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Liberal Foundations: Raising a Fuss in the Age of Trump?

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I.  Where we at

This is a moment of crisis for our country and for the institutions that stand against a lawless tyranny. In this environment, what is the role for liberal foundations whose mission it is to serve vulnerable communities? How neutral and growth encouraging can they afford to be when lawmakers are being bought up and down the Potomac by the very wealthy, when even the trenchant term “class war” seems an overpolite way to refer to the crushing of the poor and middle class?

We look up from our screens, leaving for a moment the politically charged atmospheres of Twitter and Facebook, and we step into an engulfing and healing calm. We have our children to take care of, our chores to do. Unlike the places we read about in the news, we don’t see rioters carting off pieces of the central government; there are no sprawling refugee camps just outside our cities. If we work at a foundation or a nonprofit, we might have a clearer sense than most about the challenges to vulnerable communities, to the environment, to American democracy itself. And we might be lulled into believing that the present is no more than an extension, by gradual degrees, of a familiar past.

On this last point, we would be tragically mistaken. The world has not so much shifted as lurched these past few years. The acorn is now unmistakably an oak.

Attacks on democratic processes and institutions. Activists have struggled for years to introduce democracy to the United States. And while OpenSecrets.org and other organizations have been documenting and warning us about the effects of obscene amounts of cash in political races, the Citizens United vs. FEC Supreme Court decision opened the floodgates to influence-buying by the very wealthy on a grand scale. Gerrymandered districts; intense voter suppression efforts; and this administration’s ho-hum attitude towards Russian interference in US elections tell us that it’s open season on our republic.

Inciting violence. This country has seen many long periods of state-sanctioned violence, beginning with the genocide of Native Americans and continuing through the slave trade to the new Jim Crow. What is not new, but rather a new spin on an old sin, is this administration’s sustained dog whistling and its more direct calls to violence, especially against people of color, Muslims, immigrants, women, and members of the LGBT community. The jackbooted skinhead and your bigoted uncle have been unleashed, championed by the most powerful man in the world.

Attacks on the rule of law.  We currently have a President who flouts rather than enforces our nation’s laws. From direct attacks on judges to packing the courts with unqualified ideologues, Trump and his enablers understand that the only thing standing between them and complete victory is a fawning judiciary (however much our framework of laws generally favors the well-off). The danger cannot be overstated. To paraphrase Thomas More in Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons: ‘When the last law is down, and the Devil turns round on you — where will you hide?’

Attacks on the media.  According to a recent New York Times article, Trump’s attacks on the media are having their intended effect, with 46 percent of Americans now believing the news media makes up stories about him. As noted by communications strategist Steve Schmidt, we tolerate a news network “indistinct from propaganda in authoritarian countries … aimed directly at weakening essential institutions and misinforming the American people.”

I very much appreciate Robert Reich’s unusual candor in his description of the current state of affairs:

This was the oligarch’s deal with the devil (Trump) from the start: Get us a huge tax cut, use the resulting deficit to justify cutting Medicare and Social Security, and get rid of environmental and financial regulations. In return, we’ll finance you, we’ll back your allies in the GOP, and we’ll mount PR campaigns on your behalf that magnify your lies. Hell, we’ll even make you look like a populist. …

These American oligarchs don’t have to worry about whether Social Security or Medicare will be there for them in their retirement because they’ve put away huge fortunes. They don’t worry about climate change because they don’t live in homes that might succumb to hurricanes or wildfires. They don't care about public schools because their families don't attend them. They don't care about public transportation because they don't use it. Truth to tell, they don't even care that much about America, because their personal and financial interests are global.

They are living in their own separate society, and they want people who will represent them, not the rest of us.

The Republican Party is their vehicle. Fox News is their voice. Trump is their champion. 

It might seem a stretch to call the actions of these plutocrats instances of “class war” since this implies the existence of a war room, a coordinated effort among hyper-wealthy families to screw the rest of us. But of course no cabal is necessary. Each of these families can simply seek to maximize its own benefit and all else falls into place. If there are deals to be struck, these can be arranged over a round of golf or a baptism.*

Recall that all of this is happening against a background of staggering wealth inequality in the United States and a lack of universal access to medical care. Also keep in mind that while the oligarchs’ de facto waging of class war has intensified in recent years, it is by no means new.

II.  If not raising a fist, then maybe just raising a fuss?

In one night in November 2016, hundreds of millions of dollars in liberal foundation funding essentially went up in smoke. Trump judicial appointments would now set the country back decades. The regulatory environment that was the fruit of years of advocacy and impact litigation would be cudgeled. Criminal justice reform efforts would die on the vine. An all-out assault would shred even further the little bit of safety net so many advocates had fought to preserve.

I’ve been following what my foundation colleagues have been writing ex cathedra, and I feel there’s a strange gulf between what I read and the urgency of the moment. If I’m mistaken about this, I’m happy to be set right, but for now I’m left wondering (and here I'm speaking to the leadership of these foundations directly**): Where is your voice? What kind of leadership can you provide in these troubling times? Where is your coordinated, sustained, and overwhelming response to this crisis? I understand that public foundations need to raise a buck from wealthy donors they dare not alienate. I’ve been there. But overall, where’s your sense of urgency? Can you show us your theory of change?

I have some suggestions: Instead of the more business-as-usual tones of your websites and other communications, might you instead join with your colleagues in affirming that these nefarious times require extraordinary measures; that the attacks on our democracy and its institutions, the incitements to violence, the demonizing of the media, and the laying waste to our environment are unprecedented and unacceptable? Will you commit to bringing the people most affected by these attacks directly into your planning and your work? What will be your extraordinary thinking and extraordinary acts in these extraordinary times? Will you content yourselves with asserting your “obligation to capitalism,” or will you encourage the exploration of other options for a people and a planet that are getting hammered by Big Capital?

I applaud Darren Walker’s call for moral courage. I have been—and I continue to be—a coward. When I was a community foundation CEO, I didn’t love and I didn’t care hard enough, and now I’m fearful for my country. I hope I’ll have another chance to find the moral courage Mr. Walker so eloquently describes.

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*  Nor is it necessary to posit evil intent. In the US, we adhere largely to good Judaeo-Christian values. Rather than kill poor families directly, we prefer to let the markets do it for us.

**  As if they would be caught dead reading this blog! Our leadership has better judgment and taste.

 

Rethinking Poverty

A doff of the hat to my colleague Barry Knight for his recent book, Rethinking Poverty: What Makes a Good Society? In the US, we live in a society where few public officials are ever elected for being champions for the poor* (hence all the coded references to “working families”), and in which the art of blaming the poor for their low estate, while widely practiced, is still ugly and unrefined. Nowadays it takes a special kind of person to bring up the subject at all.

Mr. Knight is special in that way. He’s also writing about the UK.

It turns out that the UK had its own “Great Society” experiment in the post-war era and that, like ours, it foundered. The limited success of anti-poverty programs; the ascendancy of free market economics; the stirrings of the “me society”—these and other factors created fresh openings for attacks on Britain’s welfare state, attacks that continue to this day. Mr. Knight uses data from surveys and focus groups to provide a sketch of “the society we want”—a society, not surprisingly, free of poverty—and to suggest a way forward that does not rely heavily on state or philanthropic actors.

Putting differences of context aside, we can draw at least four lessons from his book:

What was achieved can be easily undone.   In the UK, as in the US, hard-won protections for children and others in poverty can evaporate in a single election. How do we shore up gains while we still have them?

Fairness resonates.  In a 2015 YouGov survey of 10,112 adults in England, Scotland, and Wales, “fairness” rated above “freedom,” “equality,” and even “prosperity” as a desired quality of a good society. Ape experiments also suggest that a sense of fairness might be “hard-wired” and thus provide a basis for uniting people across class, gender, race, and other differences.

Good societies—at least better ones—are in plain sight.  Other countries have done and are doing a better job of providing a social safety net, welcoming immigrants, reducing gun violence, conducting fairer elections, reducing health care costs, etc. How do we build the political will to follow their example?

Philanthropy is largely beside the point.   It was refreshing to read a book supported by a philanthropic trust in which so little weight is given to the role philanthropy might play in imagining and ushering in the good society. The next $10 million philanthropic initiative to end poverty will not save us.

In classic Liberalism, the role of the state was to provide a framework of laws under which individuals could prosper by pursuing their own vision of the good. Neoliberals subsequently tilted the playing field in favor of “free market” actors, however significant the damage they might do to social cohesion and other values. In the US, the neoliberal line has now metastasized into a kind of balls-out, post-truth plutocracy that deals with poverty by gleefully shredding the social safety net and jailing its victims. It’s comforting to know that in the UK a book like Mr. Knight’s still has a prayer of a fair hearing.

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* Close to a word-for-word quote from a former DC Councilmember. Things gets worse as you move from local to state and national politics.

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Defining Nonprofit Success in the New Millennium

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

1. it manages to do its work entirely with volunteers.
2. it has an inspiring brochure.
3. it has paid staff and an annual operating budget of over $1 million.
4. it’s “scalable.”
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 vulnerable neighbors.
9. it’s replicable.
10. it operates in more than one city.
11. it operates in Nambia.
12. it operates in more than one country.
13. it has branch offices on other planets.
14. it’s “sustainable.”
15. it requires no subsidy to pay for its operations.
16. its operating budget is over $100 million.
17. it has a president/CEO who’s a household name.
18. the organization is a household name.
19. it’s not currently embroiled in scandal.
20. it’s funded by the Ford Foundation.
21. it’s funded by the Ford Foundation and the Bradley Foundation.
22. Betsy DeVos is a board member.
23. Neil deGrasse Tyson is a board member.
24. Bill Clinton is board member.
25. Colin Kaepernick is a board member.
26. God is a board member.
27. Beyoncé is a board member.
28. its work “disrupts” traditional models.
29. it fosters a strategic, integrated competence in a pro-active, extended paradigm to create digital, re-engineered synergies that affect its double bottom line.
30. it accomplishes its mission.
31. at least 51 percent of its funders agree that it has accomplished its mission.
32. at least 51 percent of clients served agree that it has accomplished its mission.
33. it accomplishes its mission then goes out of business.
34. building on previous success, it expands its mission.
35. the organization is important to a marginalized segment of the population.
36. 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.
37. the organization changes the basic equations of power in favor of the oppressed.
38. it works toward a vision of the Good shared by an enlightened elite.
39. it works toward a commonly shared vision of the Good.
40. it helps focus our minds on eternal things.
41. it has been roundly criticized in one of the President’s tweets.

* This is an updated version of a post published a little more than a decade ago.

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Big Philanthropy in the Age of Covfefe

 

Gentleman: Finished?! Your portrait's a bit spare, isn't it?

Artist: On closer inspection, you really didn't give me much to work with.

Gentleman: Preposterous! Didn't you read my monograph on moral courage?

Artist: I must have missed it.

Class Struggle in the Third Sector: Still Messing With the Poor

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This post is the second in a series dedicated to raising questions about the role of class in the Third Sector. It was originally published in July of 2009 but feels especially appropriate now in light of Trump’s and the GOP’s savage attacks on working families and the poor. You can find the first article in this series by clicking here.

1.

In an essay titled “Paper Mills,” Heather J. Hicks invites readers to witness her transformation from “rural class” ingénue to career academic.  She writes:

I escaped from the working class not when I first read Shakespeare or Foucault but when I first found others to discuss them with, when I took shelter with a class that insulates its financial vulnerability with a rich fabric of shared ideas.*

Her words moved me to reflect on my own experience of class mobility.  My mother, a Cuban immigrant, began her life in this country as a member of a class that it’s currently fashionable to call “the working poor.”  By the time I was twelve, we were unambiguously in poverty.

