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.

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.

Seat of the Pants Philanthropy: Riffing on Strategy

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1.  The Center for Effective Philanthropy recently published Beyond the Rhetoric: Foundation Strategy.  It should have made front page news, but it barely made a splash, even inside the world of foundations.  Here’s its primary finding:

We learned that even though most [foundation staff] interviewed believe that having and using a strategy increases a foundation’s ability to create impact, many do not use strategy in their own work. We asked respondents to describe the frameworks they use to guide their decisions. While some decisionmaking frameworks met our basic definition of strategy, a majority did not.

If I may be permitted to do a little translating: The majority of foundations do their grantmaking completely by the seat of their pants.  There’s no framework; no well articulated strategy for achieving desired ends.  The fate of some of our most vulnerable communities rests in the hands of grantmakers who do their work by feeling their way in the dark, as many of us do.

This sounds like a bad thing.  Is it?

2.  Keep in mind that for many people inside the foundation world, charity represents a kind of weak, emotional response to a social problem, while philanthropy, because it is strategic, attempts to get to the root of a problem and solve it once and for all.  Strategy is also what keeps our grantmaking from becoming a random walk through many bogus ideas about the mechanics of social change.

We use the word “strategy” frequently in our work.  But what is it really?

3.  Here’s the definition of “strategy” used by the Center for Effective Philanthropy:

A framework for decision-making that is 1) focused on the external context in which the foundation works and 2) includes a hypothesized causal connection between use of foundation resources and goal achievement.

What’s most striking about this definition is that it’s absurdly weak: Which foundation’s grantmaking doesn’t focus on the external context in which it does its work?  Which foundation CEO, when challenged, cannot articulate a connection between what his foundation funds and what his foundation sets out to accomplish?

Consider this example:  The Levittown Community Foundation aims to end gang violence in Levittown’s low-income neighborhoods.  Its strategy is to fund gang summits to achieve this end.  Foundation board and staff members believe that bringing members of different gangs together can help these gangs resolve their differences.

This has all the earmarks of a strategy, according to the Center for Effective Philanthropy definition: a framework for decision-making focused on the external context (Levittown’s low-income neighborhoods), positing a causal connection between what the foundation funds (gang summits) and its goals (the ending of gang violence).

And yet this strategy has almost no chance of succeeding.  It doesn’t address the issues that bring members of youth gangs into conflict; it does nothing to prevent young people from being drawn into gangs in the first place; it doesn’t incorporate what others have learned from failed attempts to sponsor gang summits; etcetera.

The Center for Effective Philanthropy definition is so broad that almost any kind of nonsense can count as a strategy.  And therein lies its strength:  Despite the fact that the definition is broad, it’s still the case that a majority of foundations fail to use any kind of strategy at all—good or bad—in their grantmaking.

The conclusion, lurking just behind the study’s primary finding, is that the foundation field is in disarray, having little effect, at best, and squandering enormous sums of money, at worst.

Is this a fair assessment?

4.  It might not be.  We have yet to determine empirically the correlation between explicit, well articulated foundation strategies and the production of social goods.  Foundations armed with detailed strategies and metrics might not consistently outperform grantmakers who work opportunistically without a rigid plan, who constantly adjust their tactics to a landscape that presents new opportunities and challenges.  Napoleon, for example, never developed a theory of change before going into battle.  There was no grand plan that connected the fall of Paris, say, to his winning of France.

Keep in mind also that a strategy only makes sense when the path to your goal isn’t direct, when there’s some significant uncertainty about whether your efforts will achieve your ends.  You don’t need a strategy for driving to the grocery store, but you might need a strategy for getting your school-aged child out of bed in the morning.  Likewise, a grantmaker who sets out simply to “improve the lives of children in our region” doesn’t need anything as complicated as what the word  strategy would suggest.  Just about any kindly act toward a child would achieve his desired end.

I suspect that many of the foundations studied by the Center for Effective Philanthropy had goals that were equally open-ended.  This fact, if it is a fact, would tend to inflate the numbers of the “unstrategic,” making the study’s conclusions appear much more dramatic than they are.  Why so many grantmakers would have such fuzzy goals must remain the subject of another post ...

The Foundation Board in 60,000 B.C.

White Courtesy Telephone reader Tidy Sum set the Way Back Machine to 60,000 B.C. to visit the Upland Neanderthal Fund’s board meeting.  Here’s his report ...

It was not much different than what you see now only it smelled real stinky and I had to eat a rat.

They spent a lot of time talking about the high and lows of their hunting. (Lots of posturing from the men on this subject.)

They funded an evaluation of their arts initiative—some cave thing. Nobody really cared about it but old Grogg.  He’s 24 and will die soon so they did not argue.

They funded a nice community program celebrating bipedalism and morphological diversity.

They funded a small stone tool-making program for youth after the stern objections of one trustee who wanted better data on spear effectiveness.

One member, Oog from Dear Clan, raised the big extinction issue in reference to news about Cro-Magnons and humans but this discussion was squelched because someone wanted to talk about the new CavePoint mapping antler that would track their donations.

I guess some things never change.

