Grants were awarded to the following organizations:

Baltimore Collegetown Network $10,000
Operating support

Baltimore Montessori Public Charter School $40,000
Start-up support

Charles Street Development Corporation $10,000
Operating support

Community Law Center $60,000
Project to End Predatory and Deceptive Real Estate Practices

Creative Alliance $20,000
Program support

Downtown Baltimore Family Alliance $25,000
Start-up support

Economic Alliance of Greater Baltimore $10,000
Operating support

Friends of the Family $25,000
Planning support

Live Baltimore Home Center $50,000
Operating Support

Mount Vernon Cultural District $10,000
Operating Support

Supporting Public Schools of Choice $50,000
Operating Support

University of Maryland School of Social Work Community Outreach Service $60,000
Neighborhood Fellows Program

The Goldseker Foundation publishes an annual report that contains additional information on the Foundation’s grantmaking. Past reports as well as the Foundation’s areas of interest and grantmaking policies can be found on the Foundation’s website at www.goldsekerfoundation.org.

There are two aspects of our own work that I think deserve special mention, as I reflect upon what we have done during 2007. The first has to do with the balance between support for specific, time-limited projects versus core operating support (i.e., the funding that sustains the basic costs of doing business), and how we measure the results of both types of grants. Traditionally, private foundations have preferred project-specific investments, for the simple reason that they fit neatly into a defined period of time and have more easily measured outcomes.

This trend has become more pronounced in recent years, as many new foundations have been created by highly successful entrepreneurs, who have brought to their philanthropic organizations a more explicitly bottom-line orientation and shorter goal horizons. The particular vocabulary applied to grantmaking has begun to reflect the private sector approaches and attitudes that generated the wealth in the first place, with terms such as social venture capital, return on investment, and a reliance on metrics to measure outcomes appearing regularly in articles and speeches.

Many times, as we have seen over the Foundation's thirty-two year history, project-specific funding makes perfect sense. It can produce a specific result that both the funder and recipient organization want and, from the funder's perspective, creates flexibility by setting time limits that free the foundation from open-ended expectations to fund organizations indefinitely.

But we have also learned that in many instances, a foundation can have greater impact with its dollars and be of greater service to those it funds, by providing the more general core financial support to sustain the operations of those organizations that perform important work, and perform it well, which closely supports the foundation's own mission and long-term objectives.

Things like good executive leadership, an effective staff, and adequate technology aren't especially exciting, but they are real and recurring costs, not necessarily cheap, that require annual attention. The great advantage, of course, is that the recipient can be about its own core business, about which it presumably knows best, instead of focusing effort-and real costs-on creating new projects that may sometimes be designed more to attract foundation funding than to achieve the goals of the organization. Consequently, someone reading the Goldseker Foundation's publications or visiting our website regularly will see ten to fifteen examples in any given year of grants in support of core, or general, operations. The challenge for those of us in the foundation community is to bring the vocabulary and orientation toward measuring impact to both our project-specific and our general operating grants, without losing sight of the fact that a variety of approaches are called for in our effort to facilitate change.

This relates to the second observation I would like to make. Changeable and unpredictable economic, political, and social environments make the ultimate outcome of many foundation initiatives uncertain and, as important, require having a long time horizon. As we often remind ourselves, the kinds of change we try to encourage may take many years.

Fortunately, one of the great assets of private foundations is our ability to be patient. We have the rare luxury of being able to provide the early capital necessary to incubate and nurture new ideas and approaches, and then stick with them for an extended period. The President's Message that immediately follows speaks to this approach, with examples of projects involving regional transportation, homeownership preservation, and revitalization of an especially difficult portion of the Charles Street corridor that we have been engaged in since the beginning of this decade.

As always, I am grateful for the dedication and commitment of my fellow Directors, the Advisory Selection Committee, our Investment Committee, and our staff. Together, they cheerfully contribute the time, energy, enthusiasm, and expertise that make this work so personally rewarding.

Sheldon Goldseker, Chairman
December 2007

In our particular case, our emphases upon developing stronger communities, encouraging regional thought and action, and building a more effective not-for-profit sector can be especially frustrating since none exactly lends itself to quick or predictable results. But then, patient innovation and investment are two of the great strengths that foundations bring to the civic conversation, difficult as it may be for some of us engaged in this activity to consistently heed the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan's reminder that the business of remaking cities is decidedly not for the short-winded.

