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https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-021-00331-z
RESEARCH PAPERS
Government/Foundation Relations: A Conceptual Framework
and Evidence from the U.S. Federal Government’s Partnership
Efforts
Stefan Toepler1 • Alan Abramson1
Accepted: 6 February 2021
 International Society for Third-Sector Research 2021
Abstract Interest in collaboration between government
and private, grantmaking foundations has grown consid-
erably in recent years both in the USA and abroad. In the
USA, one outcome of the increased interest has been the
emergence of liaison offices in federal agencies tasked with
facilitating partnerships between government and grant-
making foundations and others, such as corporate philan-
thropic programs. As the government/foundation
relationship is still under-conceptualized, we propose a
framework that extends general government/nonprofit
relationship typologies to grantmaking foundations and
present empirical evidence on the foundation roles that
government liaison officers prioritize in developing part-
nerships with their foundation counterparts. Empirically,
the article is based on semi-structured interviews with these
officers in U.S. federal cabinet departments and indepen-
dent agencies. Having foundation funding substitute for
government outlays factors heavily for government liaison
staff. At the same time, the role of foundations in seeding
government innovation plays a relatively modest role,
despite the prominence of the foundation innovation role in
the literature. Rather than having government scale foun-
dation-identified innovations, government liaison officers
emphasize foundations funding support services that pro-
vide access to or enhance government programs and
& Stefan Toepler
stoepler@gmu.edu
Alan Abramson
aabramso@gmu.edu
1 coordination of efforts to full-blown formal partnerships
Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason
University, 3351 Fairfax Drive, MSN 3B1, Arlington,
VA 22201, USA
foundations providing expertise to help co-design better
government programs.
Keywords Philanthropic foundations  Collaboration 
Partnerships  Government/Nonprofit relations  Foundation
roles
Introduction
Partnerships between the government and private grant-
making foundations are not new, but interest in collabo-
rative ventures has increased significantly in recent years in
the USA (Abramson et al., 2014; Ferris & Williams,
2013, 2014; Toepler, 2018a) and internationally in coun-
tries such as Canada (Phillips, 2018), Ireland (Boyle, 2016;
Boyle & Shannon, 2018; Knox & Quirk, 2017), and Israel
(Almog-Bar & Zychlinski, 2012, 2014; Bar Nissem and
Schmid, 2019). Moreover, large foundations also partner
with supranational institutions globally. The Gates Foun-
dation, f.i., has become the second-largest contributor to
the World Health Organization’s budget after the U.S.
government (Cheney, 2020). In the USA, this policy
interest manifested itself in the new label of ‘‘public/phi-
lanthropic partnerships,’’ which the Administrative Con-
ference of the United States (ACUS), an independent
federal agency dedicated to improving federal administra-
tive processes, defined as ‘‘a joint venture between federal
departments and agencies and private sector institutions
primarily focused on improvements to health, safety, and
welfare’’ (Ardito, 2016: 7). These ventures range from
informal collaboration involving information sharing and
between federal agencies and private partners requiring
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Memoranda of Understanding (MOU) or Letters of Intent
(White House, 2013).
Generally, foundations and government each bring dif-
ferent advantages to a partnership (Abramson & Spann,
1998; Person et al., 2009; Fiester cited in Boyle & Shan-
non, 2018). Government can typically provide much
greater funding than foundations; help bring innovative and
effective foundation programs to different parts of the
country and the world; and make demographic, economic,
and other ‘‘big’’ data available to inform foundation deci-
sion-making. Foundations can undertake demonstration
projects and take risks that government cannot and are well
positioned to communicate innovative approaches that
have had demonstrable impact and might be scaled up.
During the Obama administrations, these partnerships
held considerable promise in the USA. Obama had been a
board member of the Joyce Foundation in Chicago and was
eager to engage with foundations. This engagement resul-
ted in his signature project in this arena, the Social Inno-
vation Fund, which involved foundations in identifying
impactful community initiatives for government support.
Another, explicitly collaborative project, the Investing in
Innovation Fund in the Department of Education, show-
cased innovative education projects for joint federal and
foundation funding (Abramson et al., 2014; Toepler,
2018a).
These major initiatives headlined additional efforts to
connect philanthropic funders with the federal government.
In particular, the Obama years saw a growing number of
federal cabinet-level executive departments and indepen-
dent agencies developing specialized liaison offices to
facilitate additional, cooperative relationships with phi-
lanthropic partners (Ferris & Williams, 2013, 2014). These
liaison offices, and how they perceive the contributions that
foundations can make to the development of federal pro-
grams, are the focus of this article.
Conceptually, we focus on private, grantmaking foun-
dations. In the US context, a distinction is traditionally
made between independent, corporate, operating and pub-
lic foundations (for discussion see Hammack & Smith,
2018; Toepler, 1999a, 2016). Independent foundations
have income-generating endowments derived from indi-
vidual donors or families; corporate foundations receive
endowment and pass-through support from the sponsoring
company. Operating foundations operate their own pro-
grams, projects or institutions, but some also have grant-
making programs. These three types are commonly
referred to as private grantmaking foundations. As of 2017,
they accounted for over $1 trillion in assets and $72 billion
in giving (Candid, 2020). The largest funding domains are
health (28%), education (24%), human services and com-
munity development (12% each) and arts and culture (8%).
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In this analysis, we exclude public foundations, such as
community foundations ($10 billion in giving) and other
foundations that operate without endowments and must
fundraise themselves. The need to raise support exposes
public foundations to accountability requirements, from
which private foundations are largely exempted due to their
economic independence. This in turn results in a different
relationship to the government in terms of ‘‘regulation,
conceptual questions about the role of foundations in
democracy, and the government’s expectations for [grant-
making] foundation contributions’’ (Toepler, 2018b: 1959).
