This past decade has seen a significant number of our affiliate societies and institutes either develop a foundation or begin establishing one. Although the word “foundation” usually implies a significant money-raising function, the foundations developed under the aegis of The American stress the importance of collaborative outreach work within their broad communities. The foundation then solicits funds to pay for these collaborative endeavors and for some of the relevant overhead expenses of the societies and institutes. Some foundations pay for their own overhead, while others also help with their societies' and institutes' deficits. The foundation movement has grown as our members have become aware of the importance of psychoanalysts being more active and visible within our communities.
The story of the recent vote by the Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute (BPSI) membership to establish a foundation may be of interest and use to our affiliate societies in their comparable endeavors. The task for us involved working with a society membership within a large organization that already participated in many outreach activities. We needed to be certain that a new structure would be more useful than those already in existence. Our experiences may help clarify how an organization can create a new, important component.
BPSI has always been proud of its significant number of members and candidates who have worked within academia and the broad mental health community. As a response to the many changes related to the decreasing stature of psychoanalysis well known to all of us, BPSI began developing a number of successful outreach programs. Yet there was a subtle but pervasive sense of depression and “hunkering down.” We had fewer applicants for our institute, although enough for yearly classes. Both the candidates and their faculty had great difficulty in getting sufficient numbers of low-fee analytic patients for training. As with other societies, we also experienced a continuing drop in both analytic and psychotherapy patients. We established an Outreach Committee, which encouraged members to continue to develop community programs. Although it supported some further creative endeavors, it met only once or twice a year and did not provide a cohesive structure for collaborative work within BPSI and our community.
The question of establishing a foundation was occasionally mentioned by different members but received little support in informal discussions. Several of our members began attending the annual meetings of The American's Committee on Foundations sessions in New York and the yearly workshops held in cities where affiliate societies had foundations. Although these sessions were valuable for the members attending, there was little further discussion of foundations at our society meetings.
My interest in a foundation began when Marvin Margolis spoke four years ago at BPSI about various society and institute issues. He described the Michigan Psychoanalytic Foundation as part of his remarks. I began to have a sense that a foundation using the Michigan model could establish a collaborative venture between our greater Boston community and BPSI, and that a foundation board, with at least 51 percent of its members coming from the community, could provide exciting new perspectives. I was also impressed with the fact that Michigan's members and candidates had begun to have many more analytic and psychotherapy patients. Equally important, many of their members had participated with enthusiasm in the development of collaborative programs with their community, based upon shared interests of both.
In April 1994, when I became presidentelect of BPSI, I decided that one of my goals was to explore the possible formation of a foundation. Harvey Rich and Marvin Margolis were both invaluable, always available consultants during this process. I took advantage of Margolis's hospitality in November 1994, visiting him for several hours to talk about foundations during a Thanksgiving visit to one of our children in Lansing, Mich. I also began to attend the two annual Committee on Foundations meetings. I learned about many aspects of foundation formation and development at these meetings. The interchanges with colleagues there provided me with a wonderful, rapid education — and consultants to call upon when I needed help.
I decided to set up a Foundation Task Force (FTF) when my term as president began in April 1996.1 selected some of the senior leaders at BPSI, four community BPSI Board of Trustee members, and one candidate as members of this task force. The group represented a range of views about foundations. I hoped that our four community trustees would draw upon their experiences with other boards on which they served and give us a sense of how valuable community members would be on a foundation board. Potential opposition to establishing a foundation could best be addressed by these members' active participation in the process.
We met approximately six times before we had any consensus about how to proceed. Among the significant issues raised were concern that we were about to add another level of bureaucracy to an already complex organization, with questionable gain, and a sense that our Outreach Committee and our Friends group could be enriched with the appointment of some community members, without resorting to a new structure with unknown difficulties. In several discussions we explained that a foundation offered a new way of understanding true collaboration with community organizations rather than inadvertently imposing our wishes on them. We hoped that a foundation board with a majority of community members would add something different and significant, especially since our outreach endeavors were at a relative standstill.
Although there was conflict among the members of the FTF, we finally agreed that the society membership should be involved through discussions at the Executive Council (the governing body of our society), a president's letter in our BPSI newsletter defining the FTF's deliberations, and a retreat for our members and candidates. I had already presented the idea of a foundation to the Executive Council. I now brought the results of the FTFs deliberations to the council and obtained its support for a retreat.
The retreat took place in February 1997, with almost 100 participants. Although a group of us from the FTF presented our vision of a foundation, there was clear confusion about the nature of a foundation and BPSI's need for one. People began to leave as the afternoon progressed; I had a sense of organizational confusion and ambivalence. The consensus of the meeting was that the membership needed more information, which I was asked to provide in a detailed written report. I was feeling pessimistic about the potential for a foundation and spent considerable time making peace within myself about my sense that a foundation would very likely not be approved.
Although momentarily discouraged, I brought the issues of the retreat back to the Executive Council and was invited to talk about a foundation at a meeting of the Committee of Training Analysts. Both groups were unclear about what a foundation was and did (in spite of my best efforts to explain) and had doubts about BPSI's need for one.
Gerald Adler, M.D., is a training and supervising analyst for the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, of which he has been president for the past two years.
The turning point of these discussions was my realization that nothing would ever happen if I were the only one charged with bringing information to everyone else. I presented to the Executive Council our need to involve council members in the process of collecting data from foundations of other affiliate societies. Four Executive Council members volunteered to call four leaders from foundations in Atlanta, North Carolina, Portland, and San Francisco.
Each of the four presented a similar report at our next meeting: All four foundation leaders were enthusiastic about their foundations, felt that little money was needed to start one, said that a critical mass of a small group of members was required to get a foundation off the ground, and reported that their societies' membership had significant reluctance during the initial approval of a foundation. At subsequent meetings of the Executive Council, discussion led to the final approval of a foundation and the call for a combined society membership and Executive Council meeting.
At that meeting, in November 1997, our foundation was approved by a unanimous vote after a long discussion wherein almost everyone who spoke was in support of it.
Only a short time has passed since this vote. We are currently in the process of developing the outline for a charter and by-laws, and establishing committees to consider the composition of a foundation board and ways in which we can raise funds (a particularly distasteful task at BPSI). The experience has been at times like a roller coaster, with many ups and downs. It often seemed to parallel analytic work with a deeply ambivalent patient where one feels hopelessly stuck; the situation requires perseverance and slow increments of understanding on the part of both participants for a positive ending to occur.
The approval of a foundation in a little more than a year and a half after discussions began is a very short time in such a complex organization. Perhaps the fact that I, as president, took on the task as a major endeavor allowed it to happen relatively quickly. I had the advantage of having committees with which I could meet (and which I could form as needed), a constituency with many pathways for communication, and the collaboration of colleagues whom I tried to make part of the process.
Although we have taken this major step in voting for a foundation, there is obviously much more to be done to establish an entity that will capture the enthusiasm of an increasing number of our members and candidates. I know that I will experience moments of pessimism and discouragement, as I did during our early deliberations. Yet those of us involved in the work of the foundation hope that the structures we have used and are developing will facilitate the tasks we have ahead of us. We look forward to the challenge.