White Courtesy Telephone

Some Bold, Inexpensive Predictions About Philanthropy's Future

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Maureen Robinson, the mother character in the 1960s TV series, Lost in Space, is the perfect metaphor for the future of philanthropy.  Her silvery space suit and other-worldly hairdo represent philanthropy’s progressive aspirations.  She’s the imagined future of a philanthropy transformed by cosmic sums of money, by networked donors and metrics-wielding CEOs.

And yet while Maureen packs a ray gun and travels from planet to planet in a flying saucer, she also plays the reassuring role of post-war housewife and mom, staying at home to prepare a nice meatloaf while her husband goes off to protect the ship from tentacled aliens.  Let’s face it: she’s a bit of a throwback.  It’s easier for us to imagine a world in which solid objects spontaneously shift form than one in which the basic relations of power between men and women are renegotiated.

In philanthropy, as in science fiction, we tend to imagine a future in which everything changes—except us.  We’ll bring to the year 2173 our small ambitions, our competitiveness and unwillingness to collaborate, our downstream attempts to solve upstream problems.  The new donor will arrive at the spaceport with an appalling ignorance of philanthropy’s past.

Foundations periodically commission consultants to picture philanthropy’s future.  Perhaps it’s too much to expect these consultants to tell the truth about how eerily familiar that future is likely to be.

Black Courtesy, White Courtesy: The Great ARNOVA Race Debate

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Editor’s note: Two weeks ago an ARNOVA member set off a campfire of controversy by warmly recommending the White Courtesy Telephone blog to his colleagues.  For those of you unfamiliar with the group, ARNOVA is an association of extremely intelligent people who study the nonprofit sector.  WCT investigative reporter Rachel Tension was able to obtain a transcript of the highly charged ARNOVA discussion, parts of which are reproduced below.  (We changed the participants’ names because we were too lazy to ask their permission to use their real names.)  In Washington, DC, it’s dog eat dog.  In academia, it’s the opposite, so we were frankly hesitant to approach the subject without some professional assistance.  We invited WCT semiotician-on-retainer, Monique Nescafé, to help interpret the transcript for us.  Dr. Nescafé’s work for the past several years has focused on neomaterialist narratives in the novels of Jennie Adams.  This is her first guest post with WCT …

I am so very happy to be invited to write for the White Telephone of Courtesy, and especially to comment on the post-capitalist discourse of ARNOVA members.  They say the American mind is closed.  No, my friends, he is wide open, like the pore of some gigantic sweat gland.

Consider this small exchange:

Alas, … I find the name [White Courtesy Telephone] unfortunate. It may indeed be useful but the title is off-putting.
—Betty

I am in the process of considering the title for my upcoming book, so I have titles on my mind.  Can you clarify what it is about the title of the White Courtesy Telephone blog that makes it off-putting? …
—Dorothy

I think the title of “white courtesy” gives the impression that there is something else possible like “black courtesy”—i.e. that there are disparate courtesies for different groups. Or even worse—that there is no other courtesy other than white courtesy.  I have been involved in discussions with other groups who would therefore find the title offensive. Unless of course you mean it ironically (like we don’t have white courtesy).  At the very least, I do not actually understand what “white courtesy” means.
—Betty

In her brilliant rejoinder,  Betty lays bare the racial insensitivity of the White Courtesy Telephone editors.  This is not in dispute: these editors often make light of subjects that would be better treated with reverential silence.  I applaud Betty.  Her act of problematization, of affirming a posttextual paradigm of reality—the impression of a racialized there-for-me—is, in my view, an intellectual tour de force.

How does she do it?  She describes herself as being in a superposition of affective eigenstates: while it’s true that she feels “put off,” she simultaneously postpones her feelings of offense as she considers an ironic reading of “white courtesy.”  She is put off, but she is not quite yet put off.  (A monk asks Dongshan Shouchu, “What is Buddha?” Dongshan answers, “Three pounds of flax.”)  And although Betty does not actually understand what “white courtesy” means, she complains about the phrase anyway.  If confusion is the first step to knowledge, then Betty is clearly very knowledgeable.

