White Courtesy Telephone

“Sullivan Principles” for Progressive Funders?

Old dingoes like me who remember the 1980s campaigns to encourage disinvestment from companies doing business in apartheid-era South Africa might also remember the role played by the Reverend Leon Sullivan, a Baptist minister who at the time was a board member of General Motors. He developed a set of principles for companies doing business in that country which essentially required equal treatment and access to opportunity for all workers regardless of their race.

The Sullivan Principles, as they came to be known, were adopted by over a hundred companies that had operations in South Africa, and they were used effectively by many advocates for divestment.

What’s most striking about these principles is that (1) they were voluntary: there was no regulatory body that required compliance; (2) they helped coordinate activity across a broad range of stakeholders; (3) they united activists in common cause with the business community; and (4) they contributed to a great social good: the end of apartheid in South Africa.

What if progressive funders were to develop and voluntarily adopt a set of principles that governed the way they worked with one another, that strengthened their collective efforts? What would such a set of principles look like?

Here are some I would introduce for discussion:

1. The “Do ‘With’ Rather Than ‘To’ Principle”: This principle would be suitably elaborated for different kinds of actors. It would govern how grantmakers treat their grantees, and how each of these treats the communities they serve. A national funder operating under this principle, for example, would never dream of parachuting into a given geography without first meaningfully engaging local partners in the analysis, choice of strategies, selection of tactics, and overall program design for his intervention. This principle is intimately related to …
2. The Maximization of Coordination Principle: It would be a natural part of the planning work of the aforementioned national funder to gather together colleagues—both national and local—who were working in the same geography (or issue area) to map each of their proposed contributions, understand their theories of change and strategies, and explore ways to support one another’s work. Local funders would be expected to do the same with their colleagues. The “Do ‘With’ Rather Than ‘To’ Principle” alluded to earlier would help ensure that grantees and other stakeholders were included in these conversations. Another aspect of this principle that would need elaboration is the coordination of advocacy and community organizing activities—coordination horizontally, so local (or national advocates) know what their colleagues are doing, and vertically, so that national advocacy efforts connect in meaningful ways to local advocacy efforts, avoiding the “random advocacy walks” we so often see.
3. The Drop Everything Else You’re Doing Principle: To repeat what I’ve written elsewhere, the next time an issue—let’s say it’s immigration reform—garners sustained national public attention, all of us who are progressive funders, advocates, and community organizers should drop whatever else we’re doing and get behind the issue. Even if immigration reform is not our thing, we should devote a substantial part of our organizations’ resources to helping the progressive advocates for that issue win their legislative or policy victory, and we should encourage our partners to do so. Progressives got clobbered two years ago during the national debates on health care reform. Here was an issue that would affect the fates of people in low-income communities for years to come. Yet while many health advocates struggled valiantly to win support for a national health care system, many more activists ignored the issue because it simply wasn’t theirs. They saw themselves as education advocates, or housing advocates, or criminal justice reform advocates, or something other than simply advocates for low-income people. Imagine what would have happened if funders, advocates, and community organizers across the country had adopted the Drop Whatever Else You’re Doing Principle. Imagine if the voices in the pews, in the schools, in the neighborhood centers had been able to shout down the opposition. This is related to ...
4. The Get The Money Out Of Politics Principle: One of the main problems with American democracy is how to acquire it. With only 535 senators and representatives, it’s small wonder that progressives can’t afford to buy one. The amount of money spent on getting elected is obscene, and in contemporary congressional races, the biggest spender has almost always won.¹ The issue of money in politics cuts across all areas of progressive work and often puts a full stop to our best advocacy efforts. We should all be devoting attention and resources to this issue.
5. The Everything is Connected Principle: While LGBTIQ advocates, for example, clearly have specific agendas (e.g., equal rights, anti-bullying legislation, etc.), they, like all progressives, need to understand the broader context in which their particular struggles take place. This is one gay man’s opinion: we can disconnect the struggle for LGBTIQ rights from other civil rights issues, but in doing so we evince a profound misunderstanding of what it is that gives power to our calls for justice.
6. The Empowerment Principle: We should always be striving to yield power to our grantees and to the communities they serve. When doing capacity building work, for example, rather than inflict a consultant on a grantee, we should make a grant to that organization so it can hire its own consultant.
7. The Globalization Principle: We often work in our little part of the world, on our own small set of issues, and we lose sight of the emerging World Order that affects our work in ways seen and unseen. The Globalization Principle would help ensure that it’s part of our collective efforts to understand how globalization increasingly affects us and our colleagues overseas.