Forty years have passsed and now my memory of that time functions less as a mirror than as a lens.  Looking at my work in the nonprofit sector through that lens I see reasons for hope and caution—but mostly caution.

2.

I met recently with a group of funders interested in supporting community organizing in the South, and we started discussing the development of a strategy for our work.  One very wise woman agreed with the idea of developing a strategy but insisted that it come from the communities we aimed to serve.

I understood her caution.  My entire career I’ve struggled with grantmakers who thought they knew better but didn’t—myself included.  I confess to having frequently practiced sociology without a license.

On the other hand, let me assure anybody reading this post that the poor do not know how to change their basic condition any better than we do.  As I was growing up, no one in my immediate family, no one in our circle of friends, discussed systemic change around the dinner table.  I knew my mother was struggling to make ends meet in something between a meritocracy and a bare-knuckled plutocracy, but that’s as far as my analysis went.  Then, as now, it was generally well educated, middle class people earning salaries well above the federal poverty level who had a clearer idea of the ways in which power and privilege were brokered and maintained in this country.

Well educated, middle class people like me know how the system works (or at least we should).  We participate in it; and some of us, for reasons that are not always self-serving, are invested in its preservation.

3.

Moving from poverty to the middle class was like moving through a series of doorways, each leading to a new room with a new vista.  I remember clearly the first time I ordered a meal at a restaurant without feeling a pang of anxiety about its cost.  Further along, there was the time my partner and I lit a fire in our first home together.  I remember how uneasy I felt as I luxuriated in the warmth of that fireplace, watching the flames reflected in the beautiful oak floor of a house decadent enough to have a spare room.

The greater my net worth, the more insulated I became from the tragedies that visited the people I grew up with.  I was not one but many paychecks away from living on the streets.  A bad turn of health would set me back, but it wouldn’t force me to choose between buying my medications and paying my rent.

The more I had, the easier it became for me to accumulate even more.  This seemed to me the most perverse lesson of my movement from poverty to the middle class.

Money bought me confidence.  It bought me good dentition and clearer skin.  It bought me eloquence.  I was more likely to speak up because I knew the right words to use and in the right order.  It bought me an audience that would listen to whatever preposterous thing I had to say.

We tend to focus on the physical condition of the poor.  This is not insignificant.  But poverty is as much an internal prison as an external one.  Those who experience it may sit in their cells long after the doors have been thrown open and the inmates declared free.

4.

I know of a foundation that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to go on a “listening tour” of the communities it served.   After this significant investment of time and money, it concluded that “the poor were just like us”—that they wanted a good education for their children; decent, affordable housing; quality health care; and meaningful, well-paying jobs.  This foundation drew one additional conclusion: the poor, it appears, also wanted to participate actively in the decisions that affected their lives.  That is, they wanted to join neighborhood councils, serve on commissions, have more time to petition the mayor, and the like.

I never saw the transcripts that supported this last conclusion, but I found it suspect for many reasons.

Thus characterized, these low-income people didn’t seem real to me; they weren’t exhausted after 8, 10, or 12 hours of work.  They were instead super-beings able to work two shifts, go home to cook a meal for four hungry people, give quality time to their children, and then lead the charge at their town council meeting.

Like the “noble savages” of eighteenth-century sentimentalism, they had become screens upon which we projected ideal versions of ourselves.  Under the influence of our most darling theory of social change, the working poor lost their corporeality altogether.

5.

Who speaks for the poor?  We know the poor don’t always speak for themselves.  Recently in my city we hosted a conference titled Stepping Up: Creating a New Social Compact.  A compact, as we all know, is an agreement between two or more parties.  But it will not surprise the reader to learn that the poor, those who most often get the raw deal in these negotiated “agreements,” were nowhere in sight.  Ironically they were being represented by people like me who had struggled all their lives to forget what it was like to go without.

6.

I wish there were more people in the nonprofit and foundation sectors who would speak out about their experiences of having grown up in poverty.  It would be a good tonic.  I and others might be more likely to discard some of our questionable experiments in social engineering.  If I were able to see the poor neither as super-beings nor as eternal victims, I might gain a truer picture of how they sometimes participate in perpetuating their own misery.  I might spend less time feeding my sentimentalism and my self-righteousness, and more time feeding the hungry.

The next step for us is even harder.  It’s to admit that even with our privilege and our education, in spite of all the learned men and women at our beck and call, we typically haven’t the slightest clue about how to transform a system that not only keeps people in poverty but continues to create them in prodigious numbers.

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*Appearing in This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics From the Working Class, edited by C. L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law.

Class Struggle in the Third Sector: The Return of the 99 Percent?

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With the election of Donald Trump as president there have been calls on the left to widen the tents of the opposition parties, to connect with the disenfranchised white voters courted so effectively by Republicans. One way to do this, as the election made clear, is to appeal to people’s misogyny, racism, xenophobia, and other forms of bigotry. An alternative path is to better understand socioeconomic class and the manner in which it shapes people’s life outcomes.

If you were to study the agendas and offerings of mainstream nonprofit and foundation conferences in the US over the past twenty-five years, you would find little mention of class per se.* Why do class-talk and its cognates have so little resonance in the American Third Sector? Are we stepping around an important concept, or are there legitimate reasons for casting it aside? This post is the first in a series dedicated to (re-)raising this and other questions related to class.**

In spite of continuing reminders about the myth of class mobility in this country, and a shared concern for low-income communities, there are significant barriers to invoking the notion of “socioeconomic class” in foundation and nonprofit work. Socioeconomic class, a term used in the social sciences and political theory, is typically some function of income, assets, education, and occupation—these being interrelated in obvious ways. Given the degree to which these factors predict life outcomes, the reasons for resisting class-talk in the American Third Sector are not immediately obvious.

What’s going on? How do we make sense of this reticence? I believe there are three forces at work:

1. Race, not class, structures the primary American narrative of oppression

In their book Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, Omi and Winant write that

Historically speaking, the call for “class” unity across racial lines has amounted in practice to an argument that non-whites give up their racially based demands in favor of “class” unity on white terms. This will not be achieved by appeals to “class unity” or by reliance on “bargaining power theory,” which merely offer an abstraction to minorities confronted by racial inequities in the workplace.

Likewise in the nonprofit world, class-talk is sometimes seen as a distraction from issues that are more clearly rooted in racial antipathy.

Of course it’s not a zero-sum game: We can keep our traditional identity politics and at the same time deepen our understanding of what it means to be part of the 99%, a term that achieved wide usage during the time of Occupy Wall Street. Instead of heeding misguided calls to “blame the identity apostles” for Trump’s victory, why not take intersectionality seriously and consider the effects of socioeconomic class on racially-defined communities?

2. Class-talk produces in some a mental cramp

Paul Kingston and his intellectual heirs have argued that American society is essentially classless. These authors don’t deny that sociologists, political scientists, and others can divide the American public into various income categories. What they deny is that the individuals in these categories share “life-defining experiences” that license our referring to them as members of a distinct, coherent class.

How can we assess this kind of argument?

Recall that during the time of Occupy Wall Street, the division of American society into just two classes—the 1% and the 99%—served several important purposes. First, the name was the message: the moniker “1%” invited questions, reflection, and debate about current and more just distributions of wealth in American society. Second, there was enormous power in the act of self-naming and, by so doing, identifying with others across racial, geographic, and other barriers. Third, this act of self-naming reflected important experiences shared by members of the named class: 99 Percenters were generally required to work for their livings; they were much more likely to depend on Social Security for their retirements; unlike the 1 Percenters, they were not largely immune to the convulsions of financial and labor markets—in general, their life circumstances were much more precarious.

To claim, as Kingston does, that American society is essentially “classless” is to claim that while, in practice, the notion of class can play a powerful social and political role, it can never really work in theory.

3. Class-talk is impolite

Few topics will more quickly cast a pall over middle class dinner parties than the history of class struggle in the United States. Recall that in 2003, Bush II effectively silenced the critics of his tax cuts by accusing them of fomenting “class warfare.”

One of the greatest barriers to class talk in the American Third Sector, or around the dinner table, is not its lack of utility, or the sense that class consciousness necessarily leads to confrontation. I suspect it’s the fact that many of us prefer not to field uncomfortable questions about the benefits we ourselves enjoy under current class arrangements. These arrangements ultimately serve the purposes of an elite, an elite we’re loathe to name in part because keeping our jobs will often depend on silent complicity. And yet, how many members of this same elite have themselves called for greater economic justice and inclusiveness?

To introduce and champion class consciousness is to acknowledge that the “structures” we seek to change—if we’re enlightened grantmakers—are often structures put in place to serve the purposes of an economically defined class. Income and other taxes in the US are generally regressive; safety net programs are shredded while corporate welfare remains intact; and, in general, the more you have, the easier it is for you to acquire even more. If you can afford a good lawyer, you can buy your way out of a run-in with the law; if you’re poor and depend on a public defender, your chances are not so good. So while we might wish to remain class-neutral, the structures that keep people in poverty unfortunately will not.

How do we bring the lived experience of the poor and working poor into institutions that, in spite of our best intentions, perpetuate class privilege? How do we incorporate class-talk into nonprofit work in a way that doesn’t elide hundreds of years of racial oppression? I don’t deny these challenges, but I’m convinced that ignoring the effects of class is acting in bad faith. It’s treading water while strong currents continue to carry us and our neighbors further downstream.

_____

* Based on recent data from the White Courtesy Telephone Department of Armchair Sociology that conducted a mental survey on this subject approximately 45 minutes ago.
** A very pared-down version of this post first appeared in July 2007.

Postcards from the Apocalypse: Some Post-Election Questions for Liberal Foundations

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Like many of you, I would have liked a little more time to grieve. But I’m already hearing news of a membership drive for the Klan in Alabama as well as rumors that Trump will appoint a climate skeptic to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Instead of following my example—quietly sitting around and feeling stupid—some over-achievers in my field have already finished their autopsies of the body politic and are busy prescribing new cures.

As I reluctantly pull down the black crepe, I keep asking myself three questions. For those of us who work with and for foundations and other grantmakers:

1. What did we believe we had achieved and on what basis did we believe it?

After seven years, I left my job as a foundation CEO in New Orleans feeling that our social justice advocates and community organizers were woefully under-resourced and under-supported given the kinds of battles they were being asked to wage. People of good will believed that power needed to build from the bottom up, but the challenges were overwhelming for communities struggling against the new Jim Crow. Local work was often disconnected from national efforts, and there was always a mad, exhausting scramble for funding.

These were the realities “on the ground,” in communities that needed to shift if we ever wanted to see state and national electoral maps change and justice prevail.

2. How did we fail to see what was coming?

If, before the election, we had gone through the Facebook pages of Trump supporters, we would have found an overwhelming number of cat photos, inspirational quotes, and recipes for cheesy potatoes. We would have run across the occasional meme poking fun at Hillary Clinton, but little else hinting at the hatred and spleen on display at Trump rallies. Something was happening, we might have concluded, that was transforming our quirky, cat-loving aunt into a die-hard Trump supporter.

How many of us who focused on supporting low-income families understood what was happening inside the heads of working class and middle class whites? I remember meetings at which organizers from working class white communities struggled to make this point, only to see it buried under fifty other “insights” scattered across twelve sheets of flipchart paper. My own ignorance about rural and poor white communities was appalling.

I believe two factors were at work:

(a) As is the norm in most of the foundation and charitable sector, we were working using a “consensus model”—the polite term for Frankenthinking. What happens in this process is that bad ideas are treated with the same reverence as promising ideas, and promising ideas are seldom tested and refined through vigorous debate. In the Third Sector we tend to privilege voice at the expense of truth (although it doesn’t need to be a zero-sum game). This, in my view, does an enormous disservice to the communities whose voices need to be heard, and keeps most of our work outside the margins of relevancy.

