Bradley Foundation official describes a staff reading program designed to cultivate that which philanthropy’s professional frameworks cannot easily teach.
The lecture landed on my desk sometime in my first month at Milwaukee’s Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, before I’d learned where the coffee was kept or half the names in the building. Alicia Manning set it down without ceremony—a nicely bound copy, printed by the Schumacher Center, where Bill Schambra had delivered it as one of their annual lectures. She said something like, “Read this when you can, and we’ll talk about it.” I would come to recognize that as characteristically hers, and characteristically Schambra’s by way of her: no framing, no preamble, no explanation of why it mattered. Just the text, and the assumption that it would do its own work.
It did. Schambra built his argument for civil society out of something small, a recovery club on Milwaukee’s north side called The Friendship Club—its schisms, its unpaid dues, its board minutes recording arguments so fierce the board sometimes simply failed to meet. He had a habit, I’d learn, of refusing to let civil society stay abstract: not “the nonprofit sector,” but a particular woman called Cordelia Taylor, turning her own home into an elder-care facility a few blocks from where she’d always lived; not “grassroots leadership,” but a woman running a Friendship Club board meeting that could barely stay in session. Reading it, I thought of Edith Stein, of all people, the story of her staying up through the night at a friend’s farmhouse reading Teresa of Ávila’s autobiography, and closing the book the next morning simply telling herself, this is the truth.
Unlike Stein, I didn’t discover anything I hadn’t already, in some inarticulate way, believed. I’d spent the previous few years leaving a law firm to run Hispanics for School Choice, which meant long stretches in the back rooms of restaurants, at park events, at people’s kitchen tables, trying to explain a program that almost no one had accurate information about, because that was the only way anyone was going to trust it. I already knew, in my hands, that help which didn’t happen in someone’s actual kitchen wasn’t really help.
What Schambra’s lecture gave me was akin to Roger Scruton’s old line about watching the ’68 riots as a student. He didn’t yet know what he was for, but he knew, watching, exactly what he was against. I felt something like both halves at once, reading Schambra. The particular, warm, disorderly beauty of the Friendship Club drew me in on its own terms, and at the very same moment, the rival picture it was implicitly arguing against—the forms, the measurements, the quiet commodifying of people into cases and consumers—repelled me just as naturally. I had never felt the need to work out that quarrel systematically. I hadn’t even fully realized it was a quarrel. Schambra’s lecture didn’t teach me something new. It told me I was already amidst such a disagreement, and made me choose a side.
Alicia had gotten the lecture from Schambra directly, years earlier, in some version of the same wordless handoff. I didn’t know it yet, but I was receiving something that had already been given once before, which is, in miniature, most of what I now think philanthropy training should look like.
An on-paper syllabus
The occasion, when it finally came, was practical. Bradley was considering bringing on a new program officer—someone talented, but new to philanthropy, with no prior fluency in the field’s vocabulary or its quarrels. Alicia and I could have done what had been done for us: handed over a loose stack of things we thought mattered and said, read this when you can. And in the end, that is still largely how it will work. I expect to keep handing things over one at a time, in conversation, the way they were handed to me. But I wanted something written down first, a syllabus, and not primarily for the new hire’s benefit. I wanted it for the team’s.
Putting the reasoning in order, why Michel de Montaigne before James C. Scott, why literature sits alongside political theory, why we start with epistemic humility rather than civil society itself, forces us to think about and maybe say out loud what we had mostly been operating on instinct. And once it existed, other people on staff could read alongside the new hire and actually join the conversations, including colleagues who know particular sections better than I do. The syllabus became less a training document than an excuse to keep talking to each other about books.
It also made visible something I hadn’t quite noticed I’d been doing. Assembling the syllabus felt less like designing a curriculum than like building a cairn. A cairn, if you’ve ever stacked one, isn’t planned in advance. You pick up stones as you find them, without knowing yet which one will matter, and only in the stacking do you discover what shape they were always going to make. For years, I had been accumulating things in a drawer this way—newspaper clippings, notes scribbled after conversations with grantees, journal entries, half-finished thoughts about a book I’d read. A great deal of what’s in that drawer never made it into the 30 weeks that follow. It’s still useful, just not systematic, and most of it I’ll probably hand over the old way, in conversation, whenever it fits what the new person happens to be working through. What’s in the syllabus is only the part of the pile that turned out to be load-bearing. That seemed fitting, actually, for a reading program whose whole argument is that the most important formation happens informally, off to the side, in a drawer someone else eventually finds.