Please feel free to suggest your own principles or elaborate on those listed above. I see the development of these principles as much more than another idle flipchart exercise, and hope there’s enough interest in continuing the discussion.

Progressives in the US context are consistently outflanked and outspent. These principles constitute one suggestion for how to give our efforts some conherence and some teeth. How would you go about it?

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¹ If you consider all congressional elections with at least two general election candidates during the last six election cycles, the candidate with the largest war chest won 8 out of 10 Senate races, 9 out of 10 races in the House. These figures do not reflect the very high cost of being able to run in the first place, much less successfully. It’s no accident that 47 percent of congressmen (250 members) are millionaires. The influence of the new Super PACs is yet to be determined. But the plain old vanilla political action committees follow a familiar pattern. Of the top ten PACs (measured by total giving in the 2012 election cycle), 8 represent corporate interests, 2 represent labor. The data are consistent and overwhelming.

The Drop Whatever Else You’re Doing Rule

Until those of us who are progressive funders and advocates learn to better coordinate our efforts, we will lose consistently to the well bankrolled forces who oppose us.

Here’s the good news: we don’t have to sit through tedious convenings or master the newest social media technologies to attain this coordination.  To borrow from the language of the Wall Street occupiers, there is a no-cost “horizontal, autonomous, leaderless, modified-consensus-based” way to work together more effectively for social justice.

The idea is simple: The next time an issue—let’s say it’s immigration reform—garners sustained national public attention, all of us who are progressive funders, advocates, and community organizers should drop whatever we’re doing and get behind the issue. Even if immigration reform is not our thing, we should devote a substantial part of our organizations’ resources to helping the progressive advocates for that issue win their legislative or policy victory.

Call this the “Drop Whatever Else You’re Doing Rule,” if you like.

Recall what happened two years ago during the national debates on health care reform.  Here was an issue that would affect the fates of people in low-income communities for years to come.  Yet while many health advocates struggled valiantly to win support for a national health care system, I saw many more activists ignore the issue because it simply wasn’t theirs.  They saw themselves as education advocates, or housing advocates, or criminal justice reform advocates, or something other than simply advocates for low-income people.

Imagine what would have happened if funders, advocates, and community organizers across the country had adopted the Drop Whatever Else You’re Doing Rule.  Imagine if the voices in the pews, in the schools, in the neighborhood centers had been able to shout down the policy-makers who had been bought by powerful interests.

Now in the advent of the Arab Spring, with the rise of multiple people-led movements in the United States, we’ll be challenged again to break out of our siloes and support Americans who are taking to the streets for economic justice.

Consider supporting the Drop Whatever Else You’re Doing Rule.  Bring it up and debate it with your friends and colleagues.  If you have other ideas for coordinating progressive action, please share them.  How do we keep progressive advocacy from becoming a random walk? 

 

Grantmaking Strategy, Part 2: Of Mortals and True Strategists

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Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

— Philip K. Dick

Balm For The Soul ... If For Nothing Else

[Editor’s note: To read part 1 in this series of posts on grantmaking strategy, please click here.]

So somehow—using a combination of consultants, perhaps, and Ouija boards—we’ve answered the UR-Question and settled on a set of goals.  We’re now ready for strategic planning, part 2.

