White Courtesy Telephone

Defining Social Justice Philanthropy: What's Your Favorite Shade of Pinko?

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I. A Thesis

Those of us in the business of grantmaking often get so caught up in the mechanics of our work that we lose sight of the transformed lives and communities we strive to bring into being. We forget the good we set out to accomplish. This is a great shame. But next to losing a sense of the good we can accomplish through our work, the worst evil that can befall us is to have little sense of anything else. We need not only a vision of the world we want to see, but a bracing clarity about the how of social change. Good intentions will not transform complex systems that keep whole classes of people in abject misery while their neighbors live in splendor.

I know this sounds hopelessly retro, but I’m convinced that one of the first steps toward effectiveness as a grantmaker is conceptual clarity, beginning with clarity about what it is we mean by "social justice" and, by extension, "social justice philanthropy."

It’s an odd claim to make. I’m proposing that we begin what is essentially a revolutionary enterprise by paying close attention to definitions.

Contrary to what some of the more action-oriented among us might assume, definitions matter: they help structure our analyses of the forces that maintain systems of oppression, and they’re critical to shaping strategies that will be effective in countering those forces.

Countess Apraxina Steps Into The Second Line

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Editor’s note:  We publish occasional letters written to us by the Countess Apraxina.  She and White Courtesy Telephone editor Albert Ruesga became friends after a few too many champagne martinis at a Tolstoi Foundation reception many years ago.  According to Albert, the two spent the rest of the evening pretending to share a fondness for the works of Turgenev.  The Countess consistently and mistakenly refers to Albert as Alyosha ...

My Dearest Alyosha—

You have driven Countess Apraxina to margins of sanity! How shameful for me to admit it! My ears burn as I write this, but I will always play Varvara Petrovna to your Stepan Trofimovich*! How accurately that madman Dostoevsky described me when he wrote:

Some unbearable love for him lay hidden in her, in the midst of constant hatred, jealousy, and contempt.

Yes, jealousy too! How is this possible, you ask, I should be jealous of you? I do not know. Aunt Sofia tells me you are little more than bony chicken stuffed into ill-fitting suit, small man with small ideas. Now that you are big shot in New Orlinks she assures me levees will break from abject boredom. And yet I miss you terribly, my solnyshko.

I am ask new assistant, Caio, to sketch ideas I had for philanthropy Mardi Gras parade. I attach below. I do not know why I do this for you, my little dullard, after you have so many times rejected Apraxina’s brilliant concepts for you and your miserable philanthropoid friends!

I am fly to DC tonight. With so many new people in Washington, business of shameless self-promotion is absolutely booming! Call me on my cell.

 

 

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* Two tragicomic characters from Dostoevsky’s Demons (a.k.a. The Possessed). 

Dieting Advice for Education Advocates

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If you care about public education in the United States and want to shed a few pounds, have I got a diet for you:

1. Run a lap each time you hear somebody frame the purpose of K-12 education in terms of "developing 21st century skills for the workforce" or "supporting vibrant regional economies."

2. Reward yourself with an extra helping of mashed potatoes each time somebody asserts that the primary goal of education should be to help create good citizens with the knowledge and skills necessary for participating meaningfully in a democracy.

My guess is that you’ll be ready for that yellow polka dot bikini in no time at all.

I remember being surprised by a 60 Minutes episode many years back when a reporter—was it Morley Safer?—lamented the declining state of public education. His primary concern was the effect this decline would have on corporations and their ability to hire skilled workers. There was no mention, as I recall, of what it might mean for our democracy to produce high school graduates unable to write a coherent paragraph, understand a simple op ed, or locate the Atlantic Ocean on a map of the world.

Was I witnessing the divergence of a new species, Homo economicus, from its less well adapted cousin, Homo democraticus? The business sector has had a big say in framing the purpose of K-12 education. Have government and nonprofit voices been muted by comparison?

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Image source: Música y Recuerdos

I Assume You Know Who You Are

Sector Agnosticism

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I’ve been hearing it mostly from younger people entering the nonprofit field: You can do good for society in any sector—nonprofit, business, or government.

The lines between the sectors have blurred, I’m reminded, and it’s the IRS that forces incorporated entities into nonprofit and for-profit boxes. The social entrepreneur who starts a profit-making venture to support her charitable work shows us how to free our not-for-profit minds. Blended entities such as B-corporations promise double and even triple bottom lines. If you’re hip to the jive, you avoid using words like nonprofit altogether.

Am I imagining this or do I sometimes detect a bit of a sneer in all this sector agnosticism?

Belittlements aside, the view that nonprofit designation is largely a matter of IRS convention—or worse, a failure of entrepreneurial imagination—appears to be gaining currency.

I understand the frustration some people feel with the normal course of business at many not-for-profits. But our sector agnosticism overlooks an uncomfortable truth: there are important social goods nobody wants to pay for. If it really were possible for a business-minded individual to turn a hefty profit by providing health care to the penniless, for example, it would have happened long ago.