Questions about the democratic legitimacy of founda-
tions have been raised on and off over the past century
(Prewitt et al., 2006) and American private foundations are
regulated more stringently than public institutions (Simon,
1993; Troyer, 2000) as a result. How this has shaped
government expectations of foundations has not been very
well explored. Such expectations should manifest them-
selves, however, in the way government foundation liaison
officers perceive their relationships with foundation part-
ners. With the democratic ambiguity of foundations and the
fact that foundations have a different purpose than other
nonprofits (i.e., foundations fund third parties rather than
directly providing services like other nonprofits), it is dif-
ficult to subsume grantmaking foundations under the
legitimacy umbrella of the nonprofit sector at large and
make the case for foundation partnerships with govern-
ment. In fact, concern about foundations partnering with
government is reflected in the sustained criticism of private
foundation interventions in fields as diverse as education
(Ravitch, 2010) and global health (Mitchell & Sparke,
2016). With legitimacy and accountability constituting
central problems for philanthropy (Frumkin, 2006), there is
little in terms of a prima facie case for democratically
constituted governments to engage in partnerships with
grantmaking institutions that have been decried as elitist
and undemocratic (e.g., Reich, 2018). The relationship
should therefore be expected to be conflicted.
Yet, interest in generating and leveraging partnerships
with foundations has, as noted, drawn significant interest
from governments suggesting a need to review the con-
ceptual underpinnings of these collaborations more closely.
In the following, we will first briefly review how founda-
tions’ structural differences from other nonprofits make
existing sectoral relationship models less suitable for pri-
vate grantmaking foundations. We then review foundation
roles suggested by the literature as a response to the
legitimacy issue and seek to integrate this thinking about
foundation roles with a sectoral relationship typology.
While most of the foundation literature takes the vantage
point of foundations themselves, we finally present novel
results of an empirical study that probes how the role of
foundations in foundation–government partnerships is
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perceived by US federal government representatives, who
are tasked with building and managing philanthropic
partnerships.
Conceptualizing Government/Foundation
Relations
Sector relations are generally framed in what might be
termed a partnership paradigm. That is, the relationship
between government and the nonprofit sector is typically
seen as mutually beneficial, principally collaborative and
positive in nature. As Lester Salamon (1995) has argued,
the partnership holds advantages for both sectors: for
nonprofits, government has the unique ability to counter
their shortcomings, expressed in the ‘‘voluntary failures’’
of philanthropic insufficiency, paternalism, particularism,
and amateurism. Nonprofits can gain scale and scope and
build their capacity with government help. For govern-
ment, relying on nonprofits for service delivery reduces
transaction costs as no political support needs to be
mobilized and no alternative public agencies need to be
established. Nonprofits can also operate with greater flex-
ibility, less bureaucracy, and at lesser cost, while being
able to reach diverse constituencies. Partnerships between
the sectors can realize these relative advantages through a
mutually beneficial, complementary division of labor, in
which government focuses on the financing and nonprofits
on the provision of services. With this division of labor,
collaboration emerges as the dominant principle underlying
government/nonprofit relations as opposed to ‘‘a competi-
tive relationship [and] conflict between the nonprofit sector
and the state’’ (Gidron et al., 1992: 5) as suggested by
welfare state and economic theories.
In contrast, as funders of nonprofit organizations
grantmaking foundations fulfill largely the same financing
function as government. With no equivalent to the division
of labor between government and nonprofits, Salamon’s
case for cooperative relations between government and
foundations does not apply, and foundations are subject to
competition and conflict with government rather than col-
laboration. Concerns about grantmaking foundations out-
competing government in certain policy areas have, in fact,
been present throughout much of the century-long history
of the ‘‘modern philanthropic foundation’’ beginning with
the founding of the Russell Sage and Rockefeller Foun-
dations and the Carnegie Corporation between 1909 and
1913 (Karl & Katz, 1981). In Rockefeller’s case, his
aspiration to have his new foundation federally chartered in
Washington, DC was denied by Congress fearing that the
new entity would use its wealth to exert undue influence
over politics in the capital. Generally, ‘‘the rise of large
private foundations made some in Congress uneasy as
philanthropic resources threatened government’s monopoly
over social policy’’ (Frumkin, 2006: 95). Similar concerns
are now being renewed, as some expect that in the course
of a few decades, the combined philanthropic resources in
the USA will come to equal the discretionary spending part
of the federal budget (Callahan, 2017).
Differences between Nonprofit Service Providers
and Grantmaking Foundations
Structural differences between private grantmaking foun-
dations and other nonprofits sharpen the potential for
conflict with government.1 Like no other type of organi-
zation, philanthropic foundations enjoy what Anheier and
Leat (2018) termed a ‘‘dual independence’’: Endowed with
financial or other income-producing assets, they self-gen-
erate the economic resources necessary to pursue their
grantmaking programs and are thus virtually insulated from
having to acquire outside resources. In addition, they also
face few if any external accountability requirements.
Whereas governments are accountable to voters, businesses
to owners, shareholders, and consumers, and other types of
nonprofits to members and/or funders, there is no outside
stakeholder group to which foundations are directly
accountable.
The resulting lack of accountability and legitimacy
makes the private grantmaking form democratically sus-
pect (Prewitt et al., 2006). As Nielsen (1972: 3) phrased the
issue: ‘‘In the great jungle of American democracy and
capitalism there is no more strange or improbable creature
than the private foundation … aristocratic institutions liv-
ing on the privileges and indulgence of an egalitarian
society … Like the giraffe, they could not possibly exist,
but they do.’’ While the legitimacy of the nonprofit sector
at large is taken for granted, a tension deriving from the
ability of foundations to intervene in public affairs while
lacking any kind of external control remains a continuous
source of legitimacy challenges (Heydemann & Toepler,
2006). This in turn makes relations to democratic govern-
ments particularly precarious.
1
Although foundations are generally small in numbers compared to
the overall nonprofit sector, they nevertheless exhibit a level of
institutional diversity with significant variations across countries and
regions (Rey-Garcia, 2020; Toepler, 1999a), making cross-nationally
valid typologies inherently complex (Jung, Harow and Leat, 2018).