Before going on, I need to lay some cards on the table.  For a long time I’ve viewed most strategic planning work as a kind of hucksterism that has relied on the placebo effect far more than on any kind of intellectual rigor.  We attend many meetings, we convene many people, we contemplate a long series of pie charts, and at the end of this process we produce a document that garners some confidence for us and a nice check for our consultants.  Our newly minted strategic plan has an air of plausibility and so we plow ahead, putting aside our qualms about the hair-raising leaps in logic that purchased our assent.

Studies produced by very intelligent people chide grantmakers for a lack of strategy in their work, begging many questions about what constitutes a “strategy.”  In one such study, a strategy was defined as “[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.”  The authors of this study went on to claim that a majority of the grantmaking frameworks they examined did not meet this definition.  This was to me an extraordinary claim, for I’ve never once in twenty-five years of nonprofit work met a grantmaker whose grantmaking “framework” was not strategic in the sense just described.  The definition sets a very low bar.  The authors of the study offered this by way of explanation:

What constituted a strategy under our definition? Here is an example that would meet our definition from a foundation that aims to improve children’s education. Its decision making is guided by a framework that is external to the foundation: “Provide grants to nonprofits that work with teachers to improve the quality of lessons.” In addition, the foundation staff could articulate a hypothesized causal connection between foundation resources and goal achievement: “Our grantmaking supporting improved teacher training stems from our analysis that under-qualified teachers are the biggest reason why children’s educational achievement isn’t improving fast enough.”

This stands in contrast to a decision-making framework for the same goal that would not meet our definition because it looks only inward at an internal process for providing grants: “Our grantmaking process starts with a letter of intent that is reviewed by a staff member and then a full application that is reviewed by two different staff committees.”

Are we to believe that none of the grantmakers in this second example, that nobody in this foundation’s leadership or on its staff, could, if properly engaged, give some account—any account—of how their grants might lead to improving children’s education?  This sounds to me more like a failure of communication than a real lack of strategy, at least as it’s defined by the authors.  It appears to me these folks simply didn’t understand the question.  Doesn’t the very fact that these grantmakers make grants to educators rather than to figure skaters suggest that they might not be the blithering idiots we take them to be?

Definitional issues loom large in the strategy debate.  If we narrow the definition of a strategy—perhaps by requiring that we articulate an elaborate theory of change to support our intervention—do we then heap scorn on grantmakers like Bill Somerville?  He argues, essentially, that funders should simply get out of their offices, identify who’s doing consistently good work in the community, and then give them some money.  Is Mr. Somerville’s m.o. unacceptably unstrategic?

Ironically, Bill Somerville’s approach—cavalier as it sounds—is in fact supported by a straightforward and, in my view, compelling theory of change.  It looks something like this:

1.  Each time I’ve given nonprofit leader X a grant and asked her to spend it wisely to make the world a better place, she has succeeded beyond my expectations.

2.  I will give nonprofit leader X a grant and ask her to spend it wisely to make the world a better place.

3. Therefore, nonprofit leader X will likely succeed beyond my expectations.

Nonprofit leader X inspires our trust because of her talent, her intelligence, and her ability to marshal resources and be a good leader.  These qualities abide with her and account for her consistently good performance.  It’s not irrational—nor, by extension, is it a bad strategy—to invest in people with qualities like these.

I would suggest that we leave the definition of what constitutes a grantmaking strategy wide open and simply assume that grantmakers have some idea of how their grants might lead to their desired effects.  We might need to expend some effort making these ideas explicit, but at the end of the day the question that matters most is not, “Do we have a strategy?” (most of us do) but rather, “Is it any good?” quickly followed by, “And how do we know?”*

There are ways, I believe, to address these questions without succumbing to the allure of theories of change and other forms of superstition.  I also believe that something has to be done to bridge the yawning gulf between our stated aspirations and our actual effects on the world. As grantmakers, we should either step up our game or get out of the way and let somebody else try.