R U a philanthrocapitalist? If you are, I’ll eat my shoe if you can convince a hundred investors to buy stock in a company that promises to make a killing by helping returning prisoners reintegrate into their communities.

The nonprofit status of organizations that provide services to the indigent reflects not a failure of imagination or of will, but rather a sober assessment of what people value enough to pay for freely. If you’re selling a product like the iPhone, you’re in luck. If not, you might need to resort to begging like the rest of us not-for-profit shlumps.

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Image source: Sketchpot

Hitting the Nail on the Thumb: Fallout from NCRP’s “Philanthropy at its Best”

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Philanthropy at its Best, a new report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy   (NCRP), has clearly hit a nerve.  More interesting than the report itself, perhaps, has been the sociology of its reception: foundations withdrawing their support from the NCRP; powerful men eviscerating the report in prominent journals; associations of foundations releasing carefully worded statements to assuage the report’s believers and detractors.

It’s not nice to kick a publication when it’s down, but I too see its flaws.  I understand how literalist interpretations of its text might lead to arguments in the pews.

NCRP’s suggestion, for example, that grantmakers “[provide] at least 50 percent of [their] grant dollars to benefit lower-income communities, communities of color and other marginalized groups” will predictably put off grantmakers whose work focuses on saving the Chesapeake Bay, for example, or protecting Romanesque churches from the ravages of earthquakes.  Either that or it will launch us into fruitless discussions about what it really means to “benefit” lower-income communities.

And so on down the list of NCRP’s prescriptions for philanthropy at its best.*

I understand, however, that behind each of these exhortations lies a beating heart.  Behind the plea to give more to the poor is the uncomfortably reality of deep poverty in our own country.  And set against this poverty, the tens of billions of dollars in philanthropic assets dedicated to eliminating it but somehow failing to do so after all these years.

Where some critics see the NCRP report as a kind of ideological manifesto, I see in it a plea for greater effectiveness in grantmaking.  If that’s the case, then perhaps we can fault the report not for its excesses, but for not having gone far enough.

I challenge those of us in the field of organized philanthropy to try the following experiment: Let’s choose 100 foundations at random with assets of $250 million or more, dedicated to eradicating some social ill or other.  For these 100 foundations, let’s determine how many:

1. Have clearly articulated, reasonable, measurable goals for their grantmaking and publish these on their websites, inviting public comment.  And here I don’t mean copout goals like “we aim to improve public education in Anytown.”  If I sit down and provide one Anytown student 15 minutes of mentoring in algebra I will have succeeded in meeting that goal.  I will also meet the goal if I simply aim to mentor the student in question.
2. Have clearly articulated strategies for obtaining their goals, tied to compelling theories of change, and moreover publish the rationales for how they arrived at these strategies on their websites, inviting public comment.  Research indicates that this number will be vanishingly small if only because so few grantmakers develop strategies, or take the important step of exposing them to public scrutiny.
3. Are fully aware of past attempts to eradicate the social ills they’re now addressing and have incorporated this knowledge into their grantmaking strategies.  Generally we are ignorant of the efforts of grantmakers who have gone before us, despite the resources available to us.
4. Have trained staff members knowledgeable about the craft and history of grantmaking.  We continue to labor under the illusion that we can throw program officers into the deep end of the philanthropic pool without any significant training in the art and science of grantmaking.
5. Make significant attempts to increase their impact by partnering with other grantmakers rather than trying to go it alone.  The magnitude of the problems we attempt to address requires collaboration in the pooling of resources, the development of strategies, and the due diligence of grantmaking—but this kind of collaboration is the exception rather than the rule.  We sometimes (often?) opt for bragging rights rather than greater effectiveness.
6. Measure their effectiveness against stated goals and report these results to the public.**

I can simplify the lesson of this list.  If you’re a grantmaker, tell any well informed person what you hope to accomplish and how, and I predict that nine times out of ten her response to you will be, “You can’t get there from here, and you wouldn’t know it if you did.”

I’ve argued elsewhere that the concerns for social justice and the demands for effectiveness are congruent, if not actually equivalent, in many important domains.  I see the same kind of argument at work in NCRP’s Philanthropy at its Best.  It’s the argument that we will never achieve certain kinds of social change without an analysis that takes into account the effects of race and class, among other important social signifiers.  It’s the argument that without a thoroughgoing self-criticism, we’re essentially doing philanthropy in bad faith.

I share others’ concerns about the spectre of government regulation.  If that’s what the NCRP is angling for, then God help us: the cure will be worse than the disease.  That and other issues aside, I welcome the NCRP’s call for foundations to be better than they think they are.

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* Some of the NCRP’s recommendations are beyond reproach.  Who would argue with the suggestion, for example, that we “[maintain] policies and practices that support ethical behavior”?

** Guilty as charged, by the way: The foundation I direct would get a middling score when evaluated against these criteria.  But give us a few years.