Accordingly, how foundations relate to government depends on, and
varies by, foundation type. Operating foundations, for example, are
conceptually closer to other service-providing nonprofits (Toepler,
1999b), suggesting that their relationship patterns are not different
from what the standard government/nonprofit typologies indicate. Our
argument is therefore restricted to private grantmaking foundations
and may only apply to relatively few organizations in countries where
the operating form prevails (Rey-Garcia, 2020).
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To justify the existence of foundations as giraffes in
democracy, the literature developed a number of different
rationales, which are typically formulated as a set of
socially valuable roles or functions that foundations pursue
and which provide a basis for their relations with govern-
ment (see Nielsen, 1972; Anheier & Toepler, 1999; Pre-
witt, 1999, 2006; Anheier & Daly, 2007; Anheier &
Hammack, 2010; Hammack & Anheier, 2013; Leat, 2016;
Toepler, 2018b; Anheier, 2018). To the extent that these
role perceptions motivate foundation behavior and provide
an acceptable benefit to government, they provide a ratio-
nale for foundation/government partnerships. Of the mul-
titude of such roles that have been identified in the
literature, four link foundations most closely to government
action:
• In the supplementation role, foundations largely fund
initiatives that government is not supporting, including
services that cater to minority interests. A prominent
example in the early years of the US foundation field
was the Julius Rosenwald Fund, which helped construct
schools and bolster education for black children in the
segregated American South. The Rockefeller and
Carnegie philanthropies often worked along public
institutions to expand services in such fields as public
health and education, which contributed to the success
of their work in the first half of the twentieth Century.
The supplementary nature of foundations was also a
staple in the arguments in favor of foundations in the
policy debates of the 1960s. The 1965 Treasury
Department assessment of the foundation field, for
example, allowed for them a ‘‘vital role [in] providing
for areas into which government cannot or should not
advance’’ (Treasury Department, 1965, 13). The
Petersen Commission found tax exemption to be
‘‘strongly justified when private philanthropic money
is used, not as a substitute for tax dollars, but as a
supplement of a special kind that serves the public
interest in ways in which the government itself is under
various operational constraints’’ (Commission on Foun-
dations & Private Philanthropy, 1970, 15), such as
support of religion in the USA (Hammack & Smith,
2018).
• The substitution role is similarly oriented along gov-
ernment action, but rather than expanding the avail-
ability of collective services by supplementing
government, substitution implies the maintenance of
public services after withdrawal or reductions of
government commitments. In this role, private grant-
making foundations would step in to cover budget gaps
left by government retrenchment. While commonly
recognized in Europe (Anheier, 2018), substitution has
traditionally not had much resonance in the US context
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(Toepler, 2016), perhaps because of assumptions about
unidirectional funding flows from government to non-
profits (Cheng, 2018); the relative limited areas where
such private to public funding flows are likely to occur,
such as public amenities (Cheng, 2018; Gazley, Cheng,
and Lafontant, 2018) and cultural and educational
institutions (eg, Neto, 2018; Pollack and Durnford,
2005); and the relatively limited resources that foun-
dations have compared to government (Hammack &
Smith, 2018). However, substitution gained currency as
calls on foundations to step in and help fill public
budget gaps increased in the aftermath of the financial
crisis of 2008 (Abramson et al., 2014).
• In the innovation role, foundations focus their limited
financial resources on identifying and fostering social
innovations, which can then be transferred to other
more potent funders, such as government, for scaling
up. It is probably the most widely cited role: ‘‘Almost
universally, U.S. foundations claim to seek innovation’’
(Hammack & Smith, 2018: 1621), although there is
only limited empirical support for this assertion (Knott
& McCarthy, 2007; Toepler & Feldman, 2004). The
appeal of this role lies in its connection to the dual
independence (Anheier & Leat, 2018) that foundations
enjoy while justifying this independence at the same
time. It gives foundations the capacity to act as agents
of change through taking risks and providing seed
money for innovative projects whose outcomes are
uncertain but have high potential payoffs. In contrast to
other institutions (including government), foundations
can afford to absorb risk, as they are not subject to
sanctions when their projects fail. This has given rise to
views of foundations as social venture capital.
• The social/policy change role is akin to innovation, but
whereas innovation is mostly focused on public service
improvements, the social change role is directed at
broader structural changes in society and public policy.
Beginning in the 1960s, foundations started to ‘‘to
engage more aggressively with the federal government
in order to shape public policy’’ (Soskis and Katz,
2016: 1) and this role encompasses foundation funding
of social movements (Ostrander, 1995) as much as
social justice advocacy (Suárez, 2012).
Many of these roles were essentially developed in
reaction to political attacks against foundations in the early
and mid-twentieth Century and in recognition ‘‘of their
political vulnerability’’ (Nielsen, 1972: 366) and largely
reflect the foundation field’s self-image and guiding prin-
ciples. As such, they suggest how foundations conceptu-
alize their societal roles vis-à-vis government, but by
themselves do not reveal much about the resulting rela-
tionships with government. Do any of these roles allow
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grantmaking foundations to slot into the collaborative
partnership between the nonprofit sector and government?
Do any expose them to potential conflict and competition
with government in the absence of a suitable division of
labor? To put these roles into an interpretive framework to
gauge what type of government relationships each indi-
cates, we next revisit some of the core relationship
typologies proposed for nonprofits at large in the past.
Adding Foundations to Government/Nonprofit
Relationship Typologies
Prominent typologies of government/nonprofit relations
were suggested by Ben Gidron, Ralph Kramer, and Les
Salamon (1992) and Dennis Young (2000; Young & Casey,
2016). Both approaches suggested two primary relationship
types or patterns–a collaborative and a dual or parallel
pattern—to which Young adds a third, adversarial pattern
(Table 1). Embodying the partnership paradigm, the col-
laborative relationship highlights government funding of
nonprofit service providers and a generally positive,
cooperative relationship between the sectors (Salamon &
Toepler, 2015). In the dual or parallel pattern, nonprofit
service providers serve as gap fillers, financed not so much
by government but rather by donative and earned income
(Lecy and van Slyk, 2012; Paarlberg & Zuhlke, 2019).