(b) We had, and continue to have, an impoverished vision of the community we’re trying to build. How many conferences or meetings did I attend where not a single member of the business class was present? Where residents and activists were excluded from ivory tower discussions by philanthropic elites?

As I search for friends and allies in the post-election rubble, I’m inspired by Elizabeth Warren’s clarity on the need to widen the tent without compromising core values. After declaring that our first job is to stand up uncompromisingly to bigotry, she writes:

But there are many millions of people who did not vote for Donald Trump because of the bigotry and hate that fueled his campaign rallies. They voted for him despite the hate. They voted for him out of frustration and anger – and also out of hope that he would bring change. …

Working families across this country are deeply frustrated about an economy and a government that doesn’t work for them. Exit polling on Tuesday found that 72 percent of voters believe that "the American economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful." 72 percent of ALL voters – Democrats and Republicans. The polls were also made clear that the economy was the top issue on voters’ minds. Americans are angry about a federal government that works for the rich and powerful and that leaves everyone else in the dirt. …

The truth is that people are right to be angry. Angry that wages have been stagnant for a generation, while basic costs like housing, health care, and child care have skyrocketed. Angry that our political system is awash in barely legalized campaign bribery. ...

Angry that while Washington dithers and spins and does the backstroke in an ocean of money, while the American Dream moves further and further out of reach for too many families. Angry that working people are in debt. Angry that seniors can’t stretch a Social Security check to cover the basics.

Senator Warren might have her own blind spots when it comes to the particular struggles faced by communities of color, or LGBT communities, or the community of people with disabilities—others who have followed her career will know this better than I do. But we all have our blind spots and we rely on one another to see more clearly.

Perhaps we would have seen more clearly if we had spent less time at Davos and Bellagio thinking about poverty while taking in the crisp mountain air, and more time in Flint and Birmingham listening to communities ravaged by elite decision-making.

3. What will liberal foundations commit to doing differently?

… And, God help us, will we even admit that we failed? Will we continue to use language that people simply do not understand? When a Trump supporter suggests that we build a wall, will we hear only a racist taunt or will we hear also an appeal for fairness in how society divvies up its benefits? Will we continue to be the hammers for which everything is a nail?

Remember in the good old days, before this shitshow of an election, when we would wryly observe that the revolution would not be funded? Turns out we were right. Only many of us didn’t anticipate that it would be this kind of revolution. Nor did we understand how it would be possible, in one day of voting, to undo the gains that had been achieved by hundreds of millions of dollars in foundation spending.

 

Concepcion Picciotto, President Obama's Closest Neighbor, Dies After Years of Protesting the Bomb

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Concepcion Picciotto was known to thousands of DC locals and tourists. She spent many years protesting nuclear proliferation at the gates of the White House, spending night after night in a makeshift shelter a short distance away in Lafayette Park. She passed away yesterday, never having developed a theory of change for her vigil and witness.

The author interviewed Concepcion (a.k.a. Conchita) for his boldnewlook.com website in 2004 ...

BOLDNEWLOOK: How many years have you been here in front of the White House?

CONCHITA: In front of the White House since 1981.

BOLDNEWLOOK: Why did you come to the White House?

CONCHITA: Well, I used to live in New York. It's a very long, complicated story. I came to the White House because of corruption. That's why I have a website, where everything is explained. Still I have much more to put on. It's mostly on there.

BOLDNEWLOOK: What is the name of your website?

CONCHITA: It is prop1.org/conchita.

BOLDNEWLOOK: Where is your family from originally?

CONCHITA: Originally my family is from Spain. I lived in New York all the way back since 1960. My grandmother and grandfather are from Cuba and they emigrated to Spain because of the war with the United States, so I'm from Galicia.

BOLDNEWLOOK: Do you stay here 24 hours a day?

CONCHITA: Yes, I'm here all the time except when I move for necessities. Like if I need a shower or necessities. But it's very difficult because there are many rules that the government imposes, that if I don't have anybody here — it's obvious I don't have a license — but still the regulations don't allow me to move more than three feet from any of the signs. If there's nobody around it's very difficult to use any of the necessities. It's a sacrifice, it's a lot of sacrifice.

BOLDNEWLOOK: Do people bring you food, or do you go and buy food somewhere?

CONCHITA: No, I don't buy food, I eat what the bakeries give to us after they close. They have sandwiches, they have everything — salads and pastries and bread. I just had a sandwich — half of it yesterday — it's tuna, but no meat.

...

BOLDNEWLOOK: Have people from the White House ever asked you to leave?

CONCHITA: Oh, yes, yes. They have arrested me many times. I have that on the website too. Arrested, gassing by police ...

BOLDNEWLOOK: Has the President ever had the opportunity to speak with you?

CONCHITA: No president. This is unbelievable, because all the presidents who have passed through — I started with Jimmy Carter, and then Ronald Reagan, two terms, then President Bush's father, then President Clinton, two terms too, and now the son of the father — and none of them send other than the police. So it's obvious they know, they know that I am here, but there's nothing but defamation of character. But people visit my Internet. And you know, they're not as stupid. They can fool some fools sometimes, but not everyone is a fool. And they know, they know. And that's why society is my witness. Not religious witness. Political. I know, like that woman there in England, she knew what was going on with the U.N. and the spies, well I knew what has happened with the military in Argentina, because I was there on vacation and I brought my child from there ...

BOLDNEWLOOK: Do you have family in the United States?

CONCHITA: No, no: my family is the world.

...

BOLDNEWLOOK: You've been here for 23 years. What's your sense of how you've affected things? Have you changed people's minds?

CONCHITA: Oh, yes, yes. I don't change people's minds, but they come here and they've been telling me I make an impact on people's minds and they change a lot. Yes, yes, even on the website, too, I get a lot of e-mails too. It's very encouraging, oh yes.

BOLDNEWLOOK: It must be very difficult to stay here when it gets very cold.

CONCHITA: Oh, it's very, very cruel, it's cruel. Because it's not just the elements, you know ...

BOLDNEWLOOK: Do you have protest colleagues, people who help you?

CONCHITA: Yes, in front of the [White House] gate, there are pictures and everything on my website. In front of the gates in '81 I met my colleague William Thomas. We were there three years: '81 to 83. We were beaten up, arrested, gassing, everything. Finally Reagan decided not to have the signs there. Then we moved to across the street, down there. Thomas began to challenge the government in court with the Constitution. They arrested us, the beatings many times — they sent Marines, too, Navy Marines. Thomas too. So he decided to challenge legally. Because we had the American Civil Liberties Union. And we were in court for almost ten days with the American Civil Liberties Union but we lost the case. In fact, we didn't lose it. They ruled that we had the right to be in front of the gate because of the American Constitution but Reagan disregarded it and threw us out of there. So soon Thomas began to challenge it again, but the American Civil Liberties Union said, no, we won't challenge any more because we have been spending a lot of money and time, but they do what they want. And that is why Thomas is still working sometime on it. Because we have many difficulties sometimes to maintain it here. And so I'm on my own. He comes sometimes to give me a break or relieve me in the morning or the evening so I can go for a shower or whatever.

BOLDNEWLOOK: Do you get support from the church across the street?

CONCHITA: No, no, we've had a lot of problems with that church. Oh my, back in the eighties.

BOLDNEWLOOK: What were your problems with the church?

CONCHITA: It's very complicated, it's too much. We had this restraining order from the police, that we had to move at that time in '81, '82, '83, from [the White House gate] for certain hours — we had big signs, big signs. So the closest place for us to move was the church. At that time they had it open back there. So we tried to spend hours there and come back here. And the church people were throwing us out, oh my, very nasty, saying this is the house of God, and you know [Conchita laughs]. And then the Metropolitan police were accosting me, too. So one day, Thomas said, well, let's go to do something. We go back here and put up a sign saying, "Repent or Perish." And I was walking in the front of the church — "You get out of the church." And I said, "I'm not in the church, I'm on the sidewalk." And then one of the officers was incredible, and used to say, "We're going to take you to a mental institution." But I said, I'm not doing anything, I'm walking back and forth with a sign." You know, on a sidewalk — "Repent or Perish, Repent or Perish." We had a lot of trouble with that church. They didn't like us because they supported the President. The President was there, the hypocrites — as far as I know, it was Jimmy Carter, too. We had a lot of trouble at that time, but we overcome everything, no matter what.

BOLDNEWLOOK: When do you know when your work is done?

CONCHITA: Oooh — It's endless, because the situation in the world now is getting more bizarre. You see what is going on with the United States. Now we have Haiti. It's growing and growing. With the involvement of the United States everywhere. Before we had it too, we had Somalia where the troops went to the street. They go everywhere. The latest we had it too was in Yugoslavia, where they used depleted uranium and tried to attack people with the nuclear. And now they have Iraq, and they don't stop.

BOLDNEWLOOK: What is your sense of the current president, George W. Bush, compared with other presidents? Is he worse or better?

CONCHITA: The worst. The worst because of involvement with war. He's a war-monger. The economy is bad because he protects the corporations. He talks, but his words go to the wind. Actions. And his actions are for the corporations. And all the money goes there. No child should be behind with an education, but they cut the budget in the schools, they close the schools. Children cannot go to school. But Israel is getting billions of dollars. But they have a right to defend themselves — but from what, from what? It is insane. It doesn't make any sense that they know they're killing those Palestinians there daily, daily, unbelievable, grabbing their land, bulldozing their houses .... Now they're building a wall. There's too much going on in the world. We have to keep it up. There are people telling me, "Don't give up, go on, go on." One says, "The beasts, the humans, animals, and trees depend on you, Concepción Picciotto, go, go!" Many people write to me here, too. It's not what people are telling me, but I have to stay because of my conscience.

BOLDNEWLOOK: What were you doing before you came here in 1981?

CONCHITA: You'd never believe ... I was living in New York. I moved there in 1960. At that time I worked at the New York World's Fair at the Pavilion of Spain. After, I worked at the U.N. and nine years at the Embassy of Spain at the commercial office. This is what the Marines do to me, and government are doing to me. So that's why I have a helmet. [Conchita shows me photographs of lesions on her skin.] Yes, they do it, and some places I cannot show. They have more sophisticated weapons now, like I said. Go into my bones, go to my neck. Yes, my leg is getting swollen.

BOLDNEWLOOK: Where do you go for medical care?

CONCHITA: No, I don't go for medical care because medical cannot do nothing. It's electronic, and I have to take care of myself. And that was me, in my home in New York. [Conchita shows me a photograph of what she looked like 30 years ago, in her New York apartment.] That's why they destroy everybody's life. I never dreamed of being here. That was me, my husband, my daughter. She was born in Argentina in '73. Imagine the mothers there. That's what I'm saying. I have something that they know, and Jimmy Carter was involved with that. He knew. Oh my. You have to check what happened to me in Atlanta.

BOLDNEWLOOK: And that's on your website too?

CONCHITA: Oh yeah, yeah.

BOLDNEWLOOK: How much longer do you think you'll be here?

CONCHITA: Only God knows that, because I want to stay here, no matter what. I want to stay here. It's painful many times, physical and moral. Oh yes, very painful. But I see people, that people are suffering. And these here, they don't care. They kill, kill. Even American troops too, these young people in there, it's so sick. For nothing, for nothing, for control of the oil and power. It's insane. I will be here whatever it takes.

BOLDNEWLOOK: If you could send one message to the President, what would it be?