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Beige Philanthropy in the Crosshairs

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Think of them as two armies battling against overwhelming indifference—and frequently against one another—for the soul of philanthropy.

One camp is arrayed under such banners as “metrics” and “evaluation,” and has a distinctly business school cast.  The other champions a style of philanthropy concerned with social justice, and seeks to expose the root causes of our social ills.

These are caricatures, but they’re not entirely without foundation, so indulge me for a moment longer.

We fail to appreciate how closely united these two camps are in their rejection of philanthropy as usual—“beige philanthropy,” as I like to call it.  Most striking, perhaps, is their primary point of contact: a shared concern for effectiveness.

Here’s how it works: Those in the Metrics camp argue that few foundations make any real attempt to hold themselves accountable.  Without measuring the effectiveness of their grantmaking, they’re unable to track progress against stated goals (if they exist).  Even if these grantmakers are able to see with their own eyes the good they help produce, it’s not clear that this good significantly outweighs the cost of producing it.  Accountable to nobody but themselves, they end up shortchanging the communities they aim to serve.

Those in the Social Justice camp come to exactly the same conclusion but via a different path.  They argue that most of the giving done by mainstream foundations is based on an incomplete or flawed analysis of what it takes to achieve goals like ending poverty or ensuring that all children thrive.  These foundations content themselves with triaging society’s victims, never wondering about the causes of their victimhood, and suspecting, perhaps, that they might themselves be implicated in the crime.

It’s an easy matter to strawman mainstream philanthropy, to claim that it’s grown soft on flattery and self-congratulation.  It’s a far better strategy, in my view, for those in the Metrics and Social Justice camps to make their arguments incontrovertible—to give their speculations the heft of widely shared conviction.  There’s also a lot they can learn from one another.

The Island of the Yooks and the Zooks: Notes on the Systems Heresy

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In philanthropic and nonprofit work, discussions of “systemic reform” can sometimes beguile us.  We might, without realizing it, succumb to the Systems Heresy: the naïve belief that fair institutional structures and a fair enforcement of laws will inevitably produce fair social outcomes.

We understand that unequal initial conditions—a legacy of slavery for one group, say, but not for another—can lead to unequal outcomes, however fairly constituted our institutions and laws might be.  But the problems associated with the Systems Heresy go deeper than this.

Imagine an island of ten million souls inhabited by two tribes, one called the Yooks, the other the Zooks.  The Yooks, who outnumber the Zooks ten to one, part their hair on the right while the Zooks part their hair on the left.  Imagine further that a god—call him Milton—endows the island’s inhabitants with equal abilities and gives to each Yook and Zook five thousand Talents with which he or she might participate in a system of production and exchange.

There’s one problem: the Yooks hate the Zooks.  This bigotry drives the Yooks to give all their business to Yook merchants.  Yooks, who by their overwhelming numbers own most of the island’s wealth, more readily aggregate their capital to increase the productive capacity of their businesses, further favoring Yook communities.  Over time, the Zooks fall behind the Yooks.  Unable to compete effectively with their more numerous and increasingly more prosperous neighbors, Zook communities languish then decay.

This thought experiment suggests one way a fair system with equal initial conditions might lead to unequal social outcomes over time.  It’s certainly not fair of the Yooks to shut out the Zooks, but it’s a bit of a strain to say that this lack of fairness is a property of the island’s system of institutions and laws.  It’s more accurately a moral failing on the part of the Yooks.  This moral failing undermines whatever degree of fairness might be built into the island’s institutional structures.

This is for me the great lesson of the Systems Heresy: systemic reform that doesn’t somehow attend to the values we bring to a given system is a shot in the dark and borders on social engineering of the most speculative variety.

The classically Liberal conception of the state provides a values-neutral framework of rights in which each individual can pursue his or her own vision of the Good.  In a Liberal state, it’s not the government but rather civil society that’s most clearly charged with perfecting and transmitting the values we share as a people.  This great civilizing work happens—or rather, should happen—in our schools and churches, in our trade unions, on the streets, wherever people gather to reflect and deliberate.

I’m not convinced, however, that our discussion and negotiation of values is robust enough to prevent us from injecting the venom of the Yooks into any system we might yet devise or evolve to.  Our ignorance of history, the corporate ownership of the media and its concentration in fewer hands, and the abiding anti-intellectual climate in this country are among the factors exploited by those who resist the kind of social transformation many of us desire and work for.

Systemic reform is necessary, but it’s only one of the battles progressives need to engage.

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Have a thought to share?  Leave a comment by clicking here.

Image source: Dr. Seuss’s Butter Battle Book

New Nonprofit Study Promises to Change Everything

A groundbreaking new study by the Institute for Better Philanthropy concludes that sound management, good governance, and smart fundraising are strongly correlated with nonprofit success.

“We weren’t completely surprised by the findings,” commented Zach Skywalker, CEO of the 2Cool4U Foundation which sponsored the study.  “We’ve been saying for years that a completely new paradigm is needed for nonprofit work.”