Both sectors operate and finance their public service
delivery independently of each other. The relationship is
indifferent, as the government is not particularly concerned
about nonprofits providing services that government is not
funding.2 The adversarial relationship type, by contrast,
foregrounds advocacy that is funded by philanthropy and
membership fees, which is in a conflictual relationship with
government that is ‘‘almost inevitable since government
policy is often the principal target of the advocacy activi-
ties of nonprofit agencies’’ (Gidron et al., 1992: 11).
While these typologies help elucidate crucial parameters
of intersectoral relations generally, they are less well suited
to help us understand government-foundation relationships
because they were conceptualized for nonprofit service
providers and advocacy organizations, which, as discussed
above, differ structurally from grantmaking foundations.
The core rationale for a collaborative relationship doesn’t
apply to foundations, leaving the ‘‘paradigm of competi-
tion’’ (Gidron et al., 1992) and thus a conflictual relation-
ship with government as the only alternative. As a
conceptual approach to ‘‘public/philanthropic partner-
ships,’’ this is not sufficient. Where do foundations and
their roles then fit into the general government/nonprofit
relationship patterns?
Grantmaking foundations generally show up as part of
the finance function across the three patterns—collabora-
tive, dual/parallel, and adversarial—of government/non-
profit relations described above. However, foundations can
be expected to adopt different roles in each of the three
relationships, as hypothesized in Table 2. In the parallel
relationship type, foundations take on a supplementation
role and support service-providing nonprofits that are not
being funded by government and also support social
innovation that may be hard for government to undertake
(Young & Casey, 2016). In the adversarial relationship
mold, foundations would principally be pursuing social and
policy change as important funders of advocacy organiza-
tions. To the extent that government looks to foundations
to fill gaps left by government retrenchment or otherwise
enhance government funding, foundations substitute for
government funding in the collaborative pattern. Thus,
each relationship type is associated with major foundation
roles. The collaborative type highlights the foundation role
of substitution; the parallel type emphasizes foundations’
roles in supplementation and innovation; and the adver-
sarial type points to foundations’ role in advocacy and
promoting social change.
The three relationships—collaborative, parallel, and
adversarial—thus allow predictions about the government’s
posture toward foundations. In the collaborative pattern,
foundations collaborate with government in funding similar
nonprofit service providers. This arrangement can be seen in

Table 1 Government/nonprofit relationship types

Collaborative Parallel Adversarial

Government determines scope of services
Funds nonprofit service provision
Sectors are closely intertwined
Mutually beneficial division of labor between
government and nonprofits
No role for philanthropy conceptualized in
the collaboration
Nonprofits serve minority interests and
preferences
Source of social innovation
Sectors operate in parallel and independent of
each other
Philanthropy supports nonprofits;
government supports public institutions
Nonprofits engage in advocacy/political
activities and seek policy change
Government protects majority interests and
regulates scope of nonprofit action
Philanthropy supports nonprofit advocacy

Source: Based on Young (2000), Young and Casey (2016), Gidron et al. (1992)

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Table 2 Grantmaking foundation roles in government relationship types

Collaborative Parallel Adversarial

Foundation Substitution: Innovation: Social change/advocacy: Foundations pursue

roles Foundations fund public goods and Foundations foster and promote structural changes in society, particularly on
services that are principally a new solutions to social problems behalf of groups without voice in the political
government financial responsibility and alternatives to existing process
practices
Supplementation:
Foundations primarily serve social
needs that are outside the scope
of government action
Government Collaborative Indifferent Conflictual
posture
toward
foundations
Examples U.S. arts and culture (Toepler, 2013); Germany (Strachwitz, 2015; U.S. advocacy limits (Berry & Goss, 2018);
public parks (Cheng, 2018) Toepler, 1998) Sweden (Wijkström & Einarsson, 2018);
France (Archambault, forthcoming)

the case of arts and culture in the USA (Toepler, 2013) and
sometimes even public institutions (Cheng, 2018), although
given the modest resources of foundations compared to
government, foundations are typically the junior funding
partner. As foundations essentially support public objec-
tives, the government posture toward them is positive. In the
parallel pattern, government and foundations are generally
indifferent to one another as foundations support nonprofit
programs that government is unwilling or unable to fund.
Indifference to foundations was a hallmark of German
governments’ postures toward foundations during much of
the second half of the twentieth Century (Strachwitz, 2015;
Toepler, 1998). In the adversarial pattern, government and
foundations are antagonists, with foundations supporting
nonprofits advocating for changes in government policy.
The significant legal constraints placed on foundation sup-
port of advocacy in the USA (Berry & Goss, 2018) and the
traditional government hostility toward philanthropy and
foundations in Sweden (Wijkström & Einarsson, 2018) and
France (Archambault, forthcoming) correspond to this
pattern.
In the USA, adversarial relations between government
and foundations have been a recurrent theme driven by left-
wing populism in the Progressive era and again during the
2 is on the government’s expectations of what foundations
Young (2000) and Young and Casey (2016) use the terms
complementary and supplementary to describe relationship patterns
that are essentially the equivalent to what Gidron et al. (1992) termed
collaborative and dual/parallel types, respectively. To avoid termi-
nological confusion with foundation roles, we chose Gidron et al.’s
terms for our purposes here. Gidron et al. also describe two additional,
but marginal patterns: government-dominant and third sector-domi-
nant, which we omit because the dual/parallel pattern essentially
combines the two.
1960s (see Edie, 1987). A current debate (e.g., Goss, 2016;
Reich, 2018) is renewing these concerns about plutocratic
influence in key policy areas. However, the American
foundation discourse has largely followed the outlines of
the parallel pattern marked by the foundation field claiming
the innovation and supplementary roles, as noted above,
and the government adopting largely indifferent postures:
foundation activity was neither particularly encouraged nor
discouraged politically over the past four decades. The
Obama administration’s efforts to foster partnerships and a
collaborative relationship with philanthropy more explic-
itly than before was a break from the past. However, the
Obama effort still followed some aspects of the parallel
pattern in the design of the flagship Social Innovation Fund
(SIF) which sought to lean on foundations to identify
innovations for the government to scale up (Toepler,
2018a).
