FOCUS ON FACULTY
David Hammack Researches Impact of Foundations on American Society
Mandel Center Professor David Hammack is working on a joint project, entitled The Contributions of Foundations to Society, with the UCLA Center for Civil Society's Helmut Anheier. Their goal is to develop a coherent set of chapters by a dozen or so authors, as well as one or two edited volumes on the topic.
This project asks: How is American society different because of the existence of foundations? Do foundations fill a distinctive institutional niche in the United States? Do foundations make contributions that are quite unlike those of other kinds of organizations? Do foundations pose disadvantages to American society - and if so, to what extent do their advantages outweigh them?
Much recent research has focused on nonprofit organizations generally, but foundations, as a distinct organizational form, have been neglected.
"We know comparatively less about foundations than about operating nonprofit organizations - yet at present, foundations are attracting more attention from policy-makers, state as well as federal, than at any time since the late 1960s," Dr. Hammack said.
The Mandel Center is contributing a good deal of the editorial and research work for this project, including a special study of the impact of foundations in Northeastern Ohio that Professor Hammack is writing in collaboration with Mandel Center Executive Director Susan Lajoie Eagan. Current plans are for the project to be completed by the end of 2006. For additional information, contact david.hammack@case.edu.
