Make Philanthropy Succeed
- The National Park Service's long-term goal, and that of the Friends Alliance, should be to help park philanthropies move from raising $100-million a year to raising twice, three times, and four times that amount in an agreed time period.
- The Park Service culture is not yet a willing, self-motivated client of the fundraising consultants called friends groups. The national parks are significantly behind many publicly funded institutions which have actively embraced supplemental philanthropy.
- The philanthropic ideal must be infused into the National Park Service and become an embedded cultural element. The advancement of charitable fundraising should become a main operating principle of the agency.
- Friends group competition for private funds occurs between the friends movement and other charitable causes, including religion, hurricane relief, human welfare, education, natural resource protection, etc.
- Friends groups have not succeeded in explaining that we are freely donating money to government, not to politicians or parties, and are seeking no financial reward or gain from government.
- Friends groups and the National Park Service need to work together to convince Congress to recognize private philanthropy as "both a noble tradition of the national parks and a vital element in the success of today's Park Service." Private philanthropy is incredibly important National Park Service history which, if more broadly understood in Congress and throughout the Service, would help make private philanthropies equal partners in the stewardship of the federal lands.
- Government reacts at the lowest uncommon denominator when dealing with partnership failures, presumably to prevent isolated fiascos from being repeated. When a partnership project implodes, the solicitors' impulse is to protect client agencies by wholesale policy restrictions rather than sanctioning the offending parties.
- This legalistic reaction is one important reason that the shared record of successful friends projects, doesn't yet drive NPS philanthropic policy.
- It's important that the Interior Department and National Park Service work to preserve, through policies that affect friends groups, the diversity or organizational identities that make up the friends movement. Don't homogenize these organizations for the sake of uniformity, or what Emerson called "foolish consistency."
- We cannot let philanthropic standards get grayer. Just as weakening the "unimpairment" standard in park management would lessen stewardship standards, relaxing grant standards will further erode the philanthropic ideal.
- Donors need to be protected against double taxation: one tax is paid to IRS for national parks on April 15, and second "tax" is paid to a friends group in the form of a donation to make up for lost or diverted appropriations. A dollar donated under those circumstances has reduced marginal value. Congress will come to expect philanthropy to fill in. We need to wean Congress from this kind of funding.
- This undermines donor motivation. Donors do not wish to replace federal funding; they want to add to it, to supplement--to add value to national parks, to provide a margin of excellence beyond what the Park Service can do alone. You can't have private charitable investment in national parks running side-by-side with federal disinvestment.