 

Coming up: Grantmaking Strategy, Part 3: Taking a Harder Look At Some Common Social Change Strategies

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* I would also add, “Ultimately, is there any empirical evidence to support the claim that well articulated grantmaking strategies generally lead to better outcomes?”

Grantmaking Strategy, Part 1: The Ur-Question in Philanthropy

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Without an eternal goal toward which time is necessarily tending …, history is a road leading nowhere.

— Charles Upton

I.  Many Things Pressing, One Thing Needful

Given a set of well-defined philanthropic goals—e.g., reduce world CO2 emissions by 10 percent over the next 20 years, provide quality health care for all residents of Levittown—we can, with a lot of hard work, devise plausible strategies for moving toward those goals.  It’s far more difficult for a donor or grantmaker to take a step back and answer the question: What in fact should my goals be, and why?

For those who control significant amounts of discretionary capital, this question is among the most vexing in all of philanthropy.  It’s the Ur-Question on which hinges so much that’s right and so much that’s wrong about contemporary philanthropic practice.

In spite of its importance, it’s also the question most often elided in the strategic planning work that grantmakers conduct.

How do independent foundations, which have almost complete freedom in the choice of what they can fund, rationalize their choice of grantmaking goals?

The space of potential goals can be narrowed to some degree by considering constraints on talent, money, and other resources, or by adhering to historical patterns of institutional investment.  But this narrowing of the space begs many questions and still leaves a mind-warping universe of possible goals for the grantmaker to consider.

Have you decided to end childhood hunger in your region?  This is clearly a worthy goal, and one with enormous practical and emotional appeal.  But is it tolerable for you to have well-nourished children with poor health outcomes, attending low-performing public schools, living in neighborhoods with significant gun violence?  You clearly can’t do everything, but why focus on this one thing rather than another that might yield greater benefits for society?  And greater benefits measured how?  Do you simply say, ‘We’ve got to start somewhere,’ and leave it at that?  Is that the best answer any of us can give?

I don’t believe it is.

A more satisfying answer takes us, I would argue, from the familiar landscape of logic models to the more unsettling terrain of philosophers and priests.  Addressing the Ur-Question in philanthropy rather than waving it aside requires that we pause to consider our cherished assumptions and, possibly, confront some potentially uncomfortable facts about ourselves.  This goes for grantmakers large and small.

II.  Uh, What Was the Question?

A very smart colleague of mine once devised an exercise to help individual donors get in touch with their inner-program officer.  (Relax: This is not as horrible as it sounds.)  I’m paraphrasing here, but she asked donors to consider something like the following scenario:

Mary is a single mother living with her two young children in Hardby, a run-down part of the city.  Unfortunately, Mary’s neighborhood hasn’t recovered from the ravages of recent hurricanes.  Homeless individuals and families live in some of the abandoned properties in the neighborhood which are also used by prostitutes and drug dealers. Escalating levels of drug-related violence in the neighborhood have made parents afraid to let their children play in the streets.

Mary’s daughter, eight-year-old Elizabeth, is a gifted musician but suffers from asthma and other health problems.  Mary fears that her son, 13-year-old Martin, will be “lost to the streets.”  He’s had difficulty at school.  Unlike his younger sister, Martin doesn’t like “book learning” but prefers instead to work with his hands.

Mary can’t work a regular 9 to 5 job because she can’t afford childcare for her two children.  To make ends meet, she takes care of her neighbor’s children during the day for a small fee and does piecemeal sewing work to supplement her small income.  She has often dreamed of a career in nursing, but simply hasn’t had the time or resources to pursue her dream.

Donors were then presented a list of some of the nonprofit organizations serving the Hardby community:

• Hardby Community Health Center: Provides free primary health care to Hardby residents
• Hardby Boys & Girls Club
• Microenterprises 4 All: Helps individuals launch and grow their small businesses
• Hardby Childcare Association: Provides childcare services to the indigent
• Childcare For All Coalition:  Advocates for higher quality and more accessible childcare services
• Young Promising Musicians Charter School
• Hardby Neighborhood Association: Organizes a neighborhood crime watch and organizes residents to advocate for better law enforcement and police protection
• Etc.