Betty also brilliantly presences the elided contextuality of the ARNOVA discourse by referring to “other groups” that would find the blog’s name offensive.  This kind of offense-by-proxy is the mark of a generous individual, willing to be offended not only for herself but on behalf of others as well.

And so, what is it ultimately that puts the “white” in White Courtesy Telephone?  Another ARNOVA commentator chimes in:

… we know words make a difference, so what I’m interested in is: why did the creators of white courtesy telephone pick that name, rather than, say, ‘black courtesy telephone,’ or just plain old ‘courtesy telephone’?

Was it in order to prompt this very discussion?

Or do white courtesy telephones have a special connotation not shared with courtesy telephones of other colours?

I may be exposing my ignorance here—but that’s because I’m ignorant.
—Nigel

Did Monsieur Ruesga, when he chose the name White Courtesy Telephone, choose it in order to “prompt this very discussion”?  It is possible, n’est-ce pas?  He might very well have anticipated the ARNOVA exchange as a sommelier anticipates a Montrachet 1978 from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti.  How delicious, to inquire after coloured telephones through the fog of a fine wine.  While these coloured telephones may have a special significance, we will henceforth, in deference to our subject, refer to them as telephones of colour.

Think Impactful. Think Turn-Key. Think Sticky C2C.

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As the new business manager for the White Courtesy Telephone, I asked my assistant Pauline to check out the company we keep in our blogroll.  She found this post from Phil Cubeta on The Role of the Holy Fool:

If we are to cure the souls of our clients, or victims, much less our leaders, we must first cure ourselves of vanity, and of fear. The first sign of wisdom is Motley.  Anyone who thinks that The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and the like are enough is a Fool, and a bad one, lacking humor.  Ignorance, dogma, and complacency, bourgeois striving for measurable results denominated in inches, ounces, or dollars are virtues up to a point because they connect you to the mass market and the mass mind in a society devoted to base enjoyments.  But to cure yourself and others you must go a lonelier way.

Look at me, Phil.  Don’t slouch: What’s with all the big words, my friend?  What you write is the Old School thinking of a pre-networked age, more bricks than clicks.

Here, hop aboard the corporate torpedo.

At the White Courtesy Telephone, we believe it’s better to mesh strategically than reconfigure reactively. We know that without infomediaries like ourselves, subscriber communities will be forced to de-optimalize. Our feature set is unmatched, but our one-to-one e-commerce and non-complex incentivization are often considered a terrific achievement.

Quick, Phil: Do you have a 24/7 plan for syndicating new paradigms? I didn’t think so.

We, on the other hand, will transform the power of metrics to exploit.  It may seem realistic, but it’s compelling.

What will you offer them, Phil?  Grown men and women in motley; overcooked servings of satire and parable.  If these things really had the power to change the world, they’d be illegal.  Moral truth is what’s traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Here’s a few bucks.  Get yourself a new hat.  And here’s my card: call me if you want me to do for you what I did for Sean.

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Business-babble courtesy of the Corporate Gibberish Generator at AndrewDavidson.com.

How Do You Define Nonprofit Success?

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Some people say that a nonprofit organization is “successful” if …

