Archiving Simply: How the French American Charitable Trust (FACT) Prioritized Sharing

Over its eighteen years of existence, FACT focused its grantmaking on strengthening community organizations in the United States and France (we are a bi-national family). So when we made the decision to spend down the foundation in 2012, we soon realized we had boxes and boxes of files to sort through – not a task on my to-do list I was looking forward to!  Fortunately, a colleague suggested I get in touch with Brown University, which has a program on community organizing and was looking for additional resources. The librarian at Brown asked me to send her a complete accounting of our files, which included documents ranging from board meeting notes to program assessments to grantee reports. She was interested in all of it, and her staff was able to sort through the files, catalogue and archive them, and make them available to students and faculty. What a relief! 

But we had more to do. Some of our documents were more relevant to the philanthropic community, and we didn’t want those to only be available in Providence, Rhode Island. 

Spending down wasn’t a tough decision, but because there are only a few foundations that invest in community organizing, exiting the field was. Still, we felt we had some interesting learnings related to programs, technical assistance, and evaluation we wanted to share. In addition, we wrote comprehensive reports on the foundation’s activities at five years, ten years, and as we were preparing to close our doors. Because they contain reflections about working as a family foundation, the steps we took to help build the community organizing field, and lessons learned about strengthening our grantees to promote their sustainability, those reports were the most relevant documents to our peers, and we wanted to make them available to people in a way that was easy and convenient. 

To that end, we posted our final report on the homepage of our website so that if you searched for FACT, you’d be sent right to the report. Our thinking was that, in an age of information overload, the easier it was to find our most helpful lessons, the better. That final report also includes additional resources that people looking for more in-depth information can explore at their leisure.

We could have shared information on a variety of other things, such as our financial documents, the key lessons learned by board and staff, our experiences working with consultants, and so on. However, what we decided to leave behind for the philanthropic community was information about FACT’s core mission -- to strengthen the capacity of community organizations that elevate the voices of people with regard to the societal and political issues that concern them, along with the lessons we learned in pursuit of that mission, our failures and successes, and what we achieved in our foundation’s lifespan. Learning from our lessons is what will serve the philanthropic community the best. 

We have colleagues involved in spend down situations who decided to leave behind different types and amounts of information, and it’s clear that what foundations in spend down mode decide to share with the broader philanthropic community inevitably varies from foundation to foundation.

I don’t personally believe that many people will slog through hundreds of pages of documents, and so my advice to those who find themselves in a spend down situation is: Prioritize the documents and information you want to share, and make  sure the material that’s of most interest to other funders is on point, presented concisely, and easy to find and access. For the rest, there’s always a library somewhere that will be delighted to preserve and archive the material for future generations and use them with their community. Find that library and let them slog!

This is the fourteenth post in the "Making Change by Spending Down" series, produced in partnership by The Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies and GrantCraft. Please contribute your comments on each post and discuss the series on twitter using #spenddown. See related content below for more posts in this series.

About the author(s)

Former Director
French American Charitable Trust