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).