White Courtesy Telephone

Our Nonprofits Are Too Good to Fail

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Editor’s note: A version of this op ed appeared in today’s Times-Picayune.  That’s why the piece is written in the first-person serious.  Feel free to use it as your own, without attribution.

While the feds were bailing out large investment banks on Wall Street, our local nonprofit organizations were having a financial crisis of their own.  The great majority of them operate on shoestring budgets.  They feed the hungry, house the homeless, and heal the sick with the limited resources they’re able to scrape together from individual and institutional donors.  Raising enough money to keep the lights on is a never-ending task.  A recent survey of our community’s not-for-profit organizations (available at the Greater New Orleans Foundations website, www.gnof.org) revealed that almost 59 percent received less than a quarter of their revenues from public sources, and an even larger number received 25 percent or less of their funding from foundations.  Close to half of all survey respondents had three months or less of operating reserves, making their financial situation precarious, to say the least.

In sharp contrast with this gloomy picture of their financial health are the myriad contributions these organizations make to the well-being of our city and our region.  Across the US, nonprofit organizations are responsible for 12.9 million jobs, or approximately 9.7 percent of the country’s workforce.  Every dollar granted to a charity or charitable program produces $8 in direct economic benefits—this according to a 2011 study by The Philanthropic Collaborative titled Creating Jobs and Building Communities.

Beyond their contributions to our region’s economy is the important work they do in keeping us bound together as a community.  They provide avenues for the wealthy to work shoulder to shoulder with the poor to improve our city; they help us bridge the racial, ethnic, and class differences that so often divide us.  The many organizations in our region devoted to the arts and culture help preserve the very special character of New Orleans and its people.

We ignore the health of these organizations at our peril.

This is not a time of great prosperity for many of us.  When times are hard, we need to ask what’s most important to us, our families, and our communities.  We should consider what our community would look like—what it would feel like—without the thousands of nonprofit workers who dedicate long hours on short pay to make this a better place for all.  Consider what New Orleans would be like without its homeless shelters, without its food pantries, its hospitals and schools, its afterschool programs, its museums, and its parades.

As we better understand our priorities as a society, the many contributions that our nonprofits make to our region should move us to contribute more to them, not less, during this giving season.  Our community’s charities are just too good and too important to fail.

 

The 20 Percent Who Manage the 80 Percent Who Serve the Interests of the 1 Percent

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An excerpt from the film Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Mass Media:

QUESTION: You write in Manufacturing Consent [Phaedon, 1988] that it’s the primary function of the mass media in the United States to mobilize public support for the special interests that dominate the government and the private sector. What are those interests?

CHOMSKY: Well, if you want to understand the way any society works, ours or any other, the first place to look is who is in a position to make the decisions that determine the way the society functions. Societies differ, but in ours, the major decisions over what happens in the society—decisions over investment and production and distribution and so on—are in the hands of a relatively concentrated network of major corporations and conglomerates and investment firms. They are also the ones who staff the major executive positions in the government. They’re the ones who own the media and they’re the ones who have to be in a position to make the decisions. They have an overwhelmingly dominant role in the way life happens. You know, what’s done in the society. Within the economic system, by law and in principle, they dominate. The control over resources and the need to satisfy their interests imposes very sharp constraints on the political system and on the ideological system.

QUESTION:  When we talk about manufacturing of consent, whose consent is being manufactured?

CHOMSKY:  To start with, there are two different groups, we can get into more detail, but at the first level of approximation, there’s two targets for propaganda. One is what’s sometimes called the political class. There’s maybe twenty percent of the population which is relatively educated, more or less articulate, plays some kind of role in decision-making. They’re supposed to sort of participate in social life—either as managers, or cultural managers like teachers and writers and so on. They’re supposed to vote, they’re supposed to play some role in the way economic and political and cultural life goes on. Now their consent is crucial. So that’s one group that has to be deeply indoctrinated. Then there’s maybe eighty percent of the population whose main function is to follow orders and not think, and not to pay attention to anything—and they’re the ones who usually pay the costs.

Indoctrination!  Haven’t heard that word since the Cuban Missile Crisis!  I won’t be shamed, Mr. Chomsky, for serving dutifully as one of Capital’s willing middle managers. You try to keep the buses running on schedule, the prisons filled, the 80 percent sated with Chinese goods. I don’t have the time to entertain the kinds of thoughts that occur to you. Whenever I find myself drifting toward dissent, I pull out my smart phone and check which way the wind is blowing, or I watch a YouTube of a two-legged dog singing Embraceable You.  If I don’t try to live the American Dream, the terrorists will have won.

The Big Uneasy: New Data on Community Foundations and Social Justice

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A community foundation is an odd institution.  Unlike a private foundation such as Ford or Rockefeller, it’s a public charity, meaning, that among other things, it must raise money each year from the general public to satisfy what the IRS calls the “public support test.”  Community foundations typically serve a specific geography—a metropolitan area or an entire state, say—and they combine grantmaking with other programs to address the needs of a broad constituency.

You will rarely find a community foundation that fully embraces the analyses, strategies, tactics, and values of social justice grantmaking, which I define here simply as grantmaking that addresses the root and/or structural causes of social, economic, or political injustice.  A recent survey of community foundations suggests why this might be the case.