In the empirical part of this article, we use the govern-
ment/foundation relationship types and associated roles as
heuristic devices to gain insight into how federal govern-
ment officials approach partnerships with foundations
through interpreting their discussions of successful and less
successful collaborations. With the recent experience of
foundations in these partnerships discussed elsewhere
(Abramson et al., 2014), the particular focus of this article
bring to the partnership beyond financial resources. How
do federal liaison officers, as collaboration champions in
the government, interpret foundation roles and to what
extent do they see foundations in terms of the collabora-
tive, parallel, or adversarial perspectives? As the founda-
tion literature (including the formulation of foundation

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roles) is based largely on the perspective and experience of
grantmaking foundations, adding the perspective of gov-
ernment partners and representatives helps to fill a still
sizeable research gap.
Methods
This study is based on interviews with current and some
former liaison office representatives of federal departments
and agencies. In addition to the interviews, we also par-
ticipated in two meetings where staff from federal agencies
discussed partnerships. In one of these meetings, we con-
ducted a focus group discussion, which included 12 par-
ticipants from nine government offices. We used the focus
group to introduce our study to its relevant audience, sound
themes, and collect initial feedback before finalizing and
fielding the interview questionnaire. While the total num-
ber of liaison offices across the federal government is
unknown, Ferris and Williams (2014) had identified 21 in
an earlier study. We conducted 18 interviews in October
and November 2016 toward the end of Obama’s second
term. The Trump Administration’s general disruptiveness
will likely have affected this area as well. However, only
two of our federal interviewees were political appointees,
the remainder were career staff whose outlook is less likely
to change from administration to administration. Moreover,
President Biden’s transition team was notably comprised of
many nonprofit and foundation representatives (Parks,
2020), signaling a likely return to partnership efforts. Ten
interviews were with liaison officers from 7 of the 15
Executive Departments (#2, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 18),
four with representatives from executive and independent
federal agencies (#1, 4, 8, 9) and another four with foun-
dation executives working closely with federal departments
(#3, 6, 12, 13). Interviewees were drawn from regular
participants in an informal networking group organized by
the Council on Foundations that included liaison officers
from 17 departments and agencies as of June 2016.
In selecting interviewees, we used purposeful sampling
(Patton, 2014) to ensure representation of large executive
departments with prominent and well-established liaison
offices as well as smaller agencies and those still new to
partnership development. With no prior theoretical frame-
work to fall back on, our approach followed grounded
theory principles (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Some inter-
viewees had worked in more than one office and were able
to share experiences from different departments. While the
interviewees did not generally have formal training in
nonprofit management or philanthropic studies, they had
been exposed to best practices and core arguments about
the relative advantages and limits of philanthropy vis-à-vis
government through the sharing of materials (e.g., HUD,
2016b) and participation in network meetings. The semi-
structured interviews were conducted by telephone and
lasted between 45 min and 1.5 h. Interviewers took con-
temporaneous notes and prepared summary memos after
the interviews concluded.
Interview questions asked first about the interviewees’
job title, responsibilities, experience, and which offices
they were part of. The following section explored the
length of the department/agency’s engagement with part-
nerships, what types of foundation resources are generally
sought by government, whether foundation partners are
actively solicited; how aware top leadership was of part-
nerships; and how partnerships are funded and staffed. We
also asked for the largest foundation partners; whether
partnerships are sought with smaller foundations as well;
and how they are sustained. Interviewees were then
prompted to give examples of what they considered suc-
cessful partnerships, including the values they provided to
the department and the reasons for their success. Con-
versely, we also asked for unsuccessful engagements and
reasons for failure. The final section of the interview guide
solicited recommendations for improving the partnership
processes within the federal government.
Interviews did not explicitly address potential founda-
tion roles to avoid a social desirability bias. Experienced
liaison officers can be assumed to be knowledgeable about
the theory of working with foundations through the Council
on Foundations’ networking meetings and interagency peer
education. In one of the sessions, we participated in, for
example, Dept. of Housing and Urban Development
(HUD) representatives showcased best practices from their
then new how-to guidebook (HUD 2016b) to colleagues
from other departments. Taken together, with the Obama
Administration’s overall interest in social innovation, a
direct approach would likely have solicited the standard
rhetoric on innovation. Instead, for the purpose of this
analysis, we primarily focused on the discussions of suc-
cessful and failed partnerships in going through the inter-
view materials, coding according to the main foundation
roles discussed above: supplementation, substitution,
innovation, and social/policy change.
Findings
Against this background, what did our interviewees’
assessments of their partnership experiences suggest about
foundation roles? Here we offer four perspectives on role
perceptions:
123

Innovation
Our interviews did not elicit a long list of examples of
foundations approaching federal agencies with ideas for
innovative approaches that the federal government could
scale. However, one interviewee thought that the ‘‘old
approach’’ still existed but had morphed into something
else in an age of austerity when even federal government
departments were short on discretionary funds. According
to Interviewee #9, the ‘‘old model of foundations seed and
government scales’’ is still relevant. But there has been a
new trend to set programs up as competitions to identify
new solutions and some others without full funding which
‘‘sets the table differently’’ and forces ‘‘more honest con-
versations.’’ The interviewee gave as an example the
National Disaster Resilience competition (NDRC), in
which HUD awarded $1 billion to communities impacted
by natural disasters between 2011 and 2013. The Rocke-
feller Foundation supported NDRC by convening Resi-
lience Academies around the country to give jurisdictions
the chance to access resilience experts. In cases such as
this, partners ‘‘don’t bring projects, [but] figure out pro-
cess.’’ The objective was to ‘‘get communities to think
differently before they get funds’’ and help the government
to determine ‘‘how can we help communities address
inequities.’’
