What If Foundation Work Is a Craft?

Professionalization Isn’t the Whole Story: Craft as a Lens for Understanding How Foundation Work Really Happens

In philanthropy, we often talk about “getting more professional.” We mean clearer roles, better governance, and stronger accountability. It sounds good. Who would argue against being professional? However, in my research with foundation professionals, I’ve observed something else at work: a field shaped not only by emerging professional standards but also by deep, informal traditions learned through mentorship, intuition, and experience. What we call “professionalization” has advanced, but perhaps at a cost.

The Rise and Limits of Professionalization

The idea of the foundation professional emerged alongside a broader societal push toward professionalization in the mid-to-late 20th century. In this era, expertise became linked with credentials, and legitimacy became tied to formal associations, job titles, and training programs. Foundations, once run informally, often by families or committed individuals, began to adopt the language of management and the trappings of modern bureaucracy.

This shift promised clarity, consistency, and most importantly, legitimacy. The 1969 US Tax Reform Act created an incentive for accountants and lawyers to ensure that foundations were following the rules. It also benefited higher education institutions and professional associations, which now positioned themselves as the gatekeepers of philanthropic expertise. But this “professional” identity is not neutral. It was modelled, explicitly and implicitly, on a narrow archetype: white, male, managerial. As feminist and critical scholars have pointed out, the imagery of the professional often excludes and disempowers those outside dominant groups. In the philanthropic world, where there is no shared certification, no mandatory education, and no formal regulation, the professional ideal is aspirational at best and exclusionary at worst.

The Reality: Foundations Still Craft Their Own Norms

Despite the professional rhetoric, the reality is this: foundations can and often do operate as they wish. Some adopt best practices, while others work entirely outside of them. This flexibility is a defining feature of the field. However, it also reveals a central truth: foundation work is not only professional but also carefully crafted.

People fall into foundation roles from other professions. Foundations look for people specifications, not foundation-specific skills. CEOs have responded to my interview questions, stating that they can teach grantmaking but need people who can create relationships. There are mixed opinions on whether a specific skill set is required for foundation roles.

That means foundation roles are filled with on-the-job learning, peer exchanges, informal chats, mentorship, and observation. In practice, foundation staff navigate ambiguity, build trust, listen carefully, adapt their strategies, and translate values into action. Some skills cannot be easily taught in a classroom. These are hallmarks of craft, not credentials.

Reviving Craft: Toward “Organizational Crafting”

I’ve been working on a concept I’m calling organizational crafting. That’s a placeholder term. However, the idea is that in foundation work, the organization is the site of agency. It is not in the peer group, as it is in traditional professions. While professional associations and higher education exist in the foundation world, the actual how and doing of foundation work is located in the organization. The family, founder, Board, CEO, and other key stakeholders have a greater influence on how the foundation's work is conducted than any professional body. They act like a guild.

Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse: the desire to do a job well for its own sake. (p. 9)

Crafting reintroduces the value of learning by doing, of experimenting, of mentorship, of mindful and skilled decisions to create something, not perfect, but appropriate. And to learn from crafting in itself. Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman offers a helpful frame here. He writes about the sociable expert the one who shares knowledge openly, teaches through practice, and invites others into the work. This contrasts with the non-sociable expert, who guards their expertise, obscures their methods, and retains power through opacity.

Socialable expertise addresses other people in their unfolding prospects just as the artisan explores material change; one’s skill of repair is exercised as a mentor; one’s guiding standards are transparent, that is, comprehensible to nonexperts. Antisocial expertise shames others, embattles, or isolates the expert. (p. 251)

In foundations, we’ve seen both, but I do think we are too eager to accept the antisocial expertise. If we are to improve the field, we need more of the former. Craft is not the opposite of professionalization; it is its necessary counterbalance. It emphasizes pragmatism, humility, and relational learning. It also offers a path forward for those whose philanthropic practices have never fit neatly into a professional box.

Amateur Traditions: A Hidden Asset

What if the so-called “amateur” traditions in philanthropy, family involvement, community-led grantmaking, and on-the-ground learning aren’t flaws to be corrected, but assets to be understood? In our quest for legitimacy, have we overwritten these traditions with frameworks that ultimately replicate what the crafters were already doing, just with less jargon?

Introducing craft as a conceptual lens invites us to see the field in a different light. This isn’t a call to return to informality or to reject the value of training and standards. Rather, it’s a call to acknowledge the full picture. To resist the assumption that professionalization is inherently better. To ask whether our frameworks reflect the real texture of foundation work or obscure it.

When we observe foundations operating with “new” models, such as those demonstrated by Indigenous, critical, and feminist perspectives, might they actually be responding to the overprofessionalization of the field? These approaches often center relationships, local knowledge, and collective care practices grounded not in formal training, but in community and craft. They draw on the very amateur traditions the sector has long devalued.

Craft offers us a way to explore these dynamics without falling into false binaries (which the foundation field seems to love creating). It allows us to ask: what aspects of foundation work genuinely benefit from formalization and which ones thrive through practice, reflection, and tacit learning? Perhaps it’s not the entire enterprise that needs professionalizing, but only certain parts: accounting, legal compliance, governance mechanisms. The rest might already be doing just fine as craft.

Adding the lens of craft helps us more accurately describe, value, and improve foundation work. It names what many have long done, but rarely been able to articulate. And it opens space for more inclusive, grounded, and adaptive ways of understanding foundations, as they truly are.