EIN: 13-2943020
Philanthropy Roundtable
Washington, DC 20036
The Roundtable was setup by the Bradley Foundation to help coordinate conservative grantmaking.
The Philanthropy Roundtable is a growing membership organization whose 430 (now 600 - May 2001) institutional and individual donors are committed to the Roundtable's founding principle that voluntary action offers the best means of addressing society's needs.
It was founded in the early 1980s, when conservative donors left the Council on Foundations to protest the Council's adoption of The Principles and Practices of Effective Grantmaking, a statement intended to encourage its members toward greater public openness and accountability.
With the presidents and trustees of major conservative foundations as officers and members of the board, the Roundtable today expresses ironic concern over the "politicization of philanthropy."
Michael Joyce, (former) president of the Bradley Foundation, [formerly] chair[ed] the Roundtable's board of directors. James Piereson (Olin Foundation), Joanne B. Beyer (Scaife Family Foundation), David B. Kennedy (Earhart Foundation) and Chris Olander (JM Foundation) serve[d] with him.
The Roundtable holds annual and regional conferences, provides technical assistance to individual donors and grantmaking foundations (placing special emphasis on donor intent), and publishes occasional mongraphs on topical issues, including The Market Foundations of Philanthropy and Local Organizations as Problem-Solvers.
Roundtable monographs reflect an effort to "theorize" the voluntary sector's role in American society in ways consistent with pro-market policy objectives. This has involved the development of a rationale for ending the partnership between government and the nonprofit sector in the delivery of services.
The Roundtable is adding its voice to the growing number of new right grantees aggressively articulating the virtues of a philanthropic paternalism that would in effect place the poor under the direct moral guidance of the rich, or those who have presumably demonstrated their moral superiority through hard work, self-reliance and personal responsiblity. Growing concern over declining "social captial" is used to buttress conservative claims that government expansion stifles the philanthropic impulse and that private philanthropy, not government, is the proper and most effective vehicle for responding to social needs, encouraging civic responsibility and restoring social trust.
Bill Berkowitz
MediaTransparency.org
March 23, 2005
Team Schiavo's Deep Pockets
story.php?storyID=56
A host of right wing organizations, many of which are affiliated with the Philanthropy Roundtable have been copiously funding the Terri Schiavo case.
Arthur Caplan
blog.biotethics.net
March 4, 2005
Have Conservatives Bought Bioethics?
http://blog.bioethics.net/2005/03/have-conservatives-bought-bioethics.html
...the nature of the greatest threat to the integrity and credibility of bioethics [is] secret non-disclosed funding of journals, professorships, conferences, and legal cases by arch-conservative foundations. Where are the laments about this source of blatant conflict of interest????
Robert Kuttner
The American Prospect
July 14, 2002
Philanthropy and Movements
http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/13/kuttner-r.html
[Kuttner played liberal foil at a Philanthropy Roundtable event in New York City]
"...it was breathtaking to see the policy strategists ... preen for the edification of their steadfast funders - - the culmination of a 25-year strategic alliance between organized business, ideological conservatism, advocacy research, and the Republican Party. Hertog was right: $70 million a year is chump change to the American elite, but invested strategically in the battle of ideas, it yields a bountiful political harvest."
New York Times
May 10, 2001
Tough-Guy John P. Walters named Drug Czar
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/11/politics/11DRUG.html?searchpv=site02
Republican President George W. Bush has selected Philanthropy Roundtable president John P. Walters, "who has long argued for jail time over voluntary treatment for drug offenders" to be his new drug czar.
Walters served in the previous Bush administration's Department of Education under William J. Bennett as the head of the Schools Without Drugs prevention program.
He also was president of the New Citizenship Project, which (according to the New York Times) "promoted the role of religion in public life."