Board Independence and Institutional Alignment

When the state of Illinois experienced a budget crisis in 2015–16, a member of the General Assembly came to Jim Moore’s office with a question. The state was short on money—could it borrow some from the University of Illinois Foundation?

Moore, who has led the foundation for more than a decade as its president and chief executive (CEO) and ran foundations in Arizona and Colorado before that, had never fielded a request quite like it. The conversation was cordial, he recalls, and his answer was “no.” But the question itself stayed with Moore.

“It dawned on me that there’s really this misunderstanding about what these organizations actually do for these institutions that they exist to serve, and how our fiscal resources are structured,” he says.