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From the Introduction...
A great deal has been written in recent years about the importance of honoring a donor's intent in administering his benefactions, and about the various ways in which this can be assured. My first assumption, in preparing to write this monograph, was that the importance of the subject as by now widely understood, and that I could proceed immediately to describe certain new developments which, in recent years, have made important new resources available to donors to assure that their wishes are respected.
Subsequent discussions with people active in the field have disabused me of that happy assumption. A great many people who are seriously considering substantial charitable gifts have given little or no thought to enforcing their wishes, especially beyond thier own lifetimes, and are genuinely shocked to learn how the wishes and interests of such major philanthropists as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Henry Ford have been disregarded by those now in charge of the foundations they created.
Accordingly, I have begun this monograph with an historical survey of the experience of these and other men in implementing their wishes regarding their charitable contributions. Only then have I turned to the question of how those wishes might be more effectively defended. In this latter connection, I have called attention to a genuinely new development: the appearance of institutions that can reasonably be counted on to honor the donor's intention.
The full monograph, "Keeping Faith: Donor Intent in the 21st Century," is available now in PDF format (requires Adobe Acrobat 5.0 or later). Keeping_faith
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