Here was the exercise: Each donor was given $1 million in Monopoly money and asked what kind of nonprofit investments she would make in this scenario.  The donor could choose to invest in one or several of the nonprofits on the list, or add her own.

As you can imagine, a very wide range of grantmaking strategies emerged from this exercise.   Some donors focused on the immediate needs of Mary and her family; others invested in longer-term solutions.  Some ignored Mary and focused on the children; others saw getting her into gainful employment as the key to all their futures.

I’ve conducted this exercise with many groups of donors, and what’s most surprising is that only once was I ever asked to specify the goal of the exercise—that is, to answer the Ur-Question. We can, with a little reflection, formulate the goal any number of ways, with each variation eliciting a different response. For example, we can ask the donor to invest the $1 million in such a way as to ...

… generate the most good for the most people

… address the root causes of the problems facing Mary, her children, and their community

… adhere to the Golden Rule

… maximize the social return on investment.

We can imagine the world we want to see.  For many in the West, it’s the Star Trek world of the 23rd century (minus the intergalactic warfare), in which everyone’s basic needs are met; everyone is engaged in meaningful employment; there’s significant time for leisure and contemplation; and bigotry has been eliminated.  For others it might be a world run by theocrats in which women are discouraged from pursuing careers, and single mothers are shunned. Unfortunately, our different visions of the ideal world are more often negotiated by violence than by reflection and debate.

Each of us can imagine the world we want to create.  What’s far more difficult is to formulate the goals and strategies that will propel us there.

III.  Doing To, Doing With

I’ve been reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, struck by the many parallels between the Brotherhood he alludes to in his book and the contemporary confraternity of progressive grantmakers.  He devotes several passages to three young boys—Zoot Suiters? Hipsters?—whom he describes as “tall and slender, walking stiffly with swinging shoulders in their well-pressed, too-hot-for-summer suits.”  They are “outside of historical time” because they don’t embrace the leftist ideology of the Brotherhood.  But they strike a nerve with the protagonist:

I got up and went behind them.  Women shoppers with bundles and impatient men in straw hats and seersucker suits stood along the platform as they passed.  And suddenly I found myself thinking, Do they come to bury the others or to be entombed, to give life or to receive it?  Do the others see them, think about them, even those standing close enough to speak?  And if they spoke back, would the impatient businessmen in conventional suits and tired housewives with their plunder, understand? … But who knew (and now I began to tremble so violently I had to lean against a refuse can)—who knew but that they were the saviors, the true leaders, the bearers of something precious?  The stewards of something uncomfortable, burdensome, which they hated because living outside the realm of history, there was no one to applaud their value and they themselves failed to understand it. … What if history was a gambler, instead of a force in a laboratory experiment, and the boys his ace in the hole?  What if history was not a reasonable citizen, but a madman full of paranoid guile and these boys his agents, his big surprise!

Among other things, I’m reminded by this extraordinary passage of the infelicity of words like “goals” and “strategies,” invoking, as they do, our many failed attempts to dam up and control the flow of human events.  I’m reminded of the distinction we sometimes make between “doing with” and “doing to,” vainly and arrogantly ignoring where the true sources of power lie. And I’m better able to appreciate Winston Churchill’s warning that “However beautiful the strategy, [we] should occasionally look at the results.”

Well, I’ve looked, and not only is Mount Zion still a hell of a ways off, but it appears to be receding into the distance.

 IV.  Good Actions in Bad Faith?

We would be less than honest with ourselves if we didn’t consider another possibility:  Just as local efforts to provide skills training to the unemployed can seem futile when the country as a whole has plunged into a deep recession, so can our collective efforts as grantmakers appear insignificant when contrasted with the vast forces affecting the communities we aim to serve.

