It is over 18 months since Barbara Kibbe, then director of the Packard Foundation’s Organizational Effectiveness and Philanthropy Program (both the Program and Barbara herself will be sadly missed), suggested that it might be interesting to interview people from the Gates, Ford and Packard Foundations about their different levels of staffing relative to grantmaking. This suggestion finally grew into the two main feature articles in this issue on how foundations run their overseas operations. These are based on interviews with 14 foundation leaders and nine grantees in different regions. We hope Alliance readers will find these two parallel perspectives interesting and illuminating.

Having got these groups of foundation leaders and grantees together, we very much hope to be able to go back to them from time to time on other issues. In fact we plan to do so in the very next issue of Alliance!