Philanthropic Market Alignment: Getting That Green, Green Feeling

Everything’s within the realm of plausibility as we gad about in our consumerist trance, sated with our latest purchases.  In a bid to corner the new “eco-tainment” market, Discovery is launching Planet Green, a channel that will forego a hard look at Man’s effect on the environment to present consumers with new product lines they can use to redecorate their homes in eco-friendly ways.  General Motors, maker of the nine-mile-per-gallon Hummer, is a lead advertiser and partner.

I believe that in contemporary parlance this is called “making philanthropic markets more efficient.”  It’s what happens when you attempt to align market demand with social benefit.  The alignment isn’t perfect in this case—is it ever?—but we can sweeten the deal by offering to save a square inch of Amazonian rainforest with each purchase of 100 gallons or more of gasoline.  With an Environmental Product® to which we can now dedicate our consumer dollars, we can make our other purchases with a clearer conscience.  And we can forego a fruitless search for the root causes of our present predicament since that too would likely end up being a waste of precious natural resources.

We’ve come a long way since the days of Plato’s Republic.  Far from electing philosopher kings, we’ve chained them deep inside the Cave along with the rest of us and made them watch the dance of shadows on the wall, now called the NBC Nightly News.  It’s not that we can’t turn our heads to see the puppetmasters, it’s that we simply choose not to: we might in that moment of aspiration miss the ad for an important new product that will change our lives.

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Disclaimer: Only recycled 1s and 0s were used in the machine code for this blog post.

Image source: Nunc Scio

A Revolution Is Not A Dinner Party, Nor Is It Doing Embroidery

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Editor's note: Guest blogger Jiang Qing has been called the last hardliner in the Chinese Communist Party.  According to her resume, she's the director in chief of Public Security Bureau Detention Centers, the system of prisons used to detain Chinese dissidents.  She's also chair of the Hospitality Committee for the Beijing Summer Olympics.  We publish her post in the spirit of open discussion and debate.

I salute Comrade Phil for tapping into the cubicle rage that's growing across America.  Allow me to quote his blogging:

The wealthy through foundations and nonprofits manage social change via inputs, outputs, outcomes and petty rules and management hierarchies that denature a potentially revolutionary social movement of the disenfranchised into a well managed and non-threatening project to assist the disadvantaged upon their release from the State Pen. …

Could it be that philanthropy is ... the expression of a managerial tradition, of a capitalist, and technocratic, rather than moral tradition? I could give you 1,000 links to 100 philanthropy or giving blogs that would make this obvious to the point of tedium and despair.  All technocrats, all managerial wannabes.  Hot for their MBA, talking among themselves about how to be better social investors, more venturesome, more businesslike, more capable as a manager, more accountable to capital, and so gain an upward career path, with the full approval of Board, investors, wealthy donors.

Mr. Phil understands that where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish of itself.  Domestic foundation executives will never take their defeat, they cannot be reconciled, they will fight to the last ditch!  After peace and order are established throughout the country they will still engage in sabotage activities and create disturbances in a variety of ways.  In no case should we relax our vigilance.

Although Mr. Phil is himself a capitalist lackey Morals Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families, I have spoken with comrades and obtained for him role as People’s Internet Use Monitor in post-revolutionary America:

In solidarity with the housekeepers who clean Mr. Phil's office,  ¡Viva la revolución!

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Editor's note: To create the revolutionary slogans, excerpts from Quotations From Chairman Mao Tsetung (a.k.a. Mao's Little Red Book) were translated from English into Chinese and then back again using the beta version of Google Translate.  The photograph is of an actual Cuban Internet monitor (source: New York Times).

New Wine in Old Skins: Attracting the Next Generation of Nonprofit Leaders

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Attend any earnest discussion of nonprofit issues and there’s frequently an elephant in the room.  On the issue of how to attract and retain the best nonprofit talent, the room that houses all those elephants in the room is, in my view, the chronic and significant undercapitalization of nonprofit organizations. 

“Undercapitalization” is a fancy way of saying that nonprofits are always madly scrambling for money.  This undercapitalization leads to fundraising burnout (figuring prominently in both the Daring to Lead and Ready to Lead  reports*), underinvestment of time and money in staff capacity, lack of attention to new staff, and an impoverished organizational infrastructure.

But chronic undercapitalization also exacerbates something I’ll call the nonprofit “frump factor.”  That’s frump as in “frumpy.”  Think Roz Chast doing a cartoon about a bake sale for the local 4-H Club.

A friend and I were watching a film about the making of Cloverfield, one of those big budget summer blockbusters featuring extraordinary special effects: thirty-storey monsters tearing off the head of the Statue of Liberty and hurling it down Broadway—that kind of thing.  At one point my friend, a veteran of nonprofit work, turned to me and asked, “Why can’t our sector do anything as cool as that?”

