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Harnessing the Power of Cogeneration on Campus

Harnessing the Power of Cogeneration on Campus

We’re excited to announce the next phase of Campus CoGenerate! With support from MetLife Foundation, Campus Compact and CoGenerate will expand efforts to make campuses centers for cogenerational collaboration and learning, and to bring generations together to secure a...

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New! Tools, activities, case studies, guides, research & more!

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Remembering Michael Bailin: Philanthropy’s Best Supporter — and Critic

A trailblazing leader, Bailin spent his career questioning the field’s methods — and pushing it to do better.

By Marc Freedman and Nancy Roob | Jan 27, 2025

Michael Bailin portrait

Edna McConnell Clark Foundation

This article originally appeared in the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Pioneering philanthropy executive Michael Bailin passed away last month at the age of 82. He was best known for his decades of leadership at both nonprofits and foundations, notably as CEO of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation and Public/Private Ventures.

While Mike wholeheartedly believed in philanthropy’s ability to solve difficult problems, he wasn’t shy about questioning its methods — a quality born from his time as the head of a youth development nonprofit and honed as a foundation leader. That combination of both championing and challenging philanthropy was best exemplified by his efforts to level the playing field between grant maker and grantee, and to rid the sector of its over-reliance on jargon.

We worked for and with Mike for decades, beginning early in our careers. Nancy was a program director and later chief operating officer at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, or EMCF. Marc became Mike’s special assistant at Public/Private Ventures as a 25-year-old straight out of graduate school. But our connection to Mike continued long after he stopped being our boss. And the lessons he taught us still resonate.

A study in contrasts, Mike was a hard-driving lawyer, shrewd poker player, and intensely competitive former athlete who delighted in needling rivals and colleagues alike. At the same time, he was a gentle spirit who offered unconditional support. As Phil Buchanan, president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, wrote in a remembrance of Mike following his death, he was “simultaneously the toughest critic of the staff and our biggest supporter and defender.”

A Paradox

Although Mike was a walking paradox, he never forgot where he came from. Born in Newark, N.J., but raised in the state’s working-class community of Union during the 1950s, he grew up experiencing economic insecurity first-hand. His parents were both immigrants, and Mike’s father held multiple jobs, including driving a snack truck and working in a shrimp processing plant.

In high school, Mike was a standout student and athlete, once outpitching future major league all-star Al Downing in a state championship baseball game. He earned a scholarship to Dartmouth, then went to Yale Law School as a Yale National Honors Scholar.

After graduating, Mike could have headed to Wall Street like many of his classmates but instead became director of Dartmouth’s Urban Education Program in Jersey City — just 15 minutes from where he was raised. There, he built a thriving community education and youth development initiative.

Living and working in Jersey City left an indelible stamp on Mike that animated his future work. The same can be said about his time as a nonprofit CEO, notably at Public/Private Ventures, a youth development think tank funded by the Ford Foundation.

“I entered foundation work with a little bit of a chip on my shoulder,” he told Philanthropy News Digest in 2002, six years into his tenure at the EMCF. In the interview, he expressed frustration with the funder-grantee relationship, drawn largely from his Public/Private Ventures’ experience. “A grantee gets pulled in many different directions at once,” he said. Nonprofits don’t “get to really focus on what they need to do but instead have to tell a foundation how they can do what the foundation wants done.”

That’s why, when he eventually led a foundation himself, Mike tried to strike a balance between challenging grantees and supporting them. Instead of the off-putting, hierarchical dynamic he encountered during his grant-seeking days, he sought to establish real partnerships.

For example, Mike transformed EMCF’s wide-ranging grant-making agenda to exclusively focus on young people and what he called “Institution and Field Building.” IFB, as he dubbed it, helped nonprofits improve their effectiveness by marrying significant and unrestricted funding with relationship building and strategic support of grantees. The last element was most fully embodied in the close collaboration he forged with a then-new organization, Bridgespan Group. In 2000, EMCF became Bridgespan’s first major client.

Jargon Watchdog

Even as Mike settled into foundation leadership, running EMCF for a decade, that chip on his shoulder remained. He loved questioning foundation culture, most of all the field’s embrace of jargon. Ironically, this chiding came from a guy who extolled an “IFB approach” to grant making!

Working with the writer Tony Proscio, EMCF published “In Other Words: A Plea for Plain Speaking in Foundations” and “‘Bad Words for Good: How Foundations Garble Their Message and Lose Their Audience.’’ The legendary William Safire wrote in his New York Times “On Language” column that the latter “straightens out philanthropese.”

Mike’s vision for how philanthropy could be more effective laid the groundwork for EMCF’s efforts to support evidence-based programs and proven nonprofit leaders. And it paved the way for the 2016 formation of Blue Meridian Partners, a philanthropic intermediary focused on accelerating economic and social mobility in the United States. His broader influence on philanthropy can be seen in the field’s often fitful trend toward making significant organizational bets, trusting grantees and their leadership, taking strategy seriously, and measuring results at every turn.

In many ways, Mike was an organization man, more confident in philanthropy’s ability to support individual nonprofits than to fix larger, more complicated structures, such as the criminal justice or school systems.

Mike’s commitment to these principles remained unshakeable throughout his career, as did his dedication to colleagues, family, and friends. When he died last month, he had been married to Sally Bailin for 56 years. He lived near his two children and two grandchildren, a fixture in their lives. And he remained close with many younger leaders he worked with over the decades, from students he influenced in Jersey City to proteges like us.

Recently, Alzheimer’s robbed Mike of his immense intellectual capacities, particularly the words he cared so much about getting right and the more exacting side of his nature. But the loss wasn’t complete. Left was the loving friend, and the warmhearted mensch who was always there for us and others.

Marc Freedman is the founder of CoGenerate and faculty director of Yale’s Experienced Leaders Initiative.

Nancy Roob, the former CEO of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, is founder and CEO of Blue Meridian Partners.