1. it accomplishes its mission.
2. it accomplishes its mission then goes out of business.
3. at least 51 percent of its funders agree that it has accomplished its mission.
4. at least 51 percent of clients served agree that it has accomplished its mission.
5. it maximizes its social benefit-to-cost ratio.
6. it minimizes its cost per client per unit of social utility produced.
7. it provides a high quality service to a few of our most vulnerable neighbors.
8. it provides a fairly low quality service to many of our most vulnerble neighbors.
9. it’s scalable.
10. it has scaled significantly over the last ten years.
11. it has paid staff.
12. it operates in more than one city.
13. it has branch offices on other planets.
14. its operating budget is over $100 million.
15. it’s funded by the Bradley Foundation.
16. it’s funded by the Ford Foundation.
17. it’s replicable.
18. it’s sustainable.
19. it requires no subsidy to sustain its operations.
20. it has a president/CEO who’s a household name.
21. the organization is a household name.
22. it’s been endorsed by Lindsay Lohan.
23. it’s been endorsed by Angelina Jolie.
24. Morgan Fairchild is a board member.
25. Bill Clinton is a board member.
26. nonprofit executive directors and other “experts” believe it’s successful.
27. Phil Cubeta thinks it’s successful.
28. the organization is important to a generally disempowered segment of the population.
29. year after year, in its own quiet way, it manages to scrape enough money and volunteers together to serve a community largely ignored by other brand name nonprofits.
30. the organization changes the basic equations of power in favor of the oppressed.
31. it works toward a vision of the Good shared by an enlightened elite.
32. it works toward a commonly shared vision of the Good.
33. it helps focus on our minds on eternal things.
34. etcetera …

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Addendum:

Proof That There Are An Infinite Number Of Ways To Define “Nonprofit Success”

A nonprofit is successful if at least 51 percent of the public agrees that it has accomplished its mission.

A nonprofit is successful if at least 51.1 percent of the public agrees that it has accomplished its mission.

A nonprofit is successful if at least 51.11 percent of the public agrees that it has accomplished its mission.

Etcetera.

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Image source: Celebrity HotVideo

How To Free Our Funder Minds ...

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We can start by contemplating, then rejecting, the following two widely held notions.  Ready?  Say omm ...

1.  It’s my job as a funder to separate the wheat from the chaff, the bad nonprofits from the good.  I reward the effective nonprofits by giving them money (for a few years anyway); I discourage the ineffective nonprofits by denying them funding.

What images come to mind when you hear grantmakers describe their relationships with applicants and grantees?  A judge who listens with strained solicitude to an attorney’s pleas?  A pioneer who circles the wagons against marauding Indians?  A benefactor who becomes peevish when his ward speaks out of turn?

The tropes we live and work by might not seem important, but they reveal a lot about attitudes and habits of mind that keep us mired in the transactional, unable to make that important shift to the transformational.

The funder who sets himself up as judge makes two critical mistakes, in my view.  First, he fails to see applicants and grantees as potential colleagues working toward a common goal.

The second mistake is a little more subtle.

If you’re a funder, isn’t it really your primary responsibility to achieve your mission—to feed the hungry, to help people quit smoking, to produce plays of the highest artistic quality?  If so, achieving your mission might require you to help certain underperforming nonprofits do their work more effectively.  Their leaders, for example, might be long on vision but short on management skills.  By focusing exclusively on an impoverished set of performance measures, you might miss key opportunities to advance your goals.  You might also end up missing the point entirely.

2.  Different funders have different missions and therefore different funding priorities.  Thus it’s perfectly appropriate for some funders to forego supporting “overhead” and other organizational strengthening costs like board development, the upgrading of financial reporting systems, and the like.

That’s like saying you’ll support all the consonants but none of the vowels in a commissioned report.

Don’t let yourself become a philanthropic freeloader, a tick on the body of responsible grantmakers.  It’s every grantmaker’s responsibility to support overhead and organizational development costs.  I’ll go further: Because almost all nonprofits benefit from organizations like the Foundation Center and Independent Sector, it’s every grantmaker’s responsibility to help underwrite the costs of these organizations as well.

Give responsibly.

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Image source: All-American Ads of the 30s

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.

Possible Worlds: The Beguilement of Juxtaposition

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Some scientists use possible worlds to explain the physical features of our universe.  More accessible, perhaps, are the possible world theories that philosophers of language use to model concepts like possibility and necessity.

Closer to home, the October issue of The Atlantic, dubbed the “values issue” by the editors, provides an extended meditation on a possible world that might be familiar to many of us.  The magazine takes articles on the “reinvention of philanthropy” and socially responsible investing, and puts them together with ads from car companies and Ralph Lauren.

