Glasspockets Find: Learn Foundation Law Pools Resources to Offer Legal Training to Private Foundations

(Rebecca Herman is Special Projects Associate for Glasspockets at the Foundation Center-San Francisco.)

Remember all those group projects in school that were supposed to help us work together as a team? The main lesson we learned from the process was that group assignments are never easy. In the grown-up world of philanthropy, “collaboration,” “resource-sharing,” and “knowledge-building” are buzzwords that frequently show up in our benchmarks for success. Foundations often ask nonprofits if they can pool resources and share information with their colleagues, and we all know this can be just as difficult as when we were teenagers.

GrantCraft Advocacy GuideThankfully, there are online tools to facilitate both collaboration and transparency, thereby increasing our efficiency and reducing duplication of effort. Wouldn’t you like to know if someone else has already tackled any complex issues your organization is facing? The Learn Foundation Law website is an example of teamwork by a group of foundations who have created training materials on legal issues in the field of philanthropy. The legal staff at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation created Learn Foundation Law in 2010 as an online instructional resource, so that any foundation can jump-start their legal education.

The website is also a wonderful instance of foundations being more open about seldom-discussed issues in philanthropy. Course topics include legal rules for private foundations on advocacy, lobbying, and anti-bribery/anti-corruption. You can find a commentary on the content of Learn Foundation Law’s online training materials on the blog of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.

For more information about advocacy funding in particular, check out this guide on GrantCraft, the Foundation Center’s own online resource and knowledge center for grantmakers. There is even a GrantCraft guide about funder collaboratives! At Glasspockets, we advocate for transparency in philanthropy, and we see one of the benefits of greater openness is to make it easier for the field as a whole to earn an A+ in collaboration.

-- Rebecca Herman

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