A veteran philanthropist calls for decisive, hands-on grantmaking Bill Somerville believes that foundations can do a better job Grassroots Philanthropy explains how. Endless paperwork, bureaucracy, and beleaguered foundation heads bog down many bold new ventures. The cowboy approach advocated by Bill Somerville encourages philanthropists to actively engage with the community, meet people who are doing extraordinary things, and fund those in need quickly with a minimum of process and paperwork. Somerville s style is straightforward, urgent, emphatic, and persuasive. He encourages foundations to take calculated risks and to fund ideas for actual change, rather than for fact-finding reports that exhaustively sum up what s wrong with the world. This is an illuminating book for those in the foundation and nonprofit worlds alike. With an unprecedented transfer of generational wealth expected over the next half-century, it is also a call to the upcoming generation of philanthropists to step up and use their wealth to ensure that real change happens quickly and creatively.

Bill Somerville is a nationally recognized expert on creative grantmaking. He has consulted at over 350 community foundations in the United States, Canada, and the U.K. on innovative grantmaking and effective operations. In 1991 he founded Philanthropic Ventures Foundation, which specializes in responsive approaches to grantmaking, such as paperless discretionary grants and grants with a forty-eight-hour turnaround. Fred Setterberg is the coauthor of several books about the nonprofit sector and philanthropy, including Grantmaking Basics, with Colburn Wilbur and Barbara Kibbe, and Beyond Profit, with Kary Schulman. He is also the coauthor of Under the Dragon: California s New Culture, published by Heyday Books in 2007