If Schambra’s foil was the credentialed nonprofit sector performing concern while quietly disempowering the people it claimed to serve, mine was a specific and fairly ordinary demand. At Hispanics for School Choice, a funder once required, as a condition of support, that we hold 20 community meetings of at least 25 people each—a number arrived at, as far as I could tell, by nobody who had ever tried to get 25 working parents into a room on a Tuesday night in a neighborhood where trust had to be earned one kitchen table at a time. It wasn’t a malicious request. It came from people who would have described themselves, probably sincerely, as friends of the community. But it was written from behind a desk, aimed at people whose actual circumstances were invisible from that desk. This is exactly the failure Scott catalogs in Seeing Like a State: the state, or the funder, needs the world to be legible enough to administer, and so it substitutes a metric it can read from a distance for the messy reality it can’t. Twenty-five is legible. A neighborhood’s actual rhythm of trust is not.
The alternative I’d seen work, and the one the whole exercise tries to defend, is closer to what shows up in the syllabus as general operating support—funding the mission and the people, not the specific, pre-designed activity, and then trusting the grantee to know what fulfilling that mission actually requires on the ground. Alicia has a line she got from Bill, one I now find myself repeating to other people the way it was given to me: We say yes, or we say no. We don’t do anything else. Not because the funder has nothing to offer beyond a check, but because the moment you start prescribing the 25-person meeting, you’ve quietly made yourself the agent in the field instead of the grantee, you’ve displaced the very self-governance you claim to be supporting.
Subsidiarity isn’t just a nice word for local control. It’s a hard admission that the person closest to the problem usually possesses knowledge that the person furthest from it cannot acquire solely through credentials, expertise or dashboards. That’s a genuinely uncomfortable thing for a program officer to believe about his own judgment, which is exactly why it has to be taught rather than assumed.
Not metaphorically
I had a certain kind of person in mind while I put the syllabus together, more archetype than individual: young, recently out of school, sharp and curious, with real raw material, but without yet having settled into fixed opinions about man, God, law, or philanthropy, simply because life hadn’t yet forced the question. That was deliberate. It is far easier to form someone who hasn’t yet built a defensible position than to unbuild one in someone mid-career who has already built a professional vocabulary and set of habits, and who may have come to rely on process and credentialed expertise as substitutes for the harder work of judgment. I don’t think that unbuilding is impossible. I just think it’s rare, because it requires a kind of openness most of us stop practicing once we’ve settled into an answer. What I wanted, instead, was to catch someone before the settling, to ask a smart young person to sit with Montaigne and Scott and Honoré de Balzac and the rest before he’d built the alternative, easier scaffolding of forms and frameworks and best practices. Borrowing from St. Francis of Assisi, what we’re actually asking a program officer to be capable of is to kiss the leper. Not metaphorically administer to the leper population. Kiss the leper.
People don’t generally reach for Montaigne when they think about philanthropy, which is part of why the syllabus opens with him. I wanted the first thing a new hire encountered to be strange enough that they couldn’t slot it into whatever framework they’d already brought with them. No prior category for “philanthropy reading” that Montaigne fits neatly inside, so no way to skim him with the part of the mind reserved for professional development. What he gives you, especially in the education essays, is a distinction the field badly needs and rarely makes: the difference between knowing facts and possessing judgment. A program officer can be extraordinarily well-informed—fluent in an issue’s statistics, its landscape, its major players—and still exercise terrible judgment about a grantee and its community. Montaigne is one of the clearest writers I know on why those two things are not the same skill, and starting with him forces the question before anyone’s had the chance to hide behind their own competence.
That’s really the pedagogical instinct behind the whole arc, not just the opening—hit the central point sideways, in a form the participant didn’t see coming, so they can’t retreat into a preconceived position. It’s why literature carries so much of the weight it does, and why it’s woven through rather than saved for the end as a kind of dessert after the real intellectual work. A didactic argument can be agreed with at a comfortable distance, nodded along to, filed away, never quite let inside. A narrative doesn’t let you keep that distance. You don’t argue with Anton Chekhov’s Thin man; you watch him collapse, and something in you recognizes the collapse before you’ve consciously decided what it means. That’s a different kind of formation than being persuaded of a thesis, and I think it’s closer to how a program officer actually learns to see because most of what they’ll be doing, if they’re doing it well, is exactly that kind of soaking in—paying attention to what a grantee’s meeting actually feels like, or what a neighborhood is really telling you, in ways that never show up in a report.
There’s also a simply practical reason for the shape of it. A syllabus that’s unrelieved density, Friedrich Hayek followed by Robert George followed by Robert Nisbet, turns into drudgery, and drudgery defeats the entire purpose. So there’s real, deliberate texture—a documentary, a podcast episode, a lighter case discussion dropped between the heavier stretches, the way you’d space a long meal. I hold the sequence loosely for the same reason. The general movement, humility and judgment, then civil society, then pluralism and constitutional limits, then markets, then literature and time, makes sense to me as a shape. But I’m not doctrinaire about the order, and a different participant’s background or the natural pull of a conversation has moved things around before and will again.
