It was, as the keynote speaker suggested, a Thomas Paine moment.
Shale Stiller, president of the $2.3 billion Owings Mill-based Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, told the packed 24th annual meeting of the Association of Baltimore Area Grantmakers Wednesday that better assessment efforts, intellectual curiosity and common sense must inform the decision-making of those who give away “large amounts of money.”
Alluding to the American Revolutionary War author of the pamphlet,”Common Sense,” Stiller said that there is so much evaluative vagueness in grantmaking that optimal decision-making often comes down to precautions such as being skeptical, thorough, inquisitive and wary of possible conflicts of interest.
“I don?t have 50 percent of the information that I should have,” Stiller said of the $100 million-plus his foundation gives away yearly. “Giving away large amounts of money is much, much harder than the hardest trial that I?ve [ever] been involved in.”
Stiller, a partner with the Baltimore mega-law firm DLA Piper LLP, skewered a series of circumstances within philanthropy that make for selection difficulties, including determining which broad social welfare areas are the neediest, deciding applicant worthiness and negotiating the hazards of issue “dogmatism” that complicate intervention selection.
“I think philanthropy is continuing the development of effective assessment tools,” said Scot Spencer, Baltimore relations manager for the family- and child-advocating Annie E. Casey Foundation. “There are some very tangible ways to measure [grantmaking] effectiveness. … But it is very hard.”