CONCHITA: My goodness! The first thing, to come to his senses and stop killing. "Axis of Evil, we're going to bomb you with nuclear bombs," and then at the same time says, "We have to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons." How can they stop when you threaten them? They have to buy or build them up to be even. It doesn't make sense, it's sick. It contradicts, one thing to another. That's what I'm saying — stop now, make peace with the world, take care of the people at home, education, jobs, housing, affordable health care. Because if the terrorists are coming, it's because they provoked them. It's not terrorism, the terrorism is here. They terrify the world. It's like with North Korea — North Korea was doing very well with Clinton. They started to have more diplomacy with them. They started to open the borders, and people were traveling to meet their families, and they were talking about the nuclear reactor, but Bush took over. "You! Axis of Evil! We're going to bomb you with nuclear bombs!" They closed the borders, and that's it. And they want to negotiate because their people are starving for so many years. That's terrible genocide for the United States to do, and even in Cuba. Diplomacy is democracy. But they're dictating. And that's the most terrifying weapon — that they don't allow human beings for food and medication. That is worse than the bomb. The bomb kills you and that's it, but this is gradual, slow death. Which is what they're doing to me here, a slow death. And that's why I see the people suffering, like in Guantanamo. They snatch people from their country, from their lands, and bring them to another country, which is not theirs, and keep them in cages worse than in the zoo, and nobody can know where they are, what are their names, or anything. And keep torturing them. No, it's so inhuman. This has to be stopped in the world. They see that, and the world don't do nothing. Even here, the U.S. people come and I say, "Do you want literature?" and they say, "Oh, I'm just looking." I say, "It's OK." Ignorance, the American way.

Philanthropy’s Response to Katrina: A Ten-Year Perspective

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 An edited version of this post was published by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) in the Summer 2015 edition of its Responsive Philanthropy newsletter.

A CITY OF TWO TALES

Local responses to the upcoming commemoration of Hurricane Katrina have been decidedly mixed. Some who lived through the storm and its aftermath are anxious. They expect many of the images and stories in the media to be painful. They have their own memories of homes and neighborhoods destroyed and loved ones lost. Some harbor a grief that has never cycled through its stages or been properly resolved.

Others see an opportunity to show the city in its glad rags, having come so far in so many ways from the destruction that millions witnessed on their television sets. Ironically, a new levee system makes New Orleans one of the best-protected coastal cities in the United States. There’s a strong ecosystem for entrepreneurs. The city is open for business.

Certainly one of the casualties of the storm will be a nuanced account of what happened in the ten years after Katrina made landfall. As Thomas Kuhn famously remarked, there are no theory-neutral observations. Each of us will see these events through the filter of our own worldviews, our “theories” of how to interpret the mundane and the extraordinary. Our assessment of the progress New Orleans has made since 2005 will be shaped (some might say “distorted”) by our own agendas. As the tenth anniversary of Katrina approaches, many of the stories served to us will be in the style of Dickens, brimming with rogues and children in rags. Others will be triumphalist tales with titles like, “The Five Things Successful People Do After An Unprecedented Catastrophe.”

Let the reader beware. My own prejudices and obsessions will become apparent soon enough.

THE PHILANTHROPIC RESPONSE TO KATRINA

The official Katrina@10 observances will rightly commemorate the individuals who lost their lives and livelihoods in the storm. During these somber occasions we’ll mourn the citizens who left the region and never returned, and we’ll count our own lucky stars. We’ll also take the opportunity to thank once again the individuals, families, foundations, church groups, businesses, and others who contributed so much to the reconstruction and rebirth of New Orleans. There are still thousands of volunteers who return year after year to put up houses or paint ramshackle schools. I’m still moved when I see them, walking back to their hotels from their labors. The locals toot their horns at them and wave in appreciation.

I’ve been a frequent critic of the philanthropic sector. I’ve poked fun at pompous CEOs and bloviating program officers. In the spirit of self-improvement, we can legitimately raise the question of whether or not, in response to Katrina, organized philanthropy did the right things in the right measure. We can justifiably ask what $3 billion in private contributions accomplished for New Orleans’ most vulnerable citizens. I’m happy for the field to engage these questions, but prefer that this happen some other time, perhaps, in some other essay.

More pressing, I believe, is the question of why, when current realities are as harrowing as anything we might have witnessed ten years ago, we lavish so much attention on the past. If a normally constituted human being had eight fingers instead of ten, we’d have finished our commemorations two years ago and have a good head start on forgetting, once again, the lessons of 2005.

A TALE OF TWO ZIP CODES

Rather than drag the reader through the entire chamber of horrors, let me focus on a representative statistic,* published three short years ago in a report titled, Place Matters for Health in Orleans Parish:** “Life expectancy in the poorest zip code in the city is 54.5 years, or 25.5-years lower than life expectancy in the zip code with the least amount of poverty in the city, where it is 80.”

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which of these ZIP codes is predominantly black and which is predominantly white.

And I invite the reader to slow his or her headlong rush through this article and allow that one statistic to sink in a bit. Twenty-five and a half years. The difference in life expectancy between males and females in the United States is currently about five years. This should be enough to get our attention. Perhaps like me you’ve wondered why this difference in life expectancy hasn’t generated more hand-wringing, more conference panels, more calls to action. A ten-year difference in life expectancy would be nothing short of a national scandal. A fifteen-year difference would be unthinkable.

But twenty-five and a half years? Here we have a kind of Katrina unaccompanied by torrents of rain. Here’s an implacable flood driving the poor in our city to deaths that are obscenely premature.

The Negro spiritual bids us to

Wade in the water
Wade in the water, children
Wade in the water
God’s gonna trouble the water

What an image for a city that still experiences the trauma of too much water! What an act of faith our obedience requires, for we’re told that it’s God’s angel who troubles the water, and it’s this act that brings healing to those who wade in.

What kind of healing do we need to feel the full weight of that solitary number: twenty-five and a half? What can foundations do to help trouble the water a bit, to quicken our pulses at the idea that our neighbors might be dying twenty-five years before we do?

Ten years ago, I watched events in New Orleans unfold from a safe distance. I was living in Washington, DC, at the time and my fellow Washingtonians and I clucked our tongues at the images on our TV screens. Some of us remarked that ‘there for the grace of God goes Washington, D.C.’ We shared a sense that black lives appeared to matter as little in our nation’s capital as they did in the American South.

Is there perhaps some way that philanthropy can help us remember the present more vividly than we recall the past?

A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER

If you work at a foundation, if you have the privilege of funding the good people who help us remember the present, please know that much is expected of us. A higher consciousness, a greater sense of urgency, a more robust response to current suffering and injustice.

Years ago, I sat with a group of academics, one of whom described the research he had just conducted on the role of philanthropy in the Civil Rights Movement. His primary conclusion was that foundations had initially been circumspect and very slow on the draw.# They came around eventually, as they did with many progressive movements, when all the difficult work had already been done. And even then, they played a minor role.

I, the self-appointed spokesman for organized philanthropy, was indignant. I knew personally of many foundations that had taken risks to advance the cause of social justice. Here in front of me was yet another uninformed foundation-basher. But still his thesis gnawed at me, and the more I tried to negate it, the more clearly I saw how the exceptions proved the rule.

The Movement for Gender Equality, Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring—we let them spend their rage and bury their dead. After that, we convened them and funded those who knew how to speak to their betters. This was photo op philanthropy, the kind that smiles for the camera as it places one foot on a trophy that others had the courage to bag. Perhaps this will happen with the Black Lives Matter movement. Perhaps it too will devolve into an endless series of convenings in cold hotel meeting rooms, a polite request to stop the killing, an infographic or two.

The foundation response to Katrina was very different. It was not at all photo op philanthropy but rather something sacred. It might not have been perfectly strategic (whatever that means), but it came very much from the heart and therefore had its own kind of perfection. I know the overwhelming majority of my fellow New Orleanians share my gratitude for the generosity of so many.

The problems with organized philanthropy—the work of foundations and the like—are more systemic; they extend far beyond our attempts to respond to any one disaster. These problems explain why it’s the Pope, rather than a foundation president, who’s deemed by Fox News to be the most dangerous person on the planet. Understanding this slight to our field should presently be occupying the greatest minds in philanthropy.

For now, dear reader: If you’re moved to do so, make your pilgrimage to New Orleans this summer. Give us an opportunity to thank you again. We can mourn together for the dead. And, most importantly, arm in arm, we can find a way to honor the dignity of those who are thankfully still with us.

 

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* For a broader picture of “Inclusion” in the New Orleans metro area, see The New Orleans Index at Ten: Measuring Greater New Orleans’ Progress Toward Prosperity, available from the Data Center website.

** Prepared by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies Orleans Parish Place Matters Team in conjunction with the Center on Human Needs, Virginia Commonwealth University Virginia Network for Geospatial Health Research. The full report is available at http://www.orleansplacematters.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/CHER-Final-text.pdf.

# There were some notable exceptions. Cf. http://ncrp.org/campaigns-research-policy/36-campaigns-research-a-policy/1081-freedom-funders-philanthropy-and-civil-rights-movement. 

Unaccompanied Minors in Detention

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Given the current national debate on immigration, and given how little things have changed for unaccompanied minors in the past seven years, the WCT editors are republishing this October 2007 post written by WCT contributor Albert Ruesga shortly after his  visit to a detention center in Phoenix.

The mood in House 5 is somber.  Eight children ranging in age from 14 to 17, three of them girls, sit patiently as a young lawyer reviews their rights.  Several days or weeks earlier, the children, unaccompanied by family members, had been arrested along different parts of the U.S.–Mexico border attempting the dangerous crossing.  They were fleeing the poverty of their home countries.  They had come for work or to be reunited with their parents.

“How many of you are from El Salvador?” the lawyer asks them in Spanish.  Four children raise their hands.  “How many from Guatemala?”  Three more hands go up.

One young boy who looks a little taller and fairer than the others explains as best he can that he’s Romani—a Gypsy—but also speaks a little Romanian.  The advocate assures him he’ll be briefed later that day in his own language.  The boy neither smiles nor frowns, but folds his arms and looks past the pink and blue curtains into the brightly lit courtyard outside the window.  His eyes focus on a distant point as he struggles to piece together the meanings of the few words of Spanish he can recognize.

*                    *                    *

The children’s detention center in Phoenix is a series of squat, cinder block buildings with an adjoining soccer field and a small swimming pool, surrounded by a large metal fence.  The facility is managed by Southwest Key Programs, an Austin-based nonprofit.  Staff members, most of them women, do their best to care for the 130 children in their charge.

One of the most striking aspects of this facility is the complete absence of any Mexican children.  According to Aryah Somers, a staff attorney with the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, there’s an agreement between Mexico and the United States that all Mexican nationals apprehended at the border will be immediately returned.  According to some reports, after being handed over to Mexican authorities, unaccompanied children have been dropped off in border towns in the middle of the night and left to fend for themselves.* Before coming to this facility, non-Mexican children might have spent days or even weeks in border jails.

Only two countries—the United States and Somalia—have failed to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

*                    *                    * 

The walls of House 5 are painted a dark blue and decorated with colorful maps and children’s drawings: a brown vase filled with shimmering red tulips; a bay of impossibly blue water surrounded by mountains; a young vagabond in a bright green sweater carrying a bundle on a stick.  In one corner, there’s a cardboard model of a steamboat painted pink and white, with orange trim.  A sign on the wall explains the etiquette of Reporting to the Teacher: look at the teacher, stay cool, tell what you saw, answer the teacher’s questions, say “thank you.”