The weeks themselves aren’t lectures. We read together and meet weekly in something closer to a seminar than a syllabus review, and the discussion questions in the document are less a script than a signal to the participant, a hint at why I chose to put a particular text in front of them, not a checklist we work through in order. In practice, the conversation is usually pulled along by whatever’s actually alive that week—a site visit, something in the news, a different reading that happens to rhyme with the one assigned. I want that. A program officer who can’t connect Frédéric Bastiat to something that happened at a grantee visit that morning hasn’t really learned Bastiat. And because there’s no external deadline forcing the pace, we tarry when a text earns it. George’s Making Men Moral is rich enough that it can easily run two weeks, not because the syllabus says so, but because the conversation isn’t finished yet.
Woven through the weeks
Reading and conversation are only half of it, though, and I’d be misrepresenting the program if I made it sound purely bookish. Woven through the weeks, though not on any fixed schedule, are site visits, actual trips to actual grantees, sitting across from the people the readings are describing in the abstract. There’s a version of this program that could be run entirely from a conference room, and it would fail at exactly the thing it’s trying to teach. You can read Bob Woodson on indigenous renewal and nod along; it’s a different thing to sit in a recovery club or a neighborhood-run program and watch someone run their organization with the same messy, self-governing texture Schambra found in the Friendship Club. The arguments, the informal authority, the trust built over years, these are forms of knowledge and standing that no credential, however valuable in its proper sphere, can confer. The point isn’t to test the reading against reality, exactly. It’s that the reading and the visits are teaching the same lesson from two directions, and a program officer who’s only ever encountered civil society on the page hasn’t really encountered it.
A few months in, my new colleague told me something that’s stayed with me more than any evaluation metric could. He said that once he’d read a handful of the books and sat through the discussions, he started seeing the ideas everywhere, not just in philanthropy, but in the news, in conversations, in his own instincts about people. Scott’s account of legibility, once you’ve actually sat with it, is not a thing you can un-notice the next time an institution simplifies a person into a form. Seamus Hasson’s argument for the right to be wrong follows you into the next conversation where someone is a little too certain they know what’s good for someone else. The Wilhelm Röpke-Balzac pairing, a humane economy on one side, Felix Grandet’s arithmetic soul on the other, makes it hard to hear “market-based solution” again without asking what kind of soul the solution assumes. That’s what I actually wanted, more than any particular conclusion. Not agreement with a position, but a permanently changed way of seeing, the kind you can’t argue your way back out of once it’s there.
That, I think, is the real case for a program like this, and it’s a case that has almost nothing to do with the Bradley Foundation specifically. The philanthropic field has spent a generation professionalizing itself by building out theories of change, logic models, metrics dashboards, and credentialing pathways on the assumption that good outcomes follow from better technique. And some of that is genuinely useful.
None of this is an argument against expertise, much less education. Some philanthropic work is impossible without it. A foundation supporting advanced scientific research had better be able to distinguish good science from bad, and one working seriously in higher education will inevitably spend a great deal of time with scholars whose credentials testify to genuine and necessary expertise. The mistake comes when one kind of knowledge claims jurisdiction over another. When technical expertise, professional training, or institutional standing is treated as a substitute for the local knowledge and practical judgment possessed by people actually doing the work. The problem is not that experts know nothing. It is the temptation to believe that what they know is all that needs to be known.
But none of that teaches a new program officer what to do in the room with a grantee like Cordelia Taylor, or how to tell the difference between someone who needs help straightening out his accounting and someone whose whole dignity depends on straightening it out himself. That’s not a technical skill.
It’s judgment, and judgment isn’t transmitted through frameworks. It’s transmitted the way it was transmitted to me, a lecture handed across a desk, a line repeated until it becomes instinct, a book that reorders how you see everything after it, a site visit that makes an abstraction into a person with a name. If philanthropy wants more people capable of that kind of seeing, it will have to be willing to do something slower and less scalable than a workshop. It will have to be willing to hand someone a book, say almost nothing about it, and trust that it will do its own work.
***
The reading program: thirty weeks
Week 1 — Knowledge, Judgment, and Human Limits
Michel de Montaigne, “Of Experience” and “Of Presumption,” in Essays
Tony Proscio, In Other Words: A Plea for Plain Speaking in Foundations
Tony Proscio, Bad Words for Good: How Foundations Garble Their Message and Lose Their Audience
Week 2 — Judgment Revisited: Knowing What We Do Not Know
Montaigne, continued
Tony Proscio, When Words Fail: How the Public Interest Becomes Neither Public Nor Interesting
Week 3 — Citizens, Pluralism, and Civic Formation
Jay P. Greene, Education Myths, selected chapters
Kite & Key Media, “The Education Miracle Everyone Hates”
Kite & Key Media, “Are the SATs Discriminatory?”