Guest Blogger “Mouse” on Rural Philanthropy

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We welcome this post from guest blogger Mouse on the vicissitudes of rural philanthropy.  Mouse is an animal lover who lives in rural Northern California.  Check out her new blog, Northern California Muse.  If you’re interested in being a guest contributor to White Courtesy Telephone, contact us by writing to courtesy_telephone (at) yahoo.com.

I just read an interesting article on the difficulties facing rural nonprofits when it comes to securing grant money.  I think they read my mind and felt my frustration.

There are no large corporations funding nonprofits in our rural location. We don’t have any large corporations. Our largest companies are the local non-chain grocery store and hardware store.

There are no large foundations in our rural location. There are no foundations either.  We are so rural most foundations can not find us on a map.  During a discussion with a potential foundation about a site visit there was a long pause when I mentioned the three-hour-plus drive down a windy two-lane road.  That road makes it difficult to develop a “meaningful” relationship. We are a great vacation spot and I have even offered a room in a local bed & breakfast; no one has accepted yet.

Those with the money in the urban environment do not grasp our world or some of our problems. I mentioned to one foundation that we had a problem in a location far from our center, and gas money for volunteers was crucial.  She apparently had a vision of ten miles or less round-trip; I was thinking fifty miles one way.  My grocery store is ten miles away.

I want to laugh when someone asks about excessive employee benefits or high salaries. What are benefits?  Do employees get benefits?  Not here!  A benefit is that they have a job. As for those high salaries: some of the foundation heads make more than our entire payroll.

One of the suggestions in the article I read was to establish a local nonprofit group. That won’t happen. The 50 local charities are trying very hard to grab every $1 donation; we could never sit in a room together and share information. We are jealous if another nonprofit gets to put its donation can beside the busiest cash register at the grocery store.  Competition is rough here.

One foundation requires a professional site video.  I did not know how to explain that I could borrow a camera or hire the local television station; but we did not have anything in-between. The professional videographer moved out of town.

Now that I know the problem, I do not know what to do with the information.

Business As Usual For The NYSE

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Where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish of itself.     —Mao Zedong

1.

From “An Opportunity for Wall St. in China’s Surveillance Boom” in the September 11 New York Times:

Li Runsen, the powerful technology director of China’s ministry of public security, is best known for leading Project Golden Shield, China’s intensive effort to strengthen police control over the Internet.

But last month Mr. Li took an additional title: director for China Security and Surveillance Technology, a fast-growing company that installs and sometimes operates surveillance systems for Chinese police agencies, jails and banks, among other customers. The company has just been approved for a listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

The company’s listing and Mr. Li’s membership on its board are just the latest signs of ever-closer ties among Wall Street, surveillance companies and the Chinese government’s security apparatus.

Wall Street analysts now follow the growth of companies that install surveillance systems providing Chinese police stations with 24-hour video feeds from nearby Internet cafes. Hedge fund money from the United States has paid for the development of not just better video cameras, but face-recognition software and even newer behavior-recognition software designed to spot the beginnings of a street protest and notify police.

According to Terence Yap, vice chairman and chief financial officer of China Security and Surveillance Technology:

his company’s software made it possible for security cameras to count the number of people in crosswalks and alert the police if a crowd forms at an unusual hour, a possible sign of an unsanctioned protest.

2.

The New York Stock Exchange Foundation supports programs that:

help to achieve equality for all people by promoting civil rights, inclusiveness and respect for people’s differences …

It’s a good thing the Foundation only funds these programs in New York.

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Image source: The Age

Ford Foundation Announces New President

The Ford Foundation has announced its new president.  Luis Antonio Ubiñas, a director at McKinsey & Company and former South Bronx resident, will become the ninth president in Ford’s 70-year history, succeeding Susan Berresford who served in the post for 12 years.  The Ford Foundation is the second largest foundation on the planet, with assets of over $12 billion and an annual grantmaking budget of $550 million.  Read all about it here.

How will this choice affect Ford’s traditional championing of social justice causes?  How will the new president answer the four fundamental questions of philanthropy?

Stay tuned.

Foundation Boards Should Demand Failure, Expert Claims

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Joel Orosz, founder of the The Grantmaking School,* the first university-based training program for grantmaking professionals, has come out with an extraordinary new book titled, Effective Foundation Management: 14 Challenges of Philanthropic Leadership—And How to Outfox Them. What makes it extraordinary is the willingness of Dr. Orosz to speak with candor about the challenges, both ethical and practical, of working in a profession that “lacks a salutary external discipline.”  Even those who don’t work in philanthropy will benefit from his honest portrayals of foundation CEOs and program officers struggling against flattery and other forces to do good and meaningful work.

I found what Dr. Orosz wrote on the subject of foundation risk-taking especially revealing.  If foundations have the freedom to try pretty much anything to address society’s problems, he asserts, “if they are indeed boldly exercising [their freedom] to correct the failures of the market, the government, and the fundraisers, it would be virtually impossible to open a newspaper without reading of a groundbreaking social experiment fueled by their funding.”  Unfortunately, the newspapers are more likely to be filled with stories of foundation scandals than of foundations successes.

