Conclusion

What lessons have you learned from your career about the work of foundations in our society?

Well, foundations have great opportunities, they're really fortunate. They're really blessed. They have the scope and flexibility the way the laws are written and the customs have evolved, and, I must say, under the leadership of Andrew Carnegie and the broad mandate that he gave, they have scope and flexibility to address a very wide range of problems, including extremely hard problems that people would rather not think about, that look truly intractable. They have a wonderful kind of Pied Piper capacity to get the best minds -- brilliant, dedicated scientists, scholars, innovators on the street, wherever -- to work on problems with a little bit of support. So you have that effect of mobilizing terrific people to work on very important problems, and you have the scope and flexibility to go wherever the evidence leads you. That is a great privilege. And I think, on the negative side, we must not make ourselves bureaucratically rigid or overly fearful. We are meant to be the venture capital of the non-profit sector, but we have some tendency to be risk averse. We mustn't be risk averse. We will draw some criticism if we support brilliant, innovative people working on hard social problems. We have to be responsible and careful about it, but we must take the chance of addressing those problems.

What has been your greatest frustration and your greatest satisfaction in the work that you've done?

In the foundation?

Yes.

I must say I can't readily identify any great frustration, except in what is called in the foundation community the "scale-up problem." That is, if you're able to support on a small scale some terrific innovation based on the best available research and you can demonstrate with evaluative research that it's really useful, that it does work, that you can take poor kids and turn them on to science education, for example, and open up pathways in which they were thought to be just out of the question, and you can do it in three communities or six or twenty communities. And you desperately want to make that available to the whole country, but it's very hard to do. You don't have the money. Where is the money? You can turn to the business community, state governments, federal government, and you can enhance public understanding. In the long run it tends to happen. In the short run it's very frustrating when you can see good things being done, or lives being warped or even destroyed, and you can't move fast enough to apply the knowledge and skill that exists. That's a great frustration. But on the positive side, you can open so many doors of opportunities, you can stimulate so much creativity, that it's an immense privilege to be able to work for an American foundation.

One final question. What would be your advice to students who might want to do foundation work, or work on either of these two problems that we have talked about -- the situation with youth and preventing deadly conflict?

Well, I would say you have to get, first of all, a deep knowledge in some problem area. That doesn't mean, necessarily, a single discipline, although you technically start with a single discipline. But be mindful that the problems of the real world don't come in neat packages that fit any single discipline. And so you broaden your horizons in order to get deep knowledge of some particular problem area and have a sense of rootedness in that knowledge or skill. But then to keep scanning for how your professional knowledge might be usefully applied in a social context. It could be done even in college, in volunteer work, in other ways that you're constantly probing, exploring to see the extent to which your knowledge could be put to work for the benefit to people beyond your own immediate family. That can be done and can grow over time. Foundations are strange creatures and there's no single or obvious professional pathway into the foundation community. People come out of many different backgrounds. To have a reasonably broad base of knowledge and to keep flexible so you can adapt your knowledge to different situations is a cardinal criteria for being successful in the foundation community.

Dr. Hamburg, thank you very much for spending this time with us and talking about your work at the Carnegie and your life's work.

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be back with you again after these years.

Thank you. And thank you very much for joining me for this Conversation with History.

S the 1986 interview with Dr. Hamburg.
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