Kite & Key Media, “How the Pandemic Transformed Public Education”
Week 4 — Formation vs. Optimization
Greene, Education Myths, continued
Montaigne, “Of the Education of Children,” in Essays
Week 5 — Seeing, Knowing, and Governing from Afar
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State
Week 6 — Philanthropy and the Logic of the State
Scott, Seeing Like a State, continued
Alicia Manning, “The Richness of Reciprocity,” interview with Jeremy Beer, Givers, Doers, & Thinkers: A Podcast on Philanthropy and Civil Society
Week 7 — Civil Society, Community, and Decline
Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community, selected chapters
Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, To Empower People, selected chapters
John McKnight, The Careless Society, selected chapters
William A. Schambra, “The Friendship Club and the Well-Springs of Civil Society,” E. F. Schumacher Lecture
Week 8 — Social Capital: Diagnosis Without Illusion
Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone, selected chapters
Robert L. Woodson, Sr., The Triumphs of Joseph, selected chapters
William Faulkner, “The Tall Men”
Schambra, “The Friendship Club and the Well-Springs of Civil Society,” revisited
Week 9 — The Right to Be Wrong
Kevin Seamus Hasson, The Right to Be Wrong
Robert P. George, Making Men Moral
Week 10 — Constitutional Humility and Philanthropic Power
Hasson, The Right to Be Wrong, continued
George, Making Men Moral, continued
Week 11 — National Conservatism and Constitutional Inheritance
Charles R. Kesler, “National Conservatism vs. American Conservatism,” Claremont Review of Books
Montaigne, “Of Custom, and That We Should Not Easily Change a Law Received,” in Essays
Week 12 — Inheritance as Stewardship
Kesler, continued
Willa Cather, “The Sculptor’s Funeral”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Great Stone Face”
Week 13 — Moral Foundations of Commercial Society
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, selected excerpts
Samuel Gregg, Wilhelm Röpke’s Political Economy, selected chapters
NPR’s Planet Money Summer School: Government (2025), all episodes
Week 14 — The Knowledge Problem and the Limits of Design
F. A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” The American Economic Review
Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, brief revisit
Week 15 — The Pretense of Knowledge and the Temptation of Control
F. A. Hayek, “The Pretence of Knowledge,” Nobel Prize lecture, selected excerpts
Gregg, Wilhelm Röpke’s Political Economy, continued
Kite & Key Media, “When Better Data Leads to Worse Outcomes”
Week 16 — Seen and Unseen: Consequences Beyond Intention
Frédéric Bastiat, “That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen”
PovertyCure, Acton Institute video series, selected episodes
Week 17 — Poverty, Dignity, and Dependency
PovertyCure, continued
Berger and Neuhaus, To Empower People, revisited
Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy of American Compassion, selected chapters
Wilhelm Röpke, A Humane Economy, selected chapters
Week 18 — Wealth, Hoarding, and the Limits of Rationality
Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet
Week 19 — Success, Status, and the Measure of a Life
Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Week 20 — Prestige and Institutional Vanity
Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, continued
Week 21 — Culture, Character, and Moral Ecology
James Q. Wilson, On Character, selected essays
Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?,” Foreign Affairs
Week 22 — Power, Necessity, and the Eclipse of Justice
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, the Melian Dialogue
William A. Schambra, “Philanthropy’s Original Sin,” The New Atlantis
Week 23 — Status, Deference, and Moral Distortion
Anton Chekhov, “Fat and Thin”
David Bosworth, “The Cultural Contradictions of Philanthrocapitalism,” Society
Week 24 — The Ethics of Presence
Anton Chekhov, “Misery”
Chekhov, “Fat and Thin,” revisited
Week 25 — Time, Humility, and Inner Discipline
T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets, selections
Week 26 — Time Horizons and Faithfulness
Eliot, The Four Quartets, continued
Week 27 — Culture, Inheritance, and the Limits of Design
T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
Week 28 — Conservatism, Permanence, and Restraint
Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative
Week 29 — Prudence and the Discipline of Saying No
Montaigne and Scott, selected passages revisited
Week 30 — Integration: The Limits of Philanthropy
William A. Schambra, “One Cheer for Collaboration,” Philanthropy
William A. Schambra, “The Problem of Strategic Philanthropy (According to Bill Schambra),” Nonprofit Quarterly
Jerry Z. Muller, “A Cure for Our Fixation on Metrics,” The Wall Street Journal