His question gave me pause.  You’ll have investors lining up to get a piece of the Cloverfield franchise, but few who’d expect to make a buck by housing the homeless.  To my friend’s point: there is something yawn-inspiring about the way we describe our work and communicate its impact to would-be employees and other audiences.  We invite the idea that nonprofits are pokey, unglamorous, 19th century places to work, mired in process and wed to outdated business models.

A widespread misunderstanding and undervaluation of the sector contributes to the nonprofit frump factor.  We tell our parents we want to be environmental advocates, and they roar back, “What the hell kind of job is that?”

In this country, we’re not for-profit organizations; abroad, we’re not governmental.  We’re the in-between sector, the neither-this-nor-that sector, the invention of IRS lawyers and policy wonks.

We’re the sector that does things nobody really wants to pay for.

In the Ready to Lead study, we saw significant “sector agnosticism,” the notion that a person could contribute to the public good in any sector.  And I increasingly run into people who wish we’d save ourselves the embarrassment by simply dumping the term “nonprofit” altogether.

Yet I also remember what attracted me to the sector years ago, and what keeps me committed to it.  I know that each day tens of thousands of nonprofit workers in my city are getting out of bed to do somebody an unambiguous good.  I’m convinced—foolishly perhaps—that after great art and literature, nonprofits are the last remaining civilizing force, this function having been long ago been abandoned by government, business, and the media.  I believe strongly that nonprofit work is the glue that keeps us bound together as a society.  And I believe that nonprofits and the foundations that fund them are the last institutions capable of shaking a fist at government and business when a fist-shaking is called for.

We can do much more to make this work appear less frumpy.  But we’d be challenged to make it any more meaningful.

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* Full disclosure: I was one of the authors of the Ready to Lead report; my foundation funded and helped create both the Daring to Lead and Ready to Lead reports.

The Twelve Most Common Objections to Social Justice Philanthropy

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Inside the painfully polite, frequently conservative world of mainstream U.S. philanthropy, the term “social justice philanthropy” often suggests an unwholesome radicalism in one’s approach to grantmaking.  This fact, if it is a fact, should give us pause.  What kind of an enterprise is mainstream philanthropy that it can be so easily rattled by the notion of social justice?

The 2005 publication, Social Justice Grantmaking: A Report on Foundation Trends, did much to help make the philanthropic world safer for discussions of social justice.  It attempted to step carefully around—or rather through—the thornier questions, some of them related to a precise definition of the term “social justice philanthropy.”  The report’s working definition was this:

Social justice philanthropy is the granting of philanthropic contributions to nonprofit organizations based in the United States and other countries that work for structural change in order to increase the opportunity of those who are least well off politically, economically, and socially.

The authors of that report did an admirable job of balancing competing perspectives.*  Going forward, while there might be some skirmishes related to the category of the “least well off,” most of the battle will shift, in my view, to the kind of “structural change” that effectively addresses the roots of social injustice.

Of special interest in the report was a chapter written by Henry Ramos and Scott Nielsen in which they described their interviews with program officers and foundation executives, some of whom were apparently skeptical about the project of social justice philanthropy.  These interviews uncovered an eye-opening—and sometimes eye-popping—array of objections to social justice as an organizing concept.

What follows is my attempt to address the objections I believe are most commonly raised against social justice grantmaking.  Some of these are drawn from the work of Ramos and Nielsen; many come from my own experience as an apologist for the field.

So here goes, in no particular order.  Hold on to your megaphones …

1.  The poor will always be with us.  

The unfair advantages accorded one group over another might or might not result in substantial income and wealth disparities, so that while a strikingly unequal distribution of income and wealth is frequently an outcome of social injustice, it isn’t necessarily so.  Racial discrimination, second-class citizenship for gays and lesbians, draconian treatment of legal immigrants under IIRAIRA laws: these are unjust in and of themselves, whether or not they lead to significant income disparities. 

There’s no denying that in Matthew 26:11 Christ tells us that the poor are always with us.  But a sensitive reader of the Gospels would not on this basis conclude that we should do nothing to reduce their numbers or alleviate their suffering.

The deeper question here is, what can social justice philanthropy reasonably hope to accomplish for the poor (see objection 8, below)?  We have a fairly clear idea of how to help individuals and individual families escape poverty.  The challenge in the U.S. context is to better understand how our values, habits of mind, institutions, and economic and political structures enable poverty to persist in marginalized communities defined by race, ethnicity, class, national origin, and other characteristics.

Finally, if eliminating poverty were the only goal of social justice work, this objection might carry some weight.  But it isn’t, so it doesn’t.

2.  Social justice work is anachronistic at best and radical at worst: my board would never agree to it.   

The objection here, if I understand it correctly, is that the trustees of U.S. foundations would generally resist the notion of social justice.  If that’s the case, could there be a stronger argument for damning the enterprise of American philanthropy and dismantling its institutions?  If the notion of fairness raises so many objections in the boardroom, hasn’t the American foundation stopped serving a useful social purpose?