For those of us attempting to fund significant social change, how do we rationalize our work to ourselves and others? Are we

• Convinced, in spite of the evidence to the contrary, that the revolution can be funded?
• Biding our time, ready to support the next great people’s movement when it comes along?
• Going through the motions, collecting our salaries month after month, too bought in or too blind to see that we’re not really making any headway?
• Resigned (as one of my colleagues put it) to taking a permanently adversarial position?

Or are we simply keeping hope alive because the alternative is too awful to contemplate?

 

Coming up: Grantmaking Strategy, Part 2: Of Mortals and True Strategists

 

 

The Problem With The Internet, Part 2: The Internet and Social Change

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With all due respect to my WCT colleague, Albert Ruesga, I don’t believe the Internet is currently the best place to build a social change movement rooted in deliberation and consultation.

Deliberation leading to shared understandings that subsequently inform action; consultation broadening a social change community beyond a few committed elites—I’m convinced the brunt of this work can best happen offline.

I’m not denying that the Internet has provided communities of social activists new tools for collaboration.  It clearly has.

I’m saying there are many characteristics of the Internet and its use that get in the way of transforming a group of loosely associated individuals into a community with shared understandings about the world and how to change it.  The story of Joe Sector, described in an earlier post, begins to name some of these barriers, but there are others.

Consider the state of our critical thinking and reading skills; our general lack of media literacy; our inability or unwillingness to penetrate what some critics have called the Illusion of News.

We carry all of this baggage and more with us on our travels through Cyberspace, though we convince ourselves that we’re fleet of cyber-foot, dancing effortlessly from site to site and blog to blog.  We fill with frenzied points and clicks the time we might otherwise spend banging our collective heads against a shared problem.

Philanthropy’s Primum Mobile

In his lovely essay, “The Evolving American Foundation,” James Allen Smith describes how the germ metaphor ignited the imaginations of many who worked in the foundation field at the turn of the last century.  This metaphor was especially seductive because it suggested that we might understand and address our social ills the way we diagnose and cure disease.  According to Smith, the germ metaphor fell out of favor some time later and was supplanted by others that more accurately reflected social complexities.

But the use of the germ metaphor has stuck with us.  It’s clearly related to the metaphor of the root cause which persists in the parlance and thinking of philanthropy.  We still hear of programs, such as the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, for example, that “aim to address the root causes of poverty in America.”  And indeed, a casual Google search on the phrase “root cause(s)” will turn up many more.  The metaphor of the root cause has many cousins in philanthropy, among them the lever and the key (as in the “key to the puzzle”).

Nowadays we recognize, as others did long ago, that there are conceptual difficulties in identifying anything like a root cause of poverty (beyond the condition of not having any money).  The phenomenon of poverty is part of a dynamic system of many parts, interacting in complicated ways.  This complex system has no discernible root that we can yank out of the ground as we might the root of a noxious weed.

But we shouldn’t let ourselves be too awed by the image of the complex system.  Physicists, economists, electrical engineers, and others have been successful in creating mathematical models of very complex systems and using these models to predict the behavior of these systems over time.  Jay Forrester, for example, used one such model to analyze industrial business cycles and another to analyze the behavior of the stock market.  What’s unusual about these models is that they lack a point of origin—there’s no discernible “root.”  What you have instead are “feedback loops” and entities called “stocks” and “flows.”  These constructs enable you to predict how a system will respond when you change one of its properties.

Here perhaps is another case where foundations have imported the words and concepts of other disciplines without also importing their insights.  As foundation professionals we talk about complex systems, yet we don’t often apply the tools developed in other domains to study them.  In our weaker moments, we might even invoke the complexity of a system as an excuse for our inability to make any headway on a given problem. 

I suggested in another post that meaningful campaign finance and lobbying reform might the keys to making significant headway on the issue of persistent poverty in this country.  But would a deeper analysis tell us that this too is a will o’ the wisp?  Is it folly to search for root causes or pressure points?  Or is it the case, as La Rochefoucauld once said, that the man who lives without folly isn't so wise as he thinks?