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Drawing on his experience in raising over one billion dollars in six years as President of Lincoln Center, Reynold Levy has written the ultimate insider's guide to asking for and receiving funds. Rich with insights and invaluable advice from Levy's own lessons learned, this powerful book is for you, whether your organization is concerned with health, education, the arts, or humanitarian causes, a think tank or advocacy group, established or fledgling. Insightful, creative, and humorous, Yours for the Asking draws back the curtain to disclose Levy's secrets of success and reveals how you can:
Tap into the resources of donors, large and small, for your institution or cause
Reach wealthy people and successfully bring home the bacon
Put aside fears, qualms, and hesitancies and confidently ask for funds
Locate the intersection between the interests of business and the needs of your nonprofit organization
Solve the mystery of fundraising from foundations
Explore your organization's future in fundraising and discern its long-term trends
Learn the best ways to combat the adverse impact of a wide, deep, and prolonged recession
Yours for the Asking will transform your view of fundraising from a dreaded aspect of your job to a high calling, from "pleading" for money to helping donors find pleasure in advancing social causes and strengthening key nonprofit institutions. Affluence and generosity abound. It's all yours-for the asking.
John Wiley & Sons, 2008
This insider's guide to corporate philanthropy will help all foundation staffs in their efforts to give wisely and well. A candid, pragmatic look at the factors that make for a successful giving program, Give and Take also offers invaluable advice to fund-raisers who will welcome a frank account of the perspectives of institutional donors. Reynold Levy, a former executive director of New York's renowned 92nd Street Y and president of the AT&T Foundation and the current chairman of the board of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, draws on his own experience in this engaging handbook of the benefits, responsibilities, and challenges facing today's philanthropists. Companies cited for their innovative philanthropic programs include AT&T, Levi Strauss, and Dayton-Hudson. Levy then turns the tables and views corporate giving from the beneficiary's perspective, divulging insider strategies and tactics for soliciting funds from today's corporate foundations. Give and Take is a handbook for everyone who cares about philanthropy, from managers in company foundations to nonprofit employees, development directors, trustees, and volunteers.
Harvard Business Press, 1999
Free Press, 1975
They Told Me Not to Take That Job
When Reynold Levy became the new president of Lincoln Center in 2002, New York Magazine described the situation he walked in to as “a community in deep distress, riven by conflict.” Ideas for the redevelopment of Lincoln Center's artistic facilities and public spaces required spending more than 1.2 billion, but there was no clear pathway for how to raise that kind of unprecedented sum. The individual resident organizations that were the key constituents of Lincoln Center—the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the Juilliard School, and eight others—could not agree on a common capital plan or fundraising course of action. Instead, intramural rivalries and disputes filled the vacuum.
Besides, some of those organizations had daunting problems of their own. Levy tells the inside story of the demise of the New York City Opera, the Metropolitan Opera's need to use as collateral its iconic Chagall tapestries in the face of mounting operating losses, and the New York Philharmonic's dalliance with Carnegie Hall.
Yet despite these and other challenges, Levy and the extraordinary civic leaders at his side were able to shape a consensus for the physical modernization of the sixteen-acre campus and raise the money necessary to maintain Lincoln Center as the country's most vibrant performing arts destination. By the time he left, Lincoln Center had prepared itself fully for the next generation of artists and audiences.
They Told Me Not to Take That Job is more than a memoir of life at the heart of one of the world's most prominent cultural institutions. It is also a case study of leadership and management in action. How Levy and his colleagues triumphantly steered Lincoln Center—through perhaps the most tumultuous decade of its history to a startling transformation—is fully captured in his riveting account.