This eleventh edition of the Catalogue for Philanthropy begins our second decade. You will notice that this Catalogue is more collaborative, with six signed articles by leaders in our sector. By skillful costcutting and the philanthropic generosity of Acme Printing Co., we are doubling our circulation to 120,000, without sacrificing quality. We have been working hard all year to institutionalize our structures and procedures, for stronger growth. Strategically, we have also updated our mission, from “Donor education, to increase and improve charitable giving”, to: “To strengthen the culture of philanthropy—its vocabulary, conceptualization, rhetoric, infrastructure and modes of operation—through donor education and the creation of donor-friendly tools to promote charitable giving.” The Catalogue is growing, maturing, and perforce, changing.

We have found traditional philanthropy’s “vocabulary, conceptualization, and rhetoric” unnecessarily technical and negative, often simply adopted from the IRS. Younger donors from the new economy have found it uninspired and uninspiring. As for the twentieth-century “infrastructure and modes of operation”, they are everywhere in flux, being transformed by the IT revolution and new demographics of wealth—which we first identified in 2000 as a paradigm-shift. We aim to nudge the flow of changes in more donor-friendly directions, by providing better tools. The Catalogue system as developed thus far—this publication and its taxonomy of fields, our website, the charitable giving Indices, State Giving Days, and a book, Philanthropy Reconsidered—is a toolkit for the marketplace, of instruments designed to work together in mutually reinforcing ways.

One of those tools is our “Catalogue-in-a-Box” webware. We were especially pleased this past year to be invited to provide technical assistance to Governor Deval Patrick’s Inaugural Committee grantmaking program, loaning to them a modified version of our “Cat-in-a- Box” to put their entire proposal submission, review, and selection process online. About 400 reviewers commented on and scored 1,750 proposals, over 10,000 individual reviews, to select 215 grantees in all fields of philanthropy (using our taxonomy), all across the Commonwealth. This was probably the largest single proposal review process in history, and it happened without a hitch—smoothly, efficiently, quickly, and paperless. All participants learned about philanthropy and its proper relation to government, which is partnership.

Epitomizing our new direction is our new Atlas of Philanthropy in Massachusetts, now being developed on our (redesigned) website, and described in following pages. The Atlas consists of several Directories to Massachusetts charities—initially those of general and of local philanthropic interest. They open the entire Massachusetts philanthropic market, for the first time, to public visibility and accessibility, for exploration, analyses, and charitable giving. We are licensing the template for other markets nationwide.

When we began the Catalogue, we could not possibly have foreseen all this—for starters, the Internet was just beginning. Our first ten years were spent on fundamental spadework—basic inquiry, reflection and analysis. In that decade, we carefully developed our intellectual content; we did basic empirical research as well on charities, evaluating thousands of applicants to find 850 examples of excellence, and scanning 7,000 on the IRS 990 list for eligibility. We have not done this in isolation, but collaboratively, with the charities themselves; we are all on the same team, and this is an open system for continual improvement.

The ramifications and potential benefits of the Atlas are enormous. First, the practical dimension: this new tool demonstrates how, with current technology, philanthropy is on the verge of becoming systematic—more readily strategic for everyone. For donors this will be especially helpful, and for the future development of every field, it will make possible collective strategies in addressing issues.

There is also an idealistic dimension: when all of philanthropy becomes visible, for the first time, we can appreciate what a grand phenomenon and tradition it actually is. Seeing it whole moves us beyond thinking of it only as “giving”, or as “rich people helping poor people” (much less, rich people helping themselves, as alleged in a major study this past year). Seeing it both whole and in detail, simultaneously, is a great corrective to misunderstandings. With the Atlas, clear and focused images will replace vague imaginings; what everyone will see is all the ways in which so many people work so hard to make the world a better place—to improve “the human condition.”

This is the best evidence that Prometheus (which meant “foresight”) was right to have had a philanthropos tropos, a “humanity-loving character”; that Cicero and the first English dictionary (1623) were right to define “philanthropia” as synonymous with “humanitas” (humaneness). In that Classical definition, philanthropy was the goal of liberal education and self-development. It informed the culture of our Founding Fathers, and was what made them so exceptional. Its application to nation-building was the essence of the American Revolution— the birth of our nation.

Philanthropy today has gone beyond chic—it seems to be becoming a popular movement. If we can revive its Classical dimensions, it can become our school for values as well—not telling us what our values should be, but helping us to identify and express them ourselves. If that happens, perhaps we can revive the culture of American philanthropy that once held such promise for humankind.

George McCully President