My colleague Barry Knight, director of CENTRIS, and I invited community foundation staff members to respond to a five-question survey on matters relating to social justice philanthropy. We received a little over 50 responses.

We found that 57 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, “Many CEOs or trustees of community foundations resist social justice philanthropy because they fear alienating donors,” while only 17 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed. 

Rather than guess at why social justice philanthropy might alienate donors, we included a question that would probe the roots of people’s unease with the notion.  There were two factors that stood out: (1) the term “social justice” sounds too radical for some, and (2) the aims of social justice philanthropy seem too vague or too broad for others.

On the one hand, the radical connotations of social justice philanthropy are a bit surprising given that a quest for social justice is central to various mainstream Jewish, Christian, and other faith traditions.  On the other hand, many people still associate calls for social justice with the politically charged language of the 1960s.

More troubling to practitioners should be the claim that the aims of social justice philanthropy are too vague or too broad.  Is the goal fairness and equal access to opportunity?  If so, how can this be sharpened?  Or is the goal a fairer distribution of society’s benefits and harms, something that might indeed cause a flutter in many a donor’s heart?

Not too surprisingly, our survey uncovered a significant difference of opinion between the corner office and program staff members: 62 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that “Program staff at community foundations are generally more supportive of social justice philanthropy than CEOs or trustees,” as compared with 15 percent who disagreed or strongly disagreed.

When we asked survey-takers to define social justice philanthropy, we saw a broad array of responses, the most popular involving, in some way, the attainment of “equity.”  Some respondents described equity as a leveling of the playing field; others as providing equal access to opportunity.  None, apparently, thought of it as a post-earnings redistribution of wealth.  If, as 11 of our respondents suggested, social justice philanthropy is simply a matter of helping those who are least well off, then the category suffers meaning inflation and comes to include just about every grantmaker in the United States and abroad.

As I ponder these survey results, I’m hopeful that community foundations will be able find the language— “fairness,” “equality of opportunity”—that resonates with their donors and other stakeholders.  I also believe it’s possible to clarify the aims of social justice to everyone’s satisfaction.

The persistent racial and other disparities in our communities highlight, in my view, the shortcomings of philanthropy-as-usual and prompt us to look for a new kind of giving. To make the same kinds of grants year after year to the same communities, to see the same disparities persist and even widen, and not to question one’s approach to grantmaking is, in my view, to do philanthropy in bad faith.

Social justice philanthropy offers us a way of recommitting ourselves to philanthropy’s great aims. In practicing it we acknowledge that what’s good enough for us might not be good enough for the communities we purport to serve.

Download CF_survey

 For more on the definition of social justice philanthropy, click here. 

Ford and Rockefeller Should Right-Size Their Philanthropy by Funding Vans

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Yet another attack  on Philanthropy That Might Actually Succeed in Changing the World in Some Significant Way.  This one from my colleague Bill Schambra, who, perhaps sensing the untenability of the view that social phenomena have no causes, is now urging foundations to think small.

Mr. Schambra’s model for thinking small comes to us by way of the Elizabeth Brinn Foundation whose grant outcomes are “refreshingly concrete and specific.”  According to Schambra, “Brinn can point to buildings they helped improve, vans they helped purchase, playgrounds they helped clean up.”

Nothing lackluster about that, we can all agree.  A community’s need for buildings, vans, and clean playgrounds is indisputable.

By contrast, the examples of world-changing philanthropy typically paraded by its defenders—the Green Revolution, the crusade against hookworm—elicit a big yawn from Mr. Schambra who asks, What else have you got?

If these have gone stale, I would suggest exploring philanthropy’s contributions to bringing peace to Northern Ireland; providing an all-tuition-paid college education to every high school graduate in Louisiana with a GPA of 2.5 or better (a program now adopted by 21 other states); and ending the military’s discriminatory “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

One of the great ironies here is that the Hudson Institute is itself nothing like those gritty community-based organizations that Mr. Schambra loves to champion (and which I’ve often championed on these pages).  Hudson’s modest mission—generously supported by big-thinking philanthropists—is to promote global security, prosperity, and freedom.  Haven’t the Institute’s funders gotten Bill’s memo?

One can only speculate about what’s behind Hudson’s eight-year-long campaign against big philanthropy.  There are hints about the root causes of Mr. Schambra’s discomfort in his other writings.  Because foundations often fill the gaps left by retreating sources of public support, they’re sanctioned by government and given fairly wide latitude in their operations.  But if they go too far—if, as Schambra writes, they begin to “undermin[e] traditional sources of authority”—then it’s these sources of authority that must mobilize to curtail their power.  We see this in Schambra’s warning, near the end of his op-ed, that the forces of law and good order “may not be so complaisant about philanthropy’s license” if it “drift[s] carelessly and inadvertently into … a revolutionary undertaking.”

You tell me: What’s a “revolutionary undertaking” from the perspective of a conservative think tank?  Whatever it is, it’s clearly something very different from the purchase of the aforementioned vans.  Perhaps big-thinking philanthropy might succeed in winning a stream of tax dollars for frontline work in low-income communities, a more consistent source of support than the grants from a foundation which, although lionized by Schambra, has already spent itself out of existence.