A brightly painted phoenix hovers above the common area where the eight children sit quietly, listening to the advocate describe their rights.  Two of the young girls sit together, supporting one another; a third sits apart.  Five boys are spread evenly across two long sofas.

“How many of you know what human trafficking is?” asks the advocate.  The children stare at her blankly, so she explains the concept by telling the story of a young girl who asks a coyote to help her cross the border.  The coyote charges five thousand pesos, an impossible sum, but the young girl is able to scrape together a thousand pesos, promising to pay the rest later.  Unfortunately, the border crossing is botched and the young girl is arrested.  After some time spent in detention, she’s released into the custody of an aunt who’s a naturalized U.S. citizen.  The coyote telephones the young girl, demanding his four thousand pesos.  “But I was arrested!” she protests.  He’s unmoved and threatens to kill her family unless she pays.  He gives her a way out: he has a job for her, he says.  So she gratefully accepts the offer—after all, she had come to the United States to find work.  Things go well at first.  But soon she finds that no matter how hard she works, it’s impossible to reduce her debt to the coyote.  She thought she’d be working for a family, but instead finds herself in a house filled with strange men who abuse her.

The children’s eyes are glued to the sweet-faced advocate, their hands at their sides or folded on their laps.  None of them volunteers his or her story—this isn’t the time, and it’s always better not to say too much.

*                    *                    * 

I’m moved by what I see at the detention center, but even more by what I imagine these children suffered before they attempted their journey to el Norte.  I think of the struggles of children in my own country who grow up in extreme poverty, in surroundings that slowly wear away at their sense of self-worth.  I wonder how the young children in the detention center—some of whom never received a formal education—understand anything as abstract as a “right.”

What goes through their minds when the advocate shows them laminated photographs of the courtroom in which they’ll have their first hearing? of the kindly judge who speaks no Spanish? of the other judge who “has no hair and is a little more serious”?

I wonder about the national boundaries that none of us had a role in creating.  Can it be possible for our moral responsibility to extend as far as Brownsville, but no further south?

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* I have not been able to confirm these reports.

Image source: The Medical Journal of Australia

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Central American Minors Pushed North by Poverty, Violence, Hopes for Refuge

Too Hot For The Countess

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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 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 have 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 they stop working, so 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. Social justice this! Social justice that! Such blind and stupid fool you are, my lapushka, although I mean this only in nicest way. 

I have an e-mails from latest client, Fox News, telling me Ford Foundation was to blame for emancipation of serfs. What tragedy for Russia! I tell you, my little kotik, my Great Great Great Uncle Georgiy was, by all accounts, like father—almost god—to his serfs.  We did not need your philanthropy in Spas-Klepiki. Fortunately serfs on our estates died of disease long before anything like philanthropy became necessary. Mr. Darren Walker has much to answer for, you will believe me!

You write about empowerment of peasants, Alyosha, but you have never witness horrifying spectacle of toothless woman in headscarf breaking wind after potato harvest! Now you have peasant children streaming over your borders and your Mr. Hopey Changey flying them back to country of origin! Веры ридикулус! Hours after they eat every little pretzel on airplane, they are on your borders again! I am suggest to Fox News is more effective to spend little more money and fly children to Gaza Strip, but editors didn’t like idea because I couldn’t work in anti-gay angle.

I am go boating this afternoon with Michele Bachmann.  Will leave cell phone on.  Call me.

— Apraxina

White Courtesy Telephone Laff Fest

This post was prompted by the Countess Apraxina, currently the guest of Vladimir Putin at his Sevastopol dacha. She sent us this telex: “Alyosha, my little turd swallow, please help Apraxina! Send Pussy Riot quick! This dreary man does nothing but sit shirtless entire day displaying effete pectorals and reciting lines from Zhukovsky! ‘A black raven, its wings whistling / Drives above the sleigh / Prophetic wail affirming sadness!’ ... It is summer for God’s sake! Desperately need good laugh!” …

 Link: Strategic Philanthropy for a Complex World

 

 

 

 

Lessons in Strategic Philanthropy: How To Do Things With Humans

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This post was conceived as a companion piece to an earlier post on theories of change, titled How to Cause Things in Philanthropy.

1. Engineering without the math. A colleague of mine once pointed out, to my great satisfaction, that as grantmakers we are in fact social engineers. I still feel the glow of this flattering assessment. A PRI here, a dab of cash there, and soon the social machinery is purring contentedly, ending homelessness in Cincinnati or reversing global warming.

That’s the ideal picture, of course. The machines whose wheels we grease invariably have human constituents. These humans snag on one another or break down altogether. Sometimes the entire machine just gets up and walks away.

2. Building a better social intervention. At times like these we might cast a wistful eye at the board game Mousetrap which has delighted children and adults since it was first introduced in 1963.

During the course of this game, players take turns building an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine whose sole purpose is to trap little plastic mice. What a joy to set the mousetrap in motion and watch it work! You turn a crank that rotates a gear that rotates another gear that causes a plastic boot to swing up and kick over a bucket containing a small metal ball that then rolls down a set of stairs and into a chute where it’s channeled to a contraption that dislodges another ball from its high perch whence it rolls into a bathtub and falls through the drain hole onto one end of a teeter board causing a little plastic man at the other end of the board to fly backwards and into a barrel that triggers the descent of the mouse cage.

Those of us who struggle to get our grantmaking interventions to function properly can’t help but marvel at this beautifully choreographed march of causes and effects.

The game also has, I believe, some important lessons for grantmakers and others who work in the Third Sector.

The spectacular predictability of this elaborate mousetrap depends on the fact that interactions between inanimate objects—gears, balls, chutes, and the like—are governed by well-known laws. These laws express in mathematical language the regularities that physicists and others observe in the behavior of matter.

Laws governing human interactions, by contrast, are fiendishly difficult to come by. Unlike the creators of the Mousetrap game, we don’t often have the luxury of encasing our human subjects in plastic and flinging them off the ends of teeter boards or causing them to fall against one another like dominoes.

How then, as good social engineers, can we get our humans to behave in predictable ways? Fortunately, there are regularities of human behavior—stunning regularities—that grantmakers can learn to exploit.

3. The inner-life of cocktail-tropic fauna. In a previous post I considered how causal chains can become ridiculously complicated as they lead from our grantmaking intervention to our hoped-for outcomes. This thwarts our attempts to develop meaningful theories of change for our work.

Causal chains can also become rather brittle: all the stars may be in alignment for moving from some cause to a given effect, from one link of the chain to the next; all the felicity conditions might be satisfied; and yet, if the movement from cause to effect depends on the vicissitudes of human actors, we might be wise to put long odds on the outcome.

One of the challenging aspects of human actions is that they’re mediated by representations of the world. What does this mean? Shine a light near an amoeba and, without thinking, this phototropic creature will ooze its way towards the glow. Light up the sign for a bar and a cocktail-tropic human might move towards the entrance, but there’s no inevitability about it. If he does, he’s likely to pause at the threshold considering whether or not he likes the bartender, weighing his chances of meeting the man or woman of his dreams, estimating the likelihood that the lounge’s one television screen will be tuned to his favorite channel. He’ll consider his options for the evening. He’ll remember an article about beer not being as fattening as wine. In short, his beliefs and desires will interact in complicated ways to shape his resolve and ultimately bring him to a bar stool—or not.

In the case of the amoeba, the shining light activates various biochemical processes that produce the animal’s phototropic behavior. Biochemistry is also very much at work in the cocktail-tropic human, but it doesn’t determine human action without first creating or recreating various representations of the world inside the head of our subject. These representations—beliefs, desires, aversions, fears, memories—will either put a spring in the lounge-lizard’s steps or stop him in his tracks.

Most social interventions depend on linking and coordinating the activities of many human actors, each with his or her repertoire of beliefs and desires, each introducing some uncertainty into the unfolding path of events. Rather than act according to plans—our plans—these actors will be observing, remembering, desiring, resenting, and yes, perhaps even assessing whether or not they’ll cut off their own noses just to spite us.

4. You often get what you pay for. There are many cases in which desired outcomes do in fact arrive at the distal ends of long chains of coordinated human activity. Consider, for example, the writing and delivery of a letter, or the flying of 200 passengers from New York to Paris. These extraordinary accomplishments require the precise sequencing of thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of human actions. But there are important differences that set these examples apart from those we typically encounter in nonprofit work where sought-after goals often elude us.

Put aside for a moment the fact that mail delivery and air travel can fail in spectacular ways. Flying 200 passengers from New York to Paris is no doubt a complicated affair, but each step of the process, from the design and construction of the airplane to the training of the aircrew, operates according to principles that are well understood. By contrast, creating the political will to address climate change might be one of those “wicked problems” that will forever resist a comprehensive solution.

Then there’s the issue of buyer incentive, and here we need to face an uncomfortable truth: there are important social goods that nobody really wants to pay for. If you’re selling a product like an iPhone or a flight to Paris, you’ll find many willing investors and customers. If you’re raising venture capital to end racism in Mississippi you’ll likely need to go begging. When you do, you’ll find that what grantmakers and other donors drop into your hat will never come close to covering the cost of what it will take to accomplish your mission.

There’s a reason so many charities are incorporated as not-for-profits. The nonprofit status of organizations that provide services to the indigent reflects not a failure of entrepreneurial imagination or of will, but rather a clear-headed assessment of what people value enough to pay for freely. Lack of buyer interest means no working capital; it also means a social entrepreneur has little with which to incentivize her staff, cover program costs, or grow the capacity of her organization.

5. Small carrots, big sticks. The issue of an appropriate reward structure for humans whose actions we’re attempting to motivate is a vexing one—especially outside the sphere of well capitalized for-profit enterprises. How do you get complicated, extraordinary things to happen without paying people huge sums of money?

Certainly no catalog of the various ways to motivate human action would be complete without a consideration of intimidation and terror. We see that in North Korea, for example, they host an annual spectacle in which tens of thousands of citizens hold up colored placards at just the right time to create the likeness of Kim Jong-un, or of a missile pointed at San Francisco, or of some other great socialist achievement. These mass displays provide a striking model of coordinated human activity.

How does it work?

If you are one of the performers and you do well, you get an extra carrot in your annual ration of vegetables; if you don’t, the authorities stick you and your family in the North Korean gulag. This, I believe, is what’s known as the “carrot and stick” approach to human motivation.

These tough love tactics are clearly too radical for most nonprofit work. The ostentatious tableaux, however, might come in handy for foundation CEOs who, in lieu of publishing inspiring monographs of their pensées, can opt instead to communicate their key philanthropic insights with colorful, football-field-sized displays.

6. Greasy cheeseburger with a side of salad. And then there’s reason. We can’t bang our human subjects together like billiard balls; and it would be challenging to pay our way to good social outcomes in many key areas of nonprofit work. Fear and intimidation are out. Why not try an appeal to reason? In this domain at least we often observe arresting regularities. If forced to choose, more than nine times out of ten a person will strike his head with a kiwi fruit rather than with a hammer. This unprecedented degree of predictability provides strong evidence that we are in the presence of a rational actor.**

Without even thinking about it, we presume that the agents up and down our causal chains will be reasonable. This could be the Holy Grail we’re looking for. It could, that is, if human rationality were robust enough to overcome all the other stuff going on inside our heads, stuff that frequently messes up the calculus of homo rationalis.

