Continuing Pressures of Choice

All the while, through these same six years, we have faced a steady, sometimes explosive, growth in the claims and opportunities of the programs to which we are committed. The officers and Trustees of the early 1960s were prescient in their basic program choices. In addition we have honored the pledge we made in 1966 to set the struggle for equal opportunity at the top of our domestic agenda: More than 40 per cent of our current domestic program effort aims at this objective.

Other priorities which we have maintained are our commitments to the developing nations of the world and to international studies in American universities. In neither area have we been able to make up for hopes deferred in Washington, but in both we have refused to leave the field in spite of budgetary pressure and the claims of domestic crises. Our Trustees have held to the view that it makes no sense to let our domestic concerns turn us away from what we have slowly learned to do in the world at large. The Board is presently engaged in a full-dress review of our programs in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, which will undoubtedly lead to changes of emphasis and even of direction in parts of those programs. But it is a safe assumption that this Foundation will reject any form of neo-isolationism. Budgetary constraints have been tight in every part of the Foundation, and in the International Division as elsewhere we have had to refine our purposes and sharpen our techniques. But these changes are not a sign of any plan to leave the international field. They are the necessary condition of our determination to stay in it.

These program choices have only intensified our budgetary troubles. Throughout the last five years the program officers of this Foundation have been living with the reality that even within the tight parameters of our Trustee-approved programs, there was vastly more to do than we could pay for. And so we must ask applicants with even more intensity all the hard and seemingly unresponsive questions of professional philanthropy: Cannot some other source of money be found? If we help now, who will help later? If we help you, what about others with a claim as good? If your plan works, who else will benefit? The questions are painful, but the nature of our objectives and the reality of our financial position make them inescapable.

This is not to suggest that every project we support turns out as well as this list of questions might imply. We are still in risk-taking work, and the possibility of a high return often leads us to give help when certainty is not possible. So projects do fail or fall short, and even our best-directed efforts must often be undertaken in the clear understanding that the program objective may be hard to reach. It takes a certain presumption, for example, even to attempt "success" in so massive a field as population control. All that I am trying to indicate is that the necessity for choice, in every program of this Foundation, is now constrained by budget ceilings which are and must remain low, when measured against both need and opportunity.

Two vacancies on the Board this year were filled with the election of Mrs. Dorothy Nepper Marshall and Mrs. Patricia Wald. Mrs. Marshall, dean of faculties and provost of the Boston campus of the University of Massachusetts, brings us wide experience as an outstanding teacher and administrator in both private and public colleges and universities. Mrs. Wald's career also coincides with many of our interests. She was in the vanguard of lawyers working for bail reform. She has worked in the fields of poverty law, mental health for the elderly, housing, and juvenile law, and she was a co-author of the pathbreaking report which has led us to join with others in founding the Drug Abuse Council. In addition to these particular interests both Mrs. Marshall and Mrs. Wald bring the proven judgment and critical insight