The Insider's Guide to Grantmaking: How Foundations Find, Fund, and Manage Effective Programs

Sentry or Steward?

The character of the program officer is perhaps the most underrated attribute of good grantmaking. The quality of that character does much to determine which of the grantmaker's dual roles will predominate, that of the sentry or the steward. When you find and decline a bad idea–good proposal, you are quite appropriately guarding the foundation's resources: being a sentry. When finding and funding a good idea–bad proposal, you are wisely spending the foundation's resources: being a steward. Although these are two very different roles, the conundrum is that you must play both, and often must switch back and forth between the two many times in a single day.

The sentry mentality, when taken to extremes, creates what Spiro Agnew ...