Among the Foundation's many 2007 projects, I thought I would highlight three initiatives in which we are investing both significant funds and staff engagement. Beginning in 2005, we convened a small number of community development leaders to consider the issue of mortgage foreclosure. At the time, it was not widely known that the homes of a disturbingly large number of our neighbors were in danger of being lost-about fifty houses a week in Baltimore City alone in 2006-nor were foreclosure's implications for neighborhood stability and the area's property tax base well understood. We engaged the Philadelphia-based Reinvestment Fund to analyze the extent and severity of the situation in both Baltimore City and statewide, which led to subsequent grants in 2005 and 2006 to the Maryland Housing Counselors Network, Community Law Center, and Maryland Consumer Rights Coalition for various work on the issue.

It also led to the creation in 2005 of the Baltimore Homeownership Preservation Coalition, which we have continued to fund, to organize and oversee the work of preventing foreclosures, reduce abusive real estate practices, and increase consumer education about the perils and costs of homeownership. The resetting of adjustable rate mortgages anticipated during the second half of 2008 will make the Coalition's work especially important during this coming year.

The past year also saw the creation of the Central Maryland Transportation Alliance, the result of more than a year's work with colleagues from other foundations and business leaders to create a long-term project with a single focus: implementation of a first-rate transportation system for the region. Absent a comprehensive, well-articulated system for moving people and goods across the region, the Baltimore area will find it impossible to compete economically with the world's other urban areas; residents will not be able to move about freely to jobs, school, or leisure; and the environment will face greater degradation. As our report of a year earlier, "Five Years, Fifty Thousand Jobs: Acting Now On Regional Transportation," pointed out, the infrastructure demands of the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process will only make attention to this issue that much more pressing between now and 2015.

We also knew that every successful regional transportation project over the past several decades has been directed by consistently engaged, high-level business leaders. The new Alliance currently has an exceptionally strong twenty-four member Board of Directors, comprising senior business, civic, and foundation members and led by Chair James L. Shea, Chairman of Venable, and Vice Chair Laura Gamble, President of Bank of America in Maryland. Otis Rolley, former Chief of Staff to the Mayor of Baltimore, has been named Executive Director and is hard at work with the governing board to shape its program of advocacy and create the broad public and political constituencies that a truly regional transportation network will require.

In this message a year ago, I wrote of a series of conversations the Foundation initiated months earlier about how best to revitalize Station North, which I described at the time as "the most conspicuously weak link in Baltimore's central spine, the Harbor-to-Hopkins corridor along Charles Street and the blocks to either side." During 2007, an informal coalition of the area's nonprofit and higher education leaders, in close collaboration with city government officials, developed a plan and process for collaborating on the larger economic and social issues facing that part of the city, from Penn Station north to roughly 24th Street.

Members of the coalition, fourteen in all and now called the Central Baltimore Partnership, include the area's three higher education institutions, and virtually every neighborhood organization, major property owner, and community development group in the area, as well as the relevant City agencies. The Partnership's work has been organized and facilitated throughout, beginning in 2005, by the Goldseker Foundation's project consultant Joseph McNeely, a nationally prominent community development expert based in Baltimore, and its work plan was formally endorsed by Mayor Sheila Dixon as a very high City redevelopment priority. The year 2008 will be pivotal for the Partnership, as its work on public safety, sanitation, code enforcement, housing, and commercial development enters its full implementation phase.

The Foundation staff underwent changes during 2007 that especially deserve mention. The good news is that Carol Gilbert, our colleague of the past seven years, was named Assistant Secretary for Neighborhood Development in the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development. The less than good news, of course, is that we needed to find a replacement for a highly valued colleague.

Happily, midway through the year, we were able to introduce Laurie Latuda to the community as Carol's successor as the Goldseker Foundation's Program Officer. Laurie brings a combination of intellectual curiosity, analytic skills, and program development and management experience that have enabled her to become a fully participating member of our staff team in very short order.

Also adding great value to the Foundation's work are longtime Program Consultant Paul Brophy, a national community development and urban planning expert and good friend, and Terri DeBord, my very patient Executive Assistant of the past twenty years. Paul, Terri, Carol, and Laurie, along with a consistently supportive Board of Directors, combine to make my life much easier than I probably deserve-my deep appreciation to all of them.

Timothy D. Armbruster
President & Chief Executive Officer
December 2007