In the possible world suggested by the editors, unchecked consumption coexists peacefully with a feeling for self-sacrifice.  We can, without the slightest pang of conscience, drive to that Sierra Club fundraiser in an SUV; we can discuss our love of animals over a steak dinner with our friends.  Not only is this world possible, the Atlantic editors seem to tell us, it’s the world we currently inhabit.

Providing a materialist grounding for this view, the issue includes an article by Olivia Judson on the evolutionary basis of altruism.  Kindness and cruelty spring from the same source—the human genome—and we are born to save the planet even as we destroy it.

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Image source: One of the panels from the cover of Roz Chast’s Parallel Universes.

The Rules of the Game

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The July 13, 2007 edition of the Wall Street Journal Online reported on a new video game called Karma Tycoon designed to teach kids about “fiscal responsibility and social entrepreneurship.”*  Web-based youth organization Do Something and JPMorgan Chase teamed up to bring us a game in which

The more good you do … the more Karma you get!  The more Karma you get, the more grants your not-for-profit is eligible for .... the more money you get, the more good you can do!  The more good you do … the more Karma you get!  The more Karma you have, the bigger of a Karma Tycoon you will be!!

Noimsayin?  Good, good.  Stay with me.  According to Do Something CEO Nancy Lublin, “Karma Tycoon is like a vitamin in a Twinkie.”

Twinkalicious!

Coming out at the end of this month is a new arcade-style game for inner-city kids that teaches them the rules of American civic life.  Playfully called Bootstraps by its creators, the main screen is tilted to suggest an uneven playing field.  On level one (“Mettle Detectors”), players use their joysticks to avoid falling fragments of decaying school buildings.  Intermediate levels challenge kids with monsters like the enchantress Mainstream Medea who attempts to demoralize players by flashing images of “illegals” and “welfare queens.”  Heavily armored Rightwingthink Tanks chase players down tracks that require them to execute dangerous, life-sapping, maneuvers called “Bell Curves.”  The game ends when a player reaches level ten with a few Dignity Points intact.

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* “‘Tis Not Simple to Give Gifts” by Christian C. Sahner

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

Countess Apraxina Waxes Nostalgic

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WCT blogger Albert Ruesga met the Countess Apraxina at a Tolstoi Foundation reception a few years back.  She offers a unique, one might say eye-popping, perspective on American culture and philanthropy.  “Alyosha” is a Russian nickname for “Alexei.”  She never properly learned Albert’s name ...

Dearest Alyosha—

Past two weeks I’ve had terrible time sleeping!  Riviera is furnace thanks to your Mr. Al Gore’s global warming.  I have prescription for Ambiens size of golf balls, but unfortunately they have stopped working, so I am ask new boi toi Philippe to read me from your blonk.  So dull, Alyosha.  I am asleep before he reaches—how you say?—first semicolonk.

And you, fighting like Russian bear with nice Mr. Shamrock!  Such blind and stupid fool you are, my lapushka, and I mean this only in nicest way.  I have an e-mails from him telling me liberation of serfs was fault of Susan Berresford at Ford Foundation.  What tragedy for Russia.  I tell you, my little kotik, Mr. Shamrock is right to support decentralization of political authority into hands of local interests, like my Great Great Uncle Georgiy who was, by all accounts, like father—almost god—to his serfs.  We did not need your philanthropy in Spas-Klepiki. Fortunately serfs in our province died of disease before anything like philanthropy became necessary.  Mrs. Berresford has much to answer for, you will believe me.  Poor people are dirty and lazy, Alyosha.  You have never witness horrifying spectacle of toothless woman in headscarf breaking wind after wheat harvest.

Most extraordinary thing!  I am meet collector who paid $75,000 for can of feces from artist Piero Manzoni.  I am thinking, why not ask wealthy patrons to defecate into empty mayonnaise jars and give these to poor people as gifts?  It’s nice gesture and it would be simple.  Every rich person on Riviera this summer is talking about reducing carbon footprint.

I am go boating this afternoon with Scooter Libby.  Will leave cell phone on.  Call me.

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Image source: French Satirical Drawings From “L’Assiette au Beurre”