ABSTRACT
Organizational units, especially hospitals and educational institutions, have greatly increased in scale and in bureaucratization. The pressures of inflation, cuts in government income, and other financial uncertainties have produced a strong push toward the development of profit-making activities and a fee-for-services mentality, which clashes with the qualities of compassion and generosity that have been basic to the voluntarist tradition. Operating nonprofits are the instruments through which they carry out their programs and from which they receive their feedback and much of their stimulus. When the nonprofit sector is strong and healthy, foundations are strengthened and effective; when it is crippled, foundations are equally and immediately handicapped. The challenge to philanthropy is to help find some new and better answers to this fundamental dilemma: to help generate some fresh ideas and to test some new methods that might provide for both equity and efficiency, humaneness and effectiveness, in social programs.
