools haven’t
(40:58) Quote that Kari lives by “In 10 0years it doesn’t matter what car you
drove but that you made a difference in the life of a child.”
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/69473df86087ca184a4a456eb67be62b.mp3
3a476b70ec06265a4d633510744cc7f4
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
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Sound
Text
Moving Image
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
audio/mp3
application/pdf
video/mp4
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
JCPA-08
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
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.
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/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
JCPA-08_Pardoe-Mawby
Title
A name given to the resource
Conversation with Russell Mawby and Kari Pardoe
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Mawby, Russell
Pardoe, Kari
Description
An account of the resource
Former Council of Michigan Foundations' Youth Philanthropy Associate, Kari Pardoe, talks with her mentor Russell Mawby, Chairman Emeritus of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan, about the youth philanthropy movement in Michigan and Russ's perspectives on giving time, talent and treasurer for the greater good.
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
Family foundations--Michigan
Charities--Michigan
Youth
W.K. Kellogg Foundation
Women
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio/mp3
application/pdf
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Grand Valley State University Special Collections & University Archives, Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives, Council of Michigan Foundations StoryCorp Interviews
Relation
A related resource
Johnson Center Philanthropy Collection (JCPA-08)
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sound Portraits Productions
StoryCorps (Project)
Michigan Radio, Grand Valley State University Special Collections & University Archives
Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2006-10-16
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/dd0c13476b5ba07e3f2c4219de7ffc23.pdf
49c82d58eb79f3e9ddd59a377310c97d
PDF Text
Text
The Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
Interview Log Sheet
Storyteller: Rob Rowe
Interviewer: Richard Hughey
Date: 10/17/06
Time: 40:27
Facilitator: K. Duggins
Location: CMF- Kalamazoo
(0:00) Introductions
(1:28) Bob gives his background with music education performance and his
projects, playing music for the elderly in nursing homes. Renaissance Enterprise,
discusses the meaning in doing this type of work
(8:02) Bob’s parents and grandparents influenced his character by always
working with the interest of the underdog, working w/ elderly is hard work with
physical, emotional and spiritual ways
(10:50) The range of artists in Renaissance Enterprise including Gospel, Country,
R&B. Elderly also participated via karaoke
(12:46) Discuss the process of bringing art to people who won’t or can’t come to
the art. Discuss the benefits of the elderly participating with the project,
increased cognitive ability, health benefits
(16:31) Bob’s trouble in funding his work, overcoming challenges that poses in
obtaining funding for the project. Renaissance was awarded a Mother Teresa
Award for their innovative work. In 1987 he wrote a letter to Mother Teresa and
got a handwritten letter back
(22:00) Richard discusses the importance of (?) the good happening in the
community and how it’s under reported in the mainstream media. Bob discusses
the technological evidence we’ve made this generation. Richard discusses how art
is as important as technology. How the art (?) for so many things, spiritual,
physical
(32:51) What needs to be offered to children, artistically speaking, how their
talents need to be nurtured
(34:54) Discusses bringing back spirit to the lives of youth via the arts
(36:49) Bob discusses some of the success of the Renaissance so far.
(39:00) Comments on the additional funding that is needed for the Renaissance
(40:00) Closing
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/862c84e99c87fe59743ed266713bfffd.mp3
adc7daa5df25ae99255a65169b285373
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
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Sound
Text
Moving Image
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
audio/mp3
application/pdf
video/mp4
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
JCPA-08
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
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.
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/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
JCPA-08_Hughey-Rowe
Title
A name given to the resource
Conversation with Rick Hughey, Jr. and Bob Rowe
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Rowe, Bob
Hughey, Rick
Description
An account of the resource
Rick Hughey, Jr., Executive Vice President/CEO of the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation in Kalamazoo, Michigan talks with grantee Bob Rowe, a musician from Renaissance Enterprises, about Bob's transformative work of bringing gospel, country and R&B music into nursing homes.
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
Family foundations--Michigan
Charities--Michigan
Irving S. Gilmore Foundation
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio/mp3
application/pdf
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Grand Valley State University Special Collections & University Archives, Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives, Council of Michigan Foundations StoryCorp Interviews
Relation
A related resource
Johnson Center Philanthropy Collection (JCPA-08)
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sound Portraits Productions
StoryCorps (Project)
Michigan Radio, Grand Valley State University Special Collections & University Archives
Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2006-10-17