Consider these glosses on the groundbreaking research of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, renowned for their studies of deviations from rationality:*

The set-up	What a rational actor would do	What actually happened
“[S]ubjects were given brief personality descriptions of several individuals and asked to assess, for each description, the likelihood that it referred to an engineer or a lawyer. In one experimental condition, subjects were told that the descriptions were sampled randomly from a group of 70 engineers and 30 lawyers, and in a second experimental condition the proportion of the two professions was reversed.”	“A rational assessment of probabilities, … would involve some combination of prior probabilities (based on the relative percentage of engineers and lawyers) and current information (based on the description), leading to different probability estimates in the two experimental conditions because of differences in prior probabilities.”	“Subjects’ estimated probabilities were nearly identical, however, demonstrating the tendency to … neglect prior probabilities or base rates. Similar patterns have been identified in countless other experiments.”
“[R]esearchers gave subjects the following description: ‘Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.’ Subjects were asked to assess the likelihood that various statements about Linda were true, among them being that ‘Linda is a bank teller’ and ‘Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.’”	“Given two events A and B, the probability of the conjunction … of A and B cannot exceed the individual probability of either A or B.”	“Over 85% of subjects believed it was more likely that Linda was both a bank teller and a feminist rather than just a bank teller, contrary to the laws of probability.”
[People facing decisions over medical treatments are told in some cases that a particular treatment has a 90% survival rate; in similar cases they’re told that the same treatment has a 10% mortality rate.]	[The two options are logically equivalent so they should elicit the same response.]	“People … respond differently to a 90% survival rate than they do to a 10% mortality rate, although the two are logically equivalent. These framing effects are difficult to reconcile with rational choice ....”

I remember another example from my graduate school days in which subjects were presented pairs of photographs, each depicting a possible meal, and asked to assess which of the two had the lower number of calories. In one set-up, picture A showed a greasy cheeseburger; picture B showed the same cheeseburger together with a side of salad. I leave it to the reader to guess the outcome of this particular experiment.

These are refined studies, but the evidence for our persistent irrationality is often in plain sight. Ten years after 9/11, 41 percent of Americans still believed that “Saddam Hussein’s regime was directly involved in financing, planning or carrying out the terrorist attacks,” and according to a recent Pew study, 33 percent of all Americans reject evolution saying that “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” Some of us still avoid stepping on cracks or walking under ladders.

Other cases elicit more pity than derision. Nonprofit staffers who work with people in crisis, for example, know that these individuals may not always make rational choices; they will not consistently desire more rather than less good for themselves. Unfortunately, there are powerful forces that mess with our ability to make wise decisions for ourselves and our families. Even when we’re not in crisis, reason will often yield to more pressing demands on our psychic machinery.

Finally, we need to consider that we can have perfectly rational actors operating in a flawed scheme to address some social challenge. The scheme might be flawed because our analysis is unsound, or because our strategies and tactics are defective, or simply because perfectly rational actors might have reasonable grounds for refusing to cooperate with our boneheaded plans.

7. The paranoid madman. What do we do in the face of these challenges? Dear reader, if you’re a grantmaker, have you ever had a brutally honest conversation with a disaffected grantee, with one of those nonprofit leaders you’ve appropriated into your strategy for making the world a better place? If you have, then you probably have some inkling of why it’s so difficult to do things with humans. People don’t like to be played. They don’t like to be managed. They prefer to be the authors of their lives and the work they undertake.

And yet so many exemplars of “strategic philanthropy” are top-down affairs. We grantmakers, myself included, act as arrogant elites, drawing arrows and triangles on the whiteboards of our well-appointed conference rooms with no one around to challenge our flawed thinking. We strut about like giant roosters puffing out our breast feathers and clucking incoherently about “disruption” and “theories of change.” We look foolish to everyone except ourselves and those even more foolish than we are.

What’s missing here is a certain kind of sensibility rooted in the imperative that we treat people as ends not as means. This sensibility has as one of its fruits the goodwill people feel towards those who approach them in humility, asking for help rather than offering to save them from themselves. With this sensibility it becomes immediately possible for us to do things with humans rather to humans. Our causal chains become less brittle. A sense of commonality sustains our social change efforts through their rough patches.

Beyond this sensibility, what’s needed most, in my view, is a profound distrust of those who would straightjacket the work of civil society, imposing on it the apparatus of technocracy, framing human behavior as a problem that requires management by social technicians. “What if history was a gambler, instead of a force in a laboratory experiment?” asks Ralph Ellison in his Invisible Man. “What if history was not a reasonable citizen, but a madman full of paranoid guile?” To admit these as possibilities is to forge our causal chains one tentative link at a time, in solidarity with others, quickly reaching the point where we’re left staring into the dark of an unseen future, rejoicing in our anticipation of what’s possible rather than dreading what we cannot foresee and manage.

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* All of this material is excerpted from “Daniel Kahneman: Judgment, Decision, and Rationality” by Jack S. Levy, Rutgers University, available for download here. I’ve arranged excerpts from his text into table form.

** The rational actors of some economic and social theories figure prominently in the work of grantmakers who promote consideration of the “triple bottom line,” the economic, social, and ecological benefits produced by for-profit enterprises. I’ve been informed by private communication that researchers at the University of Schmerz am Überhogen are very close to developing the quadruple bottom line. In a landmark paper appearing in the Mathematikerzeitungsbringengelächterjournal, Alfred Stüber has proven that n-tuple bottom lines are impossible for any prime number n greater than or equal to 95,651.

 

 

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How to Cause Things in Philanthropy

Philanthropy's Uneasy Relationship With The Social Sciences

Steal This Survey: Creating a Research Agenda for Social Justice Philanthropy

Max Niedzwiecki, Ph.D., the principal of Daylight Consulting Group, is a social justice advocate, researcher, and fundraiser based in New Orleans.

The focus of people who work in philanthropy shifts in mysterious ways. Our attention spans are notoriously short. We might care about income inequality, for example, and see the issue come into sharp focus during the rise of the Occupy Movement. Weeks later, it’s old news. The same goes for topics such as the digital divide, social capital, collective impact – you name it. Areas of focus and styles of giving go in and out of fashion in philanthropy as quickly as couture changes on Paris runways.

All of this can leave the people who depend on foundation dollars, including social justice advocates, with a sense of powerlessness and anxiety, constantly scrambling to intuit and frame their work in the context of the next trend. And that can take a significant toll on their effectiveness.

Members of Philanthropy for Social Justice and Peace (PSJP) – “a global network of philanthropy practitioners working to increase the impact of grantmaking for social justice and peace” – understand that research and communications are important tools for keeping philanthropy focused where it’s needed most. They also know that we need to learn more about what kinds of research and communications efforts make the most impact on the field.

PSJP has commissioned a study to deepen that understanding through consultation with a broad range of stakeholders including foundation staff, advocates, researchers, and beyond. The study, carried out by Daylight Consulting Group and the Center for Research and Innovation in Social Policy and Practice (CENTRIS), is gathering data through a short online survey and a series of in-depth interviews. The research questions include:

1. What topics should receive more research focus?
2. What kinds of data should be collected?
3. What standards should guide how these data are collected and analyzed?
4. What audiences should be prioritized?
5. How should results be shared?
6. Who should lead these research and communications efforts?

Please help advance the causes of social justice and peace by taking a few minutes to complete a brief survey, which can be accessed here, and contact the researchers at [email protected] if you have additional input to share.

 

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The Case for Using a Social Justice Lens in Grantmaking

A Convening of Stake Holders, Redux

How to Cause Things in Philanthropy

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1. Minding the nature of cause and effect.  In philanthropic and nonprofit work, we model causes and effects when we plan a program, evaluate an intervention, articulate a theory of change, sketch a logic model, or, more generally, attempt to give an account of what the heck it is we’re trying to do.

2.  Causal attribution.  At times, after making sober pronouncements about our fundamental inability to identify our work as the cause of a desired effect, we will still gladly take credit for the latter. This is what’s known in the biz as the “problem of attribution,” which, as many of you know, is really no problem at all.

3. Representing causal attribution. We use pictures to represent the connection between our intervention (i.e., the cause, labelled C in Figure 1, below) and its intended effect, dutifully labelled E.

 

One troubling feature of this cause and effect diagram is its simplicity. This is not what we pay our consultants top dollar for. Prima facie, it fails to represent the fact that it usually takes more than one step to get from our intervention to our intended effect, so that instead of the situation pictured in Figure 1, we require something more like:

 

Our initial intervention, C₁, causes effect, E₁, which is itself a cause, C₂, of another effect, E₂, and so on, until we arrive finally at our intended effect.  Here at least we’re getting more causal connections for our money!

Unfortunately, even Figure 2 will not do for any theory of change worthy of the name. As we know, effects can—and in fact almost always do—have multiple causes, and their causes have causes, and so on. The situation for most social interventions is more like that depicted in Figure 3:

 

This is called a fishbone diagram¹, for obvious reasons, and of special interest to us is the fish’s spine, the primary chain of causes and effects (here represented by a dark arrow) that leads to our hoped-for outcome. This diagram faithfully captures the fact that each cause has its own causes (labelled “secondary”), and that these causes too have their causes (labelled “tertiary”), etc.

Judging by the shape of this particular fish, I would guess that it’s a flounder, which, if you think about it, is not a bad metaphor for what many of us do in philanthropy.

4. Playing Pachinko with people’s lives.  Are we there yet? No, not even close. In spite of our flounder’s impressive skeletal structure, it turns out we might be barking up the wrong fish. Figure 3 represents only one possible chain of events arriving at our final destination, the “Effect” in the rightmost box. But as we know from experience, just about any intervention we dream up can lead by multiple paths to our desired outcome.

Represented in Figure 4, for example, is a theory of change for a program that gives tenants representation on the management board of their public housing project, with the intended effect of improving the condition of the property.² I've excluded all possible secondary and tertiary causes to simplify the exposition, but you’ll notice immediately that there is not one, but several, paths that lead to our desired goal.

An extraordinary feature of the theory of change depicted in Figure 4 is that despite its overwhelming complexity and despite all the vagaries of human action, causes and their effects tumble like Pachinko balls toward their lowest state of potential energy, here represented by the box labelled “Improved condition of property.”

Is this reasonable?

To answer this question, it’s worth pausing to consider the reason why some grantmakers require mind-bending theories of change from their grantees. Theories of change, like the one depicted in Figure 4, are intended to make explicit our beliefs about the causal paths that lead plausibly from our social interventions to our desired outcomes. But therein lies their greatest weakness: Our theories of change are limited primarily by our imaginations. As I’ve argued elsewhere, we can imagine a thousand reasons, none of them pictured in Figure 4, why the placement of residents on the management board of a public housing project might lead ultimately to an improvement in the property. One of the resident managers, for example, might have a brother-in-law whose contracting company does excellent work for half the price; or one of the resident-managers might be very successful at organizing volunteer work crews that dedicate one Saturday each month to repairs and upkeep; or the very presence of residents on the management board might inspire a local donor to endow and thereby double the public housing project’s maintenance budget; etc.

It’s also possible that events might take one or all of the paths pictured in Figure 4 and the condition of the property not improve one bit!

Once we introduce human actors into our causal chains we move outside of the art and science of philanthropy [sic] and into the realm of fortune telling (with some exceptions that I describe below). Requiring grantees to construct detailed theories of change for their interventions is the kind of cruelty that only a grantmaker can think to inflict.

5. Gettin’ our loops on.  Reality is much more complicated than even Figure 4 suggests.  In the world of organic and inorganic beings, certain anticipated effects “loop back” to reinforce, or, in some cases, impede other elements of our program design. Consider, for example, the diagram below, in which various lines of causes and effects lead ultimately to “failed states.”³

In this simplified exposition, notice how GLOBAL WARMING is part of a reinforcing loop that includes RISING SEA LEVEL, SALTING OF COASTAL AQUIFERS, SPREADING WATER SHORTAGES, PUMPING FROM DEEPER WELLS, and INCREASING ENERGY FROM FOSSIL FUELS.  Feedback loops like this are the rule rather than the exception for many if not most social interventions.  The great pioneers of system dynamics were quick to acknowledge their importance and model their effects in complex social phenomena. We ignore them at our peril.