Other interviewees also emphasized the co-development
of programs and projects over having one side develop and
the other scale and implement. Interviewee #16 held that
‘‘Feds always write big checks but need early government-
foundation conversations around policy to co-design
opportunities. [Agencies should] invite philanthropy in
early.’’ In this context, foundation knowledge and expertise
are more important than having a range of innovative
programs to peddle. Co-development allows a distribution
of tasks that takes advantage of the respective strengths of
the partners (Phillips, 2018), especially where foundations
can take on aspects that involve risk and potential for
failure, which are difficult for the government to justify
(Knott & McCarthy, 2007). As interviewee #16 points out:
the ‘‘private sector can make mistakes; the public sector
can’t,’’ given differences in accountability and risk-taking
ability. The question then becomes what each partner can
take on in the collaboration. The foundation role here is
more that of knowledge broker and risk absorber rather
than innovator per se. Interviewee #11 also ‘‘saw founda-
tions as thought leaders who have more freedom to try new
ideas and, by working together, [the agency] and founda-
tions can figure out where each can best direct its efforts.’’
Among the few examples that fit more closely within the
innovation role, two came from HUD, including the What
Works Collaborative (WWC) which, according to inter-
viewee #2, in 2009 reviewed evidence to help the
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administration to determine ‘‘what could Obama use?’’ The
research agendas and incubator projects that led to larger
demonstration projects continued to influence the work of
HUD’s Policy Development and Research (PD&R) office.
Between the Bush and Obama Administrations,
major philanthropic institutions developed and fun-
ded the WWC, a partnership of research institutions
that conducted timely research to inform the devel-
opment of evidence-based policy decisions during
this transition period. In its first phase, the Collabo-
rative asked PD&R staff to help identify HUD’s
immediate policy research needs and produced a
number of articles in support of major policy initia-
tives. These articles span a breadth of topics such as
housing finance, sustainability, distressed suburbs,
and housing mobility, just to name a few.
In its second phase, PD&R leadership and analysts
provided input to the Collaborative as it developed
long-term, field-building research agendas in five
major topical areas ... To maintain the momentum of
these agendas, the funders supported nine incubator
projects that serve as stepping stones to larger
demonstrations that fit within the broad research
agendas and have influenced our own thinking in
PD&R (Poethig, 2012).
Interviewee #9 also saw that ‘‘philanthropy was at the
forefront of the issues HUD wanted to work on,’’ including
the Sustainable Communities Initiative (SCI), which ran
from 2010 through 2016 and provided $250 million in
grant funding to 143 regions and communities to advance
local goals for sustainability, equity, and long-term resi-
lience (HUD 2016b). Foundation representatives helped
with the initial design of SCI and participated in the ini-
tiative in a variety of ways, including by serving on pro-
posal review teams, participating on grantee advisory
groups, helping to build organizational capacity needed to
advance SCI projects, providing matching funds, conven-
ing and mobilizing other community partners, and
strengthening communications about initiative projects. In
HUD’s own assessment, these efforts ‘‘represent a new
kind of public–philanthropic partnership—one that ani-
mates the resources of the federal government with the
flexibility, creativity, and innovation made possible by
philanthropic funding and support’’ (HUD, 2016a). On
balance though, our interviews did not provide strong
support for the innovation role as a major driving force for
federal partnerships. Co-development, however, may be an
emerging new mantra.
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Supplementation
There is, of course, only a fine line between animating the
resources of the federal government and supplementing
them. Partnerships in the supplementary role can take very
different forms. In one, the supplementation is financial
and almost overlaps with the substitution role. Interviewee
#5 considered USDA’s Food Linc project as a significant
partnership success. Part of a much larger USDA program,
Food Linc engaged the Sustainable Agriculture and Food
Systems Funders affinity group and established coordinat-
ing offices in ten cities to link local farmers with urban
food purchasers. Each local coordinating office required a
2:1 match from 20 participating foundations. Another
example, given by interviewee #7, is FEMA’s ‘‘cost share’’
program that requires the community to contribute
according to a formula in exchange for significant funds to
help with damages. The agency provided a video on how
Louisiana nonprofits could access FEMA funds with a ten
percent cost share from local foundations (How ‘‘cost
share’’ works: https://www.fema.gov/cost-share).
However, financial supplementation is not the only way
in which federal partnership officers see the supplementa-
tion role playing out. Interviewee #9 saw the enhancements
that foundations can provide through convenings, demon-
strations, R&D, and a focus on outcomes orientation—‘‘not
so much plugging gaps in funding.’’ A different intervie-
wee (#18) gave an example: ‘‘An earlier response by the
philanthropic world is found in DOE’s initiative to replace
energy-consuming equipment in buildings. Known as
‘Energy Efficiency Retrofits,’ the initiative attracted the
attention of the Rockefeller Foundation which, in partner-
ship with Deutsche Bank Climate Change Advisors, funded
a publicly available research report in 2012 on the initia-
tive’s potential employment and climate benefits.‘‘
Another example of supplementation through enhancing
public programs is the Strong Cities, Strong Communities
Initiative (SC2), which engaged 19 federal agencies in
helping local communities make better, more coordinated
use of the support they received through a broad range of
federal programs. SC2 had four major components: the
deployment of federal interagency teams to work closely
with city leadership; a fellowship program that recruited
early to mid-career professionals to supplement the work of
the federal SC2 teams; an Economic Visioning Challenge
prize competition to produce comprehensive economic
development plans; and a National Resource Network, a
portal for distressed communities to access technical
assistance to help them address their economic challenges.
Detroit was given as an example, where Kresge, Ford, and
other foundations supported the city’s Detroit Future City
revitalization plan. The Kresge Foundation was to provide
an additional $150 million to support the plan’s
implementation. More broadly, the SC20 s fellowship pro-
gram was funded by a grant from the Rockefeller
Foundation.
Sometimes, foundation partnerships can simply help
government or government clients in accessing additional
services that enhance the value of a public program.
‘‘While we know what the Department of Labor system can
provide, [Interviewee #15] said we also know there are
gaps where foundations might be helpful … Money from
Veterans Affairs can pay for housing, but if it then also
pays for job training, the veteran no longer qualifies as
‘homeless.’ That means the department can’t continue
paying for rent while the individual is in job training.
