John Gardner and Common Cause

John Gardner was president of Carnegie Corporation of New York from 1955 to 1965. Under Gardner’s leadership there were many notable Corporation achievements including the creation of the White House Fellows program in 1964. He also spurred efforts to strengthen higher education in sub-Saharan Africa. At Gardner's urging, the Corporation supported much of the nation's basic research on cognition, creativity, and the learning process, particularly among young children, in the process linking the fields of psychology and education. With Gardner, Carnegie Corporation entered the era of strategic philanthropy— the planned, organized, deliberately constructed means to attain stated ends. It no longer sufficed to support a socially desirable project; rather, the knowledge must produce concrete results and be communicated to the public, the media, and decision makers with the intention of fostering policy debate. A central objective was to develop programs that might be implemented and scaled up by larger organizations, especially government. His interest in the potential of government to promote societal progress and equality led him to become U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in 1965. He later founded two influential national organizations, Common Cause in 1970 and Independent Sector in 1980. In 2010, on the 40th anniversary of Common Cause, Moyers gave a stirring and deeply moving speech about Gardner’s legacy, noting that Gardner said, “Don’t pray for the day when we finally solve our problems. Pray for freedom to continue working on the problems that the future will never cease to throw at us.”  You can read the speech here:  http://bit.ly/93Fphd