Notice also the mixing of physical causes (e.g., RISING TEMPERATURES) with human causes (“increased demand for food”), another perplexing feature common to many theories of change.

6. Felicity conditions. To complicate matters further, even the simple cause and effect connection pictured in Figure 1 conceals enormous conceptual difficulties. The figure appears to assert that cause C is inevitably followed by effect E. But this cannot be what it depicts.

Suppose C is my request that you pour me a glass of wine, and E is your pouring me a glass of wine. You might decide to pour me a glass of wine without my asking you (and for which, by the way, thank you). But if I ask you to pour me a glass of wine and, moments later, you do so, we can safely assume that my request was the cause of your kind action.⁴

If, however, you have no more wine, or I ask you impolitely and you decide to deny my request, or a piano falls on your head before you have a chance to reach for the bottle, the intended effect E will never materialize.  The cause C leading to the effect E depends critically on the presence of certain conditions (wine in the bottle) and the absence of others (falling pianos).

Shouldn’t these felicity conditions somehow be part of our theory of change? If so, where do we put them? Even more importantly, is there enough time before our sun goes nova to adduce all the felicity conditions that would make possible your pouring me, upon request, a nice glass of Merlot?

7.  The full monty. Once we take into account the inevitable feedback loops, the required felicity conditions, the multiple branches emanating from a simple intervention, the secondary and tertiary causes, etc., here is the complete theory of change for the simple act of mailing of a letter:

8. Some preliminary conclusions/observations. Grantmakers fall into error when they engage in armchair speculation about effects that lie at the distal ends of long causal chains. If our intervention depends on a tightly choreographed march of causes and effects, we will almost certainly be disappointed.

Are we therefore to abandon trying to pinpoint causes and effects in social interventions? Are we to declare the causal nexus an impenetrable mystery? Not at all. Causes and their effects are as much at work in the social as in the physical realm and we need to understand them as best we can. As for felicity conditions, most times when I ask you to pour me a glass of wine, there will be no menacing pianos about.

Our problems begin when we overreach. Our arrogance is on full display when we ask grantees to engage in exercises beyond the abilities of Stephen Hawking. Moreover, a great deal of what’s been written and discussed about theories of change and other jetsam from the world of “strategic philanthropy”—this post included—is a bunch of arm-waving that will continue to enrich technocrats like me but fail to advance the cause of justice, the latter having much more to do with truth and repentance than with logic models. But I digress ...

9. Keeping it real.  That said, even in the domain of human behavior, even with all the quirks of human personality, there are surprising regularities we can exploit in order to do good for the world.  I’ll describe some of the more esoteric examples in subsequent posts.  For now we can at least acknowledge that philanthropy is filled with simple, effective interventions, supported by equally simple theories of change.  For example:

[1]  I make a grant to Organization XYZ to pay the light bill → Organization XYZ uses my grant to pay the light bill → Organization XYZ’s lights stay on

Nice. Elegant. Too simple, perhaps, to garner you a Genius Award, but arguably the kind of intervention most critical to the health of our republic.

In the Spring 2010 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review⁵, Paul Brest, then-president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, took two of my colleagues, William Schambra and Bill Somerville, to the rhetorical woodshed.  He criticized them for their skepticism about theories of change, for advocating that we make grants to extraordinary nonprofit leaders without requiring them to spell out the causal chains that lead to their good outcomes. “These skeptics,” Brest argued, “are implicitly analogizing grantees to idiots savants—individuals who are able to do complex calculations … in their heads without knowing, let alone being able to explain, how they do it.”⁵

Putting aside the issue of the misplaced idiot savant analogy⁶, I believe that Schambra and Somerville have it exactly right. Their idea of providing funding to great nonprofit leaders who have succeeded in the past is supported by a compelling theory of change.  It looks something like this:

[2]  I make a grant to an organization run by a great leader who consistently delivers great outcomes year after year → The organization delivers great outcomes

Some of you will note the similarity between this theory of change and the following familiar example:

[3]  The rotation of the earth has caused the sun to rise every day for the past five billion years → The sun will rise again tomorrow

There are no guarantees in the theory of change outlined in [2] just as there is no guarantee that the sun will rise tomorrow. But you can hardly do better than this as a grantmaker.

An organization’s “theory of change” can, in most cases, be directly inferred from what it proposes to do. Instead of agonizing over confusing and manifestly inaccurate cause-and-effect diagrams, simply apply the plausibility test: Is it plausible that the grantee’s actions might lead to the desired outcome? How plausible is it and how do we know?

10. Complaints department. The reader likely has many questions and objections.  I’ve listed only those that show my argument to best advantage:

Objection:  Sixty-eight percent of our grantees report benefitting from the construction of theories of change.

Reply:  I’m not here denying that theories of change, and the process of constructing them, have helped many people in the nonprofit world. I’ve been assured that they have. But while I myself find it helpful to discuss my work plans with my dog, Gracie, I would never dream of requiring this of my grantees. We can perhaps settle the matter as follows: Divide your grantees into two groups. Ask the first group to construct theories of change for their interventions. Ask the second group to describe their work to their pets. Now poll the two groups to find which of them claims to have benefitted most from the exercise. I’ll publish your results on this blog. This, I believe, is what’s called “data-driven decision-making,” the alternative being, I suppose, to ignore the evidence of our senses altogether.

Objection:  Figure 4 is overly complicated. It should include only those branches that are most relevant to our intervention.

Reply:  Which branches are those? Are some of them perhaps missing from Figure 4? How do you know? What are your criteria for including some branches and excluding others?

Objection:  Struggling with complicated theories of change makes our grantees stronger, more able to cope with the vicissitudes of grantmakers even more confused than you or I.

Reply:  Point well taken.

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Notes:

1.  From the RFFlow5 website, available at https://www.rff.com/fishbone.htm.

2.  From Carol Weiss’s,  “How Can Theory-Based Evaluation Make Greater Headway?” Evaluation Review, Vol. 21 No. 4 (1997).

3.  From Lester R. Brown’s “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?” in the May 2009 issue of Scientific American.

4.  This was the argument of the philosopher Donald Davidson in the essay “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” presented at the 1963 meeting of the American Philosophical Association and published in the Journal of Philosophy 60 (1963). I’m not making this up.

5.  Paul Brest, “The Power of Theories of Change” in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2010. 6.  Ibid., p. 48.

6.  One of the interesting characteristics of idiots savants is that the complex calculations they perform in their heads are often correct.  If the nonprofit world harbored the analogues of idiots savants—executive directors, for example, who could correctly intuit the interventions required for lifting whole communities out of poverty—I would strongly encourage them rather than force them to give an account of their methods.  Despite their inability to explain how they arrived at their program designs, I would prefer that they changed the world the way they do, rather than the way most of us don’t.

 

Coming up:  Human motions and human actions; cause and effect in the law; Donald Davidson and naïve belief-desire psychology; rational actor theory; Pavlov, Skinner, and Duhigg; the Law of Large Numbers; crowdsourcing; leadership development and other empowerment strategies; movement building; arts corridors and anchor institutions; tipping point arguments; and structural change.

From Lagos, Sochi, Kampala, and Beyond: The Long, Strange Trip of LGBT Asylum Seekers

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Guest blogger Max Niedzwiecki is the founder and coordinator of the LGBT Faith & Asylum Network and a consultant with the Daylight Consulting Group.*

Homer’s Odyssey is compelling in part because it’s such an extraordinary love story. The hero, Odysseus, endures shipwreck, the Cyclops, and the Land of the Dead to be reunited with his beloved Penelope.

We feel empty when our capacity to love is thwarted. We go to great lengths to find the person to whom we can give ourselves unconditionally. Sometimes what gets in the way is far less romantic than great sweeps of time and space. It’s human ignorance. It’s simple bigotry codified as law.

That’s the challenge faced by a man—we’ll call him David—who flew 6,000 miles from Nigeria to search for the freedom to love in our country.

Being gay carries the death penalty in parts of northern Nigeria. Throughout the country, same-sex behavior is criminalized, and prison terms of up to 14 years can be imposed on people for entering into committed same-sex relationships. Mobs can attack LGBT people with impunity, and membership in any kind of gay society or organization can bring prison terms of up to ten years.

When David arrived in the US and informed a customs officer that he intended to file for asylum, he was jailed. He has no legal right to a lawyer. If he’s released, he will be barred from working for at least six months before filing for asylum.

David is not a rich man, so his options are limited. He’s now in detention, where he’s likely to be abused because he’s gay. If and when he gets out before a successful asylum application, he’ll rely entirely on the kindness of strangers to keep him off the street. If his asylum application is rejected – which is likely unless he can find a good pro bono lawyer – he’ll be returned to a country where he is likely to be beaten, imprisoned, or killed.

David is one of thousands of people who come to the US every year seeking safety from persecution that is motivated by homophobia and transphobia. It’s illegal to be gay in nearly 80 countries, seven impose the death penalty, and in many more there is no accountability for people who attack or murder people just because they are LGBT. Russia has gotten a lot of press lately, but it is not the worst place to be queer.

Invisibility is imposed on LGBT asylum seekers in the US, just as it is in their countries of origin. In the US, many are hidden in an immigration detention system that is required by law to fill at least 34,000 beds every night. Others live on the streets or in the shadows because it’s illegal for them to work or use most social service programs. Unlike most other immigrants, they usually arrive in this country alone, and because of continued prejudice they choose to hide from their former compatriots. If they aren’t fluent in English, this isolation makes it even harder for them to find safety.

LGBT asylum seekers are also invisible to American grantmakers and nonprofit organizations. Asylum seekers are barred from receiving almost all services supported by government funds, and the foundation world has yet to come around: only one American foundation – and a small one at that – has started to make grants to a group that is helping LGBT asylum seekers with necessities such as shelter, food, clothing, and medical care.

In June of 2012 a few advocates and service providers joined together for the first time to talk about what could be done do to help LGBT asylum seekers live through the period between their arrival in the US and the resolution of their applications for asylum. The LGBT Faith & Asylum Network (LGBT-FAN) has since created a community where people engaged in the work could encourage and learn from one another.

LGBT-FAN has also created a referral network connecting all regions of this country. In January of 2014, it organized a well-attended congressional briefing with support from the LGBT Equality Caucus, Center for American Progress, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Heartland Alliance, Unitarian Universalist Association, and others. LGBT-FAN has  established a charitable fund at a community foundation that will dedicate 99% of all money collected to providing shelter, food, medical assistance, and other basic necessities to LGBT asylum seekers. You can contribute to this fund by visiting this page.* You can also sign a petition here.

There’s still a long journey ahead for David and the thousands of other asylum seekers who every year cross land and sea in search of basic human dignity. Driven from their countries of origin, they seek compassion and a simple gesture of welcome, in places very far from home.

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* Disclosure statement: Max Niedzwiecki is married to White Courtesy Telephone founding editor, Albert Ruesga.  The charitable fund established by LGBT-FAN is held at the Greater New Orleans Foundation (GNOF) where Albert serves as president & CEO.  As is standard for donor-advised funds at GNOF, the Foundation charges the fund a one percent per annum administration fee.

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The Hierarchy of Rigor

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Lessons From The Undeserving Poor

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The motivation for distinguishing between the deserving and the undeserving poor is familiar to many who’ve been approached by a homeless person for a handout.  Will we give without condition? Will we draw a line at those who are visibly intoxicated, reasoning that these supplicants are inviting their own ruin? Will we brush off the request and opt instead to make a contribution to the local shelter? Even after we’ve responded in some way, will we feel we’ve done the right thing? Perhaps our rationalizations will seem a little cold, a little too far removed from what might otherwise have been a simple human response to a simple human need.