Coordinating with foundations … can resolve this
problem.’’
In this arena, government partnership offices play a
coordinating role, as they ‘‘can help prevent duplication of
effort or foster coordination of effort’’ (interview #17).
Similarly, interviewee #7 ‘‘said their goal is to help the
foundations—whether community, private or corporate—
make smart decisions after disasters. The goal is to make
them aware of leveraging opportunities instead of funding
the same things FEMA can fund … FEMA could be a
catalyst at a time of disasters and a mechanism for infor-
mation sharing’’. As an example, she noted that in times of
disaster they ‘‘… can help the philanthropic community
know what those grant opportunities are in a post-disaster
environment.’’
The interest in using foundation partners to tie existing
community resources to government programs was a
recurrent theme. DHHS’s Administration for Children and
Families started its partnership programming with ‘‘an
environmental scan of the top 100 philanthropies to see
whose funding priorities align with ACF’s priorities and
where there might be alignment, with the data broken down
according to ACF’s 19 program offices. … The goal is to
broaden the impact of ACF’s programs, such as Head Start,
refugee resettlement, energy assistance, TANF, child sup-
port enforcement, and others that reach people who need
help. Because many foundations have similar agendas that
align well with these programs, ACF sees the potential for
both the government and private philanthropy to work
strategically for the same beneficiary populations.’’ In
addition, ‘‘foundations can also be helpful in educating
external stakeholders about [the agencies’] programs’’
(interview #11). In sum, enhancing government programs
is emerging as a new take on the supplementation role.
Substitution
Whereas substitution had never been a major role expec-
tation of American foundations in the past, the role started
to come into play during the financial crisis of 2008, as
123

state and local governments faced sudden and significant
budget gaps (Abramson et al., 2014). Although the federal
government did not face the same budgetary problems and
constraints as state and local governments, substitutional
thinking is a major driving force behind partnerships in
federal agencies as well. In fact, concerns about founda-
tions just being seen as a source of funding permeated
many interviews. Interviewee #2, for example, flat-out
stated that ‘‘in some agencies, partnerships are just about
resource development.’’ Interviewee #14 pointed to the
‘‘need to get [agency] staff to understand that foundations
are not just fundraising machines …. [I’m] hearing com-
plaints from foundations about being seen as ATMs.’’
Although agency leadership is often eager ‘‘to announce
big dollars from philanthropy,’’ Interviewee #16 agreed
that ‘‘government shouldn’t first think of foundations as
money,’’ but tap foundation thought leadership and con-
vening abilities. Both partners should ‘‘look at each other
as leveraging opportunities.’’
A twist on the substitution role came from the clean
energy field, where the government aimed at involving
foundations as ‘‘direct investors with their endowments and
financial portfolios. The thought was that foundations
would be more amenable to non-traditional investments—
such as ‘patient capital,’ early stage and perhaps risky
investments in areas such as clean energy. According to an
announcement by the White House in June 2015, major
private foundations, institutional investors, and others
pledged to invest over $4 billion to fund climate change
solutions’’ (#18).
All in all, a major role for government liaison offices is
to fend off the perception that foundations are no more than
ready sources of cash for the pet projects of government
departments. In practice, however, this task proves to be a
real challenge for liaisons. As interviewee #10 observed:
I would love to say that we look to foundations to
provide us with best practices or things that they have
done on small-scale and that we are then able to bring
to scale and build them into larger programs. I would
love to say that we are not out fundraising among
foundations, but ….. I don’t like to lie. Our outreach
to foundations is often, sadly, around us coming up
with an idea and then trying to find someone else who
is willing to put resources toward it. I think we can be
better strategic partners if we are co-designing pro-
jects with the foundation community: a lot of work
needs to be done in that vein.
This interviewee has been engaged in partnership
development for a particularly long time and is well-versed
in the conceptual understanding of how it ought to be done,
but still had to acknowledge that that is not the way it
works out in practice. However, not all liaison officers have
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Voluntas
the same level of understanding of the ideal parameters of
cooperation. Another interviewee, for example, realized
that something was wrong when private funders were not
willing to step up to the plate. She got involved in the
public/philanthropic partnership network ‘‘because two or
three years ago the agencies started to see their funding
dwindle and they became concerned about the future of the
initiatives they had been funding … They were not suc-
cessful in finding others who would pick up the initiatives.
She thought they should have started earlier and brought in
people from the outside at the peak of the program’s
activity. They then could see what was going on and what
they might want to help advance’’ (Interview #4). But she
didn’t quite fully realize that coming in at the back end to
fund already established government projects, programs, or
policies is not an approach that foundations generally
favor. Overall, our interviews suggest that from the federal
government’s perspective, partnerships are primarily about
raising funds. Substitution appears to be the preferred
function.
Social Change
One interviewee advocated for a very different role for
foundations. Seeing them as potential outside allies and
taking somewhat of a social change perspective, he argued
that foundations should help break up the ossified struc-
tures of the federal government. According to the inter-
viewee, government lacks flexibility and its many ‘‘old
programs need to be blown up.’’ Foundations should fund
nonprofits that will get into the political trenches and try to
change government programs and existing laws. The
interviewee wondered why foundations are not funding
more advocacy. Rather than ‘‘ignoring Congress’’ and
getting ‘‘nervous about grantees talking to legislators,’’
foundations should increase funding for civic engagement
activities. ‘‘Foundations can help change programs’’ (in-
terview #5). However, calling for more of a social change
stand was a minority view, not widely mentioned by other
liaison officers.
Discussion
The social change perspective reflecting the adversarial
pattern was an outlier among the interviewees, which is
within expectations for officials tasked with partnership
development. The views and assessments of the majority of
philanthropic liaison officers were overall relatively con-
ventional, but split into collaborative and parallel
perspectives:
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• Partnerships should bring in private money to allow and leverage their comparative advantages best in seeking
departments to do things that they do not have funding collaborations with the government at the federal level.
for (substitution; collaborative pattern); Alternatively, foundations might consider either forgoing
• Partnership should enhance the value of public pro- such partnerships or embracing the substitution role and
grams through providing support services on the flanks simply augmenting public programs. The latter raises, of
or linking them up with existing community services course, its own issues considering the small scale of even
(supplementation; parallel pattern); or the largest foundation budgets vis-a-vis federal programs.
