Guiding Values

Family
This foundation is formed around a family and is meant to strengthen it. We are committed to encouraging and empowering philanthropy among family members.

Fiscal Stewardship
Argosy Trustees view themselves as stewards of financial and intellectual resources. We expect of ourselves and our partners a disciplined and responsible use of these resources.

Decision-Making
Argosy is deeply committed to informing the decision-making process. Proportionate to their impact, decisions should be the end result of rigorous research, data, and analysis, including best practices, risk contingency, and scenario modeling.

Human Resources
The most important variable in an organization is personnel. We are committed to aggressively seeking out, retaining, and developing an increasingly effective staff. We strongly support our partners in doing the same, particularly in leadership.

Method of Engagement
We seek to make investments that empower through infrastructure and long-term capacity-building. We approach investments with a shared notion of engagement, defined benchmarks, and an exit strategy. We encourage creativity, try to avoid bureaucracy and dependence, and focus on outcomes.

Outcomes
We are committed to continually assessing the effectiveness of ourselves and our nonprofit partners, and equally dedicated to learning from and adapting to the findings. We encourage and support partners to adopt efficient and creative study designs.

Volunteer Ethic
We celebrate and encourage the charitable impulse in society. We believe in interacting with our peers, our partners, our staff, and the community with respect and grace. Where we disagree with others, we try to communicate productively.

Collaboration
What is done well in isolation is often done better in partnership. We seek collaboration and encourage our partners to continually explore potential collaborations when they lead to greater efficiencies, scalability, and pooled-voice advocacy.

Curiosity
We believe that continually examining the world in which we live and the fields in which we work makes us better grantmakers. We are committed to remaining open-minded, sharing knowledge, and learning from our successes and failures.

Integrity
By operating in a manner consistent with our values, we hope our methodology and integrity will earn respect. We value diversity and differences of opinion regarding our decisions and actions.