I’m not convinced, however, that notions of justice or equality of opportunity will ultimately prove so alienating to trustees.  Remove the rhetoric, the partisanship, the unpleasant associations, and you’re left with an idea—justice as fairness—that all good people can embrace.

As for the charge of anachronism, it’s true that discussions of social justice have an ancient pedigree.  Mencius, Plato, Christ, and thousands of others have weighed in.  But we’ve been arguing about morality for as long a time, and nobody’s suggesting we move past the notion of ethical behavior.

3.  Social justice philanthropy can’t be properly evaluated.  

It can be and has been.  Many frameworks for assessing social justice philanthropy have been developed over the years.  Here’s a link to just a few.

4.  Funding for social services or youth enrichment programs or housing development etc.  is social justice funding.

I’ll cede the point: there’s no use arguing over the ownership of the term “social justice.”  Moreover, I can imagine contexts in which giving a hungry man a piece of bread would count as a deeply political act.  It’s true that funding social services or youth programs, for example, fails the definition I’ve given above of social justice philanthropy.  After all, providing funding for these services doesn’t typically lead to structural change and might in some cases impede it.  Nevertheless there’s something wonderfully human, deeply just about giving assistance to someone who needs our help.

There is, however, another kind of funding that aims to address the upstream causes of our downstream problems, that asks why some communities are much more desperately in need of social services or affordable housing than others, or why the young people in these communities attend schools that are falling down around their heads.  It’s the kind of philanthropy that analyzes how power and privilege are brokered and maintained in this country.  It’s the kind of philanthropy I’m championing here.  I’ll call it “social justice philanthropy plus” perhaps, “or turbo philanthropy” or “Maureen.”  Rather than fight for possession of the term social justice philanthropy, I’d happily yield it to whomever would claim it since ultimately it doesn’t matter what we call it, it matters only that we do it.

5.  We fund social services or youth enrichment or housing etc.  Social justice philanthropy has nothing to do with us.

Periodically, history affords us a few moments of clarity.  By the grace of a higher power, or by chance, the light of insight burns away the mists and we come to understand more clearly who we are and what we do.  Hurricane Katrina was for many not only an opportunity to respond but also to reflect.  Few events in recent U.S. history have so clearly put the lie to the idea that we can effectively address the challenges faced by low-income communities by ignoring the effects of race and class or by side-stepping issues of power and privilege.

6.  Social justice philanthropy is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.

In an NCRP publication titled Understanding Social Justice Philanthropy the contradiction was expressed this way:

Foundations are tax-exempt institutions with the dual purpose of holding excess wealth and benefiting the public good.  This excess wealth is quite often the result of the inequitable distribution of economic, political or social power.  The question becomes then, “How can tax exempt institutions that benefit from power inequalities and control great wealth work toward equal opportunity and social, economic and political power for those without it?”  Without market (economic or political) signals to determine the demand for social justice, how can institutions that are the result of the private market and inventions of public policy determine such a demand?

Along these same lines, there are critics who argue that it’s no accident that grand philanthropic gestures coincide with moments in our history when wealth becomes concentrated in very few hands and the gap between the rich and the poor grows unacceptably large.  (Consider, for example, the founding of the first large American foundations around the time of the Robber Barons, or the record-breaking foundations being created today.)  These critics argue that now, as in ages past, philanthropy has functioned as a social safety valve, redistributing just enough wealth to keep people in low-income communities from becoming uncontrollably militant.  In a context such as this, they ask, is it really possible for philanthropy to become the snake that bites its own tail, to challenge the very institutions from which it draws its power?

Some of these critics assume that social justice philanthropy will necessarily lead to revolution rather than evolution; that any effort to help the marginalized will require bringing capitalism to its knees.  This is an absurdity of the first water, equal in absurdity, perhaps, to the claim that a perfectly efficient market will solve all of our social ills.

We have not, in my view, taken the first step toward change, which is simply to see, to understand where we are and why.  If and when we attempt this, I would urge us to avoid what I call the “systems heresy”—the idea that just systems will necessarily lead to just people who produce just outcomes.  Let’s not presuppose what the solutions will be until we clearly understand the problems.

Human Rights, Human Wrongs

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I.

I’m at a philanthropy conference luncheon listening to some household names speak about social justice.  They trade friendly barbs as they describe the horrors of Guantánamo and flog the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.  At intervals they draw polite applause.

One of the speakers describes President Bush’s vetoing of a bill to outlaw waterboarding.  ‘There should have been a public outcry,’ he chides us.

I gaze into my salad of mixed greens, my head heavy with guilt.  Is there any vegetable more melancholy than kale?

II.

I had been attending these conferences for years and had never heard such strong language coming from the dais.  The speakers’ calls to conscience felt like the blows of a blunt weapon, like acts of verbal insurrection.

At the same time, there was something inescapably ironic about a plenary luncheon on human rights in which everything from our underwear to the salt shakers on our tables was made in China.  If I wanted to understand what sustained human rights abuses in China, my inner voice told me, I needed only to inspect the labels on my BVDs.

