Corporate & foundations relations work - my job, broadly defined - is often pretty opaque, though not because there's any secret at its core nor because practitioners (like me) are especially private. (Introverted, yes.)
Rather, CFR work is simply behind the scenes - not the actors, but the stagehands (or, on good days, production assistants). But here, via a program officer for the National Endowment for the Humanities, is a glimpse into the business, and specifically into the conference I attended last week. (The line about liberal-arts colleges "doing quite well" is a bit off, though - I asked the question that elicited that response, and I think that we are decidedly underrepresented in the pool of winners for the competitions she's discussing - though there's no way to know without crunching numbers on all the proposals and grants.)