• Partnerships should bring in expertise and knowledge Like in other kinds of government–nonprofit relationships,
early to co-design better programs and approaches there is still a lot of work to do in understanding the
(variation on innovation role; parallel pattern). appropriate division of responsibility between government
and foundations.
We found a relative dearth of references to innovation in
the partnerships that interviewees offered as examples.
Given the Obama Administration’s strong focus and
Conclusion
rhetoric on social innovation, it was a striking finding that
liaison officers almost seemed to downplay the role of
Judging from the assessment of government liaison offi-
innovation and redefined it in terms of co-design or co-
cials, the USA was in a process of change from a parallel to
development of programs. The parallel relationship pattern,
a more collaborative pattern of government/foundation
however, was more strongly in evidence with regard to the
relations under Obama, following the more proactive
supplementation function in which foundations supplement
postures that had prevailed in Europe for some time
government offerings by supporting services that govern-
(Toepler, 2018b). However, the results presented here are
ment doesn’t. But here too, the examples offered suggest a
subject to a number of limitations. While we are confident
redefinition of the role from supporting independent ser-
that our research captured the prevailing sentiments among
vices toward augmenting federal programs by providing
federal liaisons, it is not known whether all federal gov-
add-ons where federal dollars ran short.
ernment partnerships are initiated through the liaison offi-
This interpretation of supplementation brings it con-
ces. Some foundations have long-standing working
ceptually closer to substitution, which proved to be the
relationships with program officials in federal departments
most prevalent role that emerged from our interviews. For
and agencies that pre-dated the creation of the liaison
most of the federal government, it would seem that raising
offices, and such pre-existing relationships may have
funds or otherwise enhancing public programs has been the
evolved under different understandings.
focus of attention. This suggests that substitution, along
Another caveat is that the reach and scope of the federal
with the redefined supplementation role, are the key
government is too different from state and local govern-
rationales for public philanthropic partnerships, at least
ments to allow a generalization across all levels of gov-
from the government’s perspective. To some extent, this
ernment. The same is true for the foundations that seek
may be because it is difficult to maintain a clear vision of
partnership opportunities with government. Smaller and
the external partners’ role and stake when internal resource
more local foundations will have different ambitions and
pressures dominate the day-to-day workload. As one
role expectations than the larger ones that seek to engage
interviewee (#7) noted, ‘‘it’s easy to slip into just admin-
the federal government. Liaison offices originated at the
istering programs and not think about partnerships;’’ and
state level (Ferris & Williams, 2013), but the federal
that probably extends to thinking about the partners’ core
experience will not necessarily translate there.
strength. Moreover, ‘‘there isn’t always a lot of awareness
A third caveat is that the Trump Administration’s
of what philanthropic partnerships can mean’’ within the
upheaval of political norms did not leave the evolution of
government. Conceptually, this draws attention to the
philanthropic partnerships within the federal government
inconsistency of the Obama approach, which sought to
unaffected. As predicted early on (Abramson and Salamon,
create a collaborative relationship with foundations within
2016), partnerships largely became a non-issue: ‘‘What
the contours of the parallel model by focusing on innova-
Trump, his top aides, and Cabinet members proposed on
tion. The federal liaison officers that we interviewed
health care, climate change, race, civil liberties, income
appeared to embrace the collaborative relationship type,
inequality and many other issues ran counter to the pur-
but with a more realistic recognition of the substitutional
pose’’ of the grantmaking of the largest foundations (Berry
role that underlies the relationship within that pattern.
& Goss, 2018: 243). However, as noted above, the Biden
For foundations, this suggests a need to rethink their
Administration’s transition team featured a large number of
roles and functions and especially a more careful articu-
foundation and other nonprofit executives, which suggests
lation of how foundations can retain their innovative edge
that the earlier pattern may get reactivated, although at the

123

time of writing (late January, 2021), it is still too early to
predict. Finally, we cannot say yet how role conceptions of
liaison officers translate into project development in orga-
nizational practice and what other factors influence success
and failure of government-foundation collaborations,
opening a potentially rich research agenda for case-based
analyses of specific partnerships. A closer elaboration of
the practicalities of co-design of programs that got flagged
during our interviews appears to be a particularly salient
issue in this context.
In our research, we traced and discussed the generalized
expectations that federal government liaisons bring to their
efforts to build partnerships with foundations. A failure to
anticipate these government perspectives on the part of
foundations is likely a significant factor in the dissatisfac-
tion and frustrations with government collaboration efforts
that foundation leaders expressed in the past (Abramson
et al., 2014). If government officials and foundation leaders
operate on the basis of different relationship models, then
the resulting tensions may impede the development of
satisfactory partnerships. Clarifying role expectations on
both sides is therefore a necessary first step in structuring
successful collaborations. Whether a partnership is inten-
ded to be substitutional, supplementary, or innovation-fo-
cused must be understood by collaboration champions in
both government and foundation. Like the system context
of collaborative governance regimes, the relationship pat-
tern at play circumscribes ‘‘opportunities and constraints
and influences the dynamics of the collaboration at the
outset and over time’’ (Emerson et al., 2012: 5). We posit
that closer analyses of public/philanthropic partnerships
need to start with better understanding of relationship
patterns. Moreover, we believe more case-based research
on specific collaborations is needed to determine how the
value constructs for both partners develop in different
relationship patterns and what specific drivers, dynamics,
actions and outcomes emerge from the different patterns.
Acknowledgment This article draws on research originally con-
ducted on behalf of the Council on Foundations, whose support is
gratefully acknowledged. However, the authors are solely responsi-
ble for the content, analyses and opinions expressed in this article,
which do not reflect opinions or positions of the Council.
Declarations
Conflict of interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of
interest.
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