III.

This last point deserves some elaboration.

I’m attending this conference at an opulent hotel that rises like a crystal box from the banks of the Potomac.  It’s large enough to have its own zip code.  The inner space of the building is defined by a dramatic atrium soaring hundreds of feet above a fountain that periodically dances to recorded symphonic music.  A picture window the size of two football fields looks across a sparkling river to Old Town, Alexandria.

As I sit here under the newly planted figs and paper birches, I struggle with the gauzy sense that the best I can do for human rights is vote the current pols out of office.  I feel it’s me, not them, I most need to worry about.  I’m fully implicated. The purchases I make, the time I devote to scanning ads, the television channels and websites I surf—all those things I do without a moment’s reflection—sustain a system of exchange that keeps some people in chains and allows others to walk free.  My government does its part, I suppose, by hiding most of the bodies overseas.  Sitting in this place, isolated as I am from the hurly-burly of the world, I forget that the wars we most recently waged in the name of human rights have been tied to the protection of American consumption—my consumption, and that of my family and friends.

The key to ending human rights abuses is written not only on the labels to my BVDs, but also on my paycheck—the income from investments in corporations not always friendly to their workers overseas.  The key to the puzzle lies in this grand hotel that few of my poorer neighbors can afford to use.

IV.

The system is complex.  Where is my place in it, as a consumer, as a citizen who wants to do right but who over-values his creature comforts?  To what degree do I permit the demands of conscience to interrupt the flow of cheap goods?  Each time I successfully boycott some brand or some nation, don’t my fellow wage slaves lose their jobs?  The entire edifice is built stone upon stone.  Pull on one stone with enough force and it appears the whole thing threatens to come down on our heads.

At the same time, I was never one to buy the stories we tell ourselves about triple bottom lines and more efficient markets.  These, in my view, are self-serving fairy tales that enable us to sleep with ourselves inside these beautiful jeweled boxes we build on the banks of the Potomac.

Postscript

The U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, touted from the stage of the luncheon mentioned earlier, is an odd document.  For starters, there’s no U.N. Declaration of Human Responsibilities to balance the publication.  One has to read through to Article 29, the second-to-last article of the Declaration, to discover that we have duties to the community “in which alone the free and full development of [our personalities] is possible.”  Twenty-eight articles detailing our rights.  One article alluding to unspecified responsibilities.

This is a striking asymmetry.  Twenty-eight articles before we reach what is for some the essence of good citizenship.  And even here our duties to the commonweal are framed in terms of the free and full development of our personalities, a hint of Aristotle in a document that tries its hardest to appeal to every man and nation.

Philanthropic Self-Help: The Rabelaisian Method

From GiftHub:

“Come let us drink!” as Rabelais would say, dressing as a King or Philanthropist, and rucking up his robes to show his buttocks, to the saturnalian laughter of the peasants beating their tankards on the table. “There is the real gold!,” cries he, letting loose a stream of urine, to rival Pantagruel himself.  “Dear God, giving back is such a blessed relief! I just couldn’t hold it anymore—I mean the laughter.” Unless, indeed, we laugh at sober virtue we will burst.

From a recent conference catalogue:

Wednesday, May 7
LAUGHING AT SOBER VIRTUE
10:00 p.m. – 11:00 p.m.
This event is open to all conference attendees.  A small tankard fee may apply.

François Rabelais, writer, doctor, and humanist, will lead this highly interactive session during which he will lift his robes and micturate, comparing his emissions to the “gold” we foolishly seek in our personal lives and careers.  “Dr. Rabelais’s methods are unconventional,” comments Phil Cubeta, morals tutor to America’s wealthiest families, “but there’s a clear sense in which we begin to re-live as we relieve.”

March Metrics Madness

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I was recently invited by Bill Schambra, director of the Bradley Center for Philanthropy & Civic Renewal, to speak on a panel titled Metrics Mania.  Panelists were asked to comment on an essay commissioned from Gary Walker, the founding director of Public/Private Ventures, on the subject of evaluating social programs.  Here is the text of my remarks ...

Bill Schambra saw my role on this panel as the guy who when asked about metrics replies “metrics schmetrics,” but I’m going to have to disappoint him—to some extent.  Measurement and evaluation, when done properly, are not just a bit of value-added for philanthropic or nonprofit work, they’re absolutely essential.  Only a fool would disagree with that proposition. 

But here I mean not just the kinds of formal evaluations described by Gary Walker in his essay, but informal evaluation as well: the kinds of course corrections we naturally make when we embark on a project, take a false step, and adjust what we do accordingly.  Evaluation is not and should not be the sole province of the highly compensated consultant.  We evaluate all the time; our own eyes and ears notice things the most astute consultant will never notice; and we’ll often be our own worst critics.

Now here’s where the metrics schmetrics comes in, perhaps: We’ve written more nonsense about evaluation than just about any other subject in philanthropy.  Worries about evaluation, engendered in part by logic models the length of whale intestines, have become the math anxiety of the philanthropic world.