It’s true that a good scandal sells newspapers, and foundations as a class are not very good at communicating their good work.  But according to Dr. Orosz, there’s a hidden, perhaps more important, reason for the inability of many foundations to move the needle on some of our most pressing social problems.  That reason is embarrassment.  According to Orosz:

Since foundations are undisciplined by the market, electorate, or funders, their only impetus for improvement comes from their (generally) self-perpetuating board of trustees. If you are a foundation leader, your imperative thus is a simple one: keep the board happy, and you will keep your job. So, what makes a board happy? The answer is easy: pride-inducing success. What makes a board unhappy? The answer is equally easy: embarrassing failure. What does this mean for the CEO? As a practical matter, the answer to this question is also very simple: since any kind of success is preferable to any kind of failure, since embarrassing the board members is to be avoided at all costs, it is critically important that every project be a success. What is the best way to ensure that every project will be a success? The key to perpetual success is to keep every project uncomplicated and modest in its ambition. Thus, inexorably, in order to keep their boards happy, in order to assure that embarrassment never darkens the trustees’ doorsteps, CEOs tend to seek the cautious and incremental success. Paradoxically, the societal organization given the most freedom to act hobbles itself; it is as if a superb French chef, capable of creating any gastronomic delight, insisted on making nothing except the blandest of oatmeal.

It was Longfellow who said that “Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.” Dr. Orosz appears to claim that our ambitions in philanthropy are almost criminally modest.  If the responsibility for this faintness of heart ultimately rests with a foundation’s leadership, i.e., its board of directors, how should it modify its practices?  Should boards, for example, demand failure?  Yes, answers Dr. Orosz:

Not sloppy failure, of course, for no one wants that. Boards, however, must demand a certain level of experimental failure, for that is the price of doing business in the nonprofit sector, the cost of true innovation, the payment for clearing the kudzu of modest, incremental, “so what?” success. By demanding occasional experimental failure, boards free foundation leaders from their self-imposed play-it-safe shackles. If not every meal has to be perfect, the French chefs can abandon oatmeal and experiment with exotic new dishes.

Compare Dr. Orosz’s call for “experimental failure” with the tried and true of supporting direct services.  Where should foundations place their bets?

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* Pause for disclosure: I will become a member of The Grantmaking School faculty starting this fall.  Apart from a small honorarium, I will receive no compensation for my services.  Nobody at The Grantmaking School has in any way censored what I write on this blog, nor have they suggested topics for my consideration.

Image source: magnamags.com

Mr. Rumsfeld Insists on Giving Us More of Himself

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Via onPhilanthopy: AP News reports that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will be setting up a foundation to attract people to public service.  Here’s an excerpt from the foundation’s newly-published funding guidelines:

Projects that demonstrate that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to the Rumsfeld Foundation.  There are known knowns we’ll fund; there are things we know we know we’ll fund. We also know there are known unknowns we’ll fund; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know we’ll fund.  Please attach a Form 990 to your proposal.

Trained hermeneuticists are standing by.

Joe Breiteneicher on Compensating Trustees

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Joseph C. K. Breiteneicher, one the Great Souls of philanthropy, died on June 22nd after a long battle with cancer.  He was a mentor to many in the field—myself included—and one of the pioneers of promoting philanthropy.  He brought incredible intellect, passion, and moral authority to his work, serving most recently as president and CEO of The Philanthropic Initiative.  I republish below a guest post that Joe wrote two years ago for the blog Hail, Sons and Daughters of Carnegie, the predecessor to White Courtesy Telephone.

Restoring the Trust in Trusteeship

Trusteeship is a sacred calling—as should be all work in the philanthropic sector.  Compensating trustees diminishes the stewardship values and moral force of the sector.

Below, I offer several perhaps not-so-obvious arguments why all foundation trustees ought to serve pro bono.

First, I find it a moral disconnect that foundations pay trustees for service while they allow salaries in many grantee nonprofits to hover near subsistence levels.  Because most folks who work in nonprofits (real ones, not tax-exempt businesses like most hospitals and large private colleges) are underpaid, and because foundations have contributed to this “underpayment” by not fighting for better conditions of employment for the nonprofit workforce, foundation trustees should feel obliged to forswear all compensation.  It is the moral thing to do since foundations have helped keep most nonprofit workers economically barefoot and pregnant. And, thanks to Senator Grassley, it may also be the politically wise thing to do.

If the sector cannot get its act together, then Congress ought to adopt Canada’s laws regarding trustee compensation.  Perhaps that could help build momentum toward other things Canadian—universal health care, gay marriage, diversity, police in great uniforms.

The rules of Revenue Canada (IRS nord) proscribe trustee compensation for all types of NGOs/foundations.  The penalty is simple: foundations lose their nonprofit philanthropic charter.  Last I looked, Canada had some very effective, progressive philanthropies with quite active trusteeship.  No U.S. community foundation that I know pays its trustees.  In both cases I can cite great foundations that have participation from less affluent folks who are passionate about their communities and who see philanthropy as real service.  All this without the need to compensate.