The distinctions we sometimes make between the deserving and the undeserving poor have a revealing history.  The first American colonies modeled their poor laws on Elizabethan systems of relief for the needy, where the primary division was between neighbors and strangers.  Your responsibility to those who fell on hard times extended to family members and neighbors.  If evil befell a sojourner, he was sent to his community of origin where, it was assumed, he would receive assistance.  Another distinction divided your struggling neighbors into two classes: the truly impotent and the poor who were able-bodied, believed capable of at least some kind of work.

This latter category was problematic for early policymakers.  Just as an acorn could, by slow degrees, transform into an oak, so could the category of the truly impotent shift through multiple shades of difference into the category of rogues attempting to game the system.  The imperative for drawing clear lines increased as we moved from helping the poor to managing them.

Other challenges were afoot.  In the early days of our republic, there were many poor who struggled privately with their need as a kind of unavoidable evil.  The community’s “paupers,” by contrast, received some kind of public assistance, and it wasn’t long before pauperism became associated in the public mind with moral degradation.  According to Michael Katz:

The redefinition of poverty as a moral condition accompanied the transition to capitalism and democracy in early nineteenth-century America.  It served to justify mean-spirited treatment of the poor, which in turn checked expenses for poor relief and provided a powerful incentive to work.  In this way the moral definition of poverty helped ensure the supply of cheap labor in a market economy increasingly based on unbound wage labor.  The moral redefinition of poverty followed also from the identification of market success with divine favor and personal worth. …

Persistent and increasing misery did not soften the moral definition of poverty.  Neither did the evidence available through early surveys or the records of institutions and administrative agencies, which showed poverty and dependence as complex products of social and economic circumstances usually beyond individual control.*

Over time the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor became deeply embedded in American culture, supported by Calvinist arguments in the antebellum period, by Darwinist arguments after the Civil War, and by the proponents of eugenics in the early twentieth century.  Within the very short span of my own memory, the undeserving poor have broken into the public consciousness as the “underclass,” as “welfare queens,” and, most recently, as Mitt Romney’s “47 percent.”

The labels have changed.  What have remained remarkably constant are the myths that cloud our understanding of poverty.  In an age when information is so freely available, when we stand to benefit from decades of excellent scholarship, we continue to misapprehend the structural and cultural causes of poverty.  We conflate structural arguments with radical denials of human agency.

There are other lessons for us in the story of the undeserving poor.  Some of these have to do with the question of who defines what constitutes an appropriate locus of philanthropic intervention.

In the same manner that elites reserve for themselves the privilege of drawing lines between the deserving and the undeserving poor, so too do their judgments determine what constitutes a “social problem” worthy of charitable investment.  It will be a rare community that wrestles with the distinction between the deserving and undeserving wealthy, or that launches a five-year philanthropic program to increase the elite’s feelings of solidarity with their less fortunate neighbors.  More often than not, philanthropy will be directed at fixing the poor, deserving or otherwise.

The homeless person asking for spare change intrudes on more than our physical space.  He brings before our eyes the dictates of our faith traditions, our responsibility to model good behavior for our children, our desire to act with decency.  At the same time, he surfaces our doubts about his bona fides, and here we are left without a clear script, reproducing on an intimate scale the ongoing, sometimes shrill, American debate about persistent poverty.

Experiences such as these can throw light on the gulf between our personal and our institutional responses to poverty.  Understanding these differences can, I believe, help make us better citizens, better champions of civil society, more fully aware of the frames we impose on our acts of giving, professional and otherwise.

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* The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare; Pantheon Books, 1989; p. 14.

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Peter Singer on the Distinction Between Good and Bad Charity

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Peter Singer’s op ed on the distinction between good and bad charity is a provocation.  It’s a provocation because he makes a strong assertion—that his brand of Utilitarian ethics can help philanthropy “make the biggest possible impact in the world,” and because he supports this assertion with the barest hint of an argument.  He presents what are typical Utilitarian-style dilemmas and invites the reader to resolve them—e.g., should you use a $100,000 gift to help build a new museum wing or to save 1,000 people from blindness?—but these thought experiments fall far short of establishing his thesis, and they suffer from a number of hair-raising leaps in logic that are, in my experience, typical of academic moral theory.*  More troubling, perhaps, Singer takes great care to narrowly frame the choices faced by the average donor, magically reducing the breadth and complexity of these choices to a bare Utilitarian disjunction.

To understand Professor Singer’s point of view, it helps to know something about the theory of Utility developed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and elaborated upon by scores of moral philosophers ever since.  In a nutshell, Mill argues that when making a choice between two actions, we should choose the action that maximizes the overall “utility,” or, equivalently, that produces the most good.  For Mill the greatest good, the summum bonum, was happiness, which he further defined as pleasure and the absence of suffering.

Note that this is not a theory about how people do in fact make moral choices; it’s a prescription for how we should make these choices.  It’s intended to regulate rather than describe behavior.  And it appears to lead us to right action in a wide variety of cases we encounter daily.

I will spare the reader the dizzying number of arguments made for and against Mill’s views; the creative variations (Rule Utilitarianism, Preference Utilitarianism, etc.); the head-spinning alternatives to Utilitarian-style theories.  I will, however, sketch some of the most salient problems with the theory and invite the reader to do a little more research, weighing all these things in his or her heart:

1. The first challenge facing any prescriptive moral theory is the question of why we should accept it in the first place.  There are, after all, competing formulations (e.g., the Golden Rule, the Categorical Imperative, etc.) that inspire what many of us would judge to be “moral” behavior, and that are not clearly equivalent to the Principle of Utility. Professor Singer criticizes the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (RPA) website because it asserts that there’s no objective answer to the question, ‘What is the most urgent issue that a donor might address?’  He then attempts to prove his point by sketching an argument grounded in the Principle of Utility.  But since there is no deductively valid argument establishing the truth of the Principle of Utility, why should we accept his argument?  I should clarify that there is no such deductively valid argument anywhere—not in Singer’s article, nor in his books, nor in anybody’s books.  It’s not in these places because it doesn’t exist.  Inductive arguments abound, but there is none that moral theorists universally judge to be strong.  In light of this uncertainty, RPA’s assertion doesn’t seem so far off the mark.

So how do you make a case for any moral theory?  At the very least you would want to show that the moral judgments generated by your theory accord best with those made by … whom? the Dalai Lama? Kim Kardashian? some other competent moral authority?  If our theory doesn’t yield the judgments we expect, shouldn’t we abandon it?  And here we come to a second problem with Singer’s argument …

2. The Principle of Utility appears to support some outrageous moral choices.  Since Professor Singer is fond of hypothetical scenarios, here’s one of my favorites from college days.  Imagine that in some post-apocalyptic world, you are a denizen of a nation of sadists.  You take pleasure in watching other people experience pain.  One day, the only other human being on earth chances across your borders and is taken prisoner.  One of your number suggests that each day at six o’clock in the evening, the unfortunate prisoner, who is by no means a masochist, be tortured and that his torture be televised throughout the country bringing pleasure to hundreds of millions of sadists.  As a good Utilitarian you reason that the pain inflicted on the prisoner is far outweighed by the overwhelming amount of pleasure you produce for your fellow citizens.  If the Principle of Utility requires that we torture a human being for the pleasure of others, can it really be a guide for right action?

This is but one of hundreds of counterexamples adduced throughout the years to cast doubt on Utilitarian theories in their many variations.  You can find a classic thought experiment, the so-called the “Trolley Problem,” and some of its cousins described here.

3. Those readers who are already on their second or third cup of coffee will have noticed some of the lacunae in my gloss of Utilitarian theory.  How do we, except in a few very narrow cases, know what action will produce the most good?  How can I measure the good I produce?  And who gets to determine what it is that we should try to maximize—i.e., what it is that constitutes the “greatest good”?

On this last point, you will find a great deal of shimmy-shammying in Singer’s article.  Initially, he asks us where a $100,000 donation will do the most good, without telling us what he assumes the nature of that good to be.  In the very next sentence, we’re asked where this donation will “lead to the bigger improvement in the lives of those affected by it.”  But is this the same as producing the most good?  A little further on in the article, it’s “the biggest possible positive difference to the world” that we’re after, which then shifts immediately to “the most positive impact for your time and money.”  Are these all equivalent?  And if so, doesn’t Professor Singer need to establish that they are?  And what, in instrumental terms, does any one of them mean?  These are his formulations, but might not the greatest good for some be that we love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and that we love our neighbors as ourselves?

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Here’s the kicker: Professor Singer is intimately acquainted with these and many other objections to Utilitarian-style arguments.  And yet he proposes to bring into philanthropic choice-making—as part of some purported “emerging international movement”— the same apparatus that has failed to win consensus in the domain of moral theory and that moreover, in the eyes of many, leads to manifestly bad, and, in some cases, horrifying moral choices!

Professor Singer is clearly counting on the philanthropic community to engage the argument and sort these issues out in reasoned debate.  This, for reasons I’ve alluded to before, is not likely to happen.

In my view, the biggest challenge to Singer’s suggestion is the problem of the philanthropic “blank slate”— what I’ve called elsewhere the “Ur Question” in philanthropy.  In Professor Singer’s scenarios, the choices for the donor have already been tightly narrowed: e.g., you either prevent blindness or you help open a new museum wing.  Some form of Utilitarian reasoning might help you there.  But many donors, when they start out on their philanthropic journeys, do not face such stark choices.  They want to do the most good they can for the world but encounter an infinite number of possibilities.  Is it better to fund direct services for the poor, or to fund the changing of those social, economic, and political structures that produce poor people in such prodigious numbers?  It might be true that all lives have equal value, but do I or do I not have a greater responsibility to those in my own country?  Shouldn’t I get my own house in order first?

These pressing questions are not addressed by Singer’s suggestion that, “In general, where human welfare is concerned, we will achieve more if we help those in extreme poverty in developing countries, as our dollars go much further there.”  Nor is there the slightest hint in Singer’s article that we might maximize the Good by addressing the causes of extreme poverty in these countries.  Once we start contemplating these and other options as donors, the space of possibilities becomes rather more crowded and the dream of a hedonistic calculus governing right behavior in philanthropy becomes that much more distant.

 

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* I had the opportunity to study moral theory as a graduate student and later taught it, both as a teaching fellow for Michael Sandel at Harvard University and as an assistant professor of philosophy at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania.  The strangest argument in Singer’s article is the one that proceeds as follows:

Suppose you have a choice between visiting the art museum, including its new wing, or going to see the museum without visiting the new wing. Naturally, you would prefer to see it with the new wing. But now imagine that an evil demon declares that out of every 100 people who see the new wing, he will choose one, at random, and inflict 15 years of blindness on that person. Would you still visit the new wing? You’d have to be nuts. Even if the evil demon blinded only one person in every 1,000, in my judgment, and I bet in yours, seeing the new wing still would not be worth the risk.

If you agree, then you are saying, in effect, that the harm of one person’s becoming blind outweighs the benefits received by 1,000 people visiting the new wing.

This last conclusion doesn’t follow at all from Singers’ premises.  There are countless reasons why we might avoid the new wing without our being forced to accept the conclusion that “the harm of one person’s becoming blind outweighs the benefits received by 1,000 people visiting the new wing.”  We might forego a visit, for example, because we know that there’s another equally good museum down the road that has no record of blinding its patrons through the effect of shadowy “demons.”  We are not, in other words, forced to make the choice Professor Singer believes we must make.

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