My general thesis—if I could call it that—is that from the perspective of somebody like Mr. Walker whose organization has been commissioned to conduct lucrative, large-scale evaluations of social programs (lucrative by nonprofit standards), the Impact Revolution might seem like a good thing.  But from the ground, from the perspective of many people working in community-based organizations, this so-called revolution has brought with it new sources of irritation, new ways of adding meaningless make-work to already overburdened nonprofit staff members.

It has not been a people’s revolution, in other words, but rather one championed by elites—like myself, I’m afraid— sometimes unable to see far enough beyond our own measuring sticks to understand the limitations of formal evaluation techniques, and the trade-offs in staff time and other resources that these formal techniques require.

A Message for Ben Bernanke

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My friend Rick Hohensee is back.  He’s single and a Virgo, and you can visit him at his MySpace page or in front of the Treasury building in Washington, DC.  As for his credit line proposal, perhaps Rick can offer his talent for satire as collateral.  I believe the expression is “Oh, snap” …

R U Ready 2 Lead?

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Assuming the impending nonprofit workforce crisis is real and not imagined, we have some work to do.  The latest report on the subject, Ready to Lead: Next Generation Leaders Speak Out,* reviews the various factors that will make nonprofit leadership recruitment more difficult in the years to come.  The report is based on a survey of close to 6,000 mostly younger next generation leaders—the largest survey of its kind to date.

Retiring Baby Boomers and the money worries of Gen Xers and Gen Yers will constrain the supply of would-be leaders even as nonprofits are drawn into an all-out “war for talent” with the government and business sectors.  Meanwhile, a lack of support and mentorship from incumbent executives will make it difficult for younger staffers to develop the skills they need to lead a nonprofit organization.

We’ll soon see if market forces will, as some predict, smooth out the bumps in the road ahead.  It’s possible that with more openings in the leadership ranks, more young people will look for careers in the nonprofit sector.  Sector leaders may rally and create new training programs and new incentives for charitable work.

I’d worry less about the impact of this impending crisis if the sector were, in general, better bankrolled.  Instead, charitable organizations operate in an environment of chronic scarcity as they struggle to meet the demand for services.  In this kind of environment, current leaders neglect to nurture the younger talent in their ranks; board members lose touch with the overhwelming fundraising burdens on executive directors.

But if there’s a theme that runs through these various workforce reports, it might be this: Because it’s so hard to raise charitable dollars, those of us who direct the work of the sector—current executive directors and board members, in particular—are frequently tempted to recruit and retain good talent on the cheap; but our investments in staff are the absolute last places we should be looking to cut costs.

It used to be that if one applicant turned his nose up at a nonprofit job, there’d be three waiting in the wings to apply.  We’re moving into an era when the demographics will turn sharply against us.

_____

* I was one of the authors of this report together with Marla Cornelius of CompassPoint Nonprofit Services and Patrick Corvington of the Annie E. Casey Foundation.  I serve as vice president for programs and communications at the Meyer Foundation, one of the report’s primary sponsors.

Equity and Philanthropy

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Editor’s note: Guest blogger Chris Cardona worked for eight years in philanthropic affinity groups and is chair of the advisory board for the NYC Venture Philanthropy Fund, a new giving circle that supports NYC-based social entrepreneurs in developing innovative solutions to persistent social problems.  In this post, he riffs on the effects of diversifying the ranks of professional philanthropoids …

“Equity and philanthropy” was the theme of a convening for emerging leaders of color in philanthropy hosted last week by the AIM Alliance, a partnership of three philanthropic-studies academic programs in Arizona, Indiana, and Michigan.  I walked away with mixed feelings.  My colleagues are doing important work, and more and more academic centers are taking the challenge of forming philanthropic skills.  But this discussion remains in its infancy.  We are far from understanding the causal connection between greater representation of diverse groups in philanthropy and more grantmaking dollars flowing (or not) to these nonprofits.

For example, the numbers tell us that the representation of diverse communities on the staffs of foundations has risen since the early 80s, though not on pace with their growth in the population. The level of giving to diverse communities has remained stagnant at levels far below proportionality.

Representation of diverse communities increases, giving to them does not. Doesn’t look good, eh?

But here’s the thing: The growth in representation among people of color has been concentrated at the program and support levels.  At the CEO and trustee levels, it’s largely business as usual (with the important exception of white women making inroads as CEOs).  So people of color continue to be underrepresented in the key decision-making roles.

It’s involvement in decision-making that we need to be pushing on.  From diversity we move to equity: the point is not just to have more diverse people in philanthropy, but for more grant dollars to flow to diverse communities. And from equity we move to democracy: the point is not just for more grant dollars to flow to diverse communities, but for members of these communities, the direct beneficiaries, to be involved in the process of decision-making. That’s democratizing philanthropy, and it’s where advocates for diversity can have the most long-term impact.