Charitable Foundations, Philanthropy, Glass Pockets

Last month the Foundation Center launched a new Web site created to encourage more transparency among private foundations. The novel platform features foundations that have been at the forefront of communication through the use of online resources and social networking.

Glasspockets.org provides foundations interested in achieving transparency the opportunity to reflect on reasons for “greater openness,” with the stakeholders, and the chance to share their successes and their failures. According to the Foundation Center, President Bradford K. Smith said the term “glass pockets” was used more than 50 years ago by then-Carnegie Corporation of New York Board Chair Russell Leffingwell, who told a McCarthy-era congressional hearing, “We think that the foundation should have glass pockets.” In today’s highly competitive and scrutinized philanthropic environment, the Foundation Center feels Smith’s statement still holds water. “Organizations receiving tax exemptions for serving the public good must be willing to clearly explain how they are doing so,” the Center said.

“The Foundation Center believes strongly in the kind of freedom that allows U.S. foundations to be innovative, take risks and work on long-term solutions to the world’s most vexing problems,” Smith said in a statement. “To preserve this freedom, foundations must tell the story of what they do, why they do it, and what difference they make. Glasspockets will serve as a central source of knowledge that can fuel this movement toward greater transparency in philanthropy.”

The Center said Glasspockets.org maintains facts on just about all 97,000 U.S. foundations, illustrations of philanthropy’s impact on the issues that people care about, and information on the ways in which foundations are striving to become more transparent. The site features real-time Twitter feeds as well as “Foundation Transparency 2.0,” which showcases the growing number of foundations that are using social media. For instance, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation uses, among other tools, Twitter, Facebook, an e-newsletter and RSS feeds for “Foundation News.”

“Who Has Glass Pockets?” provides at-a-glance profiles of individual foundations’ online communication practices according to information they make public regarding their governance, finances, grantmaking processes and performance metrics. The Alfred R. Sloan Foundation and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation were among new participants at time of print. Glasspockets.org was developed with partners including the Center for Effective Philanthropy, Global Philanthropy Forum, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, One World Trust and the Communications Network.

CEP President Phil Buchanan said in a release, “We have seen in our work a link between foundation effectiveness and clear and open communication. Glasspockets.org takes an important step towards facilitating that communication, thereby making philanthropy not just less mysterious, but also more effective.”

For more information

The Foundation Center is the nation’s leading authority on philanthropy, connecting nonprofits and the grantmakers supporting them to tools they can use and information they can trust. The Center maintains the most comprehensive database on U.S. grantmakers and their grants—a robust, accessible knowledge bank for the sector. For more information, visit www.foundationcenter.org. To learn more about Glasspockets, go to www.glasspockets.org.