Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors

Inside Philanthropy
April 13, 2009
By Todd Cohen

The crisis in the financial marketplace should be sounding alarm bells in the charitable marketplace.

With the failure of the capital markets, the value of the endowments of U.S. foundations fell nearly as much last year as the total grants those foundations paid out over the past four years.

Despite those huge losses, foundation endowments still total roughly $550 billion, yet foundations are blowing a big opportunity to shape social and economic change because they continue to operate as passive investors, says Michael Passoff, associate director of the Corporate Social Responsibility Program at As You Sow.

Foundations typically delegate their proxy-voting responsibilities to investment managers who often vote the foundations’ proxies based on recommendations from management of the companies in which the foundations own stock, say As You Sow and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

Read the full article.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 12:24 pm.