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AbstractFoundations divide roughly into two groups in their investment behavior. Most follow an inactive, risk‐averse style, focusing on income maximization rather than total return. Another, smaller group of foundations are more activist and aggressive, focusing on total return. This article analyzes the investment performance associated with these different approaches, showing that while a significant number of foundations are performing well, many others lag in their investment returns.

AbstractFoundations in the United States manage more than $130 billion in investment resources. In managing these assets, foundations must balance the competing goals of promoting charitable good deeds through the distribution of grants and stewarding the assets that can support such grants in the future. This paper examines how foundations perform the function of managing their financial assets and whether they follow modern practices of portfolio management in doing so. The data presented here provide reason to suspect that many foundations are giving insufficient attention to preserving and enhancing the available philanthropic resources under their control. Analysis of actual investment performance is the subject of a sequel article in the next issue of Nonprofit Management and Leadership.

Several critical factors, including demographic trends and shifts in public policy, promise to alter the balance between public, nonprofit, and proprietary provision of human services in the years ahead.

Despite the fact that gouernment in the United States relies more heavily on nonprofit organizations than on its own instrumentalities to deliver government- funded human services, and that nonprofits receive more of their income from government than from any other single source, the phenomenon of government- nonprofit partnership has been largely overlooked both in analyses of the welfare state and in research on the voluntary sector. This article argues that this neglect of government-nonprofit ties is less the product of a lack of research than of important weaknesses in theory. Both the theory of the welfare state and the theory of the voluntary sector, moreover, are deficient. To overcome these weaknesses, the article advances an alternative theoretical formulation that replaces the prevailing con ception of the welfare state with the concept of "third-party government," and replaces the current "market failure-government failure" theory of the voluntary sector with a theory built around the concept of "voluntary failure" instead. Viewed through these alternative conceptual lenses, the phenomenon of government-non profit partnership comes into far better view and becomes far more understandable. Against the backdrop of this alternative theory, the article then identifies a number of principles that should guide government-nonprofit relations in the years ahead.

Prevailing conceptions of the welfare state in the US have failed to acknowledge the widespread partnership that exists between government & private voluntary organizations in the provision of human services. Due in large part to this partnership, voluntary organizations have retained a significant role in the US welfare state, delivering a larger share of government-financed human services than government agencies. By cutting back on government spending, the Reagan administration has significantly reduced the revenue of the nonprofit sector while calling on this sector to do more. Although nonprofits as a group have overcome the resulting cutbacks, they have done so chiefly by increasing their income from service charges, rather than by private charitable support. In the process, serious questions have been raised about the continued ability of nonprofit organizations to serve those in greatest need; an important opportunity to strengthen the voluntary sector & rationalize government nonprofit ties may have been lost. 6 Tables, 28 References. HA

Implications of reduced government support for social service organizations and other nongovernmental "public benefit service" agencies.

Recent debates, both in the political arena and in academic circles, have thoroughly clouded the objectives that government reorganization can reasonably be expected to advance. To remedy this, this article suggests a framework for sorting out the lengthy laundry lists of possible goals commonly associated with reorganization. According to this framework, reorganizations can be distinguished according to whether their primary objective is (1) economy and efficiency; (2) policy effetiveness; or (3) tactical advantage. Each of these three major types of reorganizations has its own basic characteristics, political and administrative dynamics, underlying theory, and advantages and disadvantages. While no particular reorganization may fall exclusively into an y one of these categories, this framework can help clarify discussions of organizational reform and improve our